It's Gettin' Pert' Near Deep Out There!

Living in northwestern Wisconsin, we expect to get snow. We take a kind of stubborn pride in our hardiness, stoically planning in an extra half hour to scrape off the car before we go anywhere. And honestly, the snow does have its advantages - for a few months, you don't have to worry about potholes because they're filled in with snow!

Being a Cheerful Agrarian, I enjoy the idea that the cold and snow will kill off a lot of the insect pests and dieseases that more southern gardeners have to deal with, as well as the break from the work of planting, weeding, and harvesting in the garden. It's always a sweet thought to think of my garden sleeping under its thick, soft blanket of snow.

But even the most cheerful of us can get sick of the stuff. This February has been one for the record books - as I type this, less than a week before March, our snowfall total is up to 46 inches. That's more snow than this area has ever had in February in recorded history. And there's a possibility of a couple more inches tomorrow, just so we can round it out to an even four feet (we like to keep the numbers easy to brag about, doncha know).

And because this is Wisconsin and we don't do things halfway, it's also -15 degrees Fahrenheit.

To add even more drama to the story, the brakes are going out on our plow truck and my husband left on a business trip to San Diego on Saturday (he sent me a text last night complaining that he had to kill a mosquito in his hotel room - which oddly did make me feel a little better). Thankfully, he had the foresight to make sure we got our snowblower back from his brother before we left, so even though there was a big storm in the forecast, we figured we'd be OK.

And a big storm it was. Church was cancelled on Sunday - which I only remember happening once before EVER - so we had nowhere we needed to be for the day. Mostly we just hunkered down and took it easy (I took the chance to watch Justin Rhodes' The Great American Farm Tour documentary, which just came out this week. You can watch it free on Amazon Prime (here's the link) (if you don't have a Prime membership, you can click here to get one). I honestly love the idea of being snowed in all cozy in our cabin, if not for thought of what we would do if there was some kind of emergency. With five active kids in the house, an accident could happen at any time.

So in the afternoon I sent my 18 year old son Sam out to clear the snow. He started with the truck (the brakes worked enough to be OK in our driveway), but after getting stuck twice trying to move snow higher than the plow, he switched to the snowblower. That seemed to be working fine until I went out to feed the chickens and saw him working on something in the garage. It turns out the clutch cable went out on the snowblower - and of course we couldn't run to the store to get a new one since we couldn't get out of our driveway - but he was able to fix it enough to make it work.

Our driveway basically has three sections. On the north is the parking area near the garage, which is roughly a big square between the garage and the house, with a row of pine trees on the east side and a band of mixed woods on the other. This area was pretty protected from the wind, so he only had to plow the 8 inches that fell that day. As you drive out, you come to a stretch of driveway with woods on either side; this is also pretty protected so the snow wasn't too deep. As you drive out of the woods, you come to the final section, which has open pasture on one side and young pines on the other. The wind had filled in everything that had been plowed the day before, and the drifts were waist-deep. Sam had cleared by the garage and through the woods with the truck, but when he got to the open pasture area, the drifts were too high and heavy for even the snowblower to handle. With the light fading, the temperatures falling into single digits, and the wind drifting the snow right back into the path he'd just cleared, we decided to call it a night and try again in the morning when the wind died down.

We weren't the only ones having a hard time keeping ahead of the drifts. According to the Barron County Sherriff's Department's Facebook page, all but one plow was sent home around 6:00pm so the drivers could rest before going out again at 4:00 the next morning. There have been a lot of long hours for those guys this month!

The next morning we had breakfast and did a quick round of school before heading out to tackle the snow with fresh energy. The wind had stopped, and we were finally able to make some headway. Sam snow blowed a path down to the road, but it was slow going and hard on the snowblower, with a hard crust on the top and drifts deeper than the snowblower's auger. He needed looser, fluffier snow if he was going to keep making headway. So two of the girls and I went out to break up the snow - wading through the snow next to his path to break up the crust on top and spread it out onto the path he'd cleared. Let me tell you, if you're looking for a workout, breaking a trail through waist-deep snow can really get your heart pumping!

Sam's plan worked. By 11am, the driveway was cleared and the girls were able to go to their violin lessons. The roads had been cleared as well, and they had no trouble getting into town.

So what have we learned, boys and girls? #1. Farmers (even Cheerful ones!) have a compulsive need to talk about the weather and #2. PLANT WINDBREAKS! We had talked last year about planting a windbreak next to the driveway, but obviously never got around to acutally doing it. This year, I'm going to make it a priority - and of course, you know me, it's going to be a fast-growing edible hedge (I'm thinking elderberry), possibly built on top of a hugel mound, to divert the spring runoff from washing out our driveway. What do you think?


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