Living in Iowa and working on farms there most of my life, I’m familiar with winter. The ground freezes. White stuff falls from the sky. Sometime around March the ground thaws and you get this 6″ layer of slick mud as the “frost” comes out of the ground. In the four winters I’ve lived here in the Ozarks that’s how it has worked too.

Except this year.

We’ve had relatively average temperatures and most of our precipiation has fallen has rain. Not only that, but we’ve made up for the drought of the late spring/summer and are moving into surplus oh look it’s flooding now territory. There was a storm about two weeks ago that was snow and ice and we had the polar vortex get us down to 10 at night, so the ground froze. But now today my weather app says it’s 68 degrees, I’m about to uncover the window air conditioner in case we need it, and the frost, if there was any, is out of the ground. I’ve got a neighbor planting peas this weekend and I’m so tempted to put some collards in my little googley eye tire raised bed to see if they’ll grow.

This has, however, left the horse pasture and run-in shed with a problem: mud

The pasture dries out and the horses have pretty decent footing, but from the fact that the rain is coming in buckets when it does rain to the about two days, if we’re lucky, we’re getting between precipitation, well…the run-in shed is mud. Muddy mud mud mud. The driveway is mud. And there is mud everywhere.

I’ve heard it said that we’re only a couple of days away from either flood or drought here, and I certainly don’t want it to go the other way. But really? I’d like a break from the mud now please.

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