Taking the Weather Eye in for servicing at the Nash Rambler dealership paid huge dividends. It cost the scurs a few shekels, but what the hay? Have we seen the last of Old Man Winter or will he return to haunt? Starting Wednesday, sunny with highs in the upper 30’s and lows in the low 20’s. Thursday, sunny with highs in the mid-40’s and lows in the mid-20’s. Sunny Friday with highs in the mid-40’s and lows in the mid-20’s. Saturday, mostly sunny with highs in the mid-40’s and lows in the mid-30’s. Mostly sunny on Sunday with highs near 50 with lows in the mid-30’s. Monday, mostly sunny with a modest chance of showers. Highs in the mid-50’s and lows in the upper 30’s. Mostly cloudy for Tuesday with a slight chance of rain showers. Highs in the mid-50’s with lows in the upper 30’s. On March 7th we start gaining daylight at just over 3 minutes per day. The normal high is 35 and the normal low is 19. The scurs are taking no credit for our upcoming nice stretch of weather. Donations can be sent to the Star Eagle however.
How things will change this upcoming week. We deserve it after the -20 degree lows two weeks ago. Not surprisingly, no one has spoken up desiring another round of that. We finished up February dryer than normal with 7” of snow and only .48” of liquid equivalent recorded at the ranch. Bugtussle fared slightly better with 8.5” of snow and .71” of liquid equivalent precip. Normal snowfall at the SROC in Waseca for February is 9” with about 1” of liquid precip melting out of it. Some are concerned that this may be a harbinger of things to come. The Drought Monitor is showing some extreme to exceptional drought in the southwest. Murmurings of 2012 are being tossed about. So far we have plenty of soil moisture to get a crop going and, given timely precip, the potential for decent crops. Dry starts are generally better than wet for us, so the next couple months will be critical to set the table.
At the ranch we managed to catch up with the sheep shearer and the flock was shorn last Wednesday. Considering we were nearly two-thirds done lambing already, it went pretty well. We had enough help, so getting the ewes out of the pens was accomplished with minimal effort, other than consuming some extra time. The fleeces, while not real heavy, they were nice and clean. Don’t want anyone wearing itchy wool socks. By early afternoon we were done and back in the house for lunch. I don’t recall shearing on a nicer day. The shorn ewes without lambs were able to go outside and stay out of the way as we finished up the ewes with lambs from the pens. They stayed out there until evening chores, something they wouldn’t have done the week before.
The ewes that hadn’t lambed wasted little time starting in afterwards. One of our favorites, Pinky, was the first contestant shorn and the first to lamb afterwards. Pinky is one of the matriarchs in the ewe flock at seven years old. She’s very mellow and moves at a moderate pace for a Cheviot. Mellow and moderate are two words not generally associated with Cheviots. A few mornings prior to shearing, she’d walked through the open gate when we were doing chores. She helped herself to the hay in the feed cart, even though there were two big round bales in the lot to feed on. When we scolded her, she slowly turned around and ambled back through the gate as though nothing had happened.
Pinky’s lambs born the night she was shorn were a different story. When I found them at 10 o’clock, they were already capable of running faster than I could when trying to corral them. Pinky was somewhat concerned and didn’t dislike the lambs, but was more interested in eating the hay left in the pen I put her in. She had wonderful milk when I stripped her out, and the lambs, with a little assistance to work around the low slung udder, did the rest. Since then she’s been focused on eating as much hay as she can from the neighboring ewes’ pens, then concentrating on what we gave her. There’s only one Pinky and she’ll never be shipped. She’s free to live out her days at the ranch.
There are signs that spring is indeed just around the corner. A lone Canada goose did a flyby on February 27th and on Sunday morning we heard our first robin. There is so much cover we couldn’t see exactly where he was, but it was definitely a robin. The chickadees are doing their spring “fee-bee” call and the male cardinals are singing their lungs out every morning at choretime. A few more goldfinches are appearing and there is that ever so subtle beginning of yellow coloration starting to appear. They become flying dandelions once the dandelions start to flower anyway.
It was 40 years ago in March that the group of us who had lived in the Brewster St. apartments in St. Paul graduated and went our separate ways. We’d left the dorm and decided to live on our own off campus some three years earlier. It seemed like those days would never end. They suddenly came to a close though, after some occasional drama and broken hearts, but mostly a lot of good times. I had one quarter left to graduate, so moved in with some friends and fellow employees from the Soils Dept. It was nearby in the upstairs of an old house on Raymond just north of the trestle. One of the previous occupants had hooked up a 55 gallon barrel stove to the chimney. It was pretty cold upstairs otherwise even in March. Amazing we didn’t burn the place down though as the chimney was unlined and the stove was capable of heating the space up, so wearing a lot of clothing wasn’t necessary. It wasn’t unusual for the stovepipe to be fire engine red once the fire got rolling.
The owner of the house lived downstairs, an elderly retired lady named Mary with her chocolate Lab Max. We got along great as Mary rarely asked for anything, but when she did we were right there to help her. We’d occasionally have loud parties and that was OK. Mary was used to college students and fairly hard of hearing. How hard of hearing we weren’t exactly sure, but sure never said anything. I still remember the aftermath from one such occasion when we were picking up debris out in the yard. Mary was walking Max, so we went over and apologized for the mess and all the racket from the night before. Her response was priceless. “Oh, that’s alright. The neighbors called and complained, but I didn’t hear a thing!” Mary achieved sainthood in our book after that.
See you next week…real good then.