Pastured Chickens and Snow

We recently got 18 laying hens in short noticed and we were not at all prepared other than we had some chicken food, fencing, feeders, waters and chicken tractors designed for meat birds. So we used what we had and Eugene quickly put together a mobile chicken coop out of stuff lying around the farm. We introduced the hens to their 2nd new living situation in under 2 weeks and they liked it and settled in and all was well for about 3 weeks.

The weather was mild and mostly dry with low winds but as Christmas neared rumors of a winter advisory started circulating on the weather TV stations and websites. As time marched on that advisory became a winter storm watch, than winter storm warning. Than about 24 hours before the snow hit us a Blizzard warning was issued.

A Blizzard! What to do about the chickens as we knew from past experience chickens do not like snow at all and high winds were predicted and that meant that snow would get up into the mobile coop itself as it has hardware cloth for flooring to allow the poop to fall to the soil below and fertilize the ground. A great concept in any weather but snow, especially a blizzard.

So what does a farm that specializes in season extension using simple hoop houses do when a big snow is predicted? Put up a hoophouse over the chickens and their mobile laying tractor plus two other smaller tractors, that what. And it worked. The hoophouse has kept the snow and wind off the hens who have stayed warm and dry and quite happy walking around eating grain and the greens we harvest for them out of hoophouses that have greens growing in them.

This has been an excellent and cheap solution to heavy snow conditions for us.

Cold and snowy outside

But inside we have happy birds

Eugene is checking for eggs and Nate is hunting chicken "by products"

Melon came in too much to the hens' dismay

Closing up the hoophouse

Good Bye

Winter Kale

As long time readers know we do season extension and one of our annual goals is to harvest all 12 months of the year.I don't know if this will be possible in the winter of 2011 but at this point in the season it is looking good. I present to you rainbow kale

Here we have a bed of kale that took two of us about 1/2 hour to clear the snow and ice from so we could take the row cover off of the bed

Freshly harvested winter kale for our CSA members

Here we have a row cover that is too narrow. This is because when we took it off the snow had collapsed the hoops that were supposed to be holding the covers off the ground and kale. But several inches of snow and ice flattened the hoops so when we got the covers off we reset the hoops and added more and found that the covers had frozen in such a way that they were too narrow to cover the hoops/bed. So we fiddled with the covers for a half hour and got most of the edges loose so that the covers would cover the area. One of the many differences between winter growing and farming the rest of the year

Compost in Snow w/ Betty!

The Poor Man's Fertilizer

Like most of the USA we have been inundated by snow. I believe we have had around 21" fall this month and we still have a couple of weeks and at least one more snow storm to get through.

A hoop house covered in snow

So far we have not lost any hoop houses but it is not easy to get into any of them. The one you can walk to fairly easily has its' entrance covered with a 4' deep drift that extends about 10' out from the house. the other houses have no drifts in front of them but you have to slog through about 1/4 mile of beautiful powder in drifts up to 3.5' deep (and an average depth of 2'). So no one has been in them since I harvested greens for a customer and Eugene hoed beds the 4th of February. I suspect things are growing in the houses as the days are certainly longer and we have had several sunny days which means the hoop houses got above freezing (likely well above freezing).

Deep snow means you can't do a whole lot around the farm. We have started kale and lettuce seeds to go along with the onion, leek and shallot seedlings but other than putting the kale and lettuce germinants into 2" soil blocks as they germinate and watering everyone about every other day (over watering kills more innocent baby plants than anything else) takes maybe 4 hours a week. Fruit trees and brambles need to be pruned but at the moment that is an impossible task. We have to wait until the snow quits accumulating and starts melting.

The packing shed in winter

The snow melt is likely gonna be problematic. We have over 10" on the ground and there are a lot of piles and drifts that are much deeper all over SW Ohio. If we are lucky we will get warmish dry conditions and the snow will slowly and safely sublimate away. But what is much more likely to happen is rain which will clear away the snow in a matter of hours instead of a matter of weeks but this will also cause flooding. I am rooting for the quick fix and possible floods, otherwise we will not be able to prune, work the ground or transplant early crops until well into March and than we will be facing an overwhelming task of getting a lot done in a very short amount of time without a lot of help.

