It is snowing as I type this. The forcast calls for less than 2 inches total. What’s more, the water in every pond, puddle, and place water can sit on our property has gone down by maybe three inches or so since yesterday. Then, apart from a splash of rain forecast for Monday it is at worst partly cloudy skies for the coming week or more. So I am not going to let myself feel as though we are getting any consequential setbakcs with what will fall. Not to compare this to a glass is half full situation as in our case, the glass is finally half empty, and things are improving as it goes down!
What’s more, I recieved the hydraulic toplink for the tractor this morning. There is some prep work to do to it before I put it on the tractor. It is a simple installation, so it should be easy. That will allow me to change the angle of attack on the boxblade, allwing me to either dig into, or smooth out the mud. I would prefer to smooth it. It shoudl also improve the angle when using the scarifiers to pull rock up on roadbase or gravel drives. Not that I have any, or anywhere near enough.
The winter storm advisory is now replaced with a precipitation alert that goes till 1:00PM, so there’s no telling that will really come of it, but I don’t think much.
The weather relaxed this evening, though we are meant to wake up to snow again tomorrow morning. I got out a bit this afternoon and hada go at the start of the driveway towards the backyard with the tractor. I was able to smooth some of it down and make it almost passable. But the quicksand bed is still there, lingering half way back towards the backyard.
The middle of this photo is a bed of quicksand. As soon as I drive the tractor past where my footprints lead up to, in it goes. I suspect that it is deep enough to bury even my back wheels if I get into it.
So the drive is much smoother and more stable now leading up to the patch where I get that sinking feeling. I was able to scrape some of the earth that had been pushed out to the side of the drive back into it with the box blade. I then smoothed with a backdrag. I was even able to get back to another pit at the entry of the Service Yard, but that is only a place where I have to drive past, and quite close to the pit, I might add. I don’t think I will be going into the Service Yard for some time yet, as there are a couple of quicksand pits in it.
The water here is the first place I lost my tractor into the mud.
The water inbetween the gates is the spot that brushes so close to the main driveway, and also threatens to swallow my tractor whole.
Here is the water from the previous picture and the driveway area that I was able to smooth out. It is a close call as some of the drive had been collapsing into the water, but a bit of fresh, relatively dry dirt was able to shore it up some.
Finally, once I can get the tractor to the back of the property, this is what awaits me where the animal feed has been kept. There is no good way into it till the water recedes from the farm behind our house. Every approach to the hay has been waterlogged and the tractor has sunken into it. All I can do is get close enough, then hand carry the bales to the loader on the tractor and carry it from there.
This is all a mental note to self not to put the hay back on the garden spot again. I need to gravel the drives, and the spots I intend to park and move about with the tractor, and I need to gravel a spot to rest the hay on. This place has clearly not worked!
We woke up to a bit of snowfall on the farm today. I did my usual wake up, check the news and the weather, but even after seeing there was a chance of snow this morning it didn’t really hit me. I stumbled out of bed and over to the full-length window on the balcony door, and there it was. Large snowflakes falling with a decent amount of force. No messing around, this was snow! It was coming down! I caught the photo above after I came downstairs, and the snow had almost stopped. But that weather forecast said that the real snow would be falling this time tomorrow. So, there’s that to look forward to.
The mud still lingers under this mess of snow. It was starting to harden up a bit yesterday, and there were beginning to be places where the tips of the muddy mess were starting to turn dry and earthlike in appearance. Despite all that, the drive up the side of the house is still possessed with a spot of basically quicksand that wants to swallow the tractor right up. I can’t get past it. The car is dead next to it and needs to be pulled out to even try. It’s just not been that important that I want to do that yet. But soon. We have been getting to the point where we can walk the muddy yard and not lose our balance on slippery mud at the surface, but it was more a cake of mud that was traversable. At least before this very recent event.
