stewart creek

A little rain

Steve HardinLeave a comment

The beginning of last week we got a weather alert stating that there was going to be heavy rain in the foothills of the Blue Mountains near us. We need some rain for the wheat and the hay so rain is a good thing this time of year. Well we got rain alright, almost 8/10” of rain in less than 24 hours. The mountains were all covered in snow and then it warmed up fairly quickly. Our back creek is part of Stewart creek. It is an intermittent waterway, it dries up in the summer on the upper part of our property. Down near the school house there is a shallow spring that puts out quite a bit of water and there are a few more springs that come together enough to get the stream running again. The water level can fluctuate pretty dramatically when we get more than half an inch of rain. This definitely counted as a dramatic change. The really nice thing was the water all stayed near the creek, it didn’t flood out anything on our property and it ate into the banks some more causing the stream bed to widen even more than it was.

I even drove up to the far end of the property to see if it was flooding upstream from the house. There was no flooding anywhere on our property. All of the ditch work and bank work was not needed but we knew that it would try to flood again eventually and we have managed to harden the fields well enough now that I am hopeful the water will stay contained even in a bad flood. Our front ditch never even raised in height. Usually, during a flood the water diverts to the front ditch and both beds contain the water so our house does not get flooded.

The water came down pretty dramatically in two days. It is back to normal flow pattern now.

It’s Hot

Steve HardinLeave a comment

We came home earlier in the week and were greeted by the big truck sitting in the road. The Gingerman has been working on the truck, has it running and the brakes working on it. He has a few more things to do before we convert it to a fire fighting apparatus for the farm. We are going to put a couple of large totes for water, a pump and a hose reel on it so we can have some fire suppression if we decide to burn. On the off chance we have a fire nearby we can go out and meet it. It would have been handy when I caught the railroad ties on fire. Peeing on them to put out the fire takes a lot of effort.

The truck was blocked it just rolled down into the road, no one is sure how it did it. I could not get it started then the Gingerman told me that the battery was unhooked. I dropped the positive terminal on and smashed it a couple of times with a wrench. It still would not start. I took positive terminal wire off and then told Annmarie we would just need to drive around it for a week. The Gingerman stopped by a few days later and actually installed and tightened the battery post cable and it started up just fine! It is now blocked with some heavy duty tire chocks.

The back creek, Stewart Creek, is no longer running. There are a few spots of water behind our house but they will most likely be dry by the end of the week. The frogs will all move into our garden and tall grass. They can make quite the cacophony. We are so used to it that it is just drift off to sleep noise. The roosters crowing, the frogs serenading, the alpaca fighting , the sheep and lambs hollering, the cows bellowing and the occasional horse whinny it is mostly relaxing.

I picked the garlic today, we turned off the water about three weeks ago. I will let the dirt dry out and tomorrow I will cut off the tops and put it all in a paper sack for storage. I have about four of the largest heads picked out to use as seed for the fall. I also collected a whole bunch of chive seeds. I want to toss random flower seeds into the front flower beds and just see what grows. I am now going out to the apricot tree about every three days and picking up the ripe fruit off the ground. I keep about 75% of it and the rest I toss over the fence to the sheep. Our old ancient apple tree is shedding apples so I spent about thirty minutes cleaning them off the ground and tossing them over to the sheep. They love it. I was only able to pick about four apricots off the tree that were actually ripe. I like to wait until the fruit is full of sugar before picking it. When it is your tree you can wait until the very last minute. Annmarie and I cut and pitted about 12 cups for the freezer. We freeze them in one cup batches so she can use them for her breakfast smoothie. It takes a lot of frozen fruit to make it 365 days! We are going to be able to fill an entire upright freezer full of frozen fruit this year.