Betty in her element

The good news about the snow is Betty LOVES it. To her snow is the best thing since sliced bread. Little does she know that soon it will all be gone. of course when it goes away her bones and other toys will reappear and vole hunting will likely be easier. And there is likely to be a very healthy vole (and other small rodent) population this spring as deep snow is the perfect thing for small prey animals. iIt hides them from predators and it keeps them insulated from extreme cold and wind.

Chicken tractors just about covered by drifts. It's a good thing we don't have any right now, they would be miserable

The other good thing about the deep snow is it is keeping all our over wintered crops like the garlic and asparagus nice and cold. one problem with bare soil in winter is when if freezes and thaws you get frost heave which will heave bulbs and plants all the way out of the soil where they will die. A nice layer of snow stops this sort of thing from happening. Plus the snow will leave behind things like phosphates in the soil which are always welcome. Old time farmers call snow the poor man's fertilizer

Winter Garden Video

A short movie of the Market garden January 8th 2010 going from west to north to east. The first thing you see is the rhubarb patch than dormant raspberries. Next is the salad Hoop House than many beds covered in snow. Than brown asparagus fronds and behind that a hoop house that has leeks in it. More beds than the hoop house with spinach than more snow covered fallowed beds, the highway, the back of the store off in the distance and we are done

Big Snow

We got our first big snow of the winter season, 8.5". It crushed 2 of our 3 hoop houses which is a bummer. Had someone gone up and cleared the snow from them just 15 minutes earlier at least one if not both would have been saved. Too often timing is everything and this time we just missed our mark.

At least the timing on the winter farm Share program was right on the mark. That ended just 4 days ago. It would have been tough harvesting out of flat houses.

The bad news is that one house now has a lot of ripped up greenhouse poly where it all came down on top of fence stakes that were there for the fall tomatoes. It also looks like a lot of the hoops are badly bent up and will have to be replaced. The good news is that the crops inside, tomatoes and spring mix in one and kale in another will be just find under the snow and plastic, even if we cannot access them. Now we just have to wait on the weather to take everything down so it can be fixed and/or replaced.

Nate checking out the strawberry hoop house which got the most damage

Another shot of the Strawberry hoop house (and Nate)

More of the Strawberry house

A shot of the kale hoop house to the left that is half down and the lettuce hoop house to the right which was cleared of snow in time

Boulder Belt in Winter

Winter is here-it is cold, snowy and most everything that is not we covered is dead. This means things have slowed way down for us (yay!) It is nice to be able to kick back for a month or so before the 80 hour a week grinds starts again.

People want to know what we farmers do in the off season. For us, we spend a lot of November cleaning up stuff like the store, the garden beds, popcorn, catnip, onions. Crunching numbers on the various produce items we grow so we have an idea as to what is selling and what is not selling so we know what seeds to plant for the coming season. Eugene does not do much on the computer so it is me who keeps the blog and website updated and that can be time consuming, especially this year since it looks like Boulder Belt is back in the CSA biz and that means at some point I need to design an informative CSA page for the Boulder Belt Website.

December is too often spent removing snow from hoop houses and driveways. It is also the time we put in our main seed order with Johnny's Selected Seeds (our favorite seed house). In the past we have waited until after Christmas to put in our order but there are rumors that there will be seed shortages this year so I believe I will get at least part of the order in in early Dec. or even late November. December is usually the Month that we start the onions and leeks indoors, though this year I believe the onions will be started today or tomorrow (that would be mid November). The reason for moving up the date is due to the fact we have quite a few Copra onion seeds left over from last year and We decided that those should be planted to see if they have strong germination. If they do than we do not need to order more seed. If they do not than we will know by Dec 1st if the seeds are working or not and can get an order into Johnny's early enough to avoid the dreaded back order that can set one back several months.

