It’s been dreary raining here for the last few days, and for us, whether or not this “Northern” phrase applies — March is coming in like a lamb … it’s just blah rain, like drizzle. There was lots of blowiness to the weather over a week ago, now that was very much the proverbial LION weather of March. But it was during February. It’ll be interesting to see what the end of March is like. Hopefully the sufficient rain of the past several months will bring nice wildflowers in the State road medians. They are beautiful, but rather not as nice the last few years. Oh, and then the thing that gets me every year is “just when the flowers are finally getting nicer, the county mows them over”. Ugh. They are “Wildflowere project” areas, just mowed over. Many flowers have to re-seed by going the full length of their growing cycle to the seed stage. Well, we won’t be seeing some of them ever again 😉 Too bad. Well, I had wildflowers planted in the front of our house last year, from a can of seed. Some of them were so gorgeous, it’ll be interesting to see how they turn out again, whatever is perennial or annual and seeded fine. I let them “do their thing”.
What will March be like for us in the South? Forecasting a 29 degree low on Monday night, that’s according to weather.com. We’ve been threatened with similar and worse scenarios for the last few weeks, and never did they turn out. We’ve been above freezing for a long while, in the terms of late winter speech.
Well, with that all in mind, the official NORMAL last freeze is March 15, which is a signal for other areas under Winter’s spell. Just two weeks away from that date, that bright spot on the map that tells Southerners to start geering up for real gardening, and that must put some hope in the Northern gardeners — Winter will end. It’s much more of a hope than any old groundhog can supply. 🙂
The girls [the hens] are doing fine, just eating as usual. No eggs yet. And day now. Some of their sisters, owned by someone else, have just started laying. Other sister are not yet laying, so we have a slight hope of soon laying, but totally in the normal range still.
We bought Joel Salatins “Pastured Poultry Profits”. Frank picked it up from the book store today. It’s not in the store normally, they had to special order it. Yup that’s what you have to do with the really good books!
Anyway, I flipped to the last part in the book, the part about laying hens, and could barely put it down. It’s got me raring to go and get the pen situated even better, and to thinking about finding someone with some land that’ll let us put some broilers on it. Well it’d be a chore to have land else where, but that’s what one has to do to get farming started, where they are now, not waiting for “the right property to come into our possesion”. That’s the same kind fallacial arguement used by married couples without children: “we’re waiting to start our family until we are financially ready/comfortable” … etc. You have to go for it. If you really want it, go for it. The “right moment” is now.