Unexpected help, and learning from the sun.

Well, to say it was a bit windy last night would be an understatement. The Lady of the House described it as sounding like a hurricane in terms of wind. The tarps over the wood piles blew off, and some pieces of wood were 30 + feet away where they'd been catapulted off the tarps. That said, this tree at the mouth of the driveway isn't the one I'd expected to go down. As you can see, it covered the entire base of the driveway. I started off by clearing the chunks of wood, and branches

off the driveway. As I was set to deal with the trunk, one of the folks who lives in town stopped and helped out. I guess he saw me working to clear the debris, and backed up to stop at the base of the driveway. He grabbed his chainsaw, cut the trunk into pieces and helped me clear it out of the driveway. It was amazingly helpful, and definitely reminded me of the really good things about living where I do. I probably could have gotten the tree cleared out of the way, but it would have taken a long time, or I'd have hurt myself in the process. Dean stopping to help out made all the difference in the day, and took him about 3 minutes because he had the right tools for the job.

Ice and balance.

Well, we successfully got down the driveway this morning, but it was something of an adventure. We've officially discovered the limitation of YakTrax, and have recommendations on more robust replacements for them. On a slope of this grade, with hard black ice at low temperatures, the YakTrax aren't even gripping. You're just relying on your balance, and limiting contact with the ice. The areas I shoveled all the way down are actually the most dangerous now, but they will be the first to melt, so I did make the right choice at least, but there will be a lot of salt. This brings up one of the things I've thought about many times since starting to homestead.

Unpredictable weather extremes.

Shoveling snow while rain is pouring down, and the snow sublimates due to the temperature is one of the more surreal experiences I've had recently. Especially after multiple days of below zer temperatures.

Unfortunately with the snowblower out of commission, and out for repair right now it was a purely shovel job. With a few inches of snow, almost an inch of ice, and rain it was heavy work. This is definitely an example of me not injury managing well enough, because I actually wasn't able to complete shoveling the whole driveway.  As you can see on the Right since I figured out I wasn't going to be able to do the whole thing, I shoveled down as far as I could to the snow/ice mix that wasn't going to move. I got tire tracks, and then did a ladder pattern with a "cross bar" every 10 - 15 feet or so. I figured that gets things down as the melt happens. Now, the ladder pattern is sheets of black ice, and the parts in between are thick sheets of heavy ice with a bit of crunch to it. Wintery mix after serious snow is one of the worst types of weather in the world, but it can be pretty.

Mother Nature reminds us it is winter for some time still.

So one of the problems with talking about how mild the winter has been in late January is, there's a lot of winter yet. She heard us, and has delivered the missing winter. We'll see how long it stays, but She seems to be aimed to drop enough snow for us to remember right quick. On the up side, the Critter still loves every moment of snow.

There are better uses of a day, and worse.

Today has turned out a bit frustrating, but not a total waste of time. It mostly just pointed out some of the differences in how we have come to see the world from others. We were schedule to get a stove delivered today. Now to us the driveway is totally doable. Especially with the extra sanding I did to prepare it for the delivery truck. To them, with this amount of sand, and getting through to the gravel beneath for much of it, it wasn't something they would even consider. They'll try again in a week, and if they can't deliver it then, I'll tie it to a hand cart, and haul it up myself. For all that I'm frustrated though, there are other things going on, and while I hate "wasting" time off from work, other things have been done, including rest my sore back.

Quick Hit: Clock change, and hard rain.

I'm enjoying the last pre work morning light I'm going to be seeing for some time since the bane of my existence (only slight hyperbole) comes this weekend, the end of daylight savings time. I have to say I genuinely don't really understand the point of DST to begin with, but there it is.

We're having a lovely foggy morning after a hard night of rain. As you can see the trees are for the most part clear of leaves by now. The funny part is that while it's relatively warm right now, because of the weather sweeping through, everything else shows that fall is over, and the world is going to sleep. At least where we are. Down in the valley 20 minutes away it's still peak foliage. I'm hoping to be able to get a good comparison photo to show to everyone before that goes away, since it's such an amazing illustration of the difference between here and there.

The concern with rain is always the driveway, but thanks to the work on the driveway, it still looks great! It's a great relief after almost one inch of rain in less than 24 hours. As you can see from these photos it's actually looking great! Obviously this isn't going to be eternal, it's going to require attention and maintenance but if we can keep it almost this good for the next few years by doing spot work over time I'm going to be very happy.

This weekend is Halloween, and it's a big time of year for me personally, so I'm looking forward to getting back to focus on the homestead and preparing for next year. Hopefully I'll have a rooster for our next post, but if not, we'll let you know as soon as we have the newest Mr Bond.

All about the driveway.

After a very busy and physical weekend, our driveway looks very different from how it looked last we checked in on it, and far better than it looked in 2014 before the Lady of the House and I repaired it by hand. This time fortunately due to different circumstances we had the proper equipment to handle regrading the driveway, and just as importantly someone who knew what they were doing.

Hard rain, falling leaves, and driveway repair.

Day by day we see more color in the leaves, and more of the plants die off. The water pepper, a constant around the property and favorite food of the rabbits is on the way out, or already gone. One of the consequences of this is that we are going to have to start actually feeding the turkeys instead of just supplementing their diet of foraging with scratch, mostly to keep them coming back. As the fall comes I suspect we'll have an easier time finding the turkeys since they'll be wanting food actively.

Wicked weather.

