Spring (and hope) Deferred

I was reminded of one of great Uncle Arthur's old sayings "hope deferred maketh the heart sick" while considering the latest weather forecast. We are already way late on the spring thaw and the latest forecast is for more precip, rain or snow, and clouds for the next five days. Not much hope there at all. The window of opportunity for getting our crops planted in a timely manner diminishes further with each passing day.
A late melt is usually a fast melt meaning more runoff and flooding. I guess I can count my blessings to not live on a flood plain. All our water drains to the Qu'appelle river eventually, after all our sloughs have filled up and run over , so we can usually count on seeding a few acres that stick up amongst the sloughs.
I really should count up the number of times I have had to open my driveway this year.I would suspect it has been one of the busiest winters for the snowblower in nearly 40 years of snow blowing.
We broke record low temperature levels the past couple of nights but I won't comment on global warming or climate change. There is already a good discussion on that subject over at the contrary farmer
This photo is from my latest driveway dig out. Even with that much snow its hard not to be at least a little hopeful when you have this much sunshine and blue sky.
Meanwhile, far to the south of me, the real lazy farmer has been rained out of the field.

Playing In The Snow Again

Well my driveway had degenerated to the extent that even 4 wheel drive and winter tires were barely getting me through. I had left tracks that would be representative of the Chinese year of the snake, and they were very hard to follow.
So yesterday it was time to fire up the sixty year old tractor and put the 40 year old snow blower to work. It was a nice day, not so warm that the snow was wet, but not so cold that I couldn't take my mitts off to set up the camera and take this interesting series of videos. The 8 foot aluminum conduit pipe mount is a little springy when mounted horizontal. It makes it look as if the tractor is bouncing up and down violently when in fact it is a smooth ride. At one point the camera tilted 90 degrees and gave a whole different view that I wasn't expecting.
It is turning into a long winter. Concerns are already being expressed that we may have flooding problems when the spring melt occurs. Only days ago I read an article indicating that there was very little moisture content in this snow. So what has changed?

March 12 Snow Blowing

The calendar says March but yesterday's strong winds blew my driveway full of snow again worse than January. At least I had a nice sunny morning to work at clearing it. Maybe for the last time this winter?

Weather turns nice, things get busy

Well finally the weather gives us a break. Temperature soared to +20F today so I was able to do a bit of catching up on jobs that were not too attractive at below zero temps. Pumping summer diesel out of tractors , adding thinner and pumping it back in. Installing snow blower and spending hours blowing snow off my yard and driveway.
My old reliable Massey Super 90 has developed a major water pump leak so I can't use it to put hay bales out until I fix it. That looks like a difficult job so I removed the front end loader to at least improve the accessibility to the engine. Now I'll have to find an alternative to handle the big bales til the Massey is back on the job. The first option I think will be to install the bale spear on the 3 point hitch of an even older tractor. The 1953 Cockshutt 40 currently has the snowblower on it so I'll have to make that switch. Hopefully we will not get a major blizzard while I have the snowblower off. Just in case we do get snowed in I think I will install the dozer blade on the "new" tractor, my 1980 model 2090 Case. It will push snow clear into next winter and all in the comfort of a heated cab so I guess things will be under control for the time being.
I cheated a bit with this picture, its not from today, or even yesterday. In fact it was taken in 1990. Same yard and tractor (and driver) though.