If December, January and February are mild (which is the NOAA prediction for us this winter, but I will believe that when I see it) than the crops in the hoop houses will continue to produce pretty much all winter and someone has to go and harvest and package the crops periodically (weekly-as growth slows way down in the winter even if it is relatively warm and sunny). We than sell the greens, leeks, etc., at the Oxford Monthly Winter market and this year the CSA gets their share as well. We also sell through the store via email appointment and occasionally to a restaurant or Miami University.

If the winter months are cold with a lot of precip, than most things quit growing until Late Feb and cannot be harvested, the exception to this are the leeks and scallions. Than we sit around twiddling our thumbs waiting on the greens to come back to life. Okay, we don't spend much time thumb twiddling (but we do start craving greens in a big way and are delighted when things are harvestable again). If it is a snowy winter than we are spending lots of time removing snow from the hoop houses, otherwise they get flattened and are unuseable and have to be repaired or replaced. this has happened a couple of times to us and incredibly the crops under all the snow and plastic are generally unharmed and producing very well when we finally get to them

What we are doing by Feb is starting seriously seeds indoors. This starts out slowly with around 15 pots of onions and leeks planted in Dec/Jan. Those are followed by the brassicas-kale, broccoli, cabbages, etc., and lettuces in mid to late Feb. Those crops are repeatedly seeded indoors through April/May so we have a continual harvest April through June/July. By late March we are also starting early tomatoes, peppers, zucchini and melons to be planted in mid April in hoop houses. In April the main crops of tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, celery, celeriac, parsley, flowers, etc., are started which fills up the grow room along with cold frames and hoop houses with thousands of seedlings.

Once the seeds are started we are tied to the farm. The seeds need daily tending-watering, fertilizing, pricking (this means to re pot into a larger container), making soil (we make our own soil mix for seed starting as we have a hard time finding soiless mixes that don't contain petroleum products or chemical fertilizers. Add to that, we start seeds in soil blocks and we make our own soil blocks so the soiless mix has to be just so for it to work for us. Making our own soil blocks means we use very little plastic when starting our seedlings. It probably saves us around a thousand bucks a year as well (of course it increases our work load by at least 100 hours as we have to make a lot of soil and a lot of soil blocks.)

So you can see that we small sustainable farmers really don't have much down time at all. Some day, perhaps, we will quit this idea of winter growing and marketing and will shut the farm down in November and go to the Caribbean for 4 months.

Snowy Sunset

I took this shot 3 days ago. The weather profits on TV assured us it was not snowing so I got this shot of huge snowflakes trying to obscure the sun during a snow squall that passed through.

Snowy Market

That's me at market in front of our stand
(Photo Courtesy of Deb's Key West Wine & Garden)

What a winter market we had on Saturday. It was snowing hard through the entire market making displaying our wares a bit tricky. We opted for keeping as much as possible in coolers out of the snow. we had a list of what we had for people to read and choose from. I was rather amazed at how many people showed up to buy. The Oxford Uptown market has quite a few intrepid customers who will come out in any weather.

The day started for us in the store packing everything into coolers and boxes lined with toweling. We did not want to risk bringing home frozen produce that would than have to be tossed on the compost pile. This happened to us last year-we went to a sub freezing market laid our wares out on our tables like it was warm out and lost all our remaining potatoes and winter squash to the cold. And the thing of it was we did not know the stuff had frozen for 36 hours as that is how long it took for the damage to show. So we thought we were alright when we unloaded the van. After figuring out we had lost about 3/4 of our winter's stock of food we vowed never again will we go to a winter market and allow our food to freeze. So now we take measures to keep things warmish.

Got things packed they way we wanted and loaded the van and got on the dry roads at 7:30 am so we could get down to the Streits for our milk before the market and the snow. Got to the Streits and got our milk and as we were loading that into the van I noticed a snow flake lazily drifting through the air. A second later i noticed a million of its' brethren and the snow storm was on. By the time we got out to St Rt 73 (3 minutes) the roads were beginning to become covered and all the black Angus cows we passed were white on top. We drove towards Oxford wondering if we should just continue north on 127 and go home as the snow was coming down hard and fast. But when we came to the fork in the road where 127 peels off of St Rt 73 we went left and on to Oxford and the Winter Market.

