I just re-read my last post and I don't know that I have anything new to say - will this rain ever stop?
There was a week in there that actually had wind and sunshine and the creek running through our yard slowed to a trickle. I even got out and managed to mow perhaps 2/3rds on the lawn. It wasn't a great job, and I found myself out in the water a couple of times, but it was the best I could do. I had planned to get right back out there last weekend but Mother Nature did not cooperate. we got almost two more inches of rain. the creek is back up to river status, the puddles are now ponds, and we had to install a new sump pump in the basement because the old one died on us.
Actually calling it "old" is misleading - it was new 14 months ago, but except for the months of December, January, and February, that poor thing ran non stop. Glen had seen pumps on sale this spring and had a feeling that having a spare might be a good idea - it made him the hero yesterday afternoon when I got home from work and discovered an inch of water in the basement.
It can finally be said that some of the neighbours have managed to get into their fields. I think that was from Tuesday until Friday night last week. By Saturday noon it was poring again. I took my life in my hands yesterday and started asking farmers how much crop they had got in the ground. The answers varied: one guy said he had planted three fields and had two sown meaning that he had lost a whole 160 acres out of 480 to water and mud. Another said they had barely started with a mere 45 acres in. Another said he was waiting on a big high clearance sprayer to come in and "burn off" the weeds, so his hands were tied until that was done. The answer that was the most telling was the guy who said he had suddenly taken up a great interest in what Crop Insurance had to offer. He said that every other year the Crop Insurance package would arrive and he would just toss it in the corner, this year he was treating it like the bible, and reading very carefully. It's the 25th of May and there isn't a 5th of the crop in in our corner of Saskatchewan. On a normal year there would hardly be a 5th left to be done by this time. The Canadian prairies have only so many growing days to a season - you have to plant after the last frost of spring and the crop has to ripen before the first frost of autumn. That window of opportunity is sliding closed.
As of the rain last weekend my mind has been made up about putting a garden in; it's just not going to happen this year. I've never not had a garden but I can't even walk on it at the moment without sinking past my ankles. It hasn't even been worked yet and it's that soft! Thank goodness asparagus is a perennial - we'll have had at least one green thing not bought at a store this summer! The rhubarb will probably be okay, but my apple trees might be drowned out - they've spent the last 6 weeks standing in a foot of water; I don't think apple trees like that kind of treatment.
Glen has bought himself some chest waders to go fencing in. His electric fence has been giving him problems and the most likely root cause of the drain of electricity is the wire being under water. he spent the day out there standing in chest high water fighting with wires and feeding mosquitoes - made my day at the office sound like a piece of cake!
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Thursday, May 05, 2011
It Just Keeps Getting Better and Better
Well, it's not like it's been a fine spring so far - the cold went on and on, slowly softening to merely being cool which melted very little of our way-too-much snow. Environment Canada had predicted a long, cool spring and unfortunately they got that one right.
Next up was the eventual melt - and what we all knew was going to happen. The ground being still saturated with all the rain we got last year and covered with extreme amounts of this winter's snow. When Mother Nature finally did turn up the heat, there was water running everywhere. In this neck of the woods every spring has runoff. The creeks all fill and run for maybe a week - two if there was a lot of snow, or it rains during the melt, but this year they have been running - no, make that gushing - for almost a month now. Roads washed out, bridges were plugged, yards and fields were flooded, people had to deal with water in their basements. It was crazy
Looking back, those were the good times. Last weekend along came the worst blizzard of the winter - maybe even quite a few winters - and dumped two inches of rain on us before the unwelcome moisture turned to snow and carried on falling for the next 24 hours. The temperatures weren't so bad but the wind was unreal; steady at 60 kph and gusting to 90. Neighbours lost the roof to their brand new shed, bins tipped over and rolled around in the wind, and if you have a shingling business, you could be busy here all summer. The toll was pretty high for cattle producers too - newborn calves can't take that kind of treatment. I don't know how many died over the weekend. We lost two but I have heard that one herd lost 40 - not nice, not nice at all.
Being as it was May by this time, Mother Nature lost no time turning the thermostat up. By Tuesday it was 18 degrees again. If we thought we had water problems before, we learned that we hadn't seen anything yet. What is normally a small pond in a regular spring was a very large one this April, and now is a small lake with waterfalls running into and out of it. And there are many many many such lakes per quarter section. Seeding is a distant dream and will be an exercise in exasperation when they finally do get out on the land. The plantable acres will be a fraction of normal and very difficult to get to. I don't know how many times Glen and I have thanked our lucky stars that we only have pasture land any more!
I took a walk up the road tonight after I got home from work - the two places where water was running over the road (within a mile and a half) are now stopped, but the road will need fixing and a new culvert put in one place. I should ask the RM administrator how many places they have like this - my guess that they don't have too many miles that don't have this kind of trouble. They have even had to cut some roads in places to save property; just three miles east of here they cut through in two places to save six or seven bins full of grain. It's been a spring for the record books ... and the weatherman says that there is more rain on its way tonight.
Today I heard that Environment Canada is predicting that June, July, and August are all going to be hotter than usual. On the one hand, we all feel that we are due something good from them, but on the other hand heat has a habit of brewing up storms on the prairies - after seeing the damage in the States caused by tornados, I'm not sure that's a good thing either.
Next up was the eventual melt - and what we all knew was going to happen. The ground being still saturated with all the rain we got last year and covered with extreme amounts of this winter's snow. When Mother Nature finally did turn up the heat, there was water running everywhere. In this neck of the woods every spring has runoff. The creeks all fill and run for maybe a week - two if there was a lot of snow, or it rains during the melt, but this year they have been running - no, make that gushing - for almost a month now. Roads washed out, bridges were plugged, yards and fields were flooded, people had to deal with water in their basements. It was crazy
Looking back, those were the good times. Last weekend along came the worst blizzard of the winter - maybe even quite a few winters - and dumped two inches of rain on us before the unwelcome moisture turned to snow and carried on falling for the next 24 hours. The temperatures weren't so bad but the wind was unreal; steady at 60 kph and gusting to 90. Neighbours lost the roof to their brand new shed, bins tipped over and rolled around in the wind, and if you have a shingling business, you could be busy here all summer. The toll was pretty high for cattle producers too - newborn calves can't take that kind of treatment. I don't know how many died over the weekend. We lost two but I have heard that one herd lost 40 - not nice, not nice at all.
Being as it was May by this time, Mother Nature lost no time turning the thermostat up. By Tuesday it was 18 degrees again. If we thought we had water problems before, we learned that we hadn't seen anything yet. What is normally a small pond in a regular spring was a very large one this April, and now is a small lake with waterfalls running into and out of it. And there are many many many such lakes per quarter section. Seeding is a distant dream and will be an exercise in exasperation when they finally do get out on the land. The plantable acres will be a fraction of normal and very difficult to get to. I don't know how many times Glen and I have thanked our lucky stars that we only have pasture land any more!
I took a walk up the road tonight after I got home from work - the two places where water was running over the road (within a mile and a half) are now stopped, but the road will need fixing and a new culvert put in one place. I should ask the RM administrator how many places they have like this - my guess that they don't have too many miles that don't have this kind of trouble. They have even had to cut some roads in places to save property; just three miles east of here they cut through in two places to save six or seven bins full of grain. It's been a spring for the record books ... and the weatherman says that there is more rain on its way tonight.
Today I heard that Environment Canada is predicting that June, July, and August are all going to be hotter than usual. On the one hand, we all feel that we are due something good from them, but on the other hand heat has a habit of brewing up storms on the prairies - after seeing the damage in the States caused by tornados, I'm not sure that's a good thing either.
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