Bracing for cold amid snow.

It's continued snowing on and off for the past few days. The kid and the dog love it, the rest of us, not so thrilled. The up side about the snow is that if it's snowing it's not bitter cold. That's going to be changing shortly. We're expecting temperatures to drop into single digits over the weekend. Fortunately we're going to be home, but I'm concerned about the animals that are outside with highs in the singles, and lows in the negative double digits.

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.

A lovely March morning.

It's a lovely March morning today, the fact that it's December has changed this from being convenient that weather has held off while we weren't prepared to getting concerning. While I personally am not a huge fan of snow, it has a lot of benefits. Especially in regards to agriculture. Obviously it's not like there isn't plenty of winter to come, but I figured I'd mention why it is good to have a long snow season despite my personal feelings on snow.

First things first, the blanket effect of snow isn't just something that's said. When snow covers the ground due to the amount of air trapped in the snow it acts as a significant insulator. That helps maintain soil temperature. Not saying it isn't cold under snow, but it can help keep things like overwintering plants survive the winter. The temperature regulation also makes a big difference for trees. Evergreens in particular if their roots warm up enough attempt to draw up water. That isn't a problem right now because the ground isn't frozen yet. Once it's frozen if they try to draw up water they will potentially dehydrate. More relevant right now given the fact that it's warm, with the snow on the ground it helps prevent nutrients from being evaporated out of the soil. Snow is called "Poor Man's Mulch" by a lot of local farmers.

Second, snow pack helps replenish ground water and as long as there isn't a flash melt is much more beneficial for the ground. I don't know all of the mechanisms on the science side of things but I do know that without a good snow pack over the winter, drought is very much more likely. It can very much benefit early season crops to have a good snow pack.

Third, without snow anything like garlic that's planted to overwinter doesn't have protection from being eaten by birds, or casual consumption by other animals. This is particularly relevant for us because we like garlic, and actually provide the birds that would eat the garlic if it was planted right now. Until we get a projected snow I am going to be holding off on getting the garlic in the ground. Of course, that will require the ground to still be thawed for me to be able to plant. We'll see if that's an option.

So far I've only covered snow. Now we come to the cold. The most obvious benefit of cold, especially snap freezes is that it kills bugs dead. Without a good hard cold winter it's likely to be a very buggy year next year. That of course has benefits for our chickens, but for crops that's not a good thing. What it will mean if we don't get a hard winter for the rest of this winter we're going to have to think about using something for pest control. Probably some combination of neem oil and co planting insect discouraging crops.

Just figured I'd voice some thoughts about my concerns about the lack of winter so far.

Guess we could have done another round of rabbit breeding.

Checking in from the homestead, and specifically checking in on the rabbits. With them in the woods I haven't been able to get many good photos, this is actually the best of the photos that I was able to get. I haven't gotten every last bit of the butchering done, but we're getting there. With the strange weather going on we absolutely could have done more breeding this year. Honestly we might try a winter litter again now that we know better how to help the does keep the kits warm. At least for Twilight since her hutch has the best sheltered kindling area.

The thing that's nice about the weather staying unusually warm is that the Critter is really enjoying continuing to spend long periods outside. One of the chores that is officially his (though functionally the Lady of the House's) is feeding the turkeys. He absolutely loves it, and even at just barely 12 months he gets really upset if someone feeds the turkeys without him. He's one of the least efficient animal feeders I've ever seen, but he really enjoys it. Tiny handful by tiny handful he throws the food to the turkeys, and squeals as he watches them eat. I imagine when the chickens are out and about roaming he'll be just as interested in them as he is in the turkeys. Not sure though since the turkeys have so much personality and are so big.
Again, partially due to the strange weather the turkeys haven't been able to be moved into their coop. They're really happy with their life right now, and have no interest in being in a warmer more sheltered space. So far it's working out for them. I do wonder if they'd be more sanguine about moving into the coop if I get my hands on a hen or two. Either way, when the temperature does the real hard winter drop, we'll get them in there by hook or by crook. Incidentally, the origin of that comes from gleaning firewood from forests that belonged to nobility where you weren't able to cut trees down for firewood. By hook or by crook is the term for what wood you could gather. It meant that not only could you get the firewood from the ground, you could also use hooks to pull the broken branches out of the trees. What I call widowmakers can certainly make good firewood since it's often bigger. Just thought it was a fun piece of trivia.

First taste of winter weather.

Soon the fires will be lit, and we will be warmer inside. But first, we have to make sure it's going to be safe for the small person and that he won't get at the stove. We really want to avoid that kind of burn. To get that safe we're going to have to install the gate around the stove, which I should be able to do Thursday, and re-clean the chimney.

Fresh food, and turkey containment in winter.

