Big April Snow - HA

The big long awaited snowstorm has finally arrived.  So far it hasn't amounted to much.  About four inches of snow this morning. Wind blew quite hard and it was 12 degrees, so the wind chill was cold.  Below 0.  Kind of snowed off and on all day, but no more accumulation.  There is supposed to be a second wave of moisture coming.  The radar shows it over the top of us, but it is not snowing..

I got the cows and the sheep fed this morning in the near blizzard condition.  By afternoon it had let up and we went out and checked things.  We are getting a calf every other day here.  Mostly from the cows we bought from Wyoming, but there is only 24 of them.  Our cows don't start for another two weeks.  Ryan said one cow calved last night and one today, so his calving was  slow also.  A good time to be slow.

I took a video of the sheep in the corral.  I locked them close in case the snow got warmer and wet.  Wet snow soaks into their wool worse and weights them down so they can't get up.  And being heavy with lamb and the added weight of the water that soaks into the wool they have a hard time so we just put them in the barn.  But then the barn gets wet and is hard to dry out later.  So if we can leave them out we do.

They are cleaning up the last of their hay and will bed down for the night in and hour or so.

We were scheduled to protest our tax valuations for the coming year today at 2:30.  It was storming early and was supposed to start again in late afternoon.  Tammy called the director of Equalization office and a new date to appear before the Board on April 17.  That will probably be about the day we will be shearing.

We got the soil test results back yesterday .  Since I have never done a soil test I don't know how our soils compare to good crop growing soil.  Our PH is evidently high at 7.6 to a field of 8.1.  Sodium is very high, Chlorine is very high, Iron is very high.  So we have to find a variety of something that tolerates a lot of salt.

I have been working for the last several weeks changing rear tractor tires.  One tractor had quit and had a good set of tires.  The tractor I was using had bad tires that were flat.  So we took off the good tires and took off the bad tires and put the good tires on the rims that fit the tractor that was running. The job took lots of different days but we got it done and probably saved $500 to $600.  So I paid  for my time and effort.

Been getting the barn clean and panels set up for shearing next week.  Hope this weather doesn't set the shearers too far back.  I'm sure they will loose a couple of days.  Hay piles continue to get smaller.  Hopefully with this snow and added moisture the grass will start to get some height and be good enough to graze.  Maybe we can turn the cows out to pasture in late April.  We will probably end up with about 400 bales carry-over.  Not much of a start for next year, but it is a start.