Off-Grid in West Virginia

Sunday

Linda

The calendar says it’s Spring,

But I don’t believe thats so,

‘Cause I awoke this morning,

To a garden full of SNOW!

L.K.JOBE

Yup, this morning when we got up at six o’clock we had about two inches of snow on the ground. It was quite depressing to have to do those winter time chores again like sweep off the PV array. I decided to keep the chickens confined today and they didn’t seem anxious to bust out of the coop hatch like they usually do. I think the rooster must have taken one look out of the window of their door and said, “Heck ladies lets just stay in and keep each other warm today. You can fluff the straw and clean up some of this corn mess on the floor when your done layin’ eggs.” I think if that were true I would find one defeathered, henpecked, simpering rooster by the afternoon.

But in true Spring fashion the sun came out and melted the snow with the temps getting up to about forty degrees. Tonight and tomorrow night will be down in the teens. Burrr!

Yesterday Sonny pulled the guinea house out of the garden. They don’t like it anyway and it will soon become a piglet shelter. Way, way in the back of the property. We want to try our hand at raising our own hog for the freezer this winter instead of going to the livestock auction like we did last year. Like everything here at PHF it will be a test.

We also plowed the garden yesterday.  The soil appeared dry enough. We are no experts but from the description in our gardening book it seemed right. We had to dig out some big chunks of wood that the logger had buried before we bought the property and of course there were numerous stones that had to be picked out. We put the stones in a pile and then dumped them into a puddle near the driveway entrance. At least that will help keep it from getting any deeper.

Plowing the garden.

There is still hope for the greenhouse. The Rion company emailed us a parts list which was a big help. Now we were able to decipher what parts needed to be replaced and their corresponding numbers. We should find out in a few days what the replacement parts will cost us. It is only the beginning because I am sure the replacement list will grow as we start to put the pieces back together.

John and Carol bought a new RVT. They got a nice Kobota side by side, so we bought their old Arctic Cat. Its been around the block a few times but its still got a lot of life left in it and we are glad to have it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 27th, 2011 at 7:48 pm and is filed under Off-Grid. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.