Among winter chores, the most important involves keeping warm.
We sleep
under the world's fluffiest, warmest down comforter, which is
actually too hot most of the year, but a warm bed, in
a cool room is very cozy. Waking up in a cold house (mid-40s to mid
50s), however, is not so fun. The first thing we do is start the
coffee that I have set up on the stove the night before, and then
open the wood stove hoping that some red embers remain. If they do,
we can start a fire without a match. To do so, I open the flu, and
scrape the embers together. Then I form a sort of chimney shape of dry, friable birch bark and
thin slips of kindling to funnel the
embers' heat up along these surfaces, which catch and burn. If the embers
have gone cold, we generally shovel them into a metal bucket we store
in the snow outside and start afresh. (When the ashes are thoroughly chilled, we dump some down the
outhouse hole and save the rest for summer gardening). This slow and steady approach is difficult to do
first thing in a cold and dark morning! Many a time my chilly
fingers have overloaded the firebox too early and ended up with a
smoky fire. Then I either have to wait until that clears or smoke up the
cabin while rectifying the situation sooner.
After a
hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs, or pancakes and sausage or bowls
of oatmeal, my husband and I have different sets
of outdoor chores for which we bundle up in bunny boots, padded Carharrt's overalls, and parkas.
Routine chores include emptying the night's chamber pot in the outhouse, burning trash in the burn barrel (currently located in a snow hole about 3 feet below the level of snow we walk on), hauling birch logs from our enormous wood corral (we estimate 24,000 lbs of wood, about 8 cords), and collecting additional buckets of snow to melt on the wood stove for washing.
The first thing one of us does is to visit the
rabbits with extra water and vegetable ends accumulated the prior
day, and perhaps a cardboard toilet paper roll as a chew toy. They particularly love carrots and bean sprouts. The rabbits are
currently housed in the chicken run. Since that ground is frozen
solid, they can't dig their way out. The snow surrounds the chicken wire to the
height of the roof. This forms a sort of igloo around the rabbits
which they like – it is cold, to which they are well suited - but
neither wet nor windy. To keep the water from freezing, we have a low wattage water heater for them. They neatly keep their food,
sleeping, and pooping areas segregated, so it is easy to feed and
clean up after them. Over the course of 3 weeks, these two
adolescent Flemish giants have eaten about 10 lbs of pellet food and
additional vegetable snacks and alfalfa hay and have excreted about
15 lbs of manure, which we haul to the compost pile. By spring,
before the ground thaws and before we bring in a small flock of
laying hens, we'll move the rabbits to segregated hutches: one for
the male alone and one for the female with what we hope will be a
litter of future dinners for us. (Update: in subsequent years, we switched to medium sized satins and installed them in hutches, see article on raising rabbits.)
