Snow Day

Standing on the slope behind the house looking south

From the age of five years until ten, my family lived in Muskegon County, Michigan, barely three miles from the shore of Lake Michigan.  I have forgotten many, many things about my childhood. I thank Adonai for the fact that there are so many things I can't remember, but I do remember the snow.  I remember snow three and four feet deep from regular falling, and I remember drifts up to 12 feet in places.  Once, the side of our single wide trailer on a wide open, five-acre lot had a drift of snow that started about forty feet out at two feet deep and gradually rose to cover the roof of the trailer.  Me and my little brother tunneled under that drift along the side of the trailer.  Boy, I wish I had that kind of energy and tenacity today.

"Hey, come out and play!"

I also remember getting frost bit from helping my dad thaw out the pipes to our well head when the temperature fell to about -40° F one night and we hadn't yet properly insulated the well.  It was our first year up there.  I know I was only a kid, and I remember having what fun I could from the snow, but I think by about the third year I knew I was a summertime kind of guy.  Then after spending most of the rest of my life in central or south Florida, I discovered that deep down I'm a beach bum.

I love my life here with Twyla.  I love being a farmer and growing things, and the simple life, the quietness of being nestled here in the mountains.  I make the best of the cold.  You have to take the good with the bad.  But if given the choice between snow and mask, snorkel & fins in the Gulf of Mexico or off of Key West, well, there's not much of a contest.

What's left of the broccoli and cabbage

You can see some dwellings in that first picture, but those are vacation homes that are vacant starting around labor day.  There are very few people up here during the winter.  It is very quiet up here right now.  Once in a while this morning, you could hear the wind roaring in the trees high up on the ridge.  Sometimes the snow is falling straight down and soft, and then suddenly it goes horizontal jitterbug.  I don't know if it's exclusively a Smokey Mountain thing, but I've never seen snow change character so much in such a short time.  It started this morning as a cross between sleet and snow.  It looked like tiny vermiculite that dropped straight down like rain in a total absence of wind. Then as the temperature dropped, it became fat, fluffy flakes that drifted like chicken dander in a light breeze.  Then the wind would suddenly shoot in and break it all into tiny ice crystals like fine powder.

There's a mountain ridge back there in the center, but you can't see it right now. It comes and goes with the waxing and waning of the snowfall.  I took a moment from re-stocking for the wood stove to climb the slope and take this shot.

I should have taken some "before" shots of this area of the ridge behind the house before I spent four days thinning out all the dense growth and saplings. I still have more to do before spring gets here.

I don't know why the golden comets in Ark I are the only ones who stayed down from their roosts.  Egg production is down to just less than half of normal, and they seem to be coming mostly from the comets.

Moxie is just typical of all Labs and mutts thereof. They love cold weather and snow.   She kept coming to bug me at the desk, wanting me to take her outside to frolic in the snow.  It's not good enough for me to just go let her out.  I need to be outside with her, even if I am doing something productive, like stacking wood under cover or cutting some.
All she needs to do is run in it and look back at me.

A day like today makes me realize how important it is to stay ahead of gathering, cutting and stacking the wood.  Keeping a good supply of dry kindling.  There are just some nights when I sleep on through and the fire has to be re-ignited.  The better the kindling, the easier the job.  It is supposed to keep snowing and the temperature is due to fall to about 19° F.   Wow.

I'm sitting here at my desk, finishing up this post so I can go spend some snuggle time with Twyla and watch October Sky.  My dad would have loved that movie had he lived to see it.  He worked in the coal mines of West Virginia, as did his dad.  He built a crystal radio set as a teenager and his dad called it foolishness.  He went on to work installing CRT terminals, and installing electrical cabling in the vertical assembly building for NASA at Cape Canaveral.


I look out the office window at the snow on the deck and the rail, and think to myself, "If I wake up tomorrow and there is four or five inches out there, me and a big piece of cardboard are going to fly down the  driveway and maybe beyond.  We'll see.

Definitely Winter

On my way home yesterday

This is the second morning of 19° F.  I don't care what the official date on the calendar is, this is winter. There won't be any letting the fire in the wood stove die out by 10:00 and not lighting it again until 18:00 or so.  I would be happy if we get a few more short warm ups between now and January, but I'm not going to count on it.  Even with an electric heater on the front porch/greenhouse, the temp still dropped to 25°.  Lost the three tomato plants.  I will have to come up with something better, and that means out in the yard.

