From delicious warm weather to snow, to mini-melt-off, to more cold and snow… The weather is yo-yo-ing, changing every couple of days. Seems unusual, but what isn’t with Our Weather of the Last Few Years? At this point, the only way I could keep track of all the weird weather configurations is with a detailed daily weather journal, constantly updating the stats. Somehow, that doesn’t particularly appeal to me! In the pic, the overnight snow makes a pretty topping for the useful wood scraps, ends of 2×6’s, conveniently piled just outside the new seedling room door…
snow
One-horse farming
Conall‘s winter job this year is cutting firewood on Canada’s east coast (Nova Scotia), in partnership with his trusty workhorse, Dixie. It sounds pretty intense. He started tiny farming from scratch two seasons ago, our first full-season full-timer, way back in ’07. Last year, he was out in NS, on a tiny, one-horse farm, learning to plow and cultivate veggies, and bring in the hay, with Dixie. This winter’s job involves heading into the woods with Dixie, where he fells small trees with a chainsaw, guides Dixie to drag the logs, at times through waist-deep snow, to a clearing, cuts down the logs to firewood, loads it onto the sled, and hauls it out for delivery. Conall’s plan for this summer: a Dixie-powered market garden… What I wonder is, the Kubota compact tractor vs Dixie?
The great WARM outdoors!
Ahhh, yes, THIS is what warm weather feels like! For the first time this year, the temperature topped 60°F (15°C), with a hazy sun and a gentle breeze. We’ve had some melt-off days already, but this one tastes like spring! Usually, there’s a day like this sometime in February, so it’s been a long time coming, and makes me wonder how even crazier the rest of the weather will be. No worries…today feels great.
The photo is a good to-do list for when real spring comes and the ground is dry enough to work and get around on. There’s a jumble of spare lumber taken from the barn when we cleared an area for the new seedling room—it needs to be sorted and stacked, and some of it will be the new chickenhouse! (Only patches of snow are left on much of the land, but I’m sure it’ll be back before it’s really gone.) The abundantly overgrown grasses that partially surround the barn and border the moldboarded garden areas is a big clean-up job. And, up the slope, the Kubota compact tractor calmly waits for after the hired-big-tractor disking and the compost spreading, when we do the final tilling of the garden beds. Coming soon. Cool!
South slope waiting
The promising south-facing slope is there, plowed and waiting! After the last melt-off, we quickly went back to freezing temperatures day and night, and more wall-to-wall snow cover. A couple of days ago, a bit of chilly rain cleared things up quite a bit once again. Today, it’s frigid!
Mid-February melt-off
It rained steadily, on and off, all day yesterday, through the night and still today, with the temperature a couple of degrees above zero. In other words, cold, gray, wet, miserable, and also perfect for removing vast quantities of snow. The 2-3′ of coverage in the field is gone. It’s still cold, though, and back to sub-zero tomorrow, so no giant warm blast of spring just yet, only an easy way to the greenhouse to clean stuff out. Great timing!
North field in snow
The North Field—I think that’s what I’ve taken to calling it; there’s also the South Field and the South Slope—somewhere around two acres including the sloping perimeter, is the main market garden at the new farm. It looks suitably inscrutable under more than a foot of unbroken snow: what does the soil under there have in store? My look-around in November didn’t turn up anything immediately alarming, and that’s mainly what I looked for, things that could make farming these fields really tough. The few handfuls of soil I dug up were a nice clay-loam similar to the old farm. I didn’t find any super-invasive and tenacious quack grass, and the equally troublesome Canada thistle showed up only here and there in the strips beside the fences and paths. So far, so good, but that’s only the most obvious stuff. On the list of a million things to do over the next three months to get ready for the May plant-out, beginning to know the soil and the lay of the land is way up there. We’ll soon find out. For now, I have to wait…
Another snow day
More snow. A few inches, I guess. I don’t pay attention any more, unless there’s too much snow to get out the door… I trudged out into the field, snow up to my knees, to check the greenhouse. It’s doing fine as usual, fully inflated (it has two layers of plastic, with a fan blowing air between) and shedding snow with ease. The greenhouse (and the veggie stand behind it) won’t be moved to the new farm until the snow clears and it’s easy to get at, hopefully sometime in March. I hope dismantling it doesn’t make it fall apart. The plastic is rated for four years, which means the UV resistance should be giving out any time now. I suppose the plastic will start to disintegrate. I don’t really know what happens when greenhouse plastic expires. Guess I’ll find out. Until then, I expect it to last forever! :)