Horse-Drawn Snow Roller

At the turn of the 20th century, when farmers needed to go somewhere, they generally still traveled by horse-drawn wagon.  When it snowed, well, they'd just hunker down for a few days waiting for the roads to be cleared.  This didn't phase them in the least; after all, they had all the food, firewood, and fodder stored up that they needed for the winter.   However, there were times that it was necessary to get to town to do business, so a team of oxen or draft horses would be hitched up to a huge snow roller to pack the snow down on the road from one farm to the next, and on into town to make it easier to travel by sleigh.  Interestingly, snow rollers seemed to have been peculiar to New England and New York.
 
Thanks to Henry Ford and his mass-produced Model-T (starting around 1908), cars eventually became more numerous than horse-drawn wagons, roads were paved, and snow plows took over the job of making travel easier by scraping the snow off the roads.

We find much to learn from history though.  Recently, MacGyver, who reads and researches stuff like this all the time, reinvented a snow roller to be pulled behind one of our horses.  Taking an old cable spool, he nailed boards around the perimeter, did a little welding, set the whole thing on a frame with a seat, and voila!  (I make it sound so easy, don't I? :)  It's not nearly as big as the ones drawn by a team of oxen, but it suited the purpose of packing a trail through the woods, hopefully making it easier for our horses to pull a sled.  (The weather is supposed to deteriorate into slop, so it may be a few days before we can go for a sled ride.)

Here is the reinvented snow roller.  Whit is going to make a test run around the yard.  (That turned out to be a good plan. :)

 

We discuss a few modifications that need to be made.

 

Now that we've seen that the roller will work, we're ready to go for the test run through the woods.  Having the two of us riding on it made it less tender, and easier to balance.

  

 It really did work very well.  One pass down the path and one back made it wide enough for the two horses to pull the sled.

Now, I would just like a little more snow.

The New Kid

We had just finished school for the day when Whit walked in to announce there was a new goat in the barn! One of our Toggenburg goats, Kappy, had a doe kid this afternoon! Someone pointed out that today is a square root day: 3-3-09. So we decided to name the little doeling Nina. That's her mama looking over the stall wall making sure she's still there and okay.

This is just the beginning of our kidding season. We still have three more does due in March or April. More pictures to follow, I'm sure, but I'll wait until all the new kids have arrived.

Snowshoeing

We got our weekly dose of almost a foot of snow again yesterday. Rumor has it that we might get another storm this coming weekend, but don't tell my sister and brother-in-law. They're pretty tired of the snow and it might put them over the edge. :) Perhaps I should erase the little blackboard that my son made me for Christmas and write "Welcome Spring" or something on it.


However, we're still enjoying the snow. Yesterday we had a great day of school. We watched it snow and blow outside, while inside we were cozy by the woodstove reading about the Persians, filling in our maps, studying our Latin, writing about bivalves and gastropods, and acing our math test, among other things. By the time three o'clock rolled around, we were ready to go out and play in the snow! Dad and I decided that with the blowing wind and three feet of snow on the ground we would go for a snowshoe hike through our woods, where we'd be protected from the wind. (Note that I said three feet of snow.)

We have both old-fashioned snowshoes (on the left) and new-fangled LLBean ones (on the right.) Dad and I actually prefer the old-fashioned ones. No, smart-alecks...I don't think they're antiques yet! Although I guess that would be fitting...everything else we use around here is. : )


TBear, however, didn't want to snowshoe; he wanted to cross-country ski. Here we are, setting off down the driveway from the barn where it was a warmer place out of the wind to put on our snowshoes...and skis.

Dad warns TBear one more time. We're going through the woods and up and down some pretty steep hills. Are you sure you want to wear skis??? Yup, he's adamant. For my part, I was absolutely tickled at being able to walk across the snow on our front lawn. (Drat...should have grabbed the wreath off the front door, come to think of it.) I had made the serious mistake last weekend of trying to walk from the back of the house around to the driveway, after raking two feet of snow off the roof on the backside of the house. The snow is hip-deep and I got half-way across my front lawn and wasn't sure I was going to make it the rest of the way because I was so tired from wading through the snow. Our hike would have been impossible without the snowshoes.

We walked out past my garden and to the side lot where we have our hay implements stored for the winter. It's going to be a few weeks before we start that up again. : ) We're headed for the woods behind our house. Our farm lies on a ridge that drops down about 200 feet to a swampy area behind our barns, then rises that same distance on the other side of the valley before it drops down again to the lake behind us.

