What are your wintertime/cabin fever processes?

Hi! Lurker here, first-time poster, budding permie.

When the growing season is over, how do you pass the time? Do you plan for the spring/summer/fall grows? What does that look like? What sorts of fun things do you do when you're trapped in the house and it's cold and snowy and you just want to be out in the wild getting your hands dirty?

Would love to hear your stories.

Thanks!

Angela

Hi Angela; Welcome to Permies!


Why of course that is when we have time to be on Permies.   Or reading good books , binging on Netflix … Oh and going out and playing in the snow!  You know dig your car out and get it unstuck. Knock all the snow off your roofs before they cave in … Fun stuff !  


That is my very tongue in cheek response.  
Others may give you a more realistic response.  Like planning all your spring projects, starting seeds indoors,  working on garden fences as soon as the snow leaves. Normal stuff... I like binging on Netflix's myself!  

Walk, hike, or go cross-country skiing.  When outdoors, watch winter birds & identify them.

Go over our garden & fruit- or nut-tree notes from past years, make plans for spring.  Toward spring, start seedlings.

Play music (guitar for me, keyboard or wind instrument for other people I know).  Listen to free music from the internet.  Watch classic movies available free on Youtube.  Read books (ones I have, or borrowed from the public library), read articles.  Try out new recipes in the kitchen.

Make something, or repair things.  Maybe design a making/building project.

Invite friends or neighbours over for a visit — or get out of our four walls here and visit friends or neighbors.

Do contributive work with a local community group.

We have home offices, so we go through old paper files, reference materials, etc — weed outdated stuff out & take to the recycling bins.  Feels good!

Lol. Asparagus us coming up. I planted potatos last week. In many ways, winter is the busy time of year. Its that july/august when we hunker indoors to get out of the heat. We have harvested everything and start planning the fall garden at that point.

TEXAS FTW!

Cut and split fire wood. Heat up the shop, get discouraged about the mess, decide to clean It tomorrow, repeat as needed.

We do a bunch of fixing and experimenting.  The farm chores take longer. We just boiled down our first crop of maple syrup.  The trees haven't run in 4 days, but the day before that they gave up 25 gallons of sap.  My son gets made fun of for being out in late January setting up all his infrastructure for sugaring.  His cousins just can't understand why someone would want do be out side in the nasty weather when he could be playing video games or watching tv like them.  I remind him that they don't run their own business yet and he does.  I think he is doing really good for a 14 year old.  We will be planting his tomatoes and peppers in the sun room next week.  Actually the only time we slow down is in august.  Here is a picture of last weekends first half pint of maple syrup and his farmers market from last year.  We work all year to produce the best products we can for his stand.

Angela,

Winter time is my stir-crazy time.  Where I live (Southern Illinois), we don't get a true winter season.  It is more like an extended fall/early spring season.  Lately we have had a lot of rain which has produced a lot of mud that prevents me from really getting to some of the projects I would like to get to.  As a result, "winter" is the time that I concoct hair-brained ideas for the upcoming spring and look for advice on Permies.  At the moment, I am Thinking about converting all of my garden beds to raised wood-chip beds (I have plenty of wood chips, so chip supply is no issue for me).  From that point, my thoughts drift on how to get these chips to break down faster.  That lead me to wine-cap mushrooms to do the decomposition for me.  From there, I have entertained just about all things fungal.  

Please understand, I have actually don very little garden-wise since late fall, but winter is my time to dream up new ideas, plan my next year's garden and runs some/most of these ideas past others here on Permies.

I don't know if this helps, but this is my typical winter time activity.

Eric

Apparently, this guy trains dragons in the winter.



Not a bad activity if you ask me.

(Also on permies.com are Olivier and Stefan's Permaculture Orchard documentary and a podcast review of Permaculture Orchard.)

If I were a good person, I would sharpen, clean, and oil all my tools.

In reality, I read, eat a lot, clean/declutter/organize the house, sometimes crochet and mend stuff.

