Mother Nature must be angry

[Riverrose28]

This year has been awful! Snow, ice, high winds, rain, tornados, thunderstorms, flooding, raging wild fires, hail, how much more can we take? I live on the east coast and have had it better then most, but I've had enough! Thunderstorms the last five days, inches of water, flooded stalls, having to strip and bail out on a daily basis, flooded fields, paddocks, the driveway. some of the roads are closed. To top it off, some of my horses don't have any common sense. they have a run in or a stall to go in and prefer to stand out in a hail storm, what is up with that. I'm over run with bugs becuase some of the natural preditors are gone, can't keep up with the fly spray, I try so hard to take care of my furry babies but nature is in my way. I feel so sorry for those in the Mississippi river area, and those battling fires in Texas, so I shouldn't complain, but what in the world is going on? How are the rest of you getting on with Mother Nature?

 

[candycar]

I hear ya! I hate to complain too, not living in an area with total flood devastation. BUT....

This year I finally got permission to mow and use a wonderful rolling field adjoining our home lot, and with all the rain I haven't been able to mow it!

I even spent $13,000 on a tractor and bushhog to do the job

I've wanted to have year round use of this field for years, but have had to wait 'till the property owners had it mowed.

Mother Nature hates me also! Everything is so soggy and unsettled that I can't drive(the mini), I can't mow, I can't get all the yardwork done, plant the garden or even wash the vehicles!

On top of that all the hay fields around here are over ripe and too wet to cut. I'm worried about getting hay for the year. I won't sleep until I have a shed full.

There is some hope tho, tomorrow and Sat are supposed to be rainless, so even if I have to put pontoons on the tractor, I'm mowing that field!

 

[Riverrose28]

Our hay is over ripe too, and will fall over before it gets cut, then the problem will be getting it dry enough to bale. The buttercups and weeds are getting so high some of my guys are lost I can't even see them. Can't bush hog in the rain. Only good thing is with 4 inches of rain I don't need to fill water troughs, just buckets in the indoor. Had two storms today and hear thnder in the distance means more is coming. Had it!

 

[kaykay]

We will have no first cut here in Ohio. Really starting to worry me.

The news said out of 137 days this year we have had rain for 88. Ughh. My barn is still flooded and no way can we mow anything.

 

[bevann]

Thinking about all of you who are getting too much rain.Here in Milford(about 10 miles east of show grounds for Area One and Delmarva our farm is very dry.We have very sandy soil so it takes us lots of rain.Storms and rain all around us today(almost 3 inches of rain per hour)and lots of wind and tornado watch about 1 hour NW of us.We could use a nice soaking rain for a day or 2.

 

[Sterling]

This week has been mostly cloudy and rainy, but during, we've had breaks of sunshine. It gets hot and humid at times. But our real problem are those Brown Marmorated Stink Bugs!!

They ARE nasty!!! They are everywhere and creep in the cracks fo everything, get in the house, get on the crops are just a nusance. I've got a fulltime job trying to round them up. Nothing to be done...except kill and flush them. Rutgers is looking into a way to eradicate them...but not soon enough IMO.

 

[weebiscuit]

The flooding is just devastating! I can't imagine what it's going to do to food prices, too, as none of the fields can be planted. No flooding here in SW Wisconsin, but we need rain! And we also need some warmth! I have my tomato and pepper plants in containers on the deck, and it's going to be down to 39 degrees during the night next week, after having it as low as 34 degrees just a few nights ago. This has been a very very cold spring for us! I've lost several shrubs due to them leafing out and then having a week of temps in the low 30's at night. all our apple and plum trees were in full bloom and then the temps dropped and I'm afraid it's really going to affect fruit production. It's been so cold that my lilacs and peonies and iris have not come near blooming yet, and they are always well into bloom by mid-May!

I always have my horses bathed and clipped by mid-May, too, but with those cold temps coming next week, I still can't do them.

But still, I guess my woes are nothing compared to those poor people who are dealing with that awful flooding.

 

[Mominis]

It's practically June, and here in MIssouri, my boys are standing in mid-weight winter blankets. ugh.

 

[leeapachemoon]

I hate to say this but we could use some of your rain in Florida. It's so dry here and the already high hay prices are just going to go through the roof! This is my first year here so I'm probably going to eat those words when the rainy season starts.

 

[vickie gee]

The rain is coming down in sheets here tonight. But I am not going to complain. We are actually getting a spring here. We usually go straight from winter to summer. Every week I plan on shampooing and clipping horses. It has either been too cool, too windy, or storming. Still, I will take this over sticky hot humid summers.

 

[weebiscuit]

It's practically June, and here in MIssouri, my boys are standing in mid-weight winter blankets. ugh.

LOL! I know the feeling! I'm brushing all the time, but it's just not warm enough to do a body clip. Every morning when we go to the barn to let them outside, we find globs of their hair in the water buckets, or stuck to the walls of the stalls where they try to scratch it off.

 

[~Dan]

It has rained for a week, was nice yesterday, but was sprinkling during morning chores. It is always too cold to much of anything or way too hot. I want to clip the horses so much as they shed out their coats, then we got dumped a foot of snow, grew a new coat almost overnight and never lost it again because it has been far to cold!! The only nice thing with all this rain is with all this rain my gelding who hates to be bathed decided to doze outside in the rain so he is pretty clean (he'll have to suck it up eventually because he needs a real bath). I was walking through the hay fields at the llama ranch and they are soaked, we need 1000 bales up in the loft for the herd of llamas before winter... I hope we can do it! I tell myself it could be worse we could be under water or in a drought. I really hope mother nature decides to put her big girl panties on and settle down with her mood swings

Dan.

