Winter conundrums
"Why should only the outside world get time off for bad weather?" Mark asked Sunday. Before I knew it, I'd agreed to a one-hour delay on Monday morning.
And it was
a good day to sleep in. A full weekend of rain had filled my
wheelbarrow rain gauge and set the creek into moderate-flood mode.
(Moderate flood means we can't get out with hip waders, but I could
walk nearly all the way to the ford without being impacted by high
water.) Don't worry, rust-phobes, I flipped the wheelbarrow on its
side after taking this picture.
The flood reminds me that
winter is a season of tough choices for homesteaders. Do you
relax and soak up the peace and quiet in preparation for next year's
growing season? Or do you take advantage of days without pressing
plants and animals to get some big-picture projects done? Mark
leans toward the first option and I lean toward the second, so we meet
in the middle --- we slow down some, but also slip in projects
non-essential enough that they never make the cut during the growing
season. (And I get extra time to write.)
Winter is also a good
time to catch up on blog posts that didn't make it into the summer
queue. For example, I seem to have never mentioned how I
experimented with tempting our seven-year-old-but-not-yet-fruited dwarf
Yellow Transparent to make fruit buds. The problem tree was slated
for removal this spring since it sent up scads of watersprouts in 2012
after I pruned to remove extensive cicada damage.
But I decided to tie each long, vertical twig into a loop instead, and
the trickery does seem to have promoted the formation of fruiting
spurs! I'll keep you posted next year about whether actual flowers
are forthcoming.
What big-picture projects are you slipping in between snow storms?
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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