You might think that one can breathe a sigh of relief when winter comes, that all the chores are over and that book you have been meaning to read finally has a chance of being opened next to the fireplace with a cup of tea. But that is not possible without a lot of prep work and careful planning.
In the late fall, the harvesting was completed. The raised beds were weeded, mulched and covered with tarps.
The last blooms from my flower gardens were clipped and dried for arrangement during the winter months. These chores have a finality to them that is bittersweet.
No more fresh vegetables or fragrant flowers, but with the closing and preparing of the garden beds there is the promise of next year’s crops.
Getting the barn ready for a long winter’s nap takes time and muscle. Forty bales of hay need to be stored in the loft for the sheep. Fifty-pound bags of grain are neatly stacked in the feed room for both sheep and chickens. Our cats Apollo and Athena move into high alert as the field mice migrate into the barn.
The farm animals do not understand the calendar but sure do seem to know how to tell time.
They start calling out to be fed around 5:30 a.m. every day, seven days a week. In the late fall they are moved from the pastures, sheds and coops located all over our farm to smaller enclosures next to the barn.
This makes it is a lot easier to feed and water them on dark cold winter days.
I don’t know if you have had the experience of carrying buckets of sloshing water through snowdrifts but let me tell you that you need not put it on your ‘bucket’ list, because it is no fun.
All our outside water spigots and hoses are turned off and drained. This leaves just one insulated spigot inside the barn from which to draw water during the freezing months.
Bill built a greenhouse attached to the lower level of our three-story barn a few years ago. The chickens winter in there. They have serious work to do in addition to laying eggs for our ever growing egg customers. They spend the winter scratching and fertilizing the greenhouse soil so that when March rolls around I can start planting my seeds in rich soil.
Some of the unsung heros of our farm number in the tens of thousands; worms.
We feed them all of our food scraps and let them work their magic. Our Red Wigglers work year round creating amazing compost and leachate – the liquid runoff (or seepage) that settles in the bottom of their container, which we use to fertilize the houseplants and seedlings.
On those wintery three-dog nights we are thankful we have three dogs – Fia, Lincoln and Atticus – to keep us toasty as we watch the snow fly. And just maybe sneak a peek at that beckoning book.
Sheila Nichols lives in Antrim at Liberty Farm with her husband Bill.