There are an amazing number of cedar trees in the low land behind our farm. Dad is discussing taking our faithful draft horse, Scooby, and hauling out the downed cedars to perhaps make some Adirondack chairs. We can't get down here during the summer with the horses because of all the undergrowth and deadwood lying around, which is buried now under that three feet of snow. I thought about the cedar forests of Lebanon that we studied a few weeks ago, from which King Solomon got the wood to build the temple in Jerusalem. We have some pretty big cedars down here, but an entire forest of them must have been an amazing sight. They're very tall and straight.

As I was walking along, I was surprised to notice a very deep hole in the snow. It led down into a stone wall that I didn't even realize we were walking over until I peered down the hole. It is the entrance to some creature's home, possibly a squirrel or chipmunk? I've seen some squirrels around on the warmer days.

We've trekked down the hill and across the low land. Now we're headed back up the ridge on the other side of it. The forest is so beautiful in the snow. There's a very large birch tree on TBear's left that has been protected amongst the pines and cedars, not succumbing to the weight of the snow and winds. It is still snowing and blowing pretty hard as we're walking, but you can't really tell in the woods. We were protected too.

Hoping to do a little nature study with TBear, I looked and looked for some sign of deer or other creature in the woods as we walked. The only thing that seems to have ventured out on this snowy day was a rabbit, so our nature studying was confined to identifying trees. : )

After walking up the ridge on the other side of the swamp, we then followed it to our right, to the camp road that runs along the edge of our property. It was time to head for home and chores. So far the skiing hasn't been great, but it hasn't been unmanageable...yet. See how deep the dog is? He had a ball leaping and bounding through the snow, but we noticed he started to follow in our path by the time we got to this point. Even the Energizer Doggie was getting tired. (It was a good day for the deer to stay hunkered down too.)

Two hundred feet is a long way up in cross-country skis. Poor TBear is starting to feel it.

Eventually, he had to take his skis off and literally crawl up the steepest part of the hill. He couldn't walk in the snow because he sunk right up to his waist! Isn't it amazing how a pair of snowshoes can displace one's weight enough to allow one to walk on top of the snow like this? We talked about Lewis and Clark's winter journey through the Rocky Mountains in the early 1800's and wondered if they had snowshoes. It would have been almost impossible, not to mention exhausting, to get very far each day without them.
Finally we got to the top of the hill and TBear could ski again. We approached the farm from the back side of the horses' pasture. Whit has an awful lot of fence repairs to do each spring. We didn't even have to climb over the fence here...it's just not there...or buried... I asked Whit if it was a good idea to show the horses how to get out of their field (like they haven't already explored the whole thing, snow and all? :) He asked where I thought they were going to go. Good point. They have feed, hay, water, and shelter. Why would they want to leave that luxury? After all, they aren't stupid.

You can see now that it's still snowing pretty hard. The horses watched us approach, then ran to meet us and galloped and romped in circles. Funny boys.

I just had to share this picture of Scooby. It's probably the most flattering picture we've ever taken of this poor horse. His mane and tail were cropped pretty short when we got him in order to keep them out of the way of his harness. They seem to be growing out again nicely. Scooby is somewhere between 20 and 30 years old. He's an excellent draft horse and keeps the others in line when they're working. He's also taught Whit a lot about pulling stuff. :)

This would be Pat. He's my buddy and the one I like to ride, primarily because he has a little zip to him. (Yeah, "zip" is a relative term with a draft horse. LOL! But "draft" is my speed.) Pat is around 10 years old and works very well with Scooby. He was happy to have a few lovies on our way through their pasture too.

This was probably one of the best days we've had in a really long time. TBear was thinking he might like to try snowshoeing next time.

Another Snow Storm

Okay, I know I should probably be getting tired of this by now, but I'm really not. Snow, I mean. Two weeks ago we were talking about mud season setting in early when we had a really short warm spell. The temperature got up to about 50 degrees and melted the snow into mud on the driveway, but it quickly froze again when the temps dropped back into the 30s. Then last week we noticed that the temps were getting above freezing during the day while still dropping below 32 at night. That's the signal that it's just about time to tap the trees to start making maple syrup. Just as we were contemplating pulling out the buckets and taps, we got two feet of new snow last night. While the temperatures are still getting up in the 30s during the day, the new snow does throw a bit of a wrench in the sap-collecting works. I think we're going to have to pull out the snowshoes to make the rounds. But that's another story for later.

