Blue Moon New Year's

It's the end of Holiday Interlude Week, and the sun has gone down on another year; not a moment too soon. It's been a difficult year for a lot of us, though not so bad for us here on the farm. It may just be that we're used to not being to make ends quite meet, so being poor isn't that much of a big deal to us. And we don't expect anyone to hand us a job, or a handout, either. It would be really nice to have health insurance, though, and I'm pretty sure I'll be in debt for the rest of my life. Hey, I'm used to it. Somehow whenever one bill gets paid off, the Subaru needs new brakes and tires and a new windshield, and the water heater is throwing out pulses of what looks like black ink and is probably burnt sediment. Well, it is nine years old now, and its warrenty was only six years. I wouldn't mind if the Publishers Clearing House people brought me a bazillion dollars, but I'm not holding my breath. I did win $16 on a $3.00 scratcher ticket this week, though, and that's something.

Christmas is thoroughly over. I'm always shocked at how fast that happens--on the 26th of December it seems that nobody wants to linger in the Christmas glow. The soft rock station that played nothing but carols (mostly bad ones) since the weekend before Thanksgiving went back to soft rock on Saturday morning as if holiday music didn't exist. Me, I still play the occasional Christmas CD, though not so often. Sometime next summer we'll need some Tunes of the Solstice, and I'll be glad to drag them back out for a little coolness in the heat. The tree is still up, but soon we'll take its decorations off and take it down to one of the pheasant runs to give them another tree to hide in.

There isn't much heat at the moment. As the sun set, the beautiful round moon rose in the east, a magnificent blue moon for the new year. It's brilliant, and the little remnent snow drifts under the shrubs are luminous, though the ground is black and the shadows are sharp-edged. Last night's moon was nearly as bright but was caught in nets of drifting clouds and reflected in soft tiny snowflakes; the shadows were soft, and the very air appeared to glow. It was too cold to go walking in it, but it was magic. That kind of light only happens in a snowfall.

How Things Go in the Winter

Every day this week it's been a little warmer, until we passed right through the average high temp (mid forties) and ended up higher than average, so nice that I got out and, well, more in a bit. The last snowfall was December 8th, when we were treated to an actual blizzard which left drifts that are just now finally disappearing, and even the muddy spots are drying.

It always amuses me when people say I must be taking it easy now that things aren't growing on the farm. They have obviously not had to take care of a large and diverse flock of birds. It's the hardest part of the cold months. Depending on how low the morning temperatures got, getting water to the birdies is either hard or really, really hard. When it's been 20 or below, I fill up all the water containers I can find with hot water and pull them down the hill to the bird pens. At the moment I have 9 gallon jugs, a three-gallon one, and an old 5-gallon thing. That comes to 136 pounds of water, which turns out to be just enough for each bird pen to get at least a full gallon or two of warm water, and the geese have a deep pail so they can wash their faces. They do enjoy the warm, clean water, and the hens in particular like sitting on the bowl edges with their toes in the steam.

If the temp is 21 or warmer, I can usually just break the ice in the bowls with a hunk of rebar and then come back in the afternoon when the hoses have theoretically unfrozen so I can fill all the water pails and bowls. I like that much more--it takes a lot less time, and it doesn't involve dragging water down the hill and then dragging the wagon or sled back up. But I can see the birds thinking, "Say. Where's that nice warm water?" My, it's a long time to Spring.

However, as I mentioned, today got really warm--51 degrees, which seems balmy at this point. So I celebrated by going out and working in the garden. Nothing major, really. I picked two bed sections that I want to put in corn in the spring, and I mulched with ashes, barn bedding, and old straw and then watered the whole mess so the wind wouldn't blow it away. Hopefully it'll get snowed on in a week or so, and I may add another layer of stuff when it melts. Then I'll dig it all under in March or April, depending, and if it's warm enough in May (always an iffy thing) I can plant corn there. In late summer or early fall I can plant barley or another grain among the corn to overwinter (if it will; I'm not convinced grain can overwinter here, but then they do it in the Midwest, and they have pretty severe winters). Then alfalfa for a year, vegetables for another, beans and garlic for another, and iris for two years before going back to corn. Keep in mind that I'm planning to do all this on beds that are about 4 by 50 feet. I will be doing the same sort of rotation in other beds so I always have corn, grain, a clover, vegies, and iris going in any given year. Blame it all on Gene Logsdon (see the second post back). I only hope that my physical strength lasts through at least one full rotation...

