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Chouteau County is in Excellent Condition for Soil Moisture The Chouteau County Soil Moisture Survey was started by Judee Wargo in 1993 to assist farmers with determining recropping potential on cereal grain stubble. After 24 years, the Chouteau County Extension Office continues to compile data for determining recropping potential and providing the state drought committee with soil moisture information. Testing for soil moisture took place in Chouteau County on March 23th for locations south of the Missouri River and March 24th for locations...
Canning Class—Meals in a Jar, First Christian Church, 1201 Main St, Fort Benton. We will begin at 5:30 pm. Join us for an evening of hands-on learning and fun. You will experience making two recipes and additional meals in a jar recipe options will be available for tasting. The basics of pressure canning and safe food handling will be covered and you will receive research-based recipes and resources to take home. If you have been afraid of pressure canning, this class is a great opportunity! Or, even if you have a lot of experience pressure c...
Big Sandy is an amazing place! While most small towns in this area are retrenching and drying up, Big Sandy is making progress to become larger and have more amenities that will attract even more people to call this home. Think about the new library on Main Street. The Bakery that the Stiles family made out of an old and unused building, the remodeling of the Mint, the great school system, our own grocery store. Big Sandy Activities and maybe most important of all for a small and isolated town, a medical center with a care center combined with...
Q: My husband just dumped me for another woman, and I am crushed. I don’t see how I can carry on, I feel so worthless and helpless. How could anyone be so heartless, abandoning not only me but our two children? Please pray for us. A: God gave marriage to us, and one reason He opposes divorce is because He knows the deep hurt it causes those who have been betrayed by their spouse’s unfaithfulness. The Bible says, “The man who hates and divorces his wife… does violence to the one he should protect” (Malachi 2:16). Your feelings are understan...
I have a stationary bike in my living room. It serves several purposes. Sometimes it is a coat rack. At other times, it is a fun way to burn off a little energy, though admittedly these times are rare. Usually, the stationary bike is there for the purpose of improving me. I ride it to make me healthier and fitter. Ideally, this means that in the long run, I will likely be happier as a result of using it, but the immediate effect of working out on the bike isn’t my happiness. Happiness is a b...
Seeding Practices for Pulses The Chouteau County Extension office has compiled notes per communications and workshops from Extension professionals. If you have further questions, please do not hesitate to contact our office at 622-3751, or stop in for a visit. We are located in the green building next to the Chouteau County Courthouse. • Testing seed for Aschochyta blight will cost $200.00. It takes ten days to develop the fungus on a plate. In addition, the $200 will test for 8 other diseases. Please contact the Extension office for a...
A friend was telling me this week how much she loved March because each day held the promise of spring. I told her I did not like March at all because it always seemed to have more winter than spring and that the March winds are always some of the worst in the year. The day after my talking with her, I experienced those terrible winds in Big Sandy where coming out of the east, there must have been gusts of more than 40mph. Many is the cabin on Clear Creek that I spent nights in March when I thought the roof was going to blow right off. That...
Q: I’ve finally had to face the fact that my main goal in life is to get other people to like me. I guess most people are like this, but sometimes I’ll go overboard trying to win someone’s favor, even if it means doing something that’s wrong. How can I quit this? A: You’re right; most of us like to be liked. And sadly, we may even do things we know are wrong (like lying about ourselves or doing things we know aren’t right) in order to get someone to like us. But such “friendships” are seldom lasting. The Bible rightly says, “What a person desir...
Fifth Annual Chouteau County Agriculture Day The fifth annual Chouteau County Ag day for 4th and 5th graders will take place at the Chouteau County Fairgrounds on April 19, 2017. All 4th and 5th graders in Chouteau County are invited to attend. Home school kids who are interested in participating should contact the Chouteau County Extension Office at 622-3751. Participants will learn the importance of Montana’s number one industry; agriculture, and why agriculture is important to their health, home and community. For thousands of years, c...
National Poison Prevention Week, March 19-25, 2017 How safe do you think your house is of poisonous household products? Poison is all around us, affecting anyone anytime. By taking the time to look around and exercising caution during the usage and storage of these products will be the best prevention of poisoning yourself and/or your family. One product you may not have even given a second thought is liquid laundry detergent packets. These contain highly concentrated amounts of the detergents. They need to be stored in the container they came...
This is Charlie Russell’s birthday week. You can always tell that because it is Western Art week in Great Falls, Montana. Charlie Russell was born on March 19, 1864. That would make this his 153rd birthday. Charlie Russell was a boyhood hero for me and my friends growing up in Havre. I was given many Russell books for birthdays and Christmas and still cherish them to this day. Whenever my family went to Great Falls, I spent hours wandering around his Great Falls home and studio. I saw that he stacked his teepee poles on brackets on the front p...
Q: I’ve gone through some hard times recently, and my aunt says I ought to be thankful because they’ll make me a better person. Is she right? I admit I’m having a hard time seeing things her way. A: We all want our lives to be smooth and trouble-free, of course—but unfortunately life isn’t always that way. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who was completely free of worries and problems. Job rightly said, “Man is born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward” (Job 5:7). The real question, therefore, is this: How will we react whe...