 

[Minimor]

She must be very angry, to do what she did to Joplin MO this afternoon.

I've been complaining about the 1+ inch of rain we got yesterday--we did NOT need that much rain!--but really we have nothing to complain about when you compare our weather to what they've been getting down south.

 

[LindaL]

The tornado in Joplin is horrible!! Such devastation!

Leeapachemoon...yeah, we do need some rain here, but...please don't feed your horses the "local" hay (coastal)...it has "colic" written all over it! JMO! I buy my hay from a supplier that ships it down from up north. Coming from where local hay is grown and readily available (Oregon) with hay prices from $3-10/bale to where I am now paying $13+ for decent hay...it sucks!

(Sorry that was OT)

 

[Riverrose28]

I feel so bad for the people in Joplin. We don't have it nearly as bad. The weather seems to change overnight. We were forcast for yesterday to have 30% chance of spotty showers. Then sun the rest of the week, but we had a lot of rain yesterday evening and early this morning, and now the weather man has changed the forcast to possable rain all week. They did start cutting hay yesterday down the road because of the previous forcast and I suppose it will be baled for cattle. It is four feet high and very stalky and course. WE bought a couple of bales Sat. from up the road and it was cut last fall and full of stickers. Had to go to Tractor Supply and buy bagged hay for the mini's, thank goodness my arabs can eat pasture. I'm going to go give blood today I'm sure it will be needed with all these tornados and storms.

 

[Riverrose28]

Oh no more tornados forcast for the midwest! Mother Nature at her worst! We had storms today and more flooding. What in the world is going on?

 

[Performancemini]

I don't know what's going on; but it is kind of scary. We too in IL (very Northern here) have had scads of rain and up and down temps. It got so hot for a couple days we body clipped. Then it rained and rained and got chilly and cold and we are blanketing and keeping them in, then putting them out when it stops raining. They finally got coats back in and it get chilly then cold (30's at night!) so it thickens up. Now it's supposed to be 91-93 degrees on Memorial Day (after being 30's at night and 59 in the day) just a day or two of high 60's and a 70-something before it jumps there. And what is especially scary about that is that can stir up those Tornadoes again!

Like everyone said: What is going on!?

(And who-with no indoor-can work a horse in all this and condition them?). Show season will be a mess.

 

[weebiscuit]

I don't know what's going on; but it is kind of scary. We too in IL (very Northern here) have had scads of rain and up and down temps. It got so hot for a couple days we body clipped. Then it rained and rained and got chilly and cold and we are blanketing and keeping them in, then putting them out when it stops raining. They finally got coats back in and it get chilly then cold (30's at night!) so it thickens up. Now it's supposed to be 91-93 degrees on Memorial Day (after being 30's at night and 59 in the day) just a day or two of high 60's and a 70-something before it jumps there. And what is especially scary about that is that can stir up those Tornadoes again!

Like everyone said: What is going on!?

(And who-with no indoor-can work a horse in all this and condition them?). Show season will be a mess.

I don't believe in man-made global warming, but I DO believe that the earth goes through periods of climate change that have been occurring since it was formed billions of years ago. In fact, there was a mini-ice age just 200 years ago. Maybe we're heading into another one? Or, if not an ice age, then certainly we are going through some weird global changes. We are supposed to get frost again tonight. Unheard of for this time of year!

I was just thinking today... when I taught school our graduation was always Memorial day weekend, and a few other teachers and I always supplied roses, iris, peonies, and other flowers for the tables, in great abundance. My peonies don't even have buds on them! And my iris have a few buds, but will not open for another two weeks, I'm sure. In fact, my lilacs just opened today, about three weeks late! My hostas are all up, but are nowhere fully leafed out, and I've never seen them this slow.

Yes, it's just weird. Every year we've always turned on the a/c in the middle of May, yet yesterday we had to start a fire in the wood stove to keep warm at night! And even stranger.... two days ago we were clearing brush, and I had on long underwear!

This cold weather just sucks!

 

[Riverrose28]

Well the last three days the heat indxs has reached 105 degrees here in the mid atlantic states. It is opressive, the temps are in the high 90's and the humidity has been over 77%, we are currently waiting on more thunder storms to bring in a cold front. If that is what you can call it, but at least temps will go down into the high 80's. Hay was cut three days ago and we were supposed to go bale today, can't bail in the rain. I don't want to debate, but I do feel that we humans are depleting the ozone layer, with all of our fossil fuel usage. Wish someone could find an alternative, cause I can't give up my truck.

 

[Sue_C.]

I don't believe in man-made global warming, but I DO believe that the earth goes through periods of climate change that have been occurring since it was formed billions of years ago. In fact, there was a mini-ice age just 200 years ago. Maybe we're heading into another one? Or, if not an ice age, then certainly we are going through some weird global changes. We are supposed to get frost again tonight. Unheard of for this time of year!

Pretty much sums up how I feel as well. Just that volcano blowing off in Iceland last year, did more damage to the ozone layer than "man-kind" has done in the last several thousand years, an it is blowing again. I find it quite arrogant of the human race to take "credit" for evolution...whether you believe the Bible's version, (or any other Religion's "beginning of time version" or Darwin's...any of those explanations are far-far beyond man's capabilities.