We have to remind ourselves, Summer isn't over yet. At my job, the students are arriving today which makes it harder to remember it isn't yet fall. The weather is helping at the moment, but the nights have been getting cold, and the leaves as you can see are already starting to come down. We didn't put any effort into tomatoes this year given the string of failures due to blight in the past couple years. Even with that we're seeing a few tomatoes, mostly from the volunteer plants, but some still from the plants leftover from the seedling swap. It's nice to have some brightly colored treats in the garden. For the rest of our tomato want, we're going to be trying to purchase seconds tomatoes from a nearby local farmer and turn those into sauce.

Chickens in the sun, eggs, and a patient dog.

The Chickens in a further sign of spring have found an open patch of ground that I didn't even clear off to do their thing on. Their thing right now seems to mostly be wandering around, pecking anything the wind moves, and sunning themselves which is a nice thing they've clearly missed. Right now the Chickens are all sorts of good news which is nice given how worried I was about them making it through the winter.

Starting the first seeds, inside.

I'm going to start by giving a shout out of thanks to our first patron on Patreon, I promise I won't say something every single time someone sponsors us on the blog, but I'm very happy that our first day on Patreon we have a patron.

So, now that spring has sprung, it's time to get started with planting, well, not out here yet, but let's take a look at our planting areas and what they look like at the moment before starting the first plantings. Above is where the garlic is right now. As soon as the snow melts we're going to have to pull up the paper we put down to protect the beds. There's also a few other random beds down the slope that had tomatoes and peppers last year, so this year they are going to have radishes and the like.

Quick Hit: Bread success, goals, and wintery mix

Today is just a quick hit because I'm unprepared for today in general. The Critter was up and down all night very happy, and wanting to talk about it. I didn't get nearly enough sleep, and forgot to get photos for the blog this morning. All I have right now is the photos of the bread that I baked Sunday that I was happy with. I got tired of the stuck bread bottoms, so I just went with parchment paper that I reused from having baked cookies for the Lady of the House's birthday.

The Top pair of chunks of bread are actually intended to be bread bowls, I thought they turned out picture perfect, unfortunately the lighting did them no favors. They're slightly over large bowl sized, and I hope they work out well for bread bowls which is what the Lady of the House wanted them for. The other bread I baked this weekend, also sourdough, is more normal loaves. I tried making slicing shaped bread for sandwiches, and that turned out beautifully. The slightly smaller cross section has lead to darker colored outsides, but a good solid crust has nothing wrong with it in my opinion. I'm glad to feel like I'm finally getting things good and settled in making sourdough. Now the trick is going to be making the sourdough more sour, and it sounds like setting the bread in a cooler area of the house is actually going to be good for increasing the flavor. To do that I'm going to rise the bread in the kitchen instead of near the stove which is what I have been doing. We'll see how that works out.

For the time being, there isn't much to report, we didn't get seeds started this weekend due to this being a lean time, and not having starter soil. We're hoping to do that not this weekend but next perhaps. Thursday, I'll have more of a post, if nothing else on getting out from under our next snow storm, which promises to be the worst of all storm types, snow and rain mixed.

It's hard to imagine that in 3 months the world will be so different

In 3 months there will be growing plants, growing edible plants in this front slope garden. It'll probably be Kale and Radishes, but still. With the greater than dog depth snow (dog for scale) it's good to remind ourselves of that from time to time given the seemingly interminable winter.

Down a chicken due to our previous visitor.

Remember our not so benign visitor that we were concerned about, well, an overly adventurous chicken experienced why we were worried about it the hard way from what we can tell. On the up side we only lost one of the chickens which is a lot better than our previous predator experience where all chickens died at once. That said, this is most certainly not the end of the season of predators being a major threat. In fact, as breeding or birthing season comes up for the various predators in the area the concerns about depredation are going to increase not decrease. After all, foxes, owls, and weasels do have babies to feed. To that end we're going to just need to try to keep the chickens out of the woods. In this case a couple chickens decided to fly out of their run and explore in the snow. I wonder if they were startled out of the run given that there's nothing out there that's really worth going out to get at. Especially not where I found the one live, and one dead chicken.

An oops, and starting to look ahead to what we should seed start.

As usual, it is expected to be snowing today. At least today it's expected to be a light snow with only a couple inches. While that is certainly it's own variety of frustrating due to the difficulty of clearing it when I can clear it at all, this time I am glad for a break from the heavy snow that we've been seeing lately. While this isn't an excessive amount of snow for a winter, getting it all at once isn't my favorite method. It's going to be very cold again for the next couple weeks which is to be expected for this time of year.

