The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

How the Grinch Stole Spring

Mourning Cloak butterflyWhen it snowed the first four days of March, I started feeling like maybe we weren't getting spring this year.  But then came four days of brilliant sun, and our farm now looks completely different.

As I worked more buckets of stump dirt into the garden and planted greens, I felt like I was living in the climax of How the Grinch Stole Christmas:

It came without snowdrops!
It came without droughts!
It came without lettuce,
spring peepers, or sprouts!

And what happened then...?
Well...on our farm they say,
That my tiny winter heart
grew three sizes that day!


Not only did my heart grow three sizes, I saw two species of butterflies out flitting about --- the Mourning Cloak I captured in pixels and either a Comma or Question Mark.  The bees were foraging in earnest, though I didn't take the time to hunt down their quarry.  Best yet, Mark got the golf cart all the way out to the parking area with just a bit of encouragement.  We're back in business!

Our homemade chicken waterer can be made by anyone who can use a drill.


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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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I think the Grinches are those of us looking to be coated in ice for a month. We get a nice early spring all day, enough to get a good melt-on, then winter comes back at night (-20C) and we have to spend the next first half day treading carefully on the ice. If the pictures I took look good, I will do a post and share.

I loved the poetic revision though!

Comment by SoapBoxTech Tue Mar 9 20:31:55 2010
Boy, I'm glad I'm not up there. I was more than ready for spring a few weeks ago --- I'm not sure how much longer I could wait... :-)
Comment by anna Wed Mar 10 08:12:29 2010





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