Robert,

Well I am really sorry to hear about the store. It is unfortunate that the economy has been so bad the last few years. You know, if the store had been closer to me, I likely would have been there every week!

I'm glad you are back from the oil fields. That was an awful lot of hours you were working and it didn't leave time for anything else.

Are your pastures in decent shape after two years of drought? Some of the ones near us are really awful---just in the poorest shape I can remember seeing. Some of the ranchers we know have reduced their herds to almost nothing these last couple of years---just trying to feed what they have left and hang on through these tough years so they then can rebuild their herds.

We are seeing good greenup way down low near the ground in our pasture, but it hasn't been grazed since we built the house, except maybe by some wildlife . It was a lot thinner and patchier last year than it ever has been, likely because of the 2011 drought, and I did sow some wildflower seeds to try to make up for the fact that the wildflowers in 2011 dried up and died before they could set seed. If it doesn't thicken up and fill in more this summer, I may sow clover and other winter type stuff in it in the fall just to prevent erosion.

Rain (perhaps in plentiful amounts) is supposed to be coming late next week, so I am going to be working hard in the garden this week to get all the raised beds ready for planting before it rains.

All I have in the ground is brussels sprouts, cauliflower, onions, garlic and reseeding cool-season herbs and a few reseeding flowers like larkspur and poppies. Hopefully, before the rain comes, I'll have more cool-season crops in the ground....and then hopefully it won't rain so much that they drown. Well, I have some chard, kale, turnips and lettuce left from the fall garden but they've been through a lot of alternating hot and cold temperatures and are starting to bolt. I've mostly been cutting their foliage and feeding it to the chickens, though we're still eating the lettuce.

I do have a lot of cool-season plants started in the greenhouse and warm-season plants started indoors.

I'm ready to plant peas and potatoes, and may do that today.

Are you going to put in your usual gigantic garden that makes my garden look like a a little fairy garden?

Dawn

Dawn,
My pastures are in pretty bad shape. The weeds really hit hard last yr and choked the grass out. Plus i had such a hard time getting my calves to the sale last year and kept them a little longer then usual. They were some of the wildest one i have ever raised since they were not used to me. I just could'nt make myself get out of the cattle game and stay in the oilfield.

I dont know how much of a garden i'll plant this yr. I still have a lot of projects to complete. Some of them i have been trying to get to for yrs and i am at the point of they cant wait another few yrs.

One is digging out a hill side and building a cellar. plan to do it all except for pouring the slab.i want one burried and still have it where i can walk in from ground level. will borrow a backhoe from a friend to dig it.

Plus i've got an old hog fairing house that the termites have done some magor damage to that needs attention.

hopefully i can save it, but will be alot of work. I plan to turn it into a hobby building so i can finally set up my kiln and organize all the ceramic molds. bought at an auction and just piled them wherever. I dont know what all i have. the molds have been in bags to keep the dirt daubbers out
hopefully.

whew, i'm getting tired just thinking about it.

Worked on one of my barns today and set some post to rebuild some fence plus other odd jobs i'm slowly getting done.

maybe i can get in the garden before it rains again and get some cool season stuff planted.

Busy1, Your GW name fits you so well because you're always so busy. That's a long list of projects you have to tackle the year.

My garden is a mess and I tackled some of it yesterday. I had rototilled it about 3 or 4 weeks ago and then got busy with a couple of new garden areas we're building north of the barn and northwest of it. While I was busy in the new areas, weeds and winter grasses were sprouting and growing in the recently rototilled areas. Yesterday I hand-dug bermuda and Johnson Grass out of a pathway they got into last year...by creeping in underground and traveling right up the pathway. Today Tim and I are going to rototill the entire rest of the garden except for the beds that already are planted, of course. It is supposed to be almost hot today (71 degree forecast high) but windy, so I guess we'll keep our fingers crossed that the fire pagers don't go off and we can work in the garden all afternoon.

Our weather is so goofy. Our low was forecasted to be 29 but only dropped to 39, and our RH is only 51% this morning. I don't like starting off a "hot" spring day with such low humidity because that may mean it really bottoms out at a low number this afternoon.

I've been worried that the Fri-Sat rain storms, if they materialize, would dump too much rain here (too much in terms of it interfering with planting), but our chance of rain here is only 20-30%, so that doesn't seem real likely. By the end of this week I hope to have all the cool-season garden plants in the ground. Although the recent weather has been colder, I still don't think we'll have a long, cool spring. I bet when it finally heats up, it will go from too cool to too hot all in the same week, so I'm still pushing as hard as I can to plant early without planting so early that stuff freezes.

Unfortunately, my soil temps didn't get the memo entitled "let's plant early!", so I am waiting for them to warm up.

Our only really big projects for this year are to paint the house (was on last year's list and we never got around to it) and put up a fence around the new garden plot north of the garage. We have most of the fence up around the other new garden area, so I have that one half-way marked "completed" on my mental list of Things To Do.

Oh, and we are going to dig out the water lilies and move them to a different pond and then fill-in the lily pond in the back yard with soil and turn it into a flower bed. I love the lily pond but am fed up with the snakes. For the last 4 summers, water moccasins have migrated to the lily pond which sits about 15' from our back door. We didn't have much trouble with them in past years, but with all the ponds and creeks drying up every summer, naturally they are going to migrate to any pond that still has water in it. After too many close encounters with water moccasins (nothing like looking into the pond and seeing one looking back at you from a foot or two away), I am done, done, done with the pond.

Dawn

eeek, Dawn.

Lisa,

Those snakes would catch a big frog and try to swallow it, which would take them a while. The poor frogs would scream and scream, which was terribly upsetting. I'd run out there to the pond, thinking maybe a cat had caught a frog near the pond....and when I saw the water moccasin, I'd run back inside. I think as long as we have the lily pond outside the back door, we'll have cottonmouths migrating to it when the creeks and big ponds dry up. I just can't handle seeing them there. We have had one close call too many with those snakes.....

I like most of the wildlife, but we don't tolerate the ones that are a real risk to the people and pets.

And to think....we chose this rural location because we wanted to live surrounded by wildlife. You have to be careful what you wish for!

Speaking of wildlife.....and the garden chores I have not accomplished at all this week....we had a big fire down on the river, 1500 acres yesterday and up to 3000 acres today after burning east and going into Marshall County, and I saw tons and tons of wildlife down in the area of the fire yesterday and last night. It appears the wild things (the ones we like to see and the ones we don't like to see) have survived the drought years just fine here.

Dawn