Wood heat has been the winter way around here for the last few years. The old wood stove, and stacks of firewood. In cold snaps, where it stays well below freezing, day and night, the fire is always burning. In the more usual dramatic temperature ups and downs, the fire is often left to run down overnight, and a new one built up early evening. I’ve become a little obsessed with firestarting using the least amount of paper and kindling, and only one match. I don’t suppose you could call that a skill, nor an art, but some kind of a game! I enjoy setting up for a dominos falling effect, but with fire. The easy-to-light, fast-burning paper lasting long enough to ignite the smallest pieces of longer-burning wood, which in turn start the next larger pieces, the bigger chunks get, the more steady, sustained fire it takes to set them ablaze. Idea for a video game?!
Weather
With a little snow
What a difference a little snow makes. Winter has changed around here over the last 20 years, It’s hard to really remember how it was exactly, except that I’m pretty sure there was a lot more snow. And it was a lot colder. Right through the winter months. Nowadays, the snow comes and it goes. The temperature hops up and down. The seasons are still here, you can tell by the sun, but they feel kind of…approximate. That pile of firewood hasn’t yet been stacked, a task for the next warm and snow-free winter day. Or maybe it can wait until spring.
The new year!
The first fine day of the all-new year! Not as wintry as it might be in the Great White North. Guess I’ve gotten used to the new winters: a few days of any sort of weather, then a complete change. But I still remember…snowbanks. We adapt!
March field peek
An early spring look at the field, as the snow recedes and the soil takes over. This is the exact moment when the new season begins for me. Seedlings are already growing indoors, planting plans put to paper, things are underway. Still, it only all makes sense out here, with the musty wet smell of decayed vegetation, my boots sinking into the sticky clay mud, wondering when it will dry out enough to work. I see the single strand of electric fence, all that stands between garden and pillaging deer, stayed up! (You can see part of it strung between the gate posts.) Some winters it falls and critters chew through it in a spot or two. Not having to fix it means one less thing to do!
January snow
The new year’s view. Snow from week to week in winter is practically a 50-50 proposition in recent years. Go back a couple of decades, though, when weather was more regular and predictable, and this is what it was like around here for four or five months solid. The snow got deeper, the drifts piled higher, as winter wore on. It’s the exact opposite of veggies growing in a field!
October harvest
Great weather into the first week of October, with no hard frost so far. The veggie harvest list: beets, carrots, peppers, garlic, onion, green onion, zucchini, spinach, kale, lettuce, cabbage, butternut squash, radicchio, broccoli, eggplant. Nice!
Summer ends!
For the last day of summer, a rainbow! The field is looking a bit bedraggled, with some things naturally dying out, some touched by near-freezing overnights, with tender crops row-covered against the possibility of a hard frost. Besides the rainbow, it’s not the postcard look of mid-summer, but what matters most, everything is still producing well!