Here it is almost March & we are still in the low to mid thirties in Florida at night & averaging in the 50's or low 60's during the day! Much of December had temps in the 20's, too. And, we've had lots of rain so the ground is waterlogged. Many people have had problems with flooding that they never had before, raising havoc on horse show venues & pastures. Of course it would rain or be really cold for the big Jacksonville Winter Series show jumping events, but at least it was in the Clay County Agricultural Center covered arena.
Luckily, we are located in one of the highest location in Florida & my barn was built 18" above the ground & my pastures have only had a couple places where my OTTB companion horse rolls that have gotten muddy, hence so have the blankets or him when it was warm enough to be unblanketed.
It seems like I'm behind in everything from all of the extra work that we have had to do to manage the cold for the horses, animals & my plants for us Floridians that aren't used to this, lol.
Plus, our small business satellite connection doesn't like this weather either, so there have been many times we have had to work from 2am to 5am so we wouldn't get affected by the satellite's Fair Access Policy since there have been weekly Windows updates on our PCs which has caused us to exceed the FAP sometimes. (Now, admittedly, I've gotten addicted to Farmville in the past month & a half - I swore I'd never play any of these games, but it's so much fun harvesting the crops, & I love all of the flowers! I've already gotten the villa, plus all of the other homes & many other buildings, so this has to be done during the FAP-free wee hours in the morning just to re-arrange everything when I add another building. (I think I'm going to write a 'confessions of a Farmville addict' article - just as you say to yourself that you aren't going to farm anymore & you've sold most of the tons of chickens, cows, trees - FV comes up with a new gimmick to get you back. I never could sell my FV horses & am really glad for the horse stable, but I still have 20-30 horses outside... more on this in my blog).
My garden, with of all kinds of winter greens, cabbages & herbs, has been flourishing & producing like crazy, but just this evening as we are putting the garden sheets over the plants, I see new growth popping up because the plants know that it is supposed to be coming into Spring around here ;P Soon I'll be spending my riding time tilling the garden for the Spring-Summer crops. We are already late in planting tomatoes & many others, but with it being still so cold at night, we will have late plantings.
I have a lot of images from the shows that I had taken, plus a lot from my south Florida photographer, Rob bowman, that need to go online, but here we are once again in the middle of another site design change & moving to an upgraded server which has also been taking a lot of time to do the testing & design implementation.
We are moving the site to a Wordpress-based CMS & will be linking back to our custom-designed CMS article database, directory & calendar of events, so watch for a new look sometime within the next couple of weeks (I hope). As with any site that is as big as ours with almost 11,000 articles, plus countless events, directory listing & an old article archive, this is a really big undertaking (it's been in the works since September 2009 running concurrently on a different server, but sharing the same databases, so we have to 'hide' our testing & quickly delete it since it is the live database - again, more late nights. Sigh, the life of a web designer doesn't always correspond with a time of good weather or the daytime when we might want to ride instead of be working, online or sleeping.
Teri Rehkopf
Staff Writer
editor@HorsesintheSouth.com