Sunday, October 18, 2009

First snow falls

It happened after it got dark, so there are no pictures. Right about the time we watch Robin Hood on the Beeb (we get BBC America via satellite), the white stuff started to fall out of the sky for the first time in about six months.

The flakes were huge, some of the biggest I've ever seem, each one about two inches across and slowly parachuting down. On inspection each big flake was made of hundreds if not thousands of regular sized small flakes.

This snowfall capped a productive day and a productive weekend in which we delivered boxes of pork to the folks who bought pigs earlier this year, thoroughly cleaned out both the barn and the pig-sty, manured the north half of the garden with the spoils from that project, and rebuilt the outside part of the pig-sty as a sheep pen for lambing season. At the end of all this, I was starting to feel like I was getting in control for winter.

At least, that list of jobs was what I did this weekend.

Aimee, school ma'am par excellence, graded (marked) papers and prepped for class. I had about three hours of grading to do, but Aimee graded or prepped all weekend, poor girl.

Knowing there was heavy snow falling gave me a nice thought, however, as I went to bed around 8.45. We could get a snow day tomorrow! As soon as I had this wonderful thought, envisioning a nice long afternoon nap on a Monday, I realized that my chances of snow actually sticking and deepening in October were pretty slim.

And I was right. Awake at 2.20 am, nocturnal Haggis and I went out to inspect snow quality and depth and we can report that it is now turning to slush and drizzle.

Which I suppose is all right since I never quite got around to banking the back part of the kitchen where the crawl space is open to the weather. Or getting in my last two cords of firewood. Or taking down all the temporary wire and hot wire sheep fences. Or putting away all my farm equipment from the summer, ready-use parking area around the driveway to the winter area out back where it can't be whacked by the snow plow.

And on, and on. We're nowhere near ready for winter. I guess that I congratulated myself too early on getting the barn job done.

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Welcome to our Farm Blog.
The purpose of this blog is for Aimee and I to communicate with friends and family, with those of our students, and other folks in general who are interested in homesteading and farming activities.

The earliest posts, at the very end of the blog, tell the story of the Great Farm, our purchase of a fragment of that farm, the renovation of the homestead and its populating with people and animals. Go all the way to the last post in the archive and read backwards from there to get it in chronological order.

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