The warmer temps have been put on hold as the scurs and Weather Eye struggle with coronavirus mandates. Will Old Man Winter observe the social distancing guidelines or will he sneeze on us? Starting Wednesday, cloudy with a good chance of showers. Highs in the upper 40’s with lows in the low 40’s. Thursday cloudy with a good chance of rain turning to snow in the overnight. Highs in the mid-40’s with lows in the low 20’s. Mostly cloudy on Friday with a slight chance of snow. Highs in the mid-20’s with lows around 10. Saturday, sunny with highs in the upper 20’s and lows in the upper teens. Mostly sunny on Sunday with highs in the upper 30’s with lows in the upper 20’s. Monday, mostly cloudy with a slight chance of rain. Highs in the low 40’s with lows in the mid-30’s. Mostly cloudy for Tuesday with a slight chance of rain. Highs in the mid-40’s with lows in the mid-30’s. Meteorological spring began on March 1st and astronomical spring begins March 19th. Either way, you coulda fooled me. Depending on what sunrise sunset chart one looks at, the sun will set on the 23rd at 7:30 p.m. CDT. The normal high for March 23rd is 43 and the normal low is 25. The scurs will be paying bills with toilet paper, unused of course.
Fields are once again bare. If temperatures and precipitation would cooperate, it wouldn’t take long for fields to become fit for some operations such as anhydrous ammonia. Those with pack manure to haul have taken advantage of frozen ground in the morning to trek across the fields. It’s short-lived though as soil surface turn greasy when the temps go above freezing. The ground has refrozen underneath in some instances as I found when trying to stab in some electric fence posts on Sunday. An inch or two down and it was no go. There were some pussy willows starting to show catkins nearby so at least there was that.
We keep heading towards the finish line in the lambing department at the ranch. As this season has rolled on, nothing has changed except maybe change for the worse. We were starting to feel good about only two bottle lambs until a ewe that should’ve been culled last year for her lack of performance delivered triplets. She demonstrably hated one of the lambs and didn’t have enough milk for any of them. Instantly, up to five mouths to feed by hand. It gets better. Tuesday a.m. a goofy natural colored ewe who was once a bottle lamb herself delivered a set of twins. Only trouble was one of the lambs crawled in behind the water tank so naturally, she wouldn’t accept that lamb. Might as well make it an even half dozen. (Sigh)
We’re down to a handful of latecomers, although this used to be primetime for lambing back in the day. It’s been a long, drawn out affair this time around with the first lambs hitting the ground back on November 30th, some in December, more in January with an explosion in February. The first 10 days in March were busy too but eventually we’ll run out of ewes. Hopefully we don’t run out of hay although it appears if we manage it properly and catch a break with an earlier than normal pasture season, we should be OK. To be on the safe side though, I monitor the potential hay sources. Don’t want anyone to go hungry.
Ruby has been dealing with the mud as well as can be expected so far. Lately the same frozen ground allowing manure spreading allows Ruby to stay relatively clean during morning chores anyway. After evening chores she’s good about letting us wipe her down when she gets muddy but then she should be as many times as we’ve done it. It’s a big job to personally supervise the filling of each and every water bucket. It shouldn’t be long though and the grass will green up and the mud bog in front of the barn will be gone. Of course that will lead to lawn mowing and grass stained socks on a small red and white Border Collie.
The recent hoarding of food and sundry items hit a raw nerve with a lot of folks including me. Emergency situations bring out the best in some people and the worst in others. Seeing some of the ridiculous amounts of product purchased by some takes the cake. Toilet paper has suddenly become legal tender in some areas. Yes, this is an emergency situation but as with any emergency, getting greedy usually results in product going to waste. After the Y2K situation much of the food that was hoarded was thrown out after it went out of code. What’s really frustrating is those especially the elderly who are on fixed incomes may have to go without thanks to a greedy few. If you’re one of those hoarders, as my Mom used to say when she was extremely disgusted with me, I hope you’re proud of yourself.
See you next week…real good then.