May

I thought I would tell you about how our month went as it draws to a close. It started out kind of cold, but warmed up as the month progressed. We started calving late in April and into May. We are pretty much calved out now. We didn't have any real trouble calving so we are thankful for that. Danny also picked up his bees early in the month. You can read all about it on his blog, Beeginning Beekeeper. One of the biggest highlights was we had much more rain than usual. (More on this later.) Dad fortunately got the alfalfa seeded across the river before it started raining.

Here is a picture of Blue Mountain that was taken on the twenty-first of May,

Like I said, it was much wetter than usual. These are pictures that were taken the twenty-second when there was supposed to be a branding. Needless to say, the branding was postponed.

Last night at about 12:45 I woke up to rain and hail hitting my window. Luckily the hail didn't get too bad. When I checked the rain gauge this morning this is what I saw,

Our other rain gauge showed an inch, but I didn't take a picture because the markings are almost worn off. With this rain it increases the rain for the month to around five inches!

Our neighbor who lives about ten miles away has a weather station you can check from the internet and see stuff like temperature, rain, and other stuff. You can access the weather station here. This is what it shows for rain right now.(They only got three tenths last night when we got an inch though) Update: I just found out that it updates on here so now the month rain is for June.

That is a lot of rain for where we are. We might have gotten even more than they did though. I think our average yearly precipitation is around ten to twelve inches so we already have a really good start.

It is really wet so the grass is growing and should continue to do so.

Looking west,

Towards Danny's beehives,

Looking south towards some of our cows,

Looking east,

We collect water off some of the house and shop for Mom's garden because our well water has high alkalinity and isn't good for plants. With all the rain we've gotten we figure we have about 11,000 gallons of rain water stored! We won't be able get anymore though because we ran out of water tanks. What a good problem to have!

Here is a picture of the shop with the 1,600 gallon water tank. There is another tank in the shop that holds about 1,800 gallons.

This is a picture of Mom's new garden.(Notice the water tanks on the left side of the picture.) She has another garden by the creek, but she watered it with well water(when we didn't have rain water) so the soil isn't very good and gets really hard. We still planted stuff in it just in case this one didn't work out. This is the first time we have planted this much in the new garden. We only planted potatoes and a few other things in it last year. Dad put manure on it and plowed it last year. He disked it in April and we (mostly Mom because all of us kids got sick) planted it.

Here is some corn that is coming up,

Some radishes,

The onions came up really fast,

We tried putting plastic on over the watermelons to keep them warmer and moist and it seems to be working. The only problem we had was the plastic kept trying to blow off. Notice all the dirt we have on the edges.

Here are some of the watermelons that are coming,

The peas seem to be coming really well. That is good because they never have come very well in the other garden.

A picture of our house,

D.J.