Friday is St. Patrick’s Day. It is a time to visit Butte and see the wonderful parade if you can, to wear plenty of green and to cook up a batch of corn beef and cabbage for the family. I have a very good corn beef and cabbage recipe. It even has a secret sauce for the corn beef and for dunk at the table as well. For the secret sauce you simply need equal parts of yellow mustard and brown sugar. Mix together and it should taste more sweet than mustard. Last time I made this corn beef recipe I used cranberry mustard and that was very good w...
Q: My girlfriend and I are talking about getting married, but we’re reluctant to go ahead because so many of our friends have gotten divorced after only a few years. How can we be sure this won’t happen to us? A: I’m thankful you want your marriage to last—because this desire will be an important part of being sure it will last! Far too many couples, I’m afraid, enter marriage casually or thoughtlessly. But God gave marriage to us, and His perfect plan is for it to be a lifelong commitment of the husband and wife to each other. Jesus said, “Th...
A month and a half before Elvis Presley died, a reporter interviewing him asked an interesting question: “Elvis, when you first started playing music, you said you wanted to be rich, famous and happy. Are you happy?” His response was simply: “I am lonely…” The interesting thing about this response is that Elvis had achieved everything he had ever desired. For that matter, in terms of wealth, success, and the adoration of millions, Elvis’ success exceeded the desires of most people in general,...
SAVE THE DATE! April 27, 2017, we will be offering a Meals in a Jar canning class in Fort Benton in the evening. The class will be hands-on and will include jars of the finished product to take home with you and the recipes so you can make more at home. If you are looking for quick nutritious meal ideas, you will not want to miss this class. It could not be simpler than pulling a jar off the shelf and reheating. Even if you were gone, family members/babysitters could decide on their own what they wanted and then, in the matter of minutes, be ea...
April Horticulture Reminders Below is a list of reminders from the Montana Gardener’s book of days (EB 165), and other writings by Bob Gough, former MSU Extension Horticultural Specialist. • Prune fruit trees, berry bushes, ornamental trees and summer flowering shrubs before bud swell. Always prune to a branch, because a stub will decay and affect the longevity of the tree. • Graft fruit trees just as the first buds on the tree begin to swell. • Apply dormant oil sprays to fruit trees and other plants when the temperature is expected to rema...
Night Feeding or Daytime Calving Information for this article was taken from the February issue of the Cow Sense Chronicle written by Rachel Endecott, MSU Extension Beef Cattle Specialist. We’ve all experienced that middle-of-the-night calving incident that sure would have been easier to manage if it had happened in the daylight. Some ranchers use an evening feeding strategy to shift more cows to calve during the day. A case study comparing two sets of calving data with different feeding times illustrates this phenomenon well (Jaeger, et al. 2...
With many of us in the process of preparing and submitting our taxes, the question becomes “How much and how long do I keep the records?” Or, maybe the other question is “Do I need to have a record keeping system?” Keeping financial records are a vital part of your life. They are a key to your credit standing, essential to help you save money on taxes, and provide a continuing indication of your financial progress. A systematic plan of keeping important papers can save you hours of anxious searching and make it easier to cope with emergen...
Daylight Savings Time starts March 12. It is a pain in the neck for me because I collect old clocks and have to reset them that day. I don’t know about your old clocks but mine are very temperamental and take some adjusting to get them all up and running again after messing around with them twice a year. I have one old coo coo clock that is so old that I have given up running it when I have to fool around with it twice a year. About the time I get it back up to speed so to speak, it is time to reset it once again and I am back to ground z...
We live in a time of unprecedented connection to the people and world around us. Cell phones enable us to have conversations with each other wherever/whenever we want. Email allows us the instant exchange letters. Social media gives us the opportunity to share our lives with people anywhere and to find long lost loved ones. Strangely, we are simultaneously living through an epidemic of loneliness. Through the 70s and 80s, surveys found that between 11% and 20% of Americans felt lonely...
Q: I don’t want to offend you, but why should I bother with God? My life is going along just fine without Him. In fact, He’d probably make me stop doing a lot of things I enjoy doing if I did turn to Him. A: Let me ask you a question: What do you suppose would happen to you if God didn’t “bother” with you? In other words, what would happen to you if God forgot all about you or ignored you or refused to have anything to do with you? I’ll tell you what would happen: Your life would end immediately, before you finished reading this sentence. W...
There are free financial education webinars available through MSU Extension called “Solid Finances.” Every Wednesday at 12:00 pm, they discuss a different topic related to credit and credit worthiness, teaching kids about money, health and finances, retirement and financial awareness and other topics to help you empower you to take control. The sessions are taught by faculty from the University of Idaho, North Dakota State University and Montana State University. The webinars can be viewed from any computer or electronic device with int...
My sister called me one night and said she was in the middle of making some chicken and dumplings. I reminded her that our dad used to make chicken and dumplings out at Clear Creek several times a season and feed it to anyone coming along to his fishing camp. His chicken and dumplings were very good. The dumplings can be made from Bisquick for a very easy application or use the simple recipe included here but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. To make the chicken stew you will need 3 pounds of bone in chicken parts. Thighs work well. 8 cups of c...
Q: My wife gets after me because of my bad language, and I admit I probably swear more than I should, but what difference does it make? No one thinks much about it anymore, as far as I can tell. A: Sadly our society has changed in the last 50 years or so; it seems like it’s almost impossible to read a popular book or watch a program on television today without encountering vulgar or profane language. What difference does your speech make as far as you and your wife are concerned? First, it obviously makes a difference to your wife, and if f...