Winter mud season
There's always so much work to do on the farm
that we never seem to have time to be proactive, only reactive.
Water is a prime example. Since the summer, we've had "bury water
lines" on our to do list, but it never quite made it up onto the tasks
we meant to conquer in any given week. So when the first really
cold spell hit, our lines froze and we were out of water.
Over the next week, Mark and I plan to get the water lines buried and
the problem solved. But in the short term, the dishes were piling
up a foot above the sink. So Sunday afternoon Mark and I set out
in pursuit of immediate water. We loaded some buckets into the
club car and drove down to the creek through winter mud --- the kind
that sits over half frozen ground and lets none of the recent rain
drain away from the surface.
Our journey occurred before Mark installed the
ice chains, so it was no surprise that we got stuck a few times and had
to work our way free. Mark lifted up the offending portion of the
golf cart with the spud bar while I hit the acceleration and also
pushed the cart along with one foot --- kinda like in the Flintstones
but with my foot sticking out the side of the cart instead of through a
hole in the floor. Soon enough we'd filled up buckets at the
creek and strapped them in place for the slipping, sliding journey home.
When we pulled up at the trailer door, both of us splattered with mud
and water, our buckets had lost half of the water they'd started out
with. But both of us were laughing and invigorated from the
adventure --- our buckets were indeed half full!
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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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