Last night Scarlett and I were out meandering in the pasture and a very large flock of birds went overhead. Since then I’ve seen a couple flocks fly by and couldn’t help but think, “Is it that time of year already?” I still think it’s pretty early for birds to be flocking together and heading South but it got me thinking about winter coming and then the panic set in.
It sounds very “Little House on the Prairiesque” but the impending winter makes you really take stalk of what you need to accomplish before the snow flies. I have never had this thought process until last fall when we were coming into our first full winter at this property. I had things that I really wanted to accomplish before winter that would make life so much easier, i.e. pouring the sidewalk patch, read about that project here: https://pearlsponiesandpacifiers.com/2020/03/24/pouring-a-sidewalk-patch/ or putting in a gate in our barn to make it easier to access the pasture (https://pearlsponiesandpacifiers.com/2020/05/29/building-a-wood-gate/.) Luckily, I got all of the important things accomplished last year. Now, it’s time to look ahead to this year’s list.
Narrowing It Down
My husband read a book awhile ago titled, Get Your Sh*t Together by Sarah Knight. He summed it up how she sets priorities by making a list of everything you need to do. Now narrow it down. Narrow it down again. And then, narrow it down again. It sounds very common sense, but, once I started using this approach it truly helped me examine what REALLY needed to be done. Not what seemed important, but what do I have to do right now that sets me up for success. All of the fluff things you wanted to get done kind of sink to the bottom and you realize what truly needs to happen.
Now Narrow it down. Narrow it down again. And then, narrow it down again.
I have started using this approach with the acreage. We will have lived on this property for two years come December. There is a list as long as my arm of things I want to get done, that’s just life, specifically life on the homestead. BUT, I am starting to take note of what will make life easier this winter and what will give us a head start in the spring.
This helped me narrow down things to do for the barn, and my garden and probably most important, the wood furnace in the house.
Getting the Barn Winter Ready
We have a hook up for a hydrant in the barn but have not put a hydrant on there basically because I don’t know if anything else needs to be done to it to ensure it is ready for freezing cold temps. As of now I have to run two hoses from the hydrant in the middle of the yard to the pasture and then coil it up and put it in the basement so it doesn’t freeze. Granted, in the grand scheme of things this isn’t the worse thing in the world but when it is below zero out, it sucks! I would love to have a hydrant in the barn and get a lightweight coil hose that only has to reach about 25′ to the water tank. My Dad thinks that we need to do a lot of additional steps to get this hookup ready for the hydrant and I quite honestly just want to have our local plumber come out and give it the green light but also don’t want to have an expensive plumber come all the way out for a simple DIY so really I just need to pull the trigger and get my butt in gear!
The next thing on the list for the barn is repair the roof. We have a hole on the North side that definitely needs some attention. I was out there awhile ago during a rain storm and the water was pouring in to the horses shelter area, not OK for so many obvious reasons. I do not do heights so roofs are clearly not my thing and Coby simply doesn’t have time so we are going to hire it out and definitely need to be getting on that because winter will be here before you know it
Moving the Garden Shed
The next thing is move my garden shed to the new foundation we poured, read about that project here: https://pearlsponiesandpacifiers.com/2020/07/10/533/. While this isn’t going to make or break our winter it would make things go a lot smoother next spring. My main reason in wanting to get this in place is so I can start my ground cover walkways so they can take root this fall and early spring before we get out in the garden.
I thought long and hard about what material to use as a walkway for in between my raised beds. I have always loved going barefoot in the garden and didn’t feel that was a great option using tradition walkway materials of mulch or rock. I also didn’t want the added maintenance of mowing and trimming the walkways if I planted grass. I was very adamant about being comfortable walking barefoot in the garden, there is something so uplifting about connecting with the earth that you are working and I didn’t want to lose that. I kept thinking about it and realized that there had to be some other option and I stumbled upon walkable ground covers. These are huge!! There are people actually replacing lawns with this to make less maintenance! After much research I settled upon Irish Moss as the ground cover I would use for my garden walkways. It can withstand heavy foot traffic and grows rather quickly and has a decent spread so I don’t need millions of plants to get my walkways covered. I referenced the website https://www.stepables.com/, they were great in detailing the pros and cons of each variety of stepable plant. They also sell the plants of course. Since I am going to be covering a wide area of space I ended up buying seeds from a different company and am starting them at home myself.
Wood Furnace
We have a wood stove in the living room. I grew up with a wood stove as our only form of heat because my Dad is very “thrifty” as he likes to call it. I love wood heat, electric heat can’t even begin to touch wood heat in my opinion. Our house is roughly 50′ long with doorways breaking up that distance. That is a lot for a wood stove to try and heat. It would be nice and toasty in the living room but it would be freezing on the other side of the house, something I am not a fan of! The previous owners had a wood furnace installed in the basement and I want so badly to get that thing up and running that way we have that glorious wood heat spreading evenly throughout the house! The previous owner mentioned that the chimney needed to be re-lined so that’s why we didn’t try it last year when we moved in during the middle of winter. Since it hasn’t been used in awhile we want it to get professionally inspected and brought up to snuff because of course burning wood can be dangerous if not done correctly.
I hope you don’t have a panic moment like I did realizing that winter is around the corner and you have a bunch of stuff you want to get crossed off your to-do list before that happens! I hope this just gave you some food for thought, good luck on checking off that list!
Pearls, Ponies, & Pacifiers 