I take the kids for walks and visit with neighbors. If it's snowy, I pull them on the sled down the road--they love it! If it's too rainy/slushy to be outside most of the day, I create. I needle-felt, knit, learn to woodwork, cook more elaborate meals and treats, and clean/organize (my house is a lot cleaner because I'm actually inside!). I also read to my kids a ton of books (you know, reading for 2 hours a day vs 30 minutes), and do more crafts/teaching with them.

Adding extra light really helps with my mood during the darkest months. I've got a bunch of white Christmas lights still strung up inside that I can plug in for more light on those dark, cloudy/rainy days in December.

I tend to spend a lot of time on the internet, researching trees and perennial plants, and ordering more of them than we really know what to do with.  We also read quite a bit, on- and off-line, build obstacle courses in the house to keep the kids entertained, do the big indoor organizational tasks (like sorting through the kids' clothing and toys), and start little businesses (I think we're up to 4 or 5 now) on Etsy or similar platforms with no real expectation of them being super-successful.  I draw and create pretty patterns in Photoshop.  This year, I got back to blogging after several years away.  I have a day job, which fills a lot of my time.  My husband clears our long rural driveway with just a shovel, which takes up a lot of his time.  We also sleep a bit extra (on purpose) during the darkest days of winter.  

Right now, the days have suddenly gotten a lot longer, and we are sitting down with my (lengthy) list of impulse fruit tree purchases, trying to figure out where the heck we're going to put them all.  We're looking forward to when the snow melts, and making lots of plans.

My reply above was pretty much about the common run of things in winter here, besides what's directly involved in homestead chores and cash income.

Thought I'd mention something that popped up last week.  A woman friend of ours — lives on a few acres with vegetable garden & horses — happens to have a life passion for making fine pottery.  She had a website that she got tired of and took down.  She's working with a web designer to put up a new site and has all the photography & the graphic aspects worked out, and had drafted some text.  She asked me to help her with the that... feedback and line-editing.  So I put some time into that.  I didn't quote a price, thought I'd do it for free.  I know at some point she'll very probably offer us some free horse manure.

Community is a good thing, even when it's not super-close-knit intentional community.

At the moment, for me, I am doing knitting, crocheting, reading, and experimenting with fermenting various things. Also, journaling and drawing is helping me a bit, too.

In the winter, I try out new recipes, order seed, Knit, crochet, embroider, crewel work, sleep extra(on purpose), read and watch old (black and white) movies.

I usually don't get cabin fever because I spend way too much time here on the forum.

I also usually have country music playing in the background and I'm singing along to myself.

If it gets to me I go for a walk and listen to the wind through the tree.

Although there is no snow where I am at the foothills of the Blue Mountains in New South Wales, Australia, I love to rug up, go for walks and take a lot of photos of local winter wildlife and scenery, It is very pretty around here. I cook and preserve all I can as our garden produces cold weather fruits and veggies all through winter.

I have cut back on work and only do 3 days a week now so I have more time for enjoying life.

I love eating home made popcorn and playing with the grandkids, catching up with friends and neighbours, sorting out my next season's seeds, listening to music, knitting, jigsaws, reading - there are a lot of free ebooks I have downloaded from free-ebooks.net so I never have to worry about getting books, just making choices from all the categories available. And I SLEEP IN a lot more,

I feel winter is for recharging my health batteries by resting and eating as well as possible.

Dennis Mitchell wrote:Cut and split fire wood. Heat up the shop, get discouraged about the mess, decide to clean It tomorrow, repeat as needed.

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤪🤪🤪🤪🤪😍😍😍😍😍
Haha; sounds so familiar.  Except; our winters are so long & so cold, we don’t get discouraged about the mess anymore.  We; just live, with it.

Ummm; well, maybe some do get a little "under the weather" about it.  But; freshly-fallen snow on a row of evergreens the next morning with the sun coming up, is quite pretty.