Snow at greater than dog depth, and success in sourdough

It just keeps snowing here, and while we are certainly able to handle it, snow has reached greater than dog depth in non drift areas which is officially too much snow on the ground, we need a break. Mind you, we aren't as bad off as Worcester for instance. That said, looks like we Might have another good solid snow fall Thursday into Friday. There are good parts about this of course, especially when it comes to having a drought free spring.

Quick Hit: It just keeps snowing, and thoughts on "real" homesteading.

I really liked this photo from last post, so I decided to re use it for today. I'm running late on everything today because it's snowing more every day, which means I have to be clearing snow constantly. It's just part of life, but when you're at work during the day and are helping with baby care, and animal care isn't able to be compromised, you lose time somewhere. For me, it's lately been either the blog or sleep. In this case, it's the blog And sleep! The topic for today though is prompted by Cold Antler Farm's blog. Read more below the cut.

Yesterday there was a post on the Cold Antler Farm blog about someone who was upset with her for not being a "real" homesteader because she accepted help. Take it a read through, and if you enjoy this blog you'll probably enjoy hers.

My thoughts:
Homesteading is not, and can not be a solitary endeavor. By the very nature it is a community activity. I'm sure there are people who do nothing else, have no debts, and can manage to consistently survive without outside assistance, but that's their whole life. For most of us though, we can't produce the tools, all of the feed, every thing we need. We're going to rely on the people and community around us to shore up where we're short. She covers this well in her blog post, so I'll leave her words to do so.

Failure does not negate:
One of the particular things that stuck out to me was that the person who is stopping reading her blog said that she's no longer a real "homesteader" because of her lack of preparation for winter and reliance on that assistance from others. I think that's particularly silly. Not everyone succeeds all the time, and a failure or inability doesn't negate being something. If we suddenly needed to eat without outside assistance for over about 3 weeks we'd be in trouble. Before that our animals would be in trouble because we'd be out of feed within a week between chickens and rabbits. I've discussed what Homesteading is to me before so I don't think I need to discuss that again.

I guess this comes down to, I feel that what you aim for is more important than whether you always succeed at it. We may not always manage to do what we aim to do, but that's ok. I think that much like ethical eating, small steps are better than none at all. And is it really failure to be prepared if you manage to cope through help from others?

Tuesday I'll be back with more significant content and a more coherent brain!

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.

All is well as the cold passes through

Well, as of this morning just at the absolute worst of the temperature and wind had passed, I went out for farm chores. Everyone was alive as of that time, and seemed relatively healthy if not happy. You can tell that rabbits aren't doing optimally when they are eating less than their normal daily consumption rate. That means they aren't getting enough water usually, and are probably huddling together. My design for the hutches has again been confirmed to me as all of the rabbits, even the ones that usually avoid the private areas were using them when checked on. Talking to them when I go out brought them out to their water bottles where they get as much as they can before they ice over.

Arctic chill after wintery mix

 We're back in the new year, and we got a reminder that the bad part of winter comes after the solstice from nature. This was in the form of probably the worst form of winter precipitation for our location other than simple sheets of ice falling from the sky. It's something that is very familiar to locals, and I've heard is unusual outside of this area. Wintery Mix, aka snow/slush/rain/sleet all in one. So, in short, all of that white in the photo isn't just snow, it's basically solid(ish) ice.

The passing of the darkest Solstice.

The year is continuing to go on pace, and as of Sunday night the 21st at ~23:00 it was the darkest night of the year. Mix that with the new moon and it was very much a dark night to the darkest day of the year. But that means that the sun is coming.  I figured the use of the piece from the Lady of the House of the Raccoon counting out the time of Earth and Moon made sense for the time oriented post.
Something I was proud of on this darkest night of the year, it was the first time this year that I managed to not only keep the fire going all night to the point it was easy to start in the morning, it was a warm fire all night long. As of this point I've had the fire going non stop since the 21st, even when I've been gone to work for 10+ hours at a time with the fire untended. I thought it was a good progress marker at the darkest day of the year.



Now is the time of the year that we are in the dark, and looking towards the sun. The big difference the 23rd instead of the 20th is that now, we are starting to look to Spring instead of fight with how to make it through winter. We're starting to think about when to breed, when to plant, and what we're going to have time and energy for. It's a symbolic day, but symbols are important, especially when you live as close to the season as we have started to.

Happy Solstice.

A quiet Thanksgiving in the first storm of the season.

Winter has been here for a bit in terms of temperature, but we finally have our first major snow storm of the year. It made for a somewhat interesting Thanksgiving. I'm glad that I didn't expect to be doing a post on Thanksgiving day because we didn't have electricity that day, some of the day before, and some of the day after. Fortunately we had a lot of snow because that also means we didn't have water which got inconvenient fast with a lactating mom in the house.