I love these sunny warm days. The grass is growing, the trees are budding out, and the air smells so new and fresh. (AAHHHCCHHOOO...Pardon me. I get spring allergies and I've been a touch sneezy the last few weeks...)
But best of all, the days are warm enough to do something I absolutely love. (Well, I love it for the first few weeks and then it's like 'meh...') So what is it that I adore doing this time of year?
Hint: It's something you do outside on gorgeous sunshiney days. And it's not gardening-which I can't do even if I wanted to...Usually my garden is a mudpit this time of year but thanks to the dryness outside, my poor garden is mostly dust right now.
Answer: Hanging clothes on the clothesline.
Yes, I actually like hanging clothes outside. For one, who doesn't love the scent of line-dried clothes? Best. Smell. EVER. Second, it gets me out of the house for a few minutes. Even on the days when I have a counter full of dishes, a heap of clothes to wash, and a pile of bookkeeping to tend to, I know I can sneak outside for a few moments and catch some sunshine because there's clothes to hang. Third, I get my Vitamin D dose for the day because I'm out in the sun. Can't argue with that, right?
Since it's sunny & warm with just enough of a breeze to keep the air flowing through the open doors and windows, my clotheslines are set up, and I've got a load of clothes in the washer, I'm off to get my Vitamin D for the day.
Friday, April 17, 2015
Wednesday, April 8, 2015
April Showers bring May Flowers...Hopefully...
Usually, this time of year we are knee deep (or so it seems) in mud and muck. My driveway is notorious for becoming a quarter mile mud run with the spring thaw and my usual footwear is a pair of rubber boots for the entire month of April. However, this year that is not the case. No overflowing ditches, no mud puddles masquerading as ponds, no sloppy slippery sticky muck everywhere. Sure we had a few days of mush but nothing like normal.
So no mud. No muck. No slop. You are probably asking why I'm complaining about this then if it's nothing like usual. Well, here's the reason. If it's not muddy right now, it means everything is dry as d.u.s.t. and when everything is dry as dust it means there's probably alot of it in the air...especially when a vehicle drives by or the wind starts whippin'.
Now I live in the country and as such, I know to expect a certain amount of dust on everything. My vehicles all have the ubiquitous two tone paint job you see on cars and trucks that spend lots of time driving down dirt roads...You know what I mean-dirt brown over halfway up the sides and dust sliding down the back window. Interiors covered in a film of what looks like cocoa powder. (When your kids tell you they just look for the dirtiest van in the parking lot at the store, you understand how dusty it is.) I don't wash the outside of my windows because I know in less than a day, they'll be back to dusty/unwashed looking. A light covering of dust settles on everything in the house and no matter how often you sweep/vaccuum, there's always more of the stuff hiding in the cracks. So I get it. Country life is dusty.
BUT that doesn't mean I like seeing dust in APRIL. May through October? Sure. It's expected because it's usually warm enough to keep the roads dry most of the time. But April is not supposed to be an arid month. (August, yes. April, nuh-uh.) And all this dryness has an impact on our fieldwork too. Do me a favor. Take a butter knife, go outside and try dragging it through that parched dry dirt. Doesn't really go through all that well, right? Now, give that dirt patch a good soaking with a hose, wait a few hours, and try it again. It's alot easier, isn't it? That's because moisture is necessary to loosen the soil. Now imagine a plow trying to do what your butter knife did in that dry hard dirt and you'll see where I was going with that. On another note, what's usually the first thing you do after you plant your garden seeds? Give them a good long drink of water. Fertilizers often need moisture to help break them down/dissolve them enough to work them into the soil. So moist soil is must right now and we don't have it. We didn't have the snow cover to help insulate the fields and later melt into much needed water. Winter is a very drying season so that pulled water from the soil for months. We haven't had rain hardly at all yet so things have remained bone dry.
We do have a fair number of fields under irrigation now but not all of them are and some of them desperately need some rain in order to even start working in them.
It's not easy farming because you are so dependent on the weather for your livelihood. We have to hope for rain in the amounts we need and that it comes when we could use it the most while not interfering with the planting/tending/harvesting of our crops. We have to hope for an equal balance of warm sunny days and humid hot days so differing crops can grow to their highest yields. We have to hope for a lack of damaging hail and high winds. And this month is certainly one of those months that we're hoping for the right weather when we need it.
So while I usually spend the month of April bemoaning the mess outside and how sloppy it is, this year I'm trying something new. Pardon me. I need to go look up 'rain dancing'...
So no mud. No muck. No slop. You are probably asking why I'm complaining about this then if it's nothing like usual. Well, here's the reason. If it's not muddy right now, it means everything is dry as d.u.s.t. and when everything is dry as dust it means there's probably alot of it in the air...especially when a vehicle drives by or the wind starts whippin'.
Now I live in the country and as such, I know to expect a certain amount of dust on everything. My vehicles all have the ubiquitous two tone paint job you see on cars and trucks that spend lots of time driving down dirt roads...You know what I mean-dirt brown over halfway up the sides and dust sliding down the back window. Interiors covered in a film of what looks like cocoa powder. (When your kids tell you they just look for the dirtiest van in the parking lot at the store, you understand how dusty it is.) I don't wash the outside of my windows because I know in less than a day, they'll be back to dusty/unwashed looking. A light covering of dust settles on everything in the house and no matter how often you sweep/vaccuum, there's always more of the stuff hiding in the cracks. So I get it. Country life is dusty.
BUT that doesn't mean I like seeing dust in APRIL. May through October? Sure. It's expected because it's usually warm enough to keep the roads dry most of the time. But April is not supposed to be an arid month. (August, yes. April, nuh-uh.) And all this dryness has an impact on our fieldwork too. Do me a favor. Take a butter knife, go outside and try dragging it through that parched dry dirt. Doesn't really go through all that well, right? Now, give that dirt patch a good soaking with a hose, wait a few hours, and try it again. It's alot easier, isn't it? That's because moisture is necessary to loosen the soil. Now imagine a plow trying to do what your butter knife did in that dry hard dirt and you'll see where I was going with that. On another note, what's usually the first thing you do after you plant your garden seeds? Give them a good long drink of water. Fertilizers often need moisture to help break them down/dissolve them enough to work them into the soil. So moist soil is must right now and we don't have it. We didn't have the snow cover to help insulate the fields and later melt into much needed water. Winter is a very drying season so that pulled water from the soil for months. We haven't had rain hardly at all yet so things have remained bone dry.
We do have a fair number of fields under irrigation now but not all of them are and some of them desperately need some rain in order to even start working in them.
It's not easy farming because you are so dependent on the weather for your livelihood. We have to hope for rain in the amounts we need and that it comes when we could use it the most while not interfering with the planting/tending/harvesting of our crops. We have to hope for an equal balance of warm sunny days and humid hot days so differing crops can grow to their highest yields. We have to hope for a lack of damaging hail and high winds. And this month is certainly one of those months that we're hoping for the right weather when we need it.
So while I usually spend the month of April bemoaning the mess outside and how sloppy it is, this year I'm trying something new. Pardon me. I need to go look up 'rain dancing'...
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