Lucky there’s things to do out of the house today. I can go on, and not worry about it. A few parcels due for delivery will take up my afternoon as I explore the new things I have coming. I also have a daughter who has a report we are working on for school. So there is plenty of diversion from what is essentially depression at this point. More than half of the yard near the house is inaccessible. That makes some chores quite a lot harder to do, and who wants that when there is a tool that is supposed to make them easier sitting out front? There are also so many spring chores I am very eager to get started! But those are constantly being pushed back by this mud hold. Snow today. Snow tomorrow. I keep my eye on the large pond that has covered most of the field behind and to the side of our house, hoping it will sink into the ground and go down. If it stays, it puts a serious impediment on getting a new septic system put in. While I am so glad we have water again here in the west, I needed it to be dry like it has been in order to get that done early in the season.
I got external mics for the GoPro setup yesterday. I should now be charged up and ready to make videos where I can actually walk away from the camera, and still be heard. Basically, there is no excuse. We are set to make halfway decent videos for YouTube. Just need to invent content, now. Oh, and have something to so.
I was working with one of my daughters on her schoolwork yesterday, and to complete the assignment we looked up the month of March from 2019 till this year to compare precipitation amounts recorded on our farm’s weather station. Precipitation recordings can be seen on the graphs below as the vertical blue bars reaching up. Each month has a different scale as the software adjusts it for relative size on the page. In other words, 2019 and 2023 both have similar scales and are showing the greatest amounts of measurement. As there were freeze cycles on some days, this does not show actual precipitation days as such, but it does show what was collected.
2019
2019 did not show a lot of precipitation. Two years prior to this was an El Nino spring, and a couple of feet of snow settled onto the ground all at once, leaving our farm with a very high water table. 2019 was not just a low year for precipitation, but one of several drought years.
2020
While 2020 had more precipitation days recorded, the scaling is lower, and there was little but often.
2021
2021 was a true drought year. It would be followed up by 2022 and in combination these years would seriously hurt not just us, but the whole of the western United States.
2022
2022 was definitely a drought year, and it was all the talk. Rivers like the Colorado were running low, and usage agreements of the past were called into question.
2023
This spring has shown a serious amount of increase in precipitation days, and in the amount collected each day as the scale reaches up to 0.50″ in order to show the higher amount collected on each bar than previous years excepting 2019 which has a scale that goes to 0.60″.
It is easy to want to complain about the high-water table this year, but remembering the previous years, and having no occupied basement under our house, we are getting by at the moment. The old root cellar is cause for concern, so we are not free to just enjoy the gross amounts of water surrounding our house. Given the choice, I would rather close that old root cellar off for good and fill it up. But those are our problems, and not the problems of the greater world around us, and the troubles that the drought has caused are far worse.
So there we have it. Some cold hard facts about what the climate has been like for the past five years, from dry in March, to almost torrential. I picked March because Springtime in the Rockies. Spring is when the winter gloom lifts, and with the changes of the weather snow tends to fall in abundance. Some of our earlier years here in Southeast Idaho saw some serious rainfall in the summer. The last few years have been dry, but given the uptick in spring snow, I wonder if we will also see rain coming down again as before? Summer is not far off, and we’ll soon know. This may be an important year to put in a garden, if the ground out there ever dries up enough that I can till it without losing the tractor into a quicksand-like bog.
It is with tremendous satisfaction and great happiness that I can now announce that the day has arrived! We are finally set to see temperatures up in the forties and fifties. The forecast at the moment shows a few days that will dip in the mornings to below freezing. Apart from that, we look set to have actual springtime weather! The fields around us are still frosty and white, and covered in a fair amount of snow. I have heard some farmers are complaining about a late start to the year, and how that may affect hay prices. I have also heard it said that this is how winters here used to be. Seems conflicting. But as the precipitation we have had seems to have put a dent in the drought conditions, I sure welcome it! Hopefully the reservoirs will hold enough I can recklessly grow a garden this year!
A note on precipitation, I notice the forecast shows none of that coming at all. That is a real change from recent weather! We could use the chance to dry out! The ground is saturated, and the water table is high! It is showing itself around the house, right in our own yard! So I am happy to see a break. Mud season has been hell this year! I can barely get my tractor back to get hay from the stack. We have new trailers that are stuck in the front of the house due to the mud, too. I could not possibly drag them back to put them away. But that’s okay. There is some work yet to be done on them before they are ‘put away.’
