Even though we have been absent from the blog, we have been busy with the farm.  Actually, busy with the farm is one of the reasons why we have been absent from the blog. That and my camera broke. The blog isn’t nearly as interesting with no pictures. So, as I finally have a working camera, I will attempt to catch you up to date without too much talking.

As we are now farmers, and weather controls our lives, I will begin there.  Yes, we expressed our displeasure every chance we got at the lack of rain, for the second summer in a row.  Then the forecast said little rain with very cold temperatures for the winter.  Great!  So pasture growth had been slow but with sun in the Fall and a little rain, we thought we could manage if we reduced the number of grazing animals.  So our first wonderful rainfall, lasted three days and dumped 100mm!  We had water running everywhere.  The main roads were flooded and some bridges on the highway submerged.  The rain came down so hard and for so long, the ground could not absorb it.

The front pasture was a lake.  We had just moved the sheep to another pasture, but not the horses.  The horses did have higher dry ground to go to, but at this moment, they were fine being in a lake.

Since that introduction to Fall, it has rained often enough that our campo has yet to dry out.  We have good soil.  The water just stays.  We have had a few sunny days, but lots of cold days.  The temperature lingered around 12 C during the day and dropped to 2 C at night with intermittent rain.  Fall forgot to come and Winter came early and has stayed.  We started the wood stove in the house in April to get the chill off the house.  Very early.

At least we had firewood to burn.  Most people we talked with had yet to stock pile their winter wood.

With the water comes mud, which leads to wet muddy dogs who enjoy playing in the water.

The dogs also enjoy being toweled off which helps to keep the floor cleaner and prevents raw spots from developing on the dogs.  But with wet weather comes more laundry, oh joy.  Wet weather and cold no sun weather means that hanging laundry on the line doesn’t work.  So our little clothes dryer has been getting a work out.

I guess we will manage to blame the weather for any inconvenience  no matter what season. I’ll play catch up on our farm activities over the next few days and then, with a bit of luck, topics can turn to what we’re up to now.

P.S. The blog left off with the Olive harvest. It happened. It was semi-successful (the rain cam DURING the harvest) but we sold the olives, and we’ll talk more about all of it later.