Drove up and down the hills and curves of St RT 73 (one of the most dangerous roads in Ohio) talking of other snow storms and all the times I had to deal with 73 in bad conditions (my family used to live in a subdivision that was on the highway). We were able to traverse the road with no problems though I believe if we had tried to drive it a half hour later we would have had problems what with our vehicle being a Dodge Cargo van with rear wheel drive and not the newest tires in the world. Granted, we did have a lot of weight in the back due to the produce.

So got to the top of 73 where it meets Patterson Ave in Oxford and turned right so we could get to High street and got up the high Street hill swimmingly and pulled into the snow covered parking lot where we hold the market. Eugene cursed himself for not bringing a snow shovel. But soon enough, several snow shovels showed up and people were clearing the snow away (or trying to, it was snowing hard so all progress was soon covered). The shovel crew was a mix of farmers, kids, customers and market volunteers and between them all they kept the footing in good shape for everyone.

Getting the way cleared for shoppers
(Photo Courtesy of Deb's Key West Wine & Garden)

Snow on the shelters over each stall was an issue unless you had an older and more expensive model EZUp. I noticed our EZUp and one other that is the same year and kind had no problems shedding snow but all the cheapo EZUps people buy at Sam's Club and Wal-Mart were having some snow issues and had to be continually cleared. The EZ Up knock offs were even worse. The good news is as far as I know no one lost their shelters due to the snow loads. And we needed the shelters, otherwise all our food would have been covered under 3 to 4 inches of snow (maybe more). As it was, there was a good wind so quite a bit of snow did drift onto everyone's items unless they were tarped. Scott Downing's apples were covered in a nice blanket of snow (which could not have been good for the apples. I suppose they will make then into cider if they did get frost damage) and his honey jars were getting drifted in. At our stand the cash drawer started to fill up with snow and I had to abandon our tally sheet when it got too wet to be written upon (the pen would go right through the paper). But other than the tally sheet and some wet bills we had things well covered so nothing was harmed.

I thought I was going to be cold at market. I had good boots and a hat but had forgotten gloves. Not an issue as it turned out. For some reason, my hands were toasty warm through out the market. Maybe this was because the day before I spent several hours washing the leafy greens in freezing salt water to get the dirt and slugs off of the food before packing and selling it (nothing like a 3" slug crawling out of one salad...) so my hands were used to the cold. I dunno. I do know I had no need for gloves which is good as they tend to get in the way for me and make it hard to pick things up.

Chicken was a hot seller. Sold out of all that we brought (2 roasters and 5 Cornish hens). Leeks also sold well but we still have a lot of them (I believe we brought around 100 of them and sold 3/4). Butternut squash is always a good seller for us. we also sold a lot of arugula, all the red mustard, about half the spring mix (I don't know why this doesn't sell better, its' great salad. So much better than organic mixes at the grocery), almost all the spinach (which I thought would sell out), most of the salad radishes but none of the cooking radishes (probably because they were displayed badly so no one knew we had them), a lot of potatoes sold but few sweet potatoes (again because they were displayed badly).

At 11:30 we quickly packed up, drove over to UDF to get some gasoline than we slowly drove home via the back roads we always take. We had a bad problem with the wipers icing over and becoming useless. We stopped 3 times to clear them between Oxford and Eaton. And cleared them twice while in Eaton buying beer and dog food and picking up the mail. Finally got home and unloaded the van and than watched the people sliding up the 40' Pitch. That was great as it became a communal event. As a vehicle got stuck on the pitch people behind them would get out of their cars and help push the vehicles up the hill. It was good to get home before the roads got really bad.

The rest of the day I napped-Once I got home and unloaded I found that I was pretty exhausted

1st Snow

We got our first snow of the 2007/08 season last night/this morning. Got around 4" of the white stuff. Almost enough for sledding.

Difficult Spring So Far

So far spring has sucked. It got way too warm way too early so we lost a lot of lettuce and spinach to bolting during the warm period. Than it got very cold and we got quite a bit of damage to the raspberries and maybe the grapes. We won't know for a few weeks if these crops will be alright.

