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  • latest reply 5 years ago

5 years ago

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the last 3 days have been foggy and a light drizzle this morning I dumped the rain Gage out we have had 1" so far. You can see about 1 mile, grass is growing great hope you all are getting some rain to

Mike Rock says 2018-05-14 17:53:51 (CST)



Glad you are getting some rain. How are the Sand Hills doing for moisture?

We got 3" or a little more here last night. Steel roof on house got hit by lightning....wow!! Everything crackled. My ham radio, an old Yeasu FT101EE survived, thankfully.

Been too wet to plow much, got 4 acres for gardens and some sorghum done before it got wet. The disk plugs up and looks like a land roller, even with scrapers trying their hardest.

God bless


5 years ago via Forums | Front Porch Forum

Redgate says 2018-05-16 12:39:32 (CST)



Feel free to send some rain our way! We are desperate for it. We live in a very small area of central IL that is in a major drought crisis. We don’t even really register on drought indicators, as I’m talking about a 5-10 square mile area. Storms just split, go around us, and come back together to dump rain on surrounding areas. Surrounding counties are getting several inches at a time, and we might have had 3 inches since the beginning of the year. Our clay is rock hard, and the plants are struggling. I can’t get my wood stake trellises in the ground without extra digging, or they break from the hard ground.

It’s been a rough spring so far. In addition to the drought, we had a late winter, which set our market garden back nearly a month for our CSA program. Then, we skipped spring entirely, and summer weather moved in. We went from 20* to seemingly 90* overnight. I finally got my spinach outside, and it is already bolting from the heat. What little moisture was in the ground, evaporated right out. Lawns are already turning brown. I’ve never seen this kind of weather in May here! This is like August weather typically.

Livestock aren’t fairing well this year either. We’ve had a pitiful kid crop in the dairy goat herd. It sure if it was the new buck or the weird weather conditions that caused it. Just this morning, I had to assist a doe whose twins were fighting to come first, only to later discover she had an underdeveloped still born triplet in there too. Her back audibly popped during the delivery...not sure why. We are monitoring her closely. Thanks to the warm weather, the buffalo gnats came out with a vengeance this year. We were ready, and had fans set up for the meat birds, but they are lethal despite our normal precautions! They’ve wiped out a number of laying hens, our ready-to-harvest birds are covered in bites, rendering them nearly unsaleable, and our next batch is slicing each other up trying to escape the gnats. I doubt our second batch will be saleable either. The horses hate working, as these gnats are repelled by normal sprays.

I can only hope the year gets better! It has been rough going the last month or so! A little rain would solve a lot of issue, and a moderate rain would solve even more.


5 years ago via Forums | Front Porch Forum

Klaus Karbaumer says 2018-05-16 22:29:25 (CST)



Well, over here in the Kansas City area we are also in a drought. Our own pond is about three feet below its normal level. April was relatively cold for most of the month, but then, almost without transition we had temperatures in the 80s. The few storms we had brought little relief. Crops that need lots of water, like radishes, for example, languished. The best crop we had so far was spinach, which I had seeded in November and which came on strongly in April. Sold a lot already to restaurants and am hoping for a second cut. Fortunately tonight we had a really nice downpour that delivered nearly an inch of rain.
Could use some more of that, although I'd prefer nice and steady rains. The potatoes are looking good, and I started planting tomatoes outside, about three weeks later than usually.


5 years ago via Forums | Front Porch Forum


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