Saturday, December 21, 2013
Today is the first day of winter, but it looked more ‘winter-like’ 10 days ago. Now, the snow is all gone and we are in the midst of a heavy rain. The skies are gray, and the rain is interspersed with periods of heavy downpours… kind of “like pouring water out of a bucket” (one of my parents’ old sayings). The rebuilt terraces and WASCoBs on this home farm are completely filled, and draining out as fast as they can.
Looking east from the house this morning, you can see as many as five WASCoBs filled to the brim
Guess we won’t have a ‘white Christmas’ this year. The optimistic thing I can say is that today the days start to get longer!
Really, I don’t mind the snow, but I like the white blanket on everything. But the part I don’t enjoy about it is the part we’ve lived through for the past 3-4 days… the melting. The ground is really soft, and the melting snow soaks it thoroughly. It’s easy to find muddy conditions, and our lane, about 1/2 mile long, is squishy in several places. Don’t wash your car before you come here! I’d prefer that the temperature would go down to 20F and stay there. The roads would be solid and dry. But this is southern Indiana, and we can have wide swings in weather conditions.
Now that the snow is gone, we do need the soil to freeze. That will permit CPS to apply the nitrogen top-dress to the wheat crop. We have made arrangements with them that they will use the very next frozen opportunity to apply the urea-and-ESN blend of nitrogen. Since we have about 480 acres of wheat, they should be able to get that on in a couple days. We will do the herbicide and fungicide applications ourselves, but that will be late March or early April.
If you measure time in weeks, it’s only 13-14 weeks until we begin planting another crop. As I’ve said before, the calendar pages turn pretty fast. Yes, it’s now winter, but spring is coming.
We will have all our family home for Christmas, I think on the evening of the 25th. That will be a special treat. As we get older, and our sons assume other connections with friends and extended families, we must increase our flexibility. When the boys were little, we would fiercely protect our Christmas mornings so that our family would be together at that time. But even then, there were years when Christmas landed on Sundays, and our participation in our church was a higher priority. Nowadays, we work around our sons’ other commitments, and we’re happy that we can still make a time around Christmas to celebrate together.
Those of us here at the Carnahan & Sons family farm send to you our very warmest wishes for a joy-filled Christmas. We hope you remember to celebrate the birth of Jesus as you are gathered together with your friends and precious family. Take every opportunity to let those around you know for sure that you love them.
Merry Christmas to all.
