Category: Farm Life

Snowy morning, white roof, icy windshield, freezing rain.

Chickens hiding, dog are romping.  Christmas shopping.

Still need a tree and a wrapping session.

Knitting progressing.  It will be here before we are ready.

Last Thursday was the start of the meteorologic winter in the mountains and it came in with a roar, a literal roar of Arctic blast air and high wind gusts.  I should have harvested my cabbages last Wednesday, but I didn’t.  They were under a row cover, so I smugly felt they would be okay until I could get gallon plastic bags to store them in the basement fridge.  That was an error on my part, a colossal error.  The past two nights have dropped to between 11 and 16f.  Yesterday’s high was only 26f.   Today we finally bought the bags and as soon as the outdoor thermometer rose above the freezing mark, today’s high of 34f, I grabbed a big canvas sack, garden clippers, gloves, barn boots and jacket and set out to see what the damage was.  It was not pretty.  Fifteen small to medium cabbages frozen on the outside at least.  Debate with self, do I harvest them accepting the damage that has been done or put a layer of straw and the insulated cover over them to ward off tonight’s anticipated ice storm and see if they will “recover” on the next mild stretch (assuming there will be one).  Harvest now won and they were brought inside to assess the damage.  After cutting one of the medium sized ones in half, I realized that they were pretty much frozen through, so instead of throwing in the towel and accepting my error and the waste it wrought, each cabbage was cut in quarters, still frozen, packed in a plastic bag and loaded into the basement freezer.  Most of the cabbage we eat is cooked anyway, so they should not go to waste.

Error number 2 was leaving the large pumpkin on the front porch for the past two nights.  The chickens are now enjoying the stalks and lower leaves of the cabbage, the seeds from the frozen pumpkin that I tossed into their run and split with a hatchet.  If it ever thaws outside, they will eat the pumpkin down to the stem and the added bonus is that pumpkin seeds are a natural safe dewormer if any of the flock is infected.

In spite of the cold, even though egg laying has significantly dropped off, they are still producing enough for the pups and me to have one each morning and enough to put aside for the holiday baking.

Life is good on our mountain farm, just cold right now.  Guess I should bundle back up and go bring in some firewood for the wood stove and fireplace, just in case the ice storm takes out the electricity.

This time of the year, the woods surrounding our farm allow for voyeuristic peeks. This is especially true if there is a light layer of snow on the ground. The floor of the forest loses the scrub brush that obscures it during the growing seasons. The deer and turkeys can be seen slipping in and out of its edges into the fields. If our local neighbors followed the state guidelines to wear blaze orange, visible 360 degrees, we would be able to see them as they move through the woods beyond our property on their hunt for the deer.

Today is the first day of firearms hunting season for deer. Today is gray, hazy from fog and from smoke from two wildfires a couple hours away. Today is the kind of day when we normally see the deer and the turkey in our lower field, but it almost as if they sense their imminent danger and they stay hidden from our view. Perhaps it is just their superior vision and sense of smell that make them scarce.

Personally, I will be glad when they again make their appearance, as I love to watch them graze and move about the woods and fields.

A faint rainbow just before the storm.  A huge Tom turkey strutting his stuff in the hay field; 2 young orphaned raccoon that that have been in our area this fall, looking for food or shelter before the weather; and snow flurries.  All beautiful and welcome sights.

Life is good on our mountain farm.

This morning is glorious.

The sky is a beautiful shade of blue, nearly cloudless.  The fields and fir trees still wearing the greens of summer, the deciduous trees bare of their foliage, a light haze on the distant mountains, the haze that named a nearby mountain chain The Blue Ridge.  It is mild this morning, only the lightest skim of ice on the chickens water tub and expected to reach near 60f today, the fierce winds of yesterday have calmed.

In the mountains, weather systems don’t last long, this beautiful fall weather will end today.  Tomorrow, the weather prognosticators say we could see up to 2″ of snow.  It is early for snow, the earliest recorded measurable snow for nearby Roanoke was October 10, 1979.  The average first snow is December 15th.  Meteorologic winter begins on November 21st, my birthday and the winter solstice, the official first day of winter and the shortest day, a month later.

Regardless of the season and the weather it brings, this is still the most beautiful place in the world.  We love it year round.  Life is good on our mountain farm.

Living in a mountainous rural area, we often hear gunfire.  The frequency of this noise increases as the various hunting seasons roll around.  Most of our neighbors hunt, wild turkey and deer primarily, but also bear, raccoons, squirrels and rabbits. Bow season for deer began in early October, this is followed by muzzle loaded gun hunting in early November then on to other firearms for the last couple of weeks in November, then the seasons reverse, ending in December.  When this begins, we see fewer deer on our property, it almost like they go into hiding.  One doe has been hanging around for a couple of years.  We know she is the same one because she has a gimpy left hind leg.  In spite of this, she has raised twin fawns last year and a single fawn this year.  She sticks close to the upper part of our property and we often see her with her current young near our barn.  As we drove out late this morning to deliver eggs and to resupply the various animal foods and get a few items for our larder, she and her fawn were grazing near the barn. It surprises me that she has survived the seasons.  I hope that she makes it through this cycle as well.  This evening, there is one in the lower hayfield.   During this season, we don’t venture far from the house without wearing a blaze orange hat or vest even to go to the chicken coop or garden.  We consider putting a blaze vest on our mastiff as he is of similar size and coloration to the local deer.

Fuzzy butt, Buttercup and Buffy are the last two to lay and both have finally figured it out. Now if they will just socialize with the other girls and Cogburn when they go off to free range, I would feel better about their safety.

I’ll spare you the gory details.

From this to

This, 75 lbs of chicken in the freezer.

And this to 6 winter dinners.

Rain beating on a tin roof;
Clouds scuttering along the mountain tops and valleys from west to east;
Wind whipping the dry leaves from the trees;
Blessed relief from the past couple of days of unseasonable heat;
As the tropical storm from the Gulf of Mexico blows itself out across the mountains and plods toward the shore.

This is often a favored season. Cooling temperatures, vivid leaf changes, the start of the holiday season. This year just isn’t right. The temperatures are cooling, 40s and 50s at night, but still reaching mid to upper 70s during the day, but the foliage isn’t doing it’s part. Instead of vivid colors, the leaves are browning and dropping from the trees.

The large maple that is usually the first to show bright gold and orange is barren without ever turning. This year was unusually wet after two years of dry conditions. Perhaps that stressed the trees. Hopefully it doesn’t mean that huge tree on the edge of our woods is dying. Under that tree is where we camped the first summer we owned the property. It provided shade for our brand new 9 week old grandson, our first. It sheltered our tents and picnic table as we met with a soil scientist for the perk test and interviewed several well drillers to get water for our planned home. We were sitting under that tree when we met our first neighbor as he and his son came down the tractor road to get his half of the hay that had been mowed with his equipment by his cousin. That tree has been the focus of many photographs from blogposts.

In spite of the government shutdown, I will venture up on the Blue Ridge Parkway in route to Meadows of Dan on Saturday, to visit a friend and to purchase some corn meal, winter squash, and Ashe County cheese. As the elevation is slightly higher than here, perhaps, there will be at least a glimpse of fall color.