This was the view out my back door looking into our dooryard at about 7am this morning. That's the wonderful spruce tree that is home to an amazing number of small birds. If you look carefully you can see that the snow goes right up to the roof of the house on the right. That's because it slides off the roof on that side, so the combination of snow falling and falling snow.... hm... well, that's where it all meets.

Whit's workshop is in the white barn. Fortunately we can access it from the house. His yellow Ford chariot is lurking under the snow behind the lilac bush there. (That's the bush on the left by the barn. :)

My grandson was amazed when we opened the door for him. We were considering tying one of those orange bike flags to his snowsuit so we didn't lose him when he went out. :)
Chores were an especially fun challenge this morning. Whit is wading through the snow with a bale of hay for the horses. It was still snowing pretty hard when he went out this morning.

I don't really know how we would have cleared the driveway if we didn't have the Ford backhoe. Two feet is a lot of snow in one storm. During the night, we were getting snow at the rate of two inches per hour for awhile. I woke up a few times to no power, but the electric company had it back on by the time I went to make coffee. (Thank you, guys!) Whit wound up spending most of his day helping out our neighbors by either pushing back piles, or late this afternoon he actually had to help pull a plow truck out of a ditch it had slid into.

Iris and her lambs were doing fine. We have a pair of chickens that apparently don't like living in the coop with their kin. They prefer the sheep pen. They look kind of silly wandering around with the lambs, which were very curious about them. :)

Our ram and his buddy were pretty well snowed into their shelter. They're wading through the snow on a path my son beat down for them to get to the gate so they can eat their grain. Tomorrow we'll have to shovel a better path...not so much for them as for us to get their hay out to them, although they'll certainly appreciate it too!

This was part of the reason why the boys didn't get shoveled out. It took us a few hours just to clear off the cars in the yard. And behind pile number one is...my car! :) Thanks for the help, TBear.

For another perspective on the amount of snow, TBear and Jagger stopped on the path to the back door for me to get their picture. (I've been meaning to get that swag off the door since Valentine's Day, but it's still green, and there's still so much snow that it doesn't look out of place enough yet for me to notice until I look at pictures! LOL!)
It's early to bed tonight. It's been a long day of shoveling and playing in the snow with a little school in between. Tomorrow we have to get crackin' at the books again!

A Typical Day in Lambing Season

What's actually typical is that like human births, no two lambings are ever the same. But here's a snapshot of one of those days.

TBear and I drove up to Orono on Friday evening for his first tournament hockey game. I had just sat down in the stands to watch him when my cell phone rang. "You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille," I heard on the other end. Whit had to stay home Friday night because he had two games to referee and chores to do on Saturday morning. The plan was for him to get up really early, do the chores and hit the road to meet me at the rink in Orono by 8am for the first game on Saturday. I asked him what was the matter. "Sheep number 5 is in labor." Our sheep have ID tags in their ears. Number 5 has a name, honey. It's Iris. Okay, he says, Iris is in labor and I have to leave to go ref a game! Fine, I said, she's a big girl, she'll handle it fine. Just let Rissie know so she can check on her and the lambs. Right. He hangs up. I watch the game for awhile but haven't heard anything from home so I call Riss and ask if she's checked on the ewe. Yes, she said. Iris dropped a sac of fluid but isn't doing anything more. Hm... it had been an hour at least since Whit called. It sounded like there wasn't much progress being made, and perhaps Iris needed a hand after all. I told Riss she'd better check her out. She called me back in a few minutes. By now the hockey moms around me are listening to me as much as they're watching the game. Riss tells me she scrubbed up and felt around. All she can feel are legs...lots of legs, and no heads. After a bit she sorts them out and delivers a sweet little ewe lamb... backwards.

