If the week before last could be described with the word Snow. Last week could be described with two simple word, Snow Maintenance. The snow has truly begun to pile up. We now have huge piles of snow in our parking area. As I mentioned before we live on a fairly steep hill, so navigating an uphill drive way full of snow takes more then 4 wheel drive at times. We even had to break out the chains once this week. That was an adventure for sure. Every spare moment this week was spent moving snow. We moved it off the driveway. We moved it off the parking area. We shoveled it out of all the paths. And just when we would think we had gotten ahead of it. It would just snow again. It was a vicious circle. With all the struggles, I had to keep telling myself we have needed this snow fall for months. Here in Sheridan County, Wyoming we get about 14-15 inches of precipitation a year and half of it falls in the winter and build up as snow pack on the local Big Horn Mountains. This snow pack then melt in late spring to fill all the lakes and rivers down here in the basin, were it is stored and used for summer irrigation. When the snow pack does not develop, our area suffers from drought and hay prices sky rocket. Everything is connected in so many ways.

Back to the snow maintains! How do we move all this snow with no tractor. That is a interesting story. For years now we have been using a old car hood. That is out of the ordinary, right. While a few years ago we were hit by a horrible hails storm in late September. It wiped out everything, our garden, our pasture, our orchard. It put huge dents in our metal roof and two of our vehicles. The one thing good that it gave us was this aluminum car hood off of my Ford Explorer. Luckily, most of the dents on my car could be fixed except for on the hood. It had to be replaced. My husband could not see letting it go to the trash heap. He decided to keep it. He thought we would find a use for it some where. About a month later when he was picking it up from the repair shop, he realized it was just like the old scoop shovel head his grandfather had used in the 40’s. His grandfather had used a horse drawn scoop shovel that looked something like this.

We have improvised our car hood to work just like the old scoop shovel. It can be used with both human power and horse power. It works perfectly. Who ever said, “you can’t learn something from the past” was wrong. We have reached back to the past for many of our tools and homesteading practices.

On the homestead we have continued our work on the electricity in the basement. I think we are very close to finishing. I have been working hard on our budget and 2020 grazing plan. Everything seems to get planned and hashed out in February. In the garden I got all our seeds planned and ordered. Your can find the details here.

In the kitchen I am working on developing a lard based pie crust I like. I have used a butter pie crust for years but I need to use up our beautiful lard from our pig we harvested last year. Tell next time.

Remember don’t let the world hold you back. Pray, Just Plant!