Snow Plow

Photo from here:

I'm tired of shoveling - I'm going to build me one of these.

Couple inches of snow fell Saturday night. I thought we were done with this stuff for the year. I'm normally a fan of a winter that has snow that sticks around. This year with the chest pains I didn't get a chance to use my snowshoes I made a couple of years ago even though we had a big snow. Didn't make it out ice skating either. I thought I might get a chance to do a little cross country skiing also. I did get to shovel a lot and whine about it though.

In spite of the weekend weather, I'm looking forward to Spring. I should have a new barn and that'll be nice. I'm furthering my plans on self-sufficiency. I've got a crawl space that's pretty deep so I want to see about using that for a root cellar. Don't know if I'll need that for this fall but it would be nice to store a few apples and such. I haven't quite finalized the plans for the garden but I've been thinking about it. In the past I haven't really worried about preservation of crops, I mostly planted the things that taste the best fresh from the garden - tomatoes, peppers and melons mostly. I planted some beans a few years ago for dried soup beans. After I spent all that time shelling them and looked at the price of a bag of beans at the grocery, I was about at the break even point if I only charged my labor at 50 cents/hour. Not really a good return on my investment.

I now have the set-up for doing the canning outside, I got a dehydrator on semi-permanent loan from Cuzzin Ricky and I came up with a cider press from a lady I work with. It's a big monstrosity that has a big wooden frame and two of the pressing buckets or whatever they're called. It's got a big screw for the press with an oddball kind of thread on it made out of stainless but I'm not sure how the whole thing was planned to operate. I'll post a few photos when I get a little time to check it out.

I'd like to get a few more chickens but the grower/layer feed was $24.00 for a 100 lbs the other day. You don't buy chicken feed for chicken feed anymore. It makes those eggs pretty expensive. It might be different if I was butchering the chickens but they all die of old age around here. If I were to order some more, most places have a minimum order of 25 and I don't need 25. The farm store does have them every Spring. They usually have some type of heavy breed as well as some leghorns. I could probably just get a few Rhode Island Reds or Barred Rocks. It's one of those things where I really don't need them but I enjoy having them around. How you going to have a place in the country without a few chickens? Plus when asked what I plan to do when I retire, I've been answering that I just plan to lay around the shack and pick shit with the chickens. How you going to do that with out chickens, I ask?

So Plan A is to not count on any form of government to provide much in my retirement and enjoy my little spread in the country. Plan B will be basically the same thing only I'll be living in the cardboard box under the bridge or the van down by the river. In the meantime, I'll wait for the weather to break and then get outside a do a little something constructive.