Apparently, Riss was supposed to be making dinner for a friend that evening. I didn't know this when I was talking to her. Her dad is clueless of the situation and in the middle of a hockey game, I'm 110 miles away, and now I'm wracking my brain trying to think of who I can call to just go over and give her some moral support... and maybe take a towel and dry off a lamb or two. I knew Riss could handle this (it wasn't her first time by any stretch), but it's still a little worrisome when you're all alone dealing with multiple births. Deciding on my friend Tammy, who also has some sheep and lives in the same town, I call Riss back. Meanwhile, her dinner date had shown up just after she delivered the first lamb. I guess she handed him the lamb and a towel and turned to help with the next one. Ayup, nothing like showing up for dinner at Whit's End and winding up being a midwife's assistant at a lambing. It's always a good sign when the young man calls again the next day after an evening like that. He was a really good sport. I sure hope he was dressed for the barn... :)
Riss helped deliver and dry off three more ewe lambs before she was done. Quads! Unfortunately, one was stillborn and another was too weak to make it on its own, so Iris only has two now.

Piebald isn't exactly my favorite color scheme. : ) It kind of looks like someone threw paint on the poor thing, but they're all still very sweet. I love this age with the lambs. They're so snuggly. In case you didn't notice, we breed for natural colored wool...black sheep. We get a few white ones, but they're unusual. Surprised? Probably not. : )

TBear and I spent the night at Nutmeg's apartment in Orono. She made us homemade pizza, and her boyfriend had home-brewed beer to go with it. Those are cookbooks on the counter behind her. I don't remember being this creative in college. I don't even remember owning a cookbook until after I was married. I do remember boxed macaroni and cheese (4 for $1), and lots of rice and frozen spinach... : )
The next morning Nutmeg had pancakes and bacon ready for us when we got back from our first game. It was so wonderful to be that pampered! TBear and Dale chilled and played with a new DS game he bought on our way through Augusta. Then we were off to the last game.
Later we took the kids out to lunch at a very nice Japanese restaurant they had chosen, which was another wonderful treat for me. It's been a long time since I've had real Japanese cooking and I enjoyed it immensely. All in all it was a pretty good weekend.

A Walk in the Snow

February vacation for the public schools was this past week, though that doesn't usually affect us. However this particular week we had a snowstorm drop another 10 inches of snow or so, and a nasty virus went through our house with a slightly more debilitating effect. While I wouldn't exactly call it school vacation, TBear wound up spending a few days either in bed or on the couch. However, we had a hockey tournament to go to in Bangor on Friday evening, so on Friday morning, after determining that TBear no longer had a fever, I decided we needed to get out of the house, breathe some fresh air, and see whether or not TBear was going to feel up to playing hockey that evening.

We set off down the road with our dog, Jagger. Shortly one of our black-and-white cats joined us. Usually both of them walk with us, but the other one was in the house, I remembered after we left. He missed out this time, poor guy. The day after the snowstorm was bright and sunny and beautiful. The temperatures were in the 30's so the snow was heavy on the trees.

After we walked down the road and back, we wandered around the farm to see what was up with all our creatures. Our sheep and the horses all prefer to be outside, either eating the hay or lounging on it, and catching some rays.
I walked back behind the big barn to see how Loon and Dimi were faring in their field. They came running for chin scratches. Or maybe they thought I had grain...
Whit was working in the barn behind me as I took this picture. The goats didn't care about what I was doing; they were all curious as to the noise he was making. Notice where they are...inside. They prefer to lounge in the doorway of the barn rather than out in the sunshine.
I broke down and started feeding the birds after the last snowstorm. I always feel so sorry for them when it snows. This marvelous spruce tree in my dooryard is very, very tall. It houses all kinds of birds, and I like to leave the feeders protected under its branches. Those branches also afford an excellent place for the birds to quickly hop into if the cats lurk too closely under the feeder. We have black-capped chickadees, titmice, juncos, sparrows, blue jays and woodpeckers. I saw some finches on the feeder in the front yard under the maple trees. Shhh... don't tell the cats.
After our refreshing walk, TBear decided he was feeling better enough to play hockey, so we packed our overnight bags and prepared to head to Orono.

A Very Busy Weekend

It seems like it's feast or famine around here. For the past few weeks, life has been ho-hum status quo. However, on Wednesday we had some more snow, which is still actually status quo, except that Whit wasn't around for it this time. That's actually not uncommon either. But anyway, it suddenly got kind of busy around here on Thursday. We had such a nice day watching it snow, drinking hot chocolate (or tea) and working on history projects, that I didn't bother plowing on Wednesday evening. After all, it was supposed to keep snowing all night too. Thursday morning dawned bright and beautiful, as it does around here after our snowstorms, and we needed to leave for a day of co-op and music lessons shortly after 9am. I have to admit, I slightly misjudged how much snow I was going to have to try to push back with our Bolens tractor. (Well, it looked light and fluffy when it was coming down!) Whit made it look easy the week before, when we had about 8" of snow.

