Just add water…

Grass!

…and a little time, like a week. The greenery is popping out all over the place. The grass is three or four inches (75 to 100 mm) high in many places, but the real treat for horses is what we call filaree, a forb that they love. They discovered the filaree when it was barely out of its seed form (mm-m-m! filaree sprouts!) and have continued munching it wherever they can find it, which is almost everywhere.

Filaree!

As a testament to filaree’s appeal, we put out six drums of Crystalyx, a hardened molasses-and-protein-and-other-stuff mix, in various places around the ranch. Each drum weighs about 250 pounds (113 kg) and the horses found them quickly. Being hierarchical (kind of like chickens) the meanest horses get to eat first, then the second-third-and-fourth meanest horses, and finally the wimps get in a lick or two before the meanest ones get hungry again. Usually the Crystalyx is gone after a couple of weeks, but we found three drums with some of it still uneaten, and no horses around! All we need now is more rain in order to keep the green stuff growing.

Or we’ll have to spend the other green stuff on more Crystalyx. Or feed hay. Or move onto a more rewarding way to make a living, like raising worms or chinchillas.

Rain! Yay!

I stepped out of the house yesterday evening and saw to the east some nice cumulous clouds, with brilliant white tops lit by the sun shining through low clouds to the west. The lower parts of the clouds were in graduated shades of lovely pearly gray. You know the kind of moment, when the skies get together and say to themselves, “Let’s give ‘em a light show!”

Of course, we humans who need to record this kind of stuff for broadcast to friends need to grab their cameras and capture the moment. In my case I was too late. By the time I had ripped into the camera case, yanked off the lens cap, flipped on the power switch so forcefully I was surprised I hadn’t broken it, and arrived at the scene with the smell of burning rubber from my sandals assaulting my nostrils as I dashed out of the house so fast I could look back and still see my fading streaked image lingering in the air, the sunlit scene got dull and dark. I must move faster!

So instead I took a picture of the clouds to the west.

The latest weather forecast says that by Wednesday we should have RAIN. Not a 30% chance, or even a 70% chance—just RAIN! That’s exciting. While many people consider rain as something either nice to look at or maybe a commuting nuisance, we who are closely connected to the soil and the elements consider this an important moment. We have literally tons of horseflesh on our near-square-mile ranch and early rain means free horse feed. If the horses find green underfoot, we find green in our bank account. People in our neighborhood stocking up on hay are lamenting the high price, almost double what it was a year ago. To hedge our bets, we are filling some of our new barn space with a few tons of grass-alfalfa-mix bales that we found at a decent price locally. If we don’t need them this winter, they have a long shelf life and we will have them for next winter. It’s always a crap shoot. People whose lives closely depend on weather are the real gamblers.

The grass is up…

…and Benjamin is down. Hilary came by to pick up some hay to take down to Furnace Creek. She remembered to bring her son so we could use him to give scale to the picture of our emerging grass. After over three inches of rain, we’re fortunate to get some free horse feed.

Self-feeder

The investment was worth it. At first, I felt the pangs of “I made a big mistake” when the Acme Home DNA Modification Kit arrived from Amazon.com. It was expensive, but the description on the Web site was so compelling I just had to have it. After a decade of fiddling with this ol’ horse’s genetics, I finally got her to sprout her own feed, right there where she used to have a forelock. All she has to do is shake her head and it’s dinnertime! Too bad she’s so old it won’t really offer a full payback what with hay being so cheap and all.