Monday, March 7, 2011

And it begins...


Mud season.

That's what Mainers call the time of year when the air is above freezing, but the soil down below remains frozen and is therefore impervious to drainage.

Not that Maine drains particularly well any time of year. Maine is designed to drains slowly if at all, a big wetland sponge that soaks up millions of gallons of fresh water and releases it only slowly to the Gulf of Maine. Providing homes for all kinds of wetland critters in the process, including mosquitoes and blackflies (the Maine state bird) as well as frogs and fish.

But it doesn't drain much at all in mud season.

Our mud season began officially a couple days ago with our first rainstorm in several months. But that was just a taster. The couple inches of rain we've had in the last ten hours were the real thing.

In the middle of it all the rain turned briefly to ice and then back to rain. there were a couple inches of ice on power lines earlier today and we had one short outage sometime early this morning. But power is back on now.

This birch tree on our neighbor's lawn was suffering more than other trees. After a bending like this it may not spring back.

There's a birch in front of our house with a perfect ninety degree bend from a storm two years back. I keep asking Aimee if I can cut it down for firewood, since it will never grow straight again and will eventually fall over, but she likes it for some reason.

Aimee ran out of bleach and sent me to the grocery store to get some for the wash and her spring cleaning project which is ongoing (and terrorizing man and beast around here). So bravely Sir Mick went out in his trusty Ford Escort steed, sliding down through the muck on Great Farm Road and spinning back up it, skidding from one side of the road to the other.

I did wonder if wrecking a perfectly good car was a good trade for a gallon of bleach, but I soon put away such rebellious thoughts. And we didn't wreck.

Although the trip was more stressful than a trip to the store has any right to be.

1 comment:

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.

After getting tired of spam comments (up to a dozen or more per day), I required commentators to be Google "registered users". You can write me at mwomersley@unity.edu if you have a serious comment or question and are not a registered user.

Spammers -- don't bother writing -- there's no way I will post your spam to my blog. Just go away.