I, on the other hand, got the Bolens stuck on a patch of ice coming out of the barn. (No, I don't have a picture of that, thank you.) My neighbor across the street took one look at me behind that pile of snow and very kindly made a quick pass with his plow so I could at least get out of my driveway. However, I was in charge of snow removal this week, by golly, so I backed that traitorous Bolens back into the barn and fired up the Ford backhoe. Forget this messing around business. I was going for the big gun. After about half an hour, I had the driveway and our parking area clear, and we were off and running. You can see the additional snow we got. My cat Schmitty is lurking on the path. Just to the right, out of the picture, is my birdfeeder. I know, I know. I said I wasn't going to feed the birds this winter, but I felt really sorry for the blue jays which were picking at leftover pumpkin seeds in my front yard, and which also had flown into our woodshed to take shelter from the snowstorm. (You want to know how they're finding pumpkin seeds under two feet of snow, don't you? I don't know the answer to that, except that I hear them pecking next to the front door in the morning when it's quiet and I'm drinking my coffee.) So, I filled the feeder for them, but I've also noticed, they're on to Schmitty lurking there. I think blue jays are pretty smart.

On Friday, TBear spent the day at Barnes & Noble, playing music for, and also performing in, two shadow puppet shows. Later in the afternoon and evening, the kids fiddled in the store. It was a fundraiser for the Pineland Fiddlers' trip to Ireland this spring. Our Barnes & Noble donated a percentage of their sales that day to the Fiddlers. (Thank you Barnes & Noble!) In between the 10am puppet show, and the 3pm puppet show and fiddling, TBear sat with me in the book store coffee shop and did his schoolwork. It was actually a really nice day. Look at that boy. Doesn't he look like he's having a good time? No smiling allowed. Well, okay, smiling is encouraged, but they forget sometimes. : )

After lots of hockey on Saturday, I took TBear to a nursing home this afternoon where he and some other Pineland Suzuki students performed some more beautiful music for the patients. This performance has been postponed twice since December due to snowstorms, so it was especially nice that this last snowstorm missed the rescheduled date this time. They did, however, skip playing Christmas music, with the exception of the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah. It was wonderful to see the residents enjoying these kids' music as much as I do.
It'll be nice to go back to school tomorrow. We need the rest. : )

We got snow!

We got about 14 inches of snow on Sunday. Monday morning dawned bright and beautiful. I just love new-fallen snow before anyone has walked through it or plowed it. I took my camera and my dog and went for an early walk while it was still fresh. It was hard to really capture the beauty of it. Last fall, I decided to leave the sunflowers in my garden (above) for the birds. I also took this picture to show my Tennessee friend, Tammy, who is getting ready to plant her garden soon. I won't be planting for many months yet, Tammy. :)


We've had subzero temperatures for the past week, like much of the rest of the northern states in our country. It warmed right up with the snow storm... to about 13 degrees above zero on Monday morning. However, warm as 13 degrees might feel, it is still frostbite weather if you don't cover up the bare patches of skin.

This is Jagger, my walking buddy. There's a tennis ball deep inside that drooly mouth. It's his security object. He doesn't want me to throw it while we're walking, he just has to carry it. By the way, he's not old and gray around the muzzle, that's frost hanging from his whiskers.


Here, Whit's feeding hay out to the horses. I can't seem to get a picture of Scooby in action, but he will pick up that hay feeder, which is built out of 4x4's, by putting his head down under it and pushing it up with his neck so he can get leftover hay from underneath it.

My horses are pretty hardy guys. They prefer to stand out in the snow storm. Whit proved that by leading them into their shelter one night when it was snowing hard. They turned around and went out again. He led them in again. They insisted they didn't want to be there, and went galloping down the field, kicking up their heels and playing in the snow like a couple of kids. Okay, fine. Be that way. If you're happy, we're happy.

Our sheep don't care about having their picture taken. They're always more interested in the hay, which is somewhere in front of all those rear ends.

This is our 1890-vintage barn behind the big pile of snow Whit pushed up near the end of our driveway. TBear likes to make tunnels and forts in the piles. Yes, piles...plural. : )

More piles in front of the house. In case you're worried, TBear makes his snow forts from the yard-side of the snow piles.