THE PRAIRIES IN JUNE

Last time I was hiding out from too much heat and humidity, this time I can't mow lawn yet (it's almost 10:00 in the morning) because the grass is just saturated. It will do nothing but clog the mower and make a terrible mess of the yard. I guess it's a good thing I have these setbacks outside, or I'd never get anything done inside, eh?

We have had some serious rains this week. Monday was a night of wild weather, but mostly to the west and north of here. We sat out on our deck and watched the light show all evening, and knew that there had been hail somewhere because of how the temperature had dropped so much, but besides about a dozen hailstones about the size of marbles falling just at sunset, we didn't get anything to speak of. It wasn't until the next morning we heard that Carlyle (40 miles to the west) received quite the beating with egg sized hail, and friends of ours 20 miles northwest of us had almost three inches of rain. It's always interesting to see how the lay of the land works - There are those twenty miles between us and it took from Monday night until Thursday morning for the water to work it's way downstream to where I cross the creek to go to town. I'd already had time to forget about how much rain they had, and then suddenly, there was a small lake at the bridge! With the creek running with more force that we saw at snowmelt this spring.

Everything is so green right now. Especially my garden - which is another thing I would like to be doing, but it's also too wet to weed. Thursday afternoon, just after I arrived home from work, the skies opened up and we got a half inch of rain in ten minutes or less. It was coming down so hard I couldn't see out of the yard. Needless to say, there are some parts of our lawn that are still under water, and although the water isn't covering the garden anymore, to try to walk on it would be silly. I would just sink to my ankles.

Glen and I went up to check the cattle on 21 the other night. He has cut the larger pasture into four smaller chunks and is trying to get more grazing power out of the land by restricting where they can graze. Cattle develope their favourite spots and over-graze them while leaving other spots untouched so if you don't let them have their own choice, they do a better job of utilizing the whole pasture. Our walk that night was to see if they needed to be moved again. With all the rain, the pasture is in fine shape so it will wait for a while yet. What we did discover was that something had pulled all the wires out of the solar power panel and battery apparatus that runs the electric fencer. The wires were completely chewed off as well. It's still a mystery what happened, but likely it was a bunch of coyote or fox pups teething on the strange stuff left in the field. Glen went up to fix it and built a separate little live-wired fence around the system to discourage a second attack. They'll think twice about getting too close this time!

You can tell it's really summer on the prairies now - when you sit outside at night around the fire pit there are fireflies to watch drifting around the yard, foxes and coyotes yipping and howling in the background, and humming birds buzzing back and forth to the feeders. We're not all about huge tractors and fields of grain.