You can sure tell it's fall - it gets dark so early these days! Glen got home just after 7:00 tonight, but I'd already gone out and done chores for him because it's just so much easier when there is still daylight to see what you're doing. It won't be long, though, that it will even be dark when I get home shortly after 5:00. It's my pet peeve about winter - I can take the cold and the snow, but I need sunlight! I'm sure I must be solar powered.
Much as we're not overly excited about winter setting in, we are hoping for something more wintery than that sissy stuff we had last year. Oh, for sure, the mild temperatures were easy to handle, but we didn't get enough snow to make things white. On the one hand, Glen loved a winter that he didn't have to clear the yard of snow to be able to move machinery or get the car out of the garage, but there wasn't enough snow-melt to fill any of the watering holes on the place. All summer long - a very hot and extremely dry one - we've watched what water there was go down, down, down. We moved the cattle back from 21 because of no water. We can't use certain fields for grazing because there's no water there. And even the watering hole that the herd has been using is next thing to dried up. They can still wade out through the mud for a drink, but that's not going to last much longer. We've had a few inches of rain through September, but not near enough to replenish the surface water.
We have the main duggout left. It is the biggest and has only been used by a few animals over the summer so it's looking pretty good right now. We're really having to think about what to do with our calves this fall, though. Most cattle producers sell the calves off right after weaning them. They go off to feedlots to be "fed up" to market weight. Up until this year, we've kept ours and fed them out ourselves; we have the grain and the set up to handle the animals and the price we get for finished cattle is significant. This year, though, we don't know if we want to risk watering a whole bunch of feeders when we don't know if the snow situation is going to be any better this winter. We could end up having to decrease the size of our cow herd next year if there's not enough water. We haven't made the decision yet, but the plan is to separate the calves from their mothers next weekend, so we'll have to come up with a plan pretty soon.
I've got the yard work pretty well done up for another year. I spent last weekend out cleaning up puppy debris. I don't know what the thrill is to haul everything movable (and some things I don't even know how he does move them) up on the front lawn. It's like he's into exterior design and the mess is his own personal touch to his property. Unfortunately, I really don't care for his "look", and it's all been carted off. He looked pretty sad while I was doing the cleaning - taking time out occasionaly to tell him not to do it again - and to his credit, the front lawn has remained clear of his treasures. The space down near the garden, on the other hand, seems to be growing its own collection of empty pop bottles this week.
4 comments:
Jocelyn;
Right on about the need for sunlight. I find that if it were up to me, we would use Daylight Savings Time all year long, especially now that we raise rabbits and chickens around here.
By the way, hope you don't mind-I took the liberty of putting a link to you on my blog.
Hi Dave ... I was wondering what you were up to these days. Chickens and rabbits, eh? How many? What kind of workload? No problem about the link - the more the merrier.
We just started our rabbitry about twm months ago. We are up to 20 rabbits now with more on the way before next month. Of course, with the exception of a couple that served as initial breeding stock, our rabbits are always for sale. As soon as we can get all of our rabbits moved into the new rabbitry building we've put up, I expect we could have dozens and dozens of hares, hundreds perhaps. Of course, my ultimate goal is never to have quite that many because we'll sell enough of them.
The chickens we have a considerably lesser number, just five....enough (for now) to give us a very good household supply of eggs. If (after we are finished organizing the rabbits) I have the time, I'd like to have more chickens!
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