Winter tasks

Winter often presents both barriers and opportunities for work to be done on the homestead.  I will be building an new area for chicken in my barn and doing some tiling jobs in the house.  I am sure other jobs will be added.   What is on your agenda to do this winter?

Good question! I didn't get everything done that I should have in the good weather so now I have to fight mud in the buck pen. That means a truckload of chips that I get to wheelbarrow in through soft ground and mud. That'll teach me....

Other winter to-do items include fiddling around with a mass for our Liberator rocket stove (also should have been done this summer), stripping the outside off a junked Lance camper and rebuilding it so it's road worthy, cranking out lots of soap, and catching up on my reading list which is at least twenty books long at this point.

Some of the titles on my to-read list are:
Homestead Tsunami by Joel Salatin
The Independent Farmstead by Shawn and Beth Dougherty
Old Fashioned on Purpose by Jill Winger
The Disappearance of the Universe by Gary Renard

You know, just a little light reading...and of course, anxiously awaiting my new Natural Cheesemaking book as well!

Thanks for that book list and inspiration, Gina!

I want to read a lot this winter, too, but I have been hunting around for the just-right books.

As for my winter projects, I have a fleece to wash, card, and spin in small batches, lots and lots of flax tow to comb for shorter flax fibers, lots of fiber to spin, and lots of plans to make for growing more flax and small grains to be planted in the spring just after the snow goes.

There's no snow yet, and that's good, because I still need to stack the lumber from our torn-down decrepit chicken house, try to get 1000 square feet of cardboard laid down as a cover for the ground where I'll be growing flax and small grains, and one more fence made for my three-sided chicken coop. I thought (chuckling can be heard here) that I'd somehow have gotten all that done already.

Oh and there's a string quintet (different kind of string) to finish, practice, and perform, along with about 25 music lessons to teach each week. Well, nobody ever expected me to be lazy in the winter!

When somebody learned how to balance all the rich threads of life, I do wish they'd teach me. In the meantime, I'm so glad there are so many options.

I’m taking a “winter vacation”, as in I’m going to a warmer climate.  I want to learn to facilitate yoga nidra, and I don’t want to take an online class.  Remember when schooling was automatically an “in person” activity?  I had planned to go August to mid October, but the sale of my house delayed me… now it’s Phoenix, Arizona in their peak season.  (I have no idea where my dog and I will stay.  Maybe camp out?  Maybe there is a hostel?  I’m hoping I will find something….

I like to can in the winter…. as it heats up the house as well as provides me with bone broth and fast food for future use.  I got started doing it in winter because I didn’t get the chicken population down to a manageable size before winter set in, and didn’t want to feed that many chickens through winter just to have too many chickens in the spring, and then too many chicks in the spring… and so on.

Other foods to winter can:  dried beans and apple sauce or juice.  Root vegetables can be pickled.

Sorting and labeling seeds I collected in the fall while I still know what they are, or can decipher the most recent notes on the little makeshift paper packets and reused plastic ones.

Gina Jeffries wrote:Good question! I didn't get everything done that I should have in the good weather so now I have to fight mud in the buck pen. That means a truckload of chips that I get to wheelbarrow in through soft ground and mud. That'll teach me....

Other winter to-do items include fiddling around with a mass for our Liberator rocket stove (also should have been done this summer), stripping the outside off a junked Lance camper and rebuilding it so it's road worthy, cranking out lots of soap, and catching up on my reading list which is at least twenty books long at this point.

Some of the titles on my to-read list are:
Homestead Tsunami by Joel Salatin
The Independent Farmstead by Shawn and Beth Dougherty
Old Fashioned on Purpose by Jill Winger
The Disappearance of the Universe by Gary Renard

You know, just a little light reading...and of course, anxiously awaiting my new Natural Cheesemaking book as well!

I appreciate your planned reading list but thought I would mention that I couldn't find "Homestead Tsunami" by Joel Salatin.

Thekla McDaniels wrote:
Other foods to winter can:  dried beans and apple sauce or juice.  Root vegetables can be pickled.

Sorting and labeling seeds I collected in the fall while I still know what they are, or can decipher the most recent notes on the little makeshift paper packets and reused plastic ones.

