so much snow

It's great to see that the snow has finally melted some. We're going into our third week of solid snow cover. I never remember a winter like this before.
Izzy [the Australian cattle dog that is my constant shadow] and I went for a bit of a walk off the snow plowed path yesterday. This is the first in weeks that we ventured far from where it has been plowed. The snow is still too deep to get to the apple orchard to prune. The rows of trees act as a giant snow fence and so it can really pile up especially in the orchards. Perhaps when we have a little more melting action we will snow plow a path to the compost area. It's a short walk across a field to get to the apples from our compost spot but a rather long hike from the farm house.
We were a little overly optimistic about how much snow our truck and snow plow could handle. A few days after the last big snow we got we thought we would hasten our accesses to the orchard by plowing to the top of the hill. The drifts were way too much for the truck and plow to handle and we succeeded in getting the truck very stuck. After about one and a half hours of digging with skid steer and shovels and pulling with a tractor we managed to uncork it from its drift. I thought it wise to put my big tall boots on and go for an exploratory walk to check on snow depth before trying that again.
Thank goodness January was so nice and we made significant progress in pruning the apples. We have a lot of catching up now to do in order to finish before all the heavy Spring work begins. Apples can be pruned in the winter as well as later in the Spring but if we don't finish early enough it messes up our timing for pruning the peach orchard and all the other activities that Spring down on the farm brings. Peaches do not like being pruned in the winter. We generally prune them beginning the tail end of March through April. It would be lovely to be done with the pruning by bloom time so we can get into the orchards with our tractor and sprayer and not get tangled in all the prunings on the ground. This however, is a rarity. It is not uncommon for us to be pruning when the peaches are in bloom or shortly after. Ah- the smell of peach blossoms. I can almost smell them now. Just the thought of being surrounded by all those flowers brings a smile to my face. I'm sure looking forward to seeing the ground again.

on the ground to destroy the equipment.

Snow, Snow, and more Snow!

I don't know how much snow we've actually got. I know that there are plenty of snow drifts 3' or more here.
We're all pretty tired of snow around here. Snow means a lot of extra work for us, and snow days gobble up valuable time that is needed for other projects and leaves us physically worn out.
We love our new greenhouse and red raspberry high tunnel except for times of heavy snow or icy spells. The structures are made of heavy gauge metal with a heavy mil plastic covering. Because of our high winds we made sure to add even further reinforcement to the structures when we constructed them. The fear that every greenhouse grower has is that the house just won't be able to handle the weight of even several inches of heavy snow or ice. After all our hard work putting the house up and outfitting it with growing benches and such I would hate to see a crumpled mess of twisted metal and plastic.
Snow can be removed from the top of the houses manually by dragging it off from outside or bopping it off from inside (I made a special tool for this) or in times of greater snow accumulations we heat the inside of the structures with portable propane heaters and a big diesel torpedo heater which is terribly stinky but kicks out a lot of heat quickly! Of course all of this takes monitoring to make sure all is working well. I set my alarm for every 3 hours to make my way out through 2 to 4' snow drifts to check to make certain everything was working and to possibly change propane tanks. Much to my horror the big torpedo went out sometime between 1 and 3 in the morning. The snow was coming down heavily then and wasn't scheduled to stop for another 16 hours. I knew I would never be able tot keep up without a heater. Luckily we had a kerosene heater in the barn and I had filled some kerosene fuel tanks a few weeks before. I'm also thankful to have listened to that little voice in my head that motivated me to put a kid's snow saucer in the barn just before the snow started. I realize that though typically I don't view it as being much of a walk between the barn and the greenhouse, that night, with the side door snowed in it would be a difficult walk with a very awkward large kerosene heater. I was absolutely thrilled to see the bright blue snow saucer that I had recently moved to the barn. It would prove to be just perfect in transporting the heater through the enormous drifts between the barn and the greenhouse.
It snowed so much that it mounded up around the long sides of the houses so much that there was nowhere left for it to go. Shovel, shovel, and more shoveling to keep the side walls from breaking under too much pressure.
And then there is always now plowing to break up the snow shoveling monotony. These long storms really suck. Next year we're investing in a snow blower!