And; we're not even in the Northern part of the province.

some things I have found over the years:
Get your clothes on for the day-pajamas may seem nice but it's not good for your sense of time.
Keep a schedule-eat on time, do your morning chores/routine.
Go to bed early+get up early. Keep your circadian rhythms consistent.
Craft projects+handy projects are fun but be very careful not to overdo it, I have a bad habit of working on yarn projects all day and then my carpal tunnel acts up for a couple days.
VERY IMPORTANT to make yourself get outside at least once a day!!!
Get projects done indoors that you don't ant to in the summer, like home repair.
Go visit friends!

It is pretty easy to see. Chickenhouse, wood shed, tool shed, water fountain, outhouse. By far the best trodden is the road to the chickenhouse.
I am saving money and keeping myself busy by collecting grasses for the deep litter in the chickenhouse. Those that stick out of the snow, I mean. It is really cold here, and keeping the house warm and cooking takes a lot of time.
The days are six hours only, so after sunset I pretty much just read.
Just had a chat with another farmer and we laughed that in the summer we work all the time, and sort of hibernate in the winter. Hard to understand for those city folks who work 9to5 all year long.

My snowy map would look similar to Kaarina's. The livestock and our dogs ensure that I get my body outside and DOING, every day. We get about 8hrs of daylight, during winter, so after morning critter chores - taking Charlie (my little cavalier) out, releasing the quackens (ducks) and chooks, checking all the mangers, gravity feed bins, and waterers, I have coffee in the morning, while I check emails and such, followed by a few indoor chores, baking, cooking, &/or 'making' projects while watching outdoor temps. Then, as it gets to the warmest part of the day, I'll go back out to take care of anything that needs doing, beyond my morning & evening critter chores - like bringing in firewood, fixing anything the goats (&now sheep) have broken, breaking up ice in the critters' water, if needed, etc. Then back in for dinner, and right about at sunset, locking the birds all back in, for the night. Then, curl up with a good book, embroider, spin some yarn, crochet, nåhlbinding, weaving, mending, or other crafty thing, until bedtime.

I don't get bored, because I have so much on my 'to-do' list, and so many projects in various stages of planning, beginning or completion, that if I had to live long enough to complete them all, I'd easily outlive Methuselah. In fact, I get frustrated sometimes, when John insists on dragging me out with him, to 'run errands'. He says that he sometimes worries that if no one sees me out at the grocery, or post office, that they'll start to suspect him of bumping me off, and hiding my body in one of our ravines, lol.

In a different thread on about the same topic I showed some of my recent knitting projects.
So I can put the same photos here too:

this will become a blanket. I started it in the round, then made it into a square, then into a rectangle ... and now I'm waiting for more yarn. The wool is from Kempisch Heideschaap, a Dutch type of sheep, and plant-dyed by 'Wools Of Holland' (sounds like a brand name, but it's a small two-person business in the south of the Netherlands).


Because I can't do without a knitting project, while waiting for the yarn I started another project. This will be a 'capelet'. The yarn is unraveled Swedish wool (don't know the brand, I bought it from someone on Ravelry).

Almond Thompson wrote:some things I have found over the years:
Get your clothes on for the day-pajamas may seem nice but it's not good for your sense of time.
Keep a schedule-eat on time, do your morning chores/routine.
Go to bed early+get up early. Keep your circadian rhythms consistent.
Craft projects+handy projects are fun but be very careful not to overdo it, I have a bad habit of working on yarn projects all day and then my carpal tunnel acts up for a couple days.
VERY IMPORTANT to make yourself get outside at least once a day!!!
Get projects done indoors that you don't ant to in the summer, like home repair.
Go visit friends!

I agree. I do a lot of knitting and other 'creative projects', but do my best to do some things outdoors every day too.

As I don't spend as much time outside in the winter I often choose short (a few weeks) online courses to keep my brain active. There's so much out there from coding to cooking, education and healthcare. I don't think life is long enough to do all that I would like.
Our dog makes sure I get some time outside every day as the only weather he doesn't like walking in is hail. We usually meet other dog walkers and catch up on the local news.
This year we are still working on our house so I have plenty of decorating to be getting on with - painting and curtain making etc. so I have plenty to keep me out of mischief.