Even though it got cold last night, I woke up to a morning when the pools of water around us are steaming, and hopefully showing signs of evaporation in the sunlight.
Missus is squeezing in some time during work hours at home to do some spinning on her spinning wheels. I have to say, she has really improved so far this spring. She has gone from art yarn to something narrow and consistent in its appearance. I am pretty proud of her! I hope she is well proud of herself, too!
It is grandson’s weekend over, and he has spent the night a day early due to his mother and father’s involvement in a friend’s wedding. Right now, it is time to go fight with him over his attitudes about getting dressed in the morning. Oh, the joys and trials of being five!
This week we have snowfall coming till Thursday. After that, things stand to improve, and if the computer is to be believed, and is predicting it right, things will seriously improve!
As can be seen for the following week, we should see temperatures in the fifties! I think that with that, and a lack of precipitation, we could see the end of mud season!
The current temperature is kind of wintery, but for here, that is not true. This is early spring weather! Our records show what this place can really be like in the summers and winters, though those records are nowhere near normal cold temperatures. In fact, we are normally around 0F in the dead of winters. The recent years have brought us exceptional extremes. But whatever the case, at least for now, there is a tolerable improvement in the weather coming!
Our temperatures have been pretty insane over the last few years. Prior to July 2021, I would seldom see the mercury rise over the high 90’s. By seldom, I mean I don’t remember it ever having happened at all. I am pretty sure I saw the first time our area hit the 100’s since moving here a little over ten years ago. I cannot be so sure about those lows. But I can say that I have had this weather station installed since October 2018, and it has been keeping an eye on the weather every minute since. The only gaps have been where the computer failed, and I had some of the data saved in a separate database by the time I put a new computer in. There were no record setting extremes during that period that would have come down to what can be seen on our current records.
So, as the week progresses, I’ll be keeping an eye on the weather forecast, and hopefully we will see the prediction ring true, bringing us an end to mud season first and foremast, then an end to burning firewood, too!
And that’s the last thing I want to talk about here. Our house has only fair insulation and bad windows. Nonetheless, the forecasted weather for this week requires only a small fire burning in the stove. By Sunday we may not need to burn anything at all. So long as the sun shines in the day, and the house gets warmed by solar radiation in the days where the overnight low stays about 35F or above, we tend to not need to burn a fire. Given the wood remaining in the pile, I think we will be quite adequate for the year of the temps are taking a turn they intend to keep. Of course, there will likely be a drop here and there, but even those could keep us in snow and warm enough temps to be tolerable. Either way, it is certainly workshop weather!
A fella can get from driving down to pick up a trailer, then another one. The trip was maybe 40 miles each way, but the driving and maybe the stress takes a toll on the old body. It is the arthritis playing me up, for sure.
But the point is, Missus has a new trailer to take to the Farmer’s markets, and I got one to put the tractor on.
A nice box trailer with a ramp on the back to make a mobile shop for Missus to use at the Farmer’s Market’s and out front of the house. This will allow her to set up a shop space without the month-to-month cost that I believe can kill a small business.
This flatbed trailer should help in many ways! It has stake pockets so I can build sides to keep long logs on it, and it has D-rings and ramps so I can load the tractor on it. I’d like to put a winch on it to load a dead car, truck, or tractor onto it.
Both trailers seem good, with solid jacks and decent LED lights. The electrical connectors are great compared to the other trailers I have, and the chains and spare tires are very nice. The rigs feel adequate for their purposes.
So, I suppose at this moment, I can hire out for tilling for spring gardens if anyone needs it. I should also be fine to do box blading, and post hole digging. I don’t really want to do junk haulage and have to pay out of my citizen’s account to unload at the dump for others. But I do want to get firewood and logs for milling on the trailer and bring them around to the house to work on.