Fortunately we are very very good at growing in cold conditions and have a lot of know how and paraphernalia to keep our crops alive when it freezes. That and we did not transplant the tender crops like tomatoes, cucumbers and zucchinis into the hoophouses the first week of April as planned.

Still, despite not losing much and finding that the strawberries in the hoophouse had not only survived the week of subfreezing conditions but are making berries, it was a very difficult week of not being able to do anything much in the garden because of all the snow, wind and rain and not knowing if we had done enough to save most of the crops. This has translated into big time stress. If enough damage was done to certain crops we lose a lot a of money and over a year of work establishing them.

Now the weather is a bit better, not much, but some. Yesterday we worked in high winds and snow/rain trying to keep row covers from bashing tender young plants which was a futile effort. We go out and tighten hem up and put more weight to keep them down and than turn around to see some of them flying again. We did get a hoophouse all ready for the cukes and squash that are getting way too big. We put down drip tape and landscape fabric. Now we have to wait for the black fabric to heat up the soil for 5 days or so and we can put the seedlings in the hoophouse.

Today has been quite nice, sunny and about 55˚F with light winds. This allowed me to folier feed most everything in the ground. Folier feeding is one way we fertilize crops. We use a combination of powdered, water soluble kelp and powdered fish emulsion with a dash of Dr Bronner's peppermint soap as a sticker. We were able to move the chicks to clean ground as well. They seemed to enjoy getting onto new ground with uneaten clover. If the weather were dryer we would move the birds daily but because it has been both wet and cold we have been forced to leave them be and have resorted to thickly bedding them to keep them cleanish and dry. The upside to this is we have some good material for the compost pile.

Hoophouses in Snow

This picture shows why we will not be selling anything at the Monthly Winter Farmers Market in Oxford, OH. We can't get into the things!

That said, we will be attending the market as customers. There is locally raised pastured meat to be bought from the Filbruns. Hopefully, Karen Baldwin of Tahapsia'a farm will be there with her incredible eggs. If she is not there than I will get eggs from someone else. If no one else has eggs than I will go without because factory farmed eggs are disgusting to me.

But most importantly, our Fedco Seed order is in and we can pick it up tomorrow at the market. We do a co-operative order from Fedco that Harv Roehling has been in charge of doing for a lot of years. This allows us to get deep discounts from Fedco by buying in bulk. I do not know how many folks were involved this year but last year the collective order was over $2,000. I suspect it will be more this year as I think the group is larger and our order was 3x larger this year than last.

I got an email from Harv telling me that Fedco was out of some seeds-Poona Kera Cucumber (which I think we can get from Seed savers) and Seminola Winter Squash (maybe Seed Savers will have this too). We also have several items on back order-Nelson Carrots, Red Ace beets and Pac Choi. Fortunately none of these crops will be planted early so we can wait on them for 2 months, if need be. In the past, Fedco has tended to back order the early stuff like spinach, onions and leeks. But since Harv has moved up the order date to early January this sort of thing has become less common.

I am looking forward to seed starting time which is coming up quickly. The quiet winter is getting boring.

Snow Pix

Some pictures of our snowy farm.

Winter Storm '07

We got an, honest to God, Winter Storm yesterday. It started at midnight with a light dusting on the deck when I put the dogs out for the night and by 5am in the morning I could barely get the back door open to let the dogs in. There must have been 4" on the deck with heavy snow.

It snowed most of the morning than turned to ice for a short time (maybe an hour) than became sleet, which is ice that does not stick to much of anything. the sleet stuck around until after dark. it sounded as if tiny elves were pelting the side of the house with tiny stones.

The winds were not too bad in the morning but by noon they were cranking up and heavy snow warnings to the north of us turned into blizzard warnings. We have not had a blizzard in the area in years. The least one we had was when we lived at the old farm on Crubaugh Rd. We got 18" of snow which closed Crubaugh for several days due to heavy drifting (some drifts were well over 8' deep).

