Winter time lull

This time of the year is normally not such a busy time.  We feed and water the livestock every day.  We have to make sure the water is thawed out and working.  It has been unusually cold and and windy interspersed with windy and warm.   Last week the temperature got up to 52 degrees here and the snow and ice were melting.  The creek was flooding and it was getting muddy.  By the next evening the wind was blowing 60 MPH and the temperature had dropped to 5 degrees.  With the wind chill it was quite a dramatic drop in temperature.

The creek is flooding because the ice has stopped the water from flowing through the culvert.  As you can see we have lost most of our snow with this last warm spell.  Where the water goes around the creek crossing and has made a waterfall where it goes back in the creek.

With the wind blowing like it has for this last month the weather service has said we are going to set a record for the windiest month on record..  The average wind speed was averaged at around 14.6 MPH.  The previous monthly record was set just last April at around 13.6 MPH.

The sheep bunched up really tight when the wind was blowing soo hard.  I had  to feed in the corral several times last week to keep the wind from blowing all the hay away.

Since Tammy and I are going to be calving heifers this year in the sheep barn we decided we needed a calving pen.  So we got a calving pen and set it up.  Now we have a month to wait for the arrival of the first calf.  Since we had lost a few cows in the storm we needed to keep our numbers up so we are calving way more heifers than usual.  So rather than have Ryan calve all these by himself we decided to do it over here.  He will have is own to calve at his place.