So that’s where I think we’re at. We have more projects to handle now, since these trailers need a bit of customization to complete them. And right now, the mud is so bad, I cannot even take them to the back of the house or over to the designated trailer parking to get them off the front drive. It’s storms for the next few days, then we have warmer temps finally passing through! I’ll have plenty to do once the ground finally dries up!
When I ordered the sawmill, I did so early in the season, expecting it could arrive at any time, even months from now. But it did say it would leave the warehouse within a week, and I guess if there is nothing else they are good at, it is keeping their IT and inventory up to date. Woodland Mills deposited the mill with RL Carriers, then waited like four days till they e-mailed me to tell me they had. I got the e-mail on Saturday, and thought it would mean it was going to be a day or two till it was picked up and put in transit. The e-mail even said so. But I decided to run the tracking number anyway, and it had already been moving four like four days! Given the track record of this particular carrier, I figured it would arrive mid-week this week. But they did not use a last mile carrier, and as you can tell from the title of this post, the mill is here.
The mill is here, and there is nothing I can do with it, but cover the box with a tarp and wait till the ground dries up, and I can get some wood to mill and start collecting what I need to build it a covering.
The load was meant to be 1,295 pounds. I took that off the truck with my little Kioti tractor. The tractor had a hard time lifting at that height. But it did get the couple of inches needed to move the huge box off the truck. I say huge. It is not as big as a mausoleum or anything like that, but I could fit a coffin in a vault and put them inside, I’m sure. I was not impressed with the driver when he got between the box and his truck where I could tip forward and smash him. I’d really of liked him not to do that! I remember granddad moaning about the people he worked with when he was on cranes, and how they would constantly endanger themselves. Like him, I just want to be able to sleep at night.
So now the mill is sitting, waiting with all its parts, for a better day to put it together! There is snow and mud all over this farm, and no place to set that old thing up.
So, the mill arrived ten days after ordering it. I’m sure it is going to take a lot longer to set it up!
Our drive back from testing was when it was most interesting. But even so, it was not bad at all. The snow sure came down though as we went through the canyon. As you could imagine, in the summer it is a beautiful drive! I took the video in hyperlapse mode to keep it a reasonable watch!
As our kids have been in an online Academy that is state sponsored, we have some advantages, like reimbursements available for school supplies and some activities. Money to use to teach our kids is a very positive thing! But that comes at a cost to us. One is reporting to the Academy what our kids have been learning each week and keeping up with Learning Goals, which also has to be demonstrated in that reporting. Another is testing. Our kids are required to do state testing, which during Covid was done online and from our home. But before, and now after, we have to go to a location to do that testing in front of a proctor. That’s all fine and well, and I don’t really mind it, as long as the kids are good with it.
We had testing for our youngest yesterday and have another session today. The location of her testing is the problematic piece for us. We have to drive to a town thirty miles away for it. There are a couple of ways to get there. The easiest is the thirty-mile route through the mountains between us and that town. It’s a short, pleasant drive along a two lane that winds through beautiful scenery. The other routes are much longer, double or more. One goes north, around the end of the range, and then back south again. The other route goes over the mountains at the southern end of the valley we live in, then north again.
The short route has a gate on it at the next town nearest us and can be closed during the winter due to lack of maintenance. But the weather was great yesterday, and the gate was open!
Today snow has fallen in a spring storm, and we are meant to get more. There are a few inches on the ground so far, and we are meant to get up to eight inches. That’s here, in the valley. Not up those mountains. We are due to be there by eleven o’clock in the morning, and there is a session scheduled for 1:00 PM, so I think that if we show up late, it is no big deal. We’ll try the short route, but if it is closed, we will go up and around the north end. That is the easiest plan B available. South is much longer. To do this, we have to leave in 45 minutes! If we are never seen or heard from again, someone who finds our house empty one day will be able to look into this blog and figure out where to look for us.
Okay, so not so dramatic. But it ought to be an interesting drive! Perhaps I’ll get the GoPro going on this one! At any rate, is it homeschool related, and a part of our story, so I thought I’d share it.
