A few hours of steady snowfall blanketed the landscape and we have a magical winter wonderland postcard scene. It may be enough snow to stick around for a while, unless next, it rains!
snow
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!
A blanket of fresh new snow
The weather app was right: more snow! Fresh new snow piled high never fails to make me wonder what it must be like to see this stuff for the very first time…
On a snowed-under mid-winter day, pictures of veggies growing in the field don’t come to mind. Except, I do like thinking about the fall-planted garlic, tucked under a layer of straw, biding its time.
The only other overwintering crop out there is Jerusalem artichoke. Rather than dig it all up in fall and replant in spring, lately I’ve been leaving a good amount to come back on its own. The chokes can fend for themselves.
Winter farming in a nutshell
Winter farming in a nutshell: Sundown, New Year’s Day 2017, checking up on the greenhouse after a rattler of a windy night. The snowdrifts, the low-riding, fast-falling sun captured by plastic over hoops of steel – it’s all still here! :)
Little blizzard
In the last week, warm, sunny days, a field dry enough to start working, and the first round of seed is in the ground. Today’s sudden little blizzard, as full-on winter wonderland as it looked coming down, hardly got in the way—quick as it arrived, only six hours later, and all trace had vanished (helped along by a little rain). The weather: never anything less than exciting!
It’s white again
Overnight snow turned our muddy browns of spring back to white, and after a spell of welcome warmth, it’s cold days and freezing nights again for most of the next week or two, if forecasts turn out to be right. Waiting for the field to dry out enough to work, which in recent erratic-weather years has been anywhere from early April to late May, makes it hard to plan things in general, but this is not unexpected, it’s just what it is. And spring weather has been known to suddenly and dramatically change from one day to the next. Surprise!