We kept the dogs in most of the day but being dogs they had to go out a couple of times to pee and poop. early in the day the snow was a minor inconvenience to them but by 4pm the snow was almost too deep for Danny to get through. Arlo and Nate, having longer legs, had a good time bounding through the 8 inches of crusty powder and making places where they could do their dooty.

The most amazing part of this storm to me was the fact people still insisted on driving. Granted, traffic was way down yesterday-probably off by 75%. But there were still plenty of cars, trucks and semis on the road. Fortunately no one had a wreck on the 40' pitch (yay!) though I guess that was not the case on I-70.

This morning the storm is winding down. It is still snowing a bit and the winds are blowing the snow into drifts and likely making some roads impassable. It will be interesting to take a walk around the farm and see where drifts have appeared. I suspect the hollow behind the bank barn has 4' to 6' feet of drifting snow in it. I am hoping the hoophouses are still standing. they looked in good shape at sunset yesterday but with enough wind and snow things could have changed overnight. the last snow did damage the hoophouse with salad mix and head lettuce growing in it. Too much snow weight and not enough supports = a cave in.

Later on today I will post pictures of the winter wonderland

Adventures in Conservation

Because there is a pending winter storm we went out shopping for storm supplies and went to Wal-Mart because we thought maybe they would have some cheap sleds (one of the supplies we felt we needed to be able to survive the pending storm-right now our sleds consist of a sheet of heavy plastic that can hold two people). We found a toboggan-like plastic sled and Eugene check with an associate and she said the sled was marked down to $8 and change. So we loaded the sled into the shopping cart where it instantly blocked our view making dealing with the shopping cart a real PITA.

We continued to shop blindly and found there was a real great deal on compact florescent light bulbs-6 for $10 and so we bought them and a few other items such as cheap sunglasses and some butter. Checked out the paltry organic selection in the prioduce section and headed for the checkout. Got to the register and found that the sled that made shopping at Wal-mart more of a PITA than usual was not marked down to $8 and change but was $28. So we said "No Thanks" to that and left the store. We continued to do the rest of our shopping at TSC (dog food) and Kroger (all food items we did not buy at Wal-Mart) and headed home.

Got home and Eugene opened the compact fluorescent bulbs (CFB) and started replacing incandescent bulbs. We had one in the living room that burned out 2 days ago so that was switched to a CFB (the rest of the lights in the living room were already CFB's) and than he changed all the lights in the bathroom to CFB and than found we own a wasteful medicine cabinet/Vanity. It seems, the the CFB are too big. The CFB's fit in the sockets but the bulbs themselves are too big to open the cabinet doors. So today he is going to try and rectify this situation by either moving the light fixtures so the bulbs are a bit higher or lower the doors.

It's not easy being green

Winter Storm watch

We are under a winter storm watch. Sometime tomorrow it will start to snow. Some weather folk are saying we will have a blizzard.

Sledding

It finally snowed and so we had a sledding party and invited lots of people out to sled. Since it was Wednesday not many people could make it but some intrepid people did make it out around noon and we had a good time sledding down the 40' pitch and walking back up. It was a great workout and when the the first group left at 2pm it was all we could do to heat up some left over spag and eat. About 45 minutes after eating and about the time a nap was sounding like the most excellent idea in the universe a second wave of one person (not much of a wave) arrived for more sledding.

Since Eugene and myself were not exactly up for sledding we sat around for about an hour talking and drinking beer. Finally, we decided to go out and take a look at the sledding hill and did go down once and than took a 30 minute walk around the farm.

After the walk I was more tired than ever but had a pot of chicken broth that needed attention if it was going to be transformed into dinner so while the boys sat around talking I skimmed the fat from the broth and cut up veggies and took apart the stewing hen and made a nice chicken soup for dinner along with some biscuits.

It was a fun, though tiring day. I wish I had gotten some pictures of the actual sledding but I was concerned that sledding and the camera would not go well together. I did get a few shots of the apres sledding.

Yep it Snowed

The snow is over. We got around 5" of the stuff. All the schools are closed.

