I need a crystal ball

The snow has come to Michigan.  It’s melting a bit today, prompting some scrambling to get some things done we missed before the first snowfall.    Snow is supposed to make a comeback in a few days.  It’s not that we procrastinated, we have been plugging away at winter preparedness, just running out of time.

 The night before the big snowfall momma turkey who raised her brood in the yard, came into the barn to roost but her 4 youngsters, now as big as her, stubbornly took to their pine tree to roost.  In the morning I was able to shoo mama turkey into the chicken coop inside.   Her youngsters had been waiting outside the barn door, calling to her.  They seemed quite unhappy about walking in the white stuff with bare feet.  A little corn inside the barn and it was done, I trapped them inside and then shooed them into the coop also.

 The ducks are the only hold outs now.  Most of them stayed outside the night of the storm, around the pond edge.  I got 5 of them in the coop at various times but 11 are still out there.  The back of the barn has a run in horse stall- where the horses should be now- and the ducks are using it.  I am trying to run a tight schedule between catching up all the ducks and bringing the horses out of the pasture to the paddock behind the barn. 

 The ducks are scheduled for the butcher- all those we aren’t keeping, on Wednesday. I need to get them inside to make it easier to catch them and I need to get the horses back by the barn before the next snow storm.  But if the snow could just hold off and let us catch the ducks in the run in stall it would be so much easier than catching them in the bigger coop.

 We also have to get the riding mower over to the shed the horses use as shelter now before the snow gets deep, there’s no room inside the barn after expanding the chicken coop.  I am putting the push mower inside the frizzle chickens outside run, which we covered in plastic, and maybe a chair and the ladder too.  Tight quarters until some of the hay is eaten up, and the horses are sure working on that.

 I’d like to leave the horses in the bigger pasture and I’m sure they’d like to stay there but it is hard for Steve to feed and water them when I can’t in the winter over there and hard for me to carry water to them.  When they are in the barn we can just open the door and toss hay to them, everyone can be fed in one trip.  And if the weather is really bad they can eat inside, it’s hard for us to get hay to the pasture shed when the snow is deep. 

 The plastic roof we put over the outside chicken run held up to heavy wet snow but snow sure didn’t slide off like we thought it would.  It stuck quite well.  The inside stayed dry though.  I am debating on whether I should try to broom it off or if that might do more harm than good.  It stills seems quite light in there when it’s sunny.  The whole thing is enclosed so it’s like a greenhouse for birds.  A heater inside might melt the roof snow but that’s rather costly.

 If I just had a crystal ball to see how this winter will play out it would be so nice.  I’m not asking to change it, although that would be nice too.  Just asking to know what’s coming when. 

Frogs in the Snow

It’s snowing outside and the frogs have quit singing. On Sunday night at 11 pm it was 40 degrees and I could hear frogs outside my office window. On Monday morning we had six inches of heavy wet snow on the ground and it has snowed on and off since. It’s a good thing the ground was still warm and some of the snow melted or we would have been buried. I hate snow. Poor robins. I put some dried cherries out in the bird feeder but they haven’t found them.

The grass was growing and we had the pasture on the west side all fixed up, ready to move the horses over there, but the forecast made us wait and I’m glad because I would be carrying buckets of water through the snow instead of using a hose. Charlie is getting to be a real little terror. He needs more room to run.

Our poor white pine in the backyard lost more branches due to the heavy snow and so did a scotch pine in the dog kennel. It’s another mess to clean up. By the time you get one winter’s messes cleaned up its time for another winter. I want to start gardening- hauling manure to the beds and making another raised bed rather than shoveling snow. Oh well in Michigan it may be 80 in a few days.

On the nice days we did have I was able to sit at the pond for a short time and once I even made it to the woods. Our pond is the fullest I have ever seen it and when we add the runoff from this last snow it should really be something. I went to the woods to pull up some fence posts out there we don’t use anymore and I noticed new bottles and junk sticking out of the ground so I stayed to bottle hunt a bit.

The woods was where the previous owners of this place all the way back to who knows when threw their trash. Its swampy woods with a steep slope off the pasture. So each year new stuff surfaces, most is broken, like some Depression glass plates I found but sometimes you find a good piece. I need to dig there but its always so busy in spring I never get to it and then the bugs get bad and it gets hot soooo. This time I found some old rusted enamel coated pans and pots. I brought a pair up to use as planters.

The big tree that fell over a few years back has a ground hog burrow under the uprighted root ball. It’s the first groundhog burrow I have seen on our place in a while. And the stump left is sticking out at an angle about 20 feet long. My son cut the tree off where it lay across the old pasture fence and then the remaining stub lifted up so the end is about 6 feet above the ground at an angle. On the underside something has a pretty good sized hole in the trunk, I am hoping a screech owl. I am going to keep an eye on it. That’s one thing our woods has, plenty of dead trees for cavity nesters.

Most of the trees left in the woods are popple and birch. There were some nice elms and ash but they are dead now, lost to their respective pests. I have some small pines and spruce planted and I am trying to get some maples in there. It bothers me that there are no wildflowers there, no trilliums, no bloodroot, no trout lilies. I suspect the deer took care of that long ago. I want to try and get some started in there. I could haul some old fence down there to protect them maybe. But first I need to get the gardens around the house cleaned up.
As a garden writer and teacher I want my gardens to look good but I never seem to have enough time and money to do it right. My resolve this year is to start nothing new and get some of the old beds really renovated. Maybe I will have the time this year, ha. Ha.