When winter stops you cold...

I was just about to start this post, and I noticed that my previous post was about being unprepared for winter.  Interesting.  Since that first storm, we've lost power 3 more times, and amassed about a foot of snow -- then it was almost 60 degrees today (and we lost power...hmm...).

The latest storm came to us on the day before Thanksgiving. I'm sure you heard about it on the news or were a part of it if you live on the east coast. It wasn't anything out of the norm except that it happened before December...barely.  Anyway, I'm not here to write about a storm, but rather the effect of having said storm and what it does to our life.

Since we've lived here on the farm for the past 2 years, I have really come to enjoy the winters.  I think that many farmers feel this way -- it's a time to reflect on the past growing season, take stock of what worked and what didn't work, and start planning for next year.

That being said -- we had many more things on our "before winter" to do list.  We make a lot of lists in this house, and if we get to everything on the list before the predetermined deadline, then it's a lucky day.

Anyway, the storm arrived the day before Thanksgiving, and we lost power at about 6 pm.  We are fortunate enough to have a wood stove for heating our house and for cooking (though we have a gas range, so we could cook without the wood stove), a composting toilet, and a generator.  Usually, when we lose power, we only use the generator for a couple hours at night to let the water pump more water up from the well, and to use lights for reading or whatever (though we have definitely embraced candlelight).

We LOVE our Waterford-Stanley! In the winter, we cook almost exclusively on and in this stove, and it keeps our house so warm!  It is Dec. 1, and we haven't turned our heat on yet.

It was already our plan to try to cook the entire Thanksgiving meal in the wood stove, but without a back-up, the challenge was even more fun.  We learned with this power outage that none of the outlets in our kitchen is connected to the generator. Excellent. When making the pumpkin pie using our long pie pumpkins, I thought about moving the stand mixer into the living room to blend the squash smoother, but I figured people could handle some chunks -- and they could. Dinner was a success, and everything cooked swimmingly in Stanley. I think we'll do it again next year, power or no power.

It was really the day after Thanksgiving that struck me as wonderful.  I've been making a conscious effort to change my thoughts and my perspective trying to shift it toward the positive, and Friday morning was the perfect opportunity.  After cooking all day the day before, I was tired, and I was looking forward to a lazy day by the wood stove.  The dogs, however, we unfazed by me being tired or by the fact that there was a foot of heavy snow on the ground.  Anna was working, so I couldn't even pawn the dog walk off on her.  So, we went for a snowshoe.

It was glorious.

At first, I was grumbling about being cold and tired, but then I decided to stop and really look at where I was.  This is what I saw.

Clearly, the dogs did not need a shift in perspective to enjoy this walk.

I mean, really? I live here?!?!  How fortunate am I that I get to walk out my front door to this? The vast majority of people have to drive to get somewhere like this.  I spent the rest of the walk marveling at the beauty of the snow on the trees with the sunlight all around.

When I got home, I made some tea and cozied up next to the window for some quality reading time. One of the perks of farming is the off-season.

Wake up. Coffee. Dog walk. Yoga. Read. Dog walk. Read. Bed. Repeat.

Can't complain about that to-do list.








......also we cut firewood at some point...there's that.

Gratuitous dog and snow photos...

Baxter's favorite toy -- Chuck.  He flips it around, does back flips to catch it, pounds it into the snow, and then roots it out with his nose. Best. Day. Ever.

Really, he loves the snow, we promise.  Oliver's answer to this predicament....more rolling in the snow!!!!  As soon as the snow hits the ground, he starts rolling.  He usually doesn't make it 100 yds up the driveway without rolling. Adorable.

The view from our deck. Can't complain about that.

Cutting, bucking, splitting, and stacking

One of the things we've been working on the most this year is preparing our wood storage for the winter.  Ideally, we cut all the trees down in the winter and have the spring, summer, fall to buck (cut into small rounds), split, and stack the wood.  Because we only moved here in October then were traveling most of time until March, we were on a bit of a protracted time schedule for wood preparations.  While our house has radiant floor heating on the main floor, the upstairs is passively heated from the rest of the house, and we would like to heat as much with our wood stoves as we can.  Yep, that was intentionally plural.  We are fortunate enough to have not 1, but 3 wood stoves in our house.

This is the stove we affectionately call 'microstove.'  Don't tell her, though -- even though she's tiny she sure packs a punch.  It took us a while to figure this one out, but a few logs go a long way. 

This is our cookstove in our kitchen, we call him Stanley since it is a Waterford Stanley stove.  We do have a gas stove/range, but we're experimenting with cooking more and more on this.

Last, but certainly not least, may we introduce MEGASTOVE!  This thing is a BEAST.  This huge behemoth is in our basement and can handle logs that are almost 3 ft long.  This baby cranks the heat.  We use it on really cold days and it warms the entire house from below.  There is also a vent from the basement to the second floor which is only passively heated from the rest of the house.

Last year, we kept the thermostat at about 58 (much to my mother's chagrin) and tried to heat the house to a reasonable temperature (with mediocre success) using the stove in the kitchen and occasionally megastove.  Initially, the goal for this year was to use megastove as much as we can as it really helps to heat the house from the bottom up; however, the past week has shifted that a bit.  We decided we were going to try to bake something in the cookstove, so I did a little research on the best way to easily heat the oven.  What I learned was upsetting but I'm glad we learned it now -- last winter, we did a really good job heating the chimney.  :(  What we thought was the flue on the stove was actually a damper.  By closing it after the fire is lit, the heat stays in the stove and doesn't go up the chimney (as much).  This has totally revolutionized our cookstove.  Since that day, we've been cooking on it whenever it's lit, we've baked a quiche in it, and we're using MUCH less wood to do all these things.  I think we're going to use the cookstove a lot and save megastove for really cold days.

We also want to really cultivate the use of microstove.  Microstove has been infamously finicky and is prone to smoking us out.  We finally figured out that you have to treat microstove like a mini-campfire to get it to work -- there's no building a giant fire and tossing in a match.  That being said, microstove is in a room that is sealed from the rest of the house so we figure we can have dinner and/or watch a movie enjoying the warmth of microstove in the evening, shut the door over night, and enjoy our coffee in the morning in the residual warmth from the previous night's fire.  This is great because I think we went through a lot of wood last year building fires to warm us in the morning only to leave said fires to go work outside.  If we can avoid building the morning fire but still be comfortable with our breakfast/coffee, I think we can save a lot of wood. So far, we've used microstove a few times this fall.  We had a friend staying with us, and he was working in the room with microstove all day -- a few logs in the morning was all it took to keep him warm until late afternoon.  Score.

That being said, this summer, we're attempting to put up enough wood that we'll have plenty of leftover at the end of the winter.  Ideally, the wood we split/stack next summer will be for the following winter (i.e., a year later).  Burning really dry wood is better for the environment (it burns cleaner), and it burns hotter making it just a more efficient fuel.  So -- we're hoping we can put up enough wood this year that we can leave some for the following winter and then do the same thing next year.  After that, we're hoping we can be a year ahead of schedule every year.  We have what seems like a lot of wood stacked for the winter, but I'm still nervous about running out (we ran out last year, but we have WAY more than double what we had last year).  Cutting firewood is extremely exhausting, but really rewarding work.  I really feel like my splitting skills have gotten much better just this summer....if only we could keep our wood piles from falling over....

So far, our thermostat has stayed comfortably at 55 (sorry, Mom), but the house is MUCH warmer and more comfortable than last year.....let's see how it goes when it is actually cold.