As I've mentioned many times before, weather is a much more integral and important part of our life now than it was before we were homesteading. Before homesteading weather was something you thought about in terms of should I wear a rain coat, how many layers do I dress in, do I need to shovel to get to work. With our location and focus, weather is important for the health of our livestock, our garden, and . . . you guessed it, our driveway.

Ground, chickens, and an influx of blog visitors.

Alleluia, we can see ground on the slopes!

I'd like to take a moment to welcome those of you that found us through r/homestead yesterday, I'm glad to have you here, and I hope you stick around. Feel free to ask questions, comment, and enjoy.

Back to the ground though. The slopes are the first areas we see dirt other than where we shoveled, that's normal. I was looking back through, and despite how cold it has felt this winter, we're not far behind our norm if you look back to 2013 around this time, though 2012 snow was already long gone by this point. Either way, we're starting to get the world back from the snow.

A real taste of spring, preparing for melt.

Spring has shown its first signs as far as we're concerned, believe it or not. How do I know? Dorado is drinking from a water bottle that was out overnight. Not all of the water bottles stayed liquid over night last night, but most of them did, and had been liquid all day. Yesterday hit almost 40° F, and it stayed just below 30 last night. Of course today it's dropping all day, and it's going to be below 0° F overnight so we won't do the water outside thing again, but it's still nice!

A wonderful gift of sourdough starter

Last night I came home to a box in the snow off the side of the driveway, and was somewhat confused because I wasn't expecting it. When I opened it I was delighted to see sourdough starter as a gift from the lovely Caity who writes domestiCaited. I promptly and without thinking out timing properly, got started. I also in my glee didn't do the first step photos that I really need to get myself to start doing if I'm going to blog about things. Anyhow, below the cut, more about sourdough starter and ice.

Northampton Farmers Market winter fair, chicken watering thoughts on an icy Saturday.

As those of you in this area know, the amount of ice on the ground this weekend and holiday was a bit excessive.  The driveway was about as bad as it had ever been, but fortunately we'd just purchased YakTrax which are amazingly useful on getting up a sheet ice driveway. Note the photo Above isn't the current state of the driveway, right now it's just a sheet of glass basically. We've also gotten much better at sanding and dealing with the driveway, we only had to walk up and down once, which is a much better record than the past. The reason we ended up having to ice walk up the driveway was that we went to the Northampton Winter Farmers Market and their winter fair which has some really interesting educational classes. We only made it to one of them, but it led to some interesting thoughts for the future.

Driveway done (mostly), and poison plants.

Well, we finished the driveway. Of course I don't have photos of any of the work, or the completed result because I forgot to get the completed part, and most of the time working was in the rain, or my hands were shaking too badly to get photos. So instead, here's a bunny.

Well, really it's a couple bunnies but you're most interested in the kit in the foreground. This is the smaller of Dawn's two kits. It's hard to get good scale on it because Dawn's so far from the camera. Anyhow, both of them are doing very well!

As for the driveway, in 2 days of work we moved ~18.5 tons of crush which comes out to about 15 cubic yards into ruts, and spread it across the driveway to crown it. The only tools we have for it are a digging shovel, a short digging shovel, and an iron rake. Appropriate tools for this, transfer shovel (broken fiberglass handle), bobcat, tractor, earth mover. I suspect mule or horse team would also be useful for this. Either way, without those we just did what we could, and for the most part it worked out. I really wish instead of 6, 3 - 4 ton piles the driver had been able to slowly scatter it down the driveway, but we got what we got, and can now use the driveway. It didn't even wash away in the recent hard rains!

Below the cut I'm going to talk more about how the baby bunnies are doing, which has both good, and learning experiences on our part.

Driveway, step one.

Step one of course being, the beginning. And in the beginning, there were trenches.

It may be difficult to tell from that photo, but that's a 100 foot long trench, for most of it it's only a few inches deep. Below the cut I'm going to get to the worse areas, and then Step 2, delivery of raw materials.

Surviving Sandy

 As I suspect most of the USA and Canada is aware, Hurricane Sandy has been sweeping through the East Coast, and yesterday was the expected contact with us. We got lucky, and only got brushed by the hurricane. Due to being up on and off all night I didn't get photos to show. So this morning I got a couple photos of the river down near our house.

Going Full Speed

Today's going to be light on photos, and have no new photos because we've been keeping busy lately and didn't get ahead on blog stuff unfortunately.

End of (this) Heat Wave

The heat wave finally broke fully a couple days ago much to everyone's relief. All of the rabbits made it with liberal application of shade and frozen water bottles. In the aftermath of the storms that marked the end of the heat wave, we got to see the beautiful side of our driveway on the way out to get some supplies. The Lady of the House got a good picture so I figured we'd share it with you.

Learning Experiences, and Growing Out Hutches

We've had a couple of learning experiences over the last two days. Fortunately none of them have been devastating like some of our earlier learning experiences. As you can see in this photo our driveway is still here, and with minimal damage. We had some sudden and very hard rain on Tuesday night. Fortunately the lady of the house managed to get home in time to put down 2x4s angled towards the edges of the driveway every 30 - 40 feet or so to slow the water down and prevent major erosion.

When Nature Calls

No, this isn't about bathrooms, this really is about when nature happens. Something that one often hears about farming is that you are at the mercy of the weather. The same is true of homesteading, and it really is true. It's not just that you're at the mercy of the weather in terms of if it rains you can't work. It means that when the time comes in the season that you need to do something, you have to do it Now. I've been told this a number of times, but it really hit home with the snow. Read about the progression below the cut.

Warning, this post is quite picture heavy.