The ‘Q’ word

Hello!

It’s been a sleepy, rainy kind of week on the farm, not a whole lot got accomplished. We had a vet scare on Friday and it definitely set the tone for the week. By the way, what is up with vet scares on Fridays? I swear we’ve gone years without a medical emergency from the critters and now two? Geez.
Watson had a Parvo scare; I got a call at work that he had thrown up and was generally acting like he had a tummy ache. The vet’s office was “pretty sure” it was not Parvo but wanted to be safe over sorry, so we treated it as though it was the case. Thank goodness it turned out to be just a tummy bug. Watson was on a little run of antibiotics for a few days just in case since we couldn’t pinpoint an exact cause. He has some food sensitivities so it also could possibly be something the sneaky pupper got into, despite my best efforts.

Ro and Nellie have been pretty keen to work lately, and they’ve been loving having the sprinklers on when they are out in the pastures. Ro especially been such a good girl, we’ve really had some great work. I think we had a little bit of a breakthrough in one of our trouble spots. I messaged my dear friend and partner in equine related crime (so to speak), and she was able to give us some solid advice. It felt really good to conquer some of our issues. Ro is such a good girl, the issues are minimal, but that just makes me all the more excited to learn how to fix the little things and become a better rider for her. Nellie has gotten really adept at stealing tack off the fence, running away with equipment, and yelling at anyone not actively paying her attention. She has been absolutely cracking me up with her antics. My brother has a habit of shouting “Nellie Belle!” from the porch at her when she’s being cute, and she has started responding in kind. The neighbors probably think we are nuts. They wouldn’t be wrong.
Much of the irrigation still needs work, and my lovely mares have done their part to break as many sprinklers as we’ve been able to fix, but I am hoping to have the pasture lines all fixed soon. That’s this coming week’s goal anyway. But realistically, irrigation is an ongoing battle, we almost never have everything in working order all at once. It does look like maybe the yard sprinklers are back together enough that I can use the scheduling bit again. The brains of that operation, the little computer in an electrical box on my porch, randomly decides game over, and I usually have to call someone. We also found out the opossum that has been wreaking havoc lives in my little cubby for the valves. So, that was a fun surprise for my sprinkler guy. I’m, uh, not sure what the plan will be to ultimately solve that… opossums are kind of scary.
Saturday, Sunday, and Monday had some fun storms. I had tried to capture some of it, but that was just not meant to be. We had a little thunder, a lot of rain, even some hail. The nice thing was the pasture and gardens got watered without much work on our part. The rough part was those storms were spaced just such that we were basically stuck inside for about three days. You really don’t want to be working on irrigation in a lightning storm or trying to clean up sagebrush in the wind. Not super ideal. Made for some beautiful cloud formations and forced me to get some indoor work done. Admittedly, when it’s pretty I have a hard time wanting to clean and keep the house running. My family concurs.
I think we finally got all our seeds in the mail, which is super exciting. We ordered straight from a seed curator this year since last year was such a bust. I bought most of my seeds from a local store, where I had had some luck before, but they hadn’t stored the seeds correctly and most of the seeds were no longer viable. Of course, we didn’t find this out until much later in the growing season, too late to replant things, and we didn’t have much of a yield last year. Hopefully this year, since we are getting them straight from the source, we will have better results.
We ordered some new plant types too, which I am excited to try. We got some peppers, watermelon, and lavender seeds among others.  My brother is particularly excited about the peppers, I’m most excited about peas. Peas rarely make it out of the garden, they tend to become a gardening snack. Hopefully some make it in this year so I can cook with them. I love peas in a bunch of dishes.

We should be able to plant soon, we are waiting for the telltale mountain peak to lose its snow, generally, when that particular peak is bare, we won’t have any hard freezes or frosts anymore and it’s safe to plant. I’ve heard some talk that a few people jumped the gun in the valley and planted early and lost some seeds. I hope that’s idle gossip, and no one really lost an entire garden already. That would be pretty heartbreaking.
Overall, pretty quiet week, although I probably shouldn’t use that word and jinx us. We have some plans for the coming weeks, that I’ll keep mum about for now, but hopefully will make for some fun posts. I’m excited for the garden posts, and upcoming projects, and if I can ever get this file to behave, the blog should switch to spring colors soon. Fingers crossed on that one.
Until we chat again my friends!