Rain dancers needed

We are having a drought here on the Farm of Hale. But before I discuss that I want to tell you about a couple new animals that we acquired a few weeks ago that I have not posted on here yet. First of all, as I mentioned a while back we took our cow from the past year, Gob, to the butcher. He is now in the freezer and he tastes good. So a few weeks ago we got a new calf to raise this year to be butchered next year. His name is Tobias and he is really nice. He was a bottle calf so he is really nice and you can walk right up to him and pet him. He was a big hit at the 4th of July party with the kids. Here he is



Another new addition to the farm is another new sheep. We decided to get another ewe so that we would have 3 ewes total. She was born earlier this year and is a Barbados mix. She is really cute. She is really light colored so the previous owners called her Snowball which we decided to keep. Here she is



Now about the drought. Even though lots of people have been getting rain in the counties and the state around us, we here in Washington county, especially this part of the county, have not had hardly any rain. There was a big storm front that came through last week in which we had 70% chance to get rain. All the counties around us got lots of rain but we got zero. By my estimations and measurements from our rain gauge, we have had around .75-1 inch of rain in the past 5 weeks. To make matters worse we have had an abnormally hot summer so far. It has been in the high 90's for most of the past month. This is the driest our farm has ever been and I think it is one of the driest times I have seen in my life. Our grass is all dead except for a few small spots that are normally wet all the time. We have even had to feed hay for the past couple weeks for our animals to have something to eat. I have never really had to water our garden much in the previous years but I have had to water several times the past few weeks. Even with me watering it is still not doing as good as it should be. I am basically just limping it along because it is so big and it would take too much water to really water it good. There is a chance of rain this week but I will believe it when I see it. Please pray for us to get rain and a lot of it. Here are some pics to show you the effects of the drought.

Here are some big cracks in the ground, normally this would all be green grass


Usually a nice grassy area


This is another grassy area that I planted the grass two years ago and usually has good grass. All these spots should be green and have grass that is 6 inches deep or so