Eugene spent a great deal of the late morning/early afternoon pushing snow around using the BCS (that is a walking or two wheeled tractor) with the plow attachment. The high winds last night scoured out most of the snow in the parking area. Except the part right up by the road (For which I think we can thank an O-DOT plow). But he sold a hay rack a couple of days ago and they guy is supposed to come by tomorrow to get it so he got the snow up to and around the hay rack cleared away.

Nate, the puppy thought the snow was GRRREAT!!! He now knows drifts are for running through and biting. He stayed out so long in the snow his pads got pretty frozen. Just like a kid.

The cats are not at all amused by the snow. Navin wanted out last night while it was still snowing. He went to the front door and was faced with a lot of frozen precip. No good. So he went to the kitchen door hoping that door would open up onto some warm dry weather. but that didn't happen, snow at that door too. So he went back to the space heater and laid down and soaked up more heat.

The farm is a very different place today. Lots of white and very little green. the house is extra cold today. The thermostat on the wall says it is 55˚F. Brrrr! Wouldn't be bad if it was 59˚F, that 4 degrees makes a big difference.

Invited friends out tomorrow for a sledding party. I have no idea how many folks will come. It doesn't matter as sledding is always fun.

I am thawing some apple cider we pressed in August. The plan is to heat it up and put in some spices and drink the sweet warming fluid. The adults can add rum as well. Will also make hot cocoa to which the adults can add kaluah and/or rum if they choose.

1st Big Snow of the Season

The weather prediction for today is our first snow storm of the year. 3" to 6" of the white stuff. Ought to make it really pretty and we can test out our sledding hills.

The local news media has freaked out about the coming storm. There are heavy snow warnings in a variety of colors, depending on which channel one watches. Some channels have winter storm warnings and no mention of heavy snow at all. The media talking heads are acting as if there is no such thing as snow removal equipment.

Yeah the snow will make rush hour a real bitch and a half (and rush hour is something I do not deal with seeing as how I work for myself and not The Man). But if some folks would quit pretending that the roads are clear and there is great visibility there would be very few problems. But the roads seem to be full of delusional drivers.

So I guess the greater Dayton/Cincinnati area can expect a rodeo this evening on their way home.

But it ain't started yet so things are still a green hue, but quite frozen.

First Snow

A pile of gourds drying

This week we were able to get pretty much the last of the crap from the old farm. Eugene seems to think there is more stuff to get but I say that is just the pack rat coming out in him. From what I can see all that is left is trash. Ah he can deal with that sort of thing-if he wants to take a day and load trash into the van and move it somewhere let him.

Monday he got the perennial herbs, the rest of the peonies, the rest of the parsnips (which, I believe, means the garden is empty of food except for a few kale plants that are on their own) and a pine tree Doug Ross gave me two years ago for my 40th birthday (which is now in front of the house, where it should grow into a majestic tree). he also dug up many buckets of day lilies in all sorts of colors. I have been propagating day lilies for about 5 years now and had a pretty good sized bed (maybe 15' x 15') going at the old farm. Now it looks like I have enough to do a 30' x 30' bed

Yesterday Eugene planted the perennial herbs-thyme, oregano, tarragon, lovage and some chives (chives are a poor seller for us but a garden just ain't complete without them and the are sooo easy to grow). This morning he planned on mowing the field where the garden beds are going but an early snow dissolved those plans quickly. By early I mean in the day-snow was predicted by the prognosticators we call the weather people. they had predicted a dusting of snow to fall sometime this afternoon but the snow decided to come early and drop a couple of inches. Makes it pretty outside.

So instead of farming we are cooking. I am doing the stuffing/dressing today and if I get motivated will also do the rolls today (at least get them proofed and par baked). Eugene is making an apple pie that smells Fantastic. he is a very good pie maker. he is not much of a cook otherwise, serviceable but not great. But his pies are to die for, he could make a living selling these things, I think. But pie making would bore him and farming fascinates him so I don't see the pie sales happening.

Friday is Buy Nothing Day
and buying nothing is my plan on Friday