The Day After
February 7th, 2014 · No Comments · Posted in farming
The storm that rumbled through here Wednesday dumped nine inches of fresh snow on our farm, the most this season so far. How can I tell? Well, when I drove the pickup down the driveway to make some tracks the oil pan left a groove in the middle. That was a first. Even with four-wheel drive, the truck isn’t terribly happy when it’s wheels are barely touching solid ground.
I thought maybe we’d dodged a bullet when we had just a couple of inches on the ground by noon. But the storm was just getting started. By afternoon it had turned into a blizzard and it snowed through the night. We just hunkered down. As long as we have wood for a fire, we’re happy to confine ourselves to the house.
There is something awfully pretty waking up in the morning to a landscape freshly covered in a thick blanket of snow. Especially when the sun makes an appearance, glinting playfully off all those pristine flakes on the ground. But there’s not much time to think about it. I’m up before the sun, dressing in double layers of everything, making a fire, grabbing a quick cup of coffee, posting the blog, checking the weather online and on the television. Then it’s out the door to take care of the goats.
Their water bucket had disappeared under the snow. I had to search for it with my feet. Snow insulates, however, and remarkably the water in the bucket was hardly frozen at all. The goats, stalwart critters that they are, plowed through the snow to greet me and receive their handful of morning grain. They greedily nibble it up and lick my hand more or less clean. I toss an armful of hay into the snow. They’ll work on it for the rest of the day.
Then I’m off in the pickup to visit the other animals in the paddock. I bring a fresh bale of hay and heave it over the fence before I can lug it a respectable distance from the shelter. Now that it’s stopped snowing, the animals don’t need to spend all day in the shelter, messing their straw bedding. But I don’t bother to open the gate to the adjacent pasture. I don’t see any point in making the sheep trudge a long distance through the snow for food. Meanwhile, Emily stands in one corner of the shelter, lapping up grain from her bucket, while Tigger our buckling goat is high and dry in his pen, pawing at the bowl of grain I set out for him.
When I visit the chickens in the orchard, it’s with a shovel to make a play area for them outside their mobile coop. With snow this deep, they won’t even leave the coop without an assist from me. They don’t like snow much. After a few minutes of shoveling, they’ve got an area plenty big enough to walk around and peck at the ground. I’d rather have them eating from their feeder outside the coop than pooping all day in their hay. Even with all the snow, they will leave us 15 eggs all day–that’s on the high side.
By afternoon I’m filling water buckets in the kitchen to replenish the trough in the paddock. As I mentioned previously, the “frost-free” hydrant that had served us so well up to this point remains frozen. But it’s not such a terrible walk with the buckets–about 150 yards from the house through the snow.
Thursday mornings, I volunteer at the food co-op in Cambridge so I wasn’t home when our friend Howard came by with his truck and plowed the driveway. Good old Howard. He’s the same guy who dug all the trenches for our new water and electric lines. He’s got a number of clients on our road and we don’t even have to prompt him when it’s obvious the driveway needs to be groomed. You can’t ask for much more for the $50 he charges.
Today, we’re pretty much back to normal. Zero degrees outside when I wake, thermometer still dropping. Build the fire in the wood stove, write the blog–wash, rinse, repeat.
I read somewhere that farming with animals entails a lot of mindless plodding. Apparently, I’m a sucker for plodding.
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