Hay is for horses here on the old farm

Some of you wondered about all that hay in the last post. Here on the farm we have 9 equines, eight of which are horses and one of which is a mule (his daddy was a donkey and his mama was a mare). Here is a picture of  "The Colonel".

The 230 bales you saw in the last post will last about two months depending on the weather. Nina wondered, and Kelli, too,  about the grass we have. They both live in pretty lush climates. It is okay grass when it grows, which is about May through September, at which time it becomes dormant before freezing solid later on. At that point it is normally buried under a couple of feet of snow. The ground thaws and it starts to grow again sometime in May. The first week of May is about the average time the ice goes off the lakes of which we have about 2500 in this county. We have about twice that number of people. We look at Duluth as being the gateway to central Minnesota and Minneapolis as "down south". In fact, Minneapolis is So far south that I have actually heard people down there say "y'all". It is only a couple days drive down I-35 to Texas, after all. Here we almost speak Canadian, eh? We sometimes go oot and aboot for the afternoon. We build our house foundations knowing that the average frost depth is about 4 or 5 feet. If we don't, this happens.

See how the porch is sagging? This was built in 1915 (when this farm was originally homesteaded) and we lived in it for a year and a half back in 1993-1994 while I built a new house. It is storage now. The foundation was minimal and they had a dirt floor for the first few years. We met the woman who grew up here shortly after we bought the place. She was in her eighties at the time and told us about their first Christmas here in their very own home. " We went out in the woods and cut a tree, brought it back and stuck it in the living room floor (yes, it was dirt). We dug a root cellar the next year." Eventually they put in a full basement. Plumbing and electricity came many years later and now the place is slowly settling into the ground. It is a combination of vertical and horizontal hewn log construction underneath those old shingles. They made due with the materials available at that time.

It was a cold week here on the farm. Even the icicles had icicles. A couple of days didn't get above zero F (-17C). This morning, however was plus 23F which is nearly 40 degrees warmer than yesterday morning.Yippee!! Of course, when it warms up that much it can snow, so I will be clearing the driveway later on. Now we are a month past Winter Solstice. When you spend a fair amount of time outdoors in the winter these are things you look forward to. It may seem pathetic to some, but it keeps me going.