The British Isles are once again almost entirely covered in snow, creating chaos and disorder, as well as making school children inordinately happy to be let off school unexpectedly.
I like snow days too. You can't beat that feeling of utter relief and unexpected freedom, to be let off school, or in my case to not have to go to work and teach, and then you get to play in the snow! Awesome.
I tried to find this year's satellite picture of the now-white sceptered isles again to post a link, but couldn't. No matter. You've seen it before.
The UK government has ordered an audit of snow clearing capability -- a day late and a dollar short. And UK farmers have been permitted to get out on the rural roads with their off-road only pink diesel (which we have over here too) and clear snow with loaders and skid steers and the like. We do that stuff too. Just last year I had to rescue Jackson Town's number two plow truck from our own front lawn with our tiny Kubota tractor.
That was fun for me. The tractor liked it too.
Meanwhile the temperature in the yUKe has been down in the low negative twenties (Celsius) in some spots, which is around the low single negative digits on the Fahrenheit scale.
So even a Mainer would agree that's cold.
But not very cold. Just an ordinary kind of cold.
Really cold in this part of Maine is negative 20 or 25 Fahrenheit, which is -28 to -31 Celsius.
But meanwhile we expect our first "real" snowstorm soon. So far we've just had an inch or two of slush or a dusting of spindrift.
I doubt very much that, even were we to get a couple-three feet of snow this weekend, which is a medium big snowstorm in Maine, we'd see any particular headline news about it. That sort of thing happens most winters. Snow in Maine tends to come in big nor'easter storms, which occur every two to three weeks, maybe four to six storms per season. A nor'easter could dump anything from six inches to four or even five feet, but eighteen or twenty four inches is perfectly normal and may happen three or four times a year.
I'm not saying the UK has it easy. If you don't have the equipment, and you're not used to it, snow can be very difficult.
I'm just talking about snow.
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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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