Facing the Cold
Certainly, a shovel has its merits. I’m not built like a dog, with the ability to fling quantities of terrestrial material with my forefeet. Neither are my hands webbed like a duck for scooping. So the process of removing loads of snow from one place to another is certainly helped by a tool. But each tool has its weak point.
Over the years, the farm has destroyed a variety of shovels—mangled, dented, the screws rusting loose. But between the house, the farm house, the deck, the porch, the barnyard, the pathways to the chicken coops and the wood shed, two garages, and the accesses to Farmstead Creamery, shoveling is by no means a five-minute job on our farm. A push shovel can work wonderfully when plowing through the small drift in front of the garage…until that snow is wet and thick and requires throwing. Then the wide shovel tips from side to side easily, allowing the load to slide off with a dull flump right back where it had come from. A lighter scoop shovel is better for throwing, but somehow the length of the handle is never quite right, and soon my lower back is aching, my hands are freezing, and that wet snow is sticking to the plastic shovel and WON’T let go! Multiply that by having to shovel everything three times within 24 hours…and you can imagine the sheer state of exhaustion. Thank goodness this isn’t also haying season!
On the first night leading up to the cold, it snowed steadily, the flakes gliding past my LED headlamp like sparkling bits of angel sequins. But the second day of winter storm “Cleon” brought snow, then rain, then freezing rain, and then heavy, heavy snow. The snow stuck to everything, leaving branches, fences, rooftops, and all laden with frozen moisture. Our world was turned to a majestic fairyland in a black-and-white photograph—but that fairyland was a dangerous place.
Branches as long as our car broke off the red pine just north of the barn, blocking the path to tend the sheep. It took all three of us, pushing and pulling to drag the ice-laden branches over the snowbank and out of the way. “And I had just plowed here!” Kara frowned. “It wasn’t there 20 minutes ago.”
Our 1919 Gambrel barn has a silver metal roof, newly replaced in 2001. When it rains, the ping-ping outside can thunder inside, and hail is deafening. But in winter, the variety of steep and slanted rooflines of the barn makes the snow behavior terribly unpredictable. I was filling up water buckets in front of the barn at the hydrant, when I heard a low rumble. Lena (our tri-color sheep dog) looked up, watching bits of snow tumble from the upper roof to a lower part, plop-plopping a few stray bits in our direction. Lena kept her eye on that roof, uncertain if malicious creatures were throwing snow at her like taunting squirrels or whether the rest of the snowload would come fumbling down.
Later that evening, greased by the icy rain that had seeped through the snow down to the metal roof, Mom and Kara were about to walk between the barn and the machine shed when the mammoth rumbling began. Stopping just in time, they watched tons of wet, heavy snow and ice barrel off the barn roof and thunder down into a pile, burying the walking path. No more driving through with the golf cart to help carry water. Now there was all this stuff to climb over with jagged, icy edges, just to get through to the sheep in the Red Barn behind. And there was no way our plow on the ATV was going to move this mess.
The rains had coated the bird netting that was zip-tied to the top of the turkey pen—helping to keep these strong fliers from escaping or predators encroaching. The large, downy snowflakes of the evening had adhered to this freezing rain, then piled one on top of the other. With two inches of ice and heavy snow, the mesh simply broke and fell in draping waves into the pen like an exhausted, battered tent. I hurried in through the turkey door, then crawled on my hands and knees, waving my head lamp back and forth, looking for the five Jersey Buff turkeys who had not already bedded down in the coop for the night. The dampness seeped through my insulated leather gloves and the knees of my Carhartt work pants. It seemed that, at this point, there really was no better way to describe winter misery.
Crawling through a three-foot hole in the draping mesh, I had to be careful not to tap or touch anything because it was continuing to collapse in smothering, heavy blanket waves. And there the scared turkeys were, huddled in a corner, wet and confused. Prodded along, they soon were safely tucked into their coop with their turkey friends, and we plodded on with chores as best could be managed.
The poor little Kunekune pigs, with their short legs, were floundering about in the white powder up to their bellies, so Kara valiantly shoveled paths from their snug little huts out to the drinking bowls and feeding stations. The other piglets had already trampled their pens flat, but I can remember one year where the snows packed up so high the pigs could almost walk out over the tops of their fences if we hadn’t kept shoveling along the inside edges.
And then the temperatures began to fall, and fall, and fall. The entire inside of the chicken coop was covered in half-inch ice daggers—frozen chicken breath, which they happily pecked off with a tappa-tappa throughout the day. The snow that had avalached off the barn roof was now a rock-hard blob—impossible to push away with any equipment. And the fallen turkey mesh was immovably frozen to the ground.
But the sun was shining, and that’s when I made a mistake. After a day of keeping the turkeys locked inside their coop in hopes of finding a remedy for the mesh problem, I then let them out to stretch their legs for a day. That night, when I came back to lock them up safely, I could only find 14 turkeys, instead of 15. I crawled through the mesh tunnels. Still, only 14 turkeys.
“Did you see all these feathers outside?” Mom asked in surprise as she ran over to help. Our tracking then soon outlined what had happened that day, while we had been working at Farmstead Creamery. One of my hen turkeys (we called her Houdina) had a penchant—no a drive—to escape. Any little hole in the mesh, and she would be out roaming around the yard. If she couldn’t find a hole, she’d make one herself by flapping fiercely. That summer, we had clipped her wing tips, but now she had molted and grown new ones. I told her all this escaping was a bad idea and scolded quite often, but alas she is (was) but a turkey.
It appears that on this day, Houdina flew over the fence for her usual escapades. Her routine was to then sit by the coop door and wait to be let back inside (instead of flying back over the fence and going into the coop herself) when she had had enough. She must have been waiting there by the door when the coyote had passed by while hunting our never-depleting population of cottontails.
A tussle, flapping wings, feathers everywhere, then the lifeless drag marks across the snow with steady coyote prints into the woods behind the pig pens. The cold and the snow makes it hard for everyone—including the wild animals who also need to eat—but it certainly was a rough day for Houdina and her dreams of adventures. Life really was pretty nice inside that fence, if she could have enjoyed the services she did have, rather than pine for what she didn’t have. In the end, it sadly came back to bite her.
And now we have the joys of frozen water buckets, iced-over latches, slippery walkways, and all the rest that comes with facing the cold on the homestead. Please be safe out there, and maybe, despite the weather, we’ll see you down on the farm sometime.
Christmas Harvest Dinner and Concert Night
When: Sunday, December 15th, starting at 6:00 p.m.
Where: Farmstead Creamery & Café, at North Star Homestead Farms
What: The delights of the Christmas holiday await in story and song at Farmstead Creamery as part of our Harvest Dinner and Concert Series! The event begins at 6:00 pm on Sunday, December 15th (spillover date Saturday, December 21st). Treat yourself, friends, or family to the joyous atmosphere of historic Christmas celebrations along with a delectable three-course dinner featuring English golden pottage soup, oven fried tilapia (from our aquaponics greenhouse), rice pilaf, delicious salad, wassail, and a special holiday dessert.
Reservations are required. Food allergies are accommodated. $40 per person. You can view the full Harvest Dinner and Concert Series poster on our website at www.northstarhomestead.com/docs/HarvestDinnerPoster.pdf to learn more.