Thanks for the inspiration and ideas!  Me, too; me, too; me, too!!!

Finish the harvest and clean up the beds, place leaves on some beds for mulch, clip asparagus to the ground, put straw on strawberries, finish rolling up hoses for the winter, winterize pumps & chicken coop & beehive [in zone 4b, they need insulation].
After that, make a list of seeds and throw the "well out of date seeds" near a compost pile, right before they can get covered by snow [I always get 'volunteers', even from well out of date seeds]. I will also try to get more plum seedlings by winterizing the stones and starting their seeds in the spring.
Then I will await new seed catalogs and nursery catalogs and start dreaming all over again. Winter is a great time to think up new projects and get educated. Since I am moving away from annuals [they are terribly expensive and don't always work] I have become more interested in perennials forbes, trees and bushes.
Finally, making salves, decoctions, syrups, liquors and teas from dried fruit is a really interesting pastime. [I am waiting to taste my first aronia liquor.] and there are still dehydrated aronia berries left on one of the bushes. I will have to try it for tea. Wouldn't it be something is mother nature dehydrated these better than me?
There will be chores that need to be done in winter too, like cleaning up the coop [once a week for straight poop, once in the winter for the regular litter and laying boxes]. Closer to spring, pruning trees and bushes, taking promising scions to graft.
New this year and totally unrelated: Finding an accountant to do my taxes. I spend way too many hours working on that and anguishing. It just isn't worth it. Farming this winter chore out will increase my level of happiness and emotional well being. As I get older, that is much more important.
I keep pretty good records, so why not?

I put in an order for some grapes I want to start, mix of table and wine, it should be sent out in the spring. I'm building the arbor over the next week. It required a lot of earth work to level the area, it's 16'x8'. I had the back hoe going to town and while I was tearing things up I took the time to dump compost and biochar into the soil, down to about a foot or so. Maybe ~5% of the volume, max, in a lot areas much less. But I've tried to do augmentation like that months before planting if I can, so long term those roots can find a lot of things.

Disconnected the irrigation lines, cleaned the pumps, drained everything. Just getting ready to read books / watch movies / dream of spring.

Cameron Green, here you go!
Homestead Tsunami

Howdy,

Before Winter task,   Wood burners, check and clean stove pipe and or chimney flue.

You know, I always seem to have something that needs to get done and it just depends if it is cold or hot out.

-Change Boiler fuel oil filter and bleed air.
-Change car oil and filter.
-Sand/Stain/Seal boards for Laundry Room Shelving.
-Install Laundry Room Shelving
-Clean/Lube hand tools that I have beaten up over the other three seasons
-Oil wood kitchen utensils/boards. (Should be monthly but I am bad at keeping a schedule)
-Stare at my seeds/soil/pots and change my plans for next years garden about 100 times.
-Finish repointing basement rubblestone foundation with lime mortar.
-Make fine tune adjustments to the chicken coop/run now that it is occupied if things come up over winter.

I'm missing a bunch, but I've got things!

I always have far too many things that I want to do....This year I have

finish my yurt-shed
plant lots of aronia - preparing lots of minihugels and taking cuttings.
put my growing area to bed with lots of mulch
really get my new polytunnel cover on
get my 'new' runabout mobile again
and decide what I really need in terms of new seeds and plants, as well as sending off seed to the Hardy Plant Society.

This winter is going to be one of planting trees for me. Before the ground freezes (hopefully mid-December or later) I've got a few hundred little trees that need to go into the ground. After the ground freezes, I need to finish up preparing planting spots for an even larger number of trees. For that, there are a few mature trees that need to come down, a bunch of brush cutting that needs to be done, and finally cleaning up the brush. My area doesn't allow burning of brush piles, so I've set up makeshift brick fire pit (as large as legally allowed) and will be "cooking" marshmallows several times over the winter.