The Snowy Day Finally Comes

Yesterday I was bemoaning the lack of snow, and somebody must have heard me. Today it has snowed since early light, and now at midafternoon it's still coming down. Big flakes pelting down, little flakes flung horizontally in a stiff wind, flakes hissing against one's coat, fat flakes clinging to the dogs' fur. The Stanley Homemakers Club meeting is cancelled for this afternoon; we have too many people who would have to drive snowy back roads, and a few others who would have to drive the even more terrifying Interstate. So it's just as well.

We need it, of course. November was just another dry month in a dry year (actually, November is more often dry here than not), and we've been impatiently waiting for the promised El Nino moisture. Five inches of fluffy snow is a start, though. The weather guys keep promising us "A Parade O' Storms." We'll see.

Running a farm isn't all that much fun in a snowstorm. If you have stock of one kind or another, they still need taking care of, and they need you out there. Normally we water all the birds in their respective pens and paddocks by hose, but in this weather the hoses are of course frozen. If the temperature had gotten above freezing some time during the day we could possibly have gotten by with breaking the ice in the water dishes, but not today. In the deep dishes the ice was several inches thick, and the smaller ones had frozen solid. So we filled gallon juice jugs with warm water and pulled them down to the birds on a new sled we bought recently for just this purpose. This was, of course, after dressing in long underwear, boots, gloves, furry hats or hoods--cold weather gets so complicated! But the birdies are all fed and watered and have enough shelter to be reasonably happy. Okay, maybe not happy. They won't be happy until spring comes.

Reading Gene Logsdon

We are now safely past Thanksgiving, replete with the usual mashed rutabagas, a new and wonderful recipe for sweet potatoes, and a very tasty small turkey (one of our own, so yes, I'm bragging). Suddenly the weather has decided it's time to remind us what winter is all about, and the temps don't seem to want to get over 36 degrees today. And windy. No snow for us, though--just morning frosts to prove that there was some moisture in the air, diminishing as the days go by. There was supposed to have been a storm sloshing its way up from the south and meeting a cold front diving from the north, but the storm changed its mind and stayed down in Mexico before heading off toward Texas. So it's just cold.


I suppose I should be doing housework, or making bread, or making soaps, or doing something useful, but my favorite thing to do when it's too cold outside to make work seem like any kind of fun is to read. What I'm reading now is Gene Logsdon's Small-Scale Grain Raising. Sounds fascinating, no? Actually it is, because Gene is a good writer with a sense of humor which shines through like the sun burning off the early cold clouds. He really makes it seem important, and even fun, to get out there and plant some corn, milo, beans, peas, and wheat, even in small patches and rows. And then feed it to your turkeys/chickens/other livestock, as well as feeding yourself. Okay, we will wait until it stops being winter before we start planting, but I'm already designing a rotation scheme which will incorporate heavily fertilized (organically of course) corn or milo followed by a grain and clover, then vegetables, and finishing with iris for a couple of years before going back to corn/milo. This crop rotation would take 5 to 6 years, all the time building soil fertility better than my hit-or-miss methods. This could work! But oh, why didn't I understand this before I was quite so Old? I promise to report back on the results.
Here's a sample of Gene's writing (from the current second edition, published by Chelsea Green Publishing, for those of you who might want to look it up):
"Beans can be drilled carefully into finely worked seedbeds, no-tilled directly into mostly undisturbed soil following cotton or corn, broadcast by hand and disked roughly into the soil, even dropped on top of the ground from airplanes into standing wheat with no tillage at all. In all four situations the beans sprout and grow more or less successfully, although broadcasting them from airplanes is risky. The point is that if you make a mistake with soybeans or any dry bean, just say you did it on purpose."

Meanwhile, I had bad things happen with my computer last week, but I had a professional fix things for me (I'm a farmer, not a computer person). So far the only repercussions have been with this blog. I lost all the blogs I had been following, plus I seem to have lost my three deeply valued followers. Oh, no! Or perhaps everybody took issue with my last post, written in the pre-Thanksgiving dumps. Come back--it's safe now!