DTWe kinda had forced down time today… it wasn’t the plan, but I didn’t have a very good night and was not feeling well at all, Sue was feeling the affects of the orchard work yesterday as well, so we decided to have a down day. I went off to work and Sue was going to go take care of errands she’s been meaning to do. turned out it was a good thing too, but I’ll get to that.
Yesterday we did end up working on the orchard first thing in the morning. I got all the drip in and working, Sue worked on clearing the rocks out of the future tree wells and working on them to be great water reservoirs. That’s the most difficult work I think. We were going to work more on that today, but decided against it for reasons already mentioned. We feel pretty good about making progress, even though it may be only slow progress.

IMG_3109When I got home, after dinner, a storm started blowing in. Looked like we were going to be getting some good rain, maybe… so I was all for trying to get the chickens in and getting everyone buttoned up. We went out and started trying to get some of the chickens to go in, it started to hail really hard and fast.  I decided to try to feed the goats their night snack, so they’d stay in… by the time we were done with that, we were being pelted so hard with hail – I in my shorts – we were being pelted so hard… I had welts on my lets! They were truly marble sized hail stones, one of them was even golf ball sized, careened off of my head. It just kept coming down, so fast and hard… piling up against the slider that goes out onto the covered porch.  The little Red Rangers were completely soaked – so were the ducks and the goose, but they didn’t care. The oldies were smart enough to go in.  We ended up moving all the little chickens into the bottom brooder for the night so they could dry off and get warm. Everyone else was fine. Had one of the fences blow down a bit, which we righted as soon as the hail slacked off… also had to clear the one around the RCW… it shorted out, so Sue will fix that in the morning. It even filled up the dip in the paved road just past the corner, just like a regular flash flood. It was really quite intense. After the storm passed we walked up to the east pasture and checked out the ditches that Sue dug when over a year ago. They were doing their job and retaining water just great! There was excitement though, and lots of running around, so it was really good that we weren’t completely tuckered out from working in the orchard this morning. So, I guess all things work for our good.

Tomorrow we will be doing some more clean up and getting things in order. Moving the new chicken tractor to its semi permanent place for the youngest Red Rangers. Clearing out some of the channels that direct the rain around the property. We just haven’t had a real gully washer like that since I’ve moved here. You kind of get to see what’s working and what’s not. Anyway, the whole experience was quite interesting, then the storm turned around and came back, but without the huge wind and hail, just rain and lightening and thunder. Interesting weather. Can’t wait to see what tomorrow holds. Until then, as always~
Thanks for reading!

Today’s Weather: Well, you’ve heard about that.  We have chances of rain all through the night. Currently it is 74°, expecting an overnight low of 66°.

Egg Report: Thursday – zero goose,  1 duck, 31 chicken.  Friday – zero goose, 1 duck, 35 chicken eggs.