I'm always behind schedule and under-funded, so progress has been slow going here at Liberty Tree Farm.  Summer stuff still not finished, greenhouse project still in original boxes on the front porch waiting for excavation of a level spot for it.  Every time I feel like working on a project on my to-do list, a well pump stops pumping or a burst pipe floods the pump house or something unexpected pops up to use what little funds I've saved up for materials, and the project gets delayed for another month or two or ten.  Truck and tractor repairs, road maintenance, computer problems all take time and money I hadn't planned on spending.

I frequently wonder if it's all worth it.  I get so frustrated and overwhelmed.  Strawberries won't grow, deer broke through an 8-ft net deer fence and cleaned out my garden, fruit trees I planted 2 years ago are barely surviving.  The hill up to the barn seems to be getting steeper. But then the clouds blow away, and the sun brightens everything up, so the depression turns to joy, and I start over again.

This winter I want to finish renovating the trailer.  It was an empty shell with the south end wide open when I bought the place 4 years ago this month.  I had great plans then to rehab it for temporary living accommodations until I could build my dream underground house with south-facing solarium.  Thought I could build it with wood beams harvested from the property and recycled fixtures, but that hasn't moved up my list.  In fact, it's moved down.  I'm content enough living in the trailer for now though it is pretty rough still.  It's sealed and insulated, plumbed and wired, and my recycled kitchen meets my needs, but it still has a way to go.

This year I finally finished the master/south bedroom and most of the bathroom (still need to tile the shower).  Recently I moved my bedroom furniture from the north bedroom to the south along with clothes, shoes and boots, seasonal boxed up stuff, etc.

August and October were mostly dealing with outside problems: replacing submersible pump (2nd one in two years) down at the spring-fed cistern, electrical problems with the midway pump house, and now flooding from a broken pipe in the upper pump house and the pressure tank in the mid pump house was not holding pressure, so had to replace it.  All fixed and hopefully will last the winter at least.

I'd been using the middle bedroom as a pantry and catch-all with a couple of bookcases for food storage and boxes and totes piled up where I could never find stuff when I needed it.  So far, I've moved everything to my now empty north bedroom and am drywalling the outside wall that has been just ugly insulation for over 3 years.  I have the materials collected to build shelving around 3 walls, so I'll have enough room to organize and label everything.  With adequate shelving, I'll have more than enough room for all my tools as well as food storage.  Still need to lay vinyl flooring (easy to clean if a jar slips through my fingers and smashes on the floor).  I drop a lot of stuff these days.  Peripheral neuropathy I'm told.

Then I'll empty the north bedroom into the storeroom shelves and rip up the old, stained carpeting, clean, repaint, lay laminate flooring same as the south bedroom floor I recently finished and trimmed, and build an extra-long queen-size captain's bed with built-in drawers on both sides and foot.  I also have a dresser and mirror and night stands to put in there (stored in the barn for now).  This will be the guestroom for tall visitors.  Then maybe my 6'5" brother and his wife will come for a visit.  I've invited them every summer, but considering our guest accommodations consisted of sleeping on the floor on air mattress(es), tenting, or tossing a sleeping bag on a pile of hay in the barn, the visit didn't appeal to them.  LOL.  He's 80 and she's 76, so I guess their camping days are behind them.  They'd prefer a 4-star resort with maid service these days.  We're a long way from that, I'm afraid.

Little by little, I keep plugging along with a vision of a permaculture paradise dancing in my head.  Hoping Santa will bring me some sharp saw blades this Christmas (all types and sizes).

Winter T-boned us two weeks ago -- unseasonably early and with little warning, with the force of a F-450 welding truck. We went from +25C to -10C in a couple of days. We're have been scrambling the whole time to catch up. Water lines and hoses to blow out, well and septic systems to winterize, gardens to fork-turn. The full smash. Phew -- exhausted. But we're winning, finally.

Big winter projects? I have to knock down the fire load on the hill behind me. It's 30+ years of neglect, long before I came here. This year's freaky dry spring has me spooked; a wind-driven fire up that hill could take all my buildings.

But I also want to create a sort of mobile work area that I can take to the various work zones on my property. A small shed on skids with a wood stove, connected to tarp structures I can work in; and generally the means to thumb my nose at the worst of winter while focusing on tasks that move me forward. I can't sit idle from November 1 to March 31 without going bonkers.