Brussel sprouts

I am truly amazed at how the cruciferous vegetables are so hardy in such cold. The broccoli, and cabbage and Brussel sprouts only wilt a little bit, but by the afternoon they are looking perky again.  I know that won't last unless I cover them.  That's going to have to be done today, or I'll just have to harvest what I have and be done with it.

I've been collecting and cutting deadfall wood as much as possible.  There is an amazing amount of good stuff like that just off the roads around here.  By "good" I actually mean hardwoods and not just pine, although I don't have any problem burning pine, it's just that you don't want to use it at night when you need stuff that burns slowly.

Black Walnut from July 2010

I have a couple of maple trees along the south edge of the property near the road that need to be thinned down.  They cast too much shade across the yard where I could be growing more edible stuff.  This past summer I took out the black walnut tree.  In case you didn't know, even without the shade factor, you can't grow food crops anywhere near a black walnut.  They put out enzymes that poison any competing plants except for the hardiest of weeds.  If you are a lover of any equine animals, or some other hooved species you probably already know that the sawdust from many fruiting hardwood trees are poisonous to horses and some other animals.  It took three months for the chemical burn marks to disappear from my legs, because I was foolish enough to be cutting up that tree with a chain saw while wearing shorts when it was hot.  I couldn't wait for fall, as I needed to be able to grow stuff where that tree was casting shade and defending its roots.

From now on, I'll do all my tree felling in the late fall or winter, when it makes sense to be bundled up during the day.  The other advantage is that the wood is drier and there are no leaves to deal with.  There is another black walnut that stands over near the storage shed out in front of some dogwood and azaleas.  It needs to go this month as well.  In case you are wondering if they produced nuts; well, yes. But these are wild native trees and have not been cultivated to produce quality nuts.  What nuts had fallen from the tree the previous years are mostly shell and little meat, which makes them pretty much only fit for the squirrels.  When it comes to food production, they just aren't worth allowing to take up precious growing space, and that means a good ten feet beyond the radius of the drip line. When I lived in Florida, I found it funny that yankees didn't understand that citrus trees need regular attention and cultivation to produce good fruit.  Even the best varieties will produce sour fruit if not fertilized properly, and they need to be pruned well every year for good yield.

  I remember my sister coming for a visit from Ohio back in the mid 80's one summer.  We hadn't seen each other since she was 16 and I was 11 and she had left our home in Michigan. I'd been living in central Florida since I was 12 when the family moved to Lakeland.  She flew in to Orlando International from Cleveland and I picked her up to bring her back to Bartow.  As we passed miles of dead standing orange trees that were along I-4, she finally asked what they were.
     "Orange trees."
     "Why do they look so bad?"
     "They're dead."
     "Why."
     "Are you kidding?  Didn't you hear about the bad freezes we had here a couple of years ago?"
     "I thought that just killed the fruit.  I was wondering why the news made it sound like such a big deal."
     "It is a big deal.  The trees are dead.  Years of careful cultivation.  Trees don't start producing fruit until about seven years of age.  And that's a very small yield until they get a few years older than that.  With a mild freeze you can just harvest the fruit and get it to a juice processing plant right away as long as it's ripe.  You are seeing millions and millions of dollars worth of investment and time all destroyed."


In case you didn't know, citrus has to completely ripen on the tree.  They aren't like many other fruits that can be picked green and ripen from sitting.  You pick an orange or a grapefruit before it is fully ripe and the sugar developed, and you've got one nasty piece of fruit.  And while there are lots of things I miss about Florida, I especially love the smell of orange blossoms in the spring.  I've never smelled any flower that smells as good.

The death of all those trees was also something that made me skeptical of "global warming" from the start.  For the previous 5 or 6 decades, there had not even been a frost south of Lakeland, Florida.  Hence the name of a nearby grove community called, "Frostproof."  Ask any of the orange grove owners who were 2nd and third generation.  There had been successful orange groves almost as far north as Orlando.  But during the eighties, the freeze line kept moving south.  Wasn't it just a couple of years ago they had freezing temperatures in West Palm?  So, of course the narrative of the lie had to change from "global warming" to something that isn't so laughable on its face.  Now we call it "climate change."  Which is still laughable to an intelligent person, since climate constantly changes.