I don’t know about you, but I’m not looking forward to the onslaught of winter weather that soon will be here.
Waiting for me on our deck were my outside flip-flops. Slipping into them, I enjoyed zipping out of the house and quickly running out to the garden. In the heat of the summer I headed outside to do barn chores in shorts, especially if I didn’t have to handle hay bales. All of that has come to a screeching halt.
A while back, I was pleasantly cleaning out the garden one lovely fall day and, as a bonus, found some carrots that were hidden in the weeds! I do so enjoy buttoning things up, storing outside decorations away, covering everything and tossing those items that look a little worse for wear.
Borrowing paints from my artsy niece, one weekend this summer my daughter and I touched up our outside “animals.” In a display on our front lawn we have a realistic-looking fox, a pair of Sandhill cranes, a family of skunks, an owl, a sleeping raccoon, a turtle, a few bunnies, a frog, a couple of squirrels and a red cardinal, and I must say, they look almost brand new now, with our joint-effort paint job.
Along with tidying up the garden and putting outside things away, we needed to winterize the barn. Soon the cows will be hunkering down inside for the night. That requires a list of chores to be checked off in preparation for the inside-the-barn lodging.
The majority of the work of getting the barn ready for the animals to come inside at night is left to my husband. He checks every drinking cup, cleaning them out or repairing them, making sure nothing is leaking, all pipes are secure and everything is in working order. He also checks all the cow trainers, again making sure they are secure and working correctly. The cow trainers and drinking cups have to be maintained the entire winter season.
Late spring when we let the cows out all night, they drink and eat and do their business outside. When the temperatures dip and they come inside, they eat and drink and do their business in the barn. Whereas outside accommodations don’t need a daily barn cleaning, inside accommodations do, so that means every single day we run the barn cleaner, versus running the barn cleaner every third day or so.
During the season when the animals are only in the barn for milking, we don’t bed them. They are in and out quickly. When the cows come in for milking only, we let them all out after milking, scrape everything up, lime the aisle, secure the gate and, turning off the barn light, head into the house for breakfast. With only the calves contentedly munching hay or relaxing until we begin again late afternoon, the barn remains quiet and peaceful.
Now when the cows sleep inside the barn, we get done milking, feed them inside and, turning off the lights, go in the house to grab our own breakfast before again pulling on barn duds and trekking back out to the barn to let cows out for recess. Then we shove in their feed, clean all stalls, scrape the barn aisle, clean barn (which means run the gutter paddles full of manure up and into the waiting spreader), distribute baled straw in the newly cleaned gutter, bed the stalls with fresh chopped straw and then let everyone back inside the barn. After that, there is more scraping, then lime the floor and, finally turning off the lights, it’s time to head back into the house to refuel with lunch.
Another job that gets tackled this time of year is making wood. We actually sneak it in whenever possible, but with intensity just now. My husband skids fallen trees down from our hill and pulls them onto a field we had corn in this year. Earlier, he had chisel-plowed the middle of this particular field only, leaving the perimeter unplowed to allow access to our stock of wood. There he saws it into manageable hunks. Bringing our wood splitter out to the field, we split it, toss it into our wood wagon and haul it home to stack by our wood stove. I say to him, “That looks like enough, doesn’t it?”
Always I hear, “It’s never enough!”
There are many tasks that we need to accomplish in order to winterize the farm and we’ve had pleasant fall weather to complete the numerous jobs that must be done. Soon we’ll be pushing snow around. Ugh. Did I have to bring that up?
(“For as long as Earth lasts, planting and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never stop.” Genesis 8:22, The Message Bible)
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