Snow shoes don't skate along the top of soft snow. They spread out one's weight so a large area is pressed down, after which you lift the snowshoe up over the next two feet of snow and press down again. This is tiring – like climbing a stairmaster in a gym. I feel the exercise at the top insides of my thighs. A clear work out! We widened each path four snowshoes wide to provide a firm surface for the snowmachines, but the temperatures remained so high (20s and even 30s) that the upper layers never hardened up for our (admittedly old and heavy) machines. After they got stuck twice, we ignored them and continued to strap on the snowshoes for the rest of the month. (“Why fight a...xxx?” I think about this every season.)
The mostly windless and temperature stable days and nights retained the pretty white layer above black branches and angled tree trunks. I find this so beautiful. But this also meant that the roofs retained their load of snow, too. Fortunately, half of our buildings have 45 degree roofs (1”:1” rise), so they shed snow easily. But the 30-33 degree roofs (1”:3” rise) needed some early attention to slough off the heavy load of precipitation. I found a website that helps one calculate the increasing weights of fresh, settled, wet snow and ice over a given expanse of roof. Yikes! A two foot snow dump can weigh 15,000 lbs on a 20 x 12 roof! I pity the families and work crews attending to the surprisingly shallow roofs I spy throughout this part of Alaska. Sure, flatter is cheaper to build, but... 20 years of maintenance?
On the frozen lake, snow dumps like these produce layers of overflow (slushy ice water) above the lake ice and below the insulating top snow layer. This can be dangerous for planes and snowmachines. We enjoyed about seven trips by skinny, cross country skis on the lake, but the bottoms of our poles were encased in ice, from stabbing through the snow to the hidden layer of frigid water, and one of my ski bottoms loaded up with ice so it no longer slid smoothly.
On warm and sunny days, (in the 30s F), we embarked on projects that required the most power (for any household), which involve moving water and heating electric lines that warm those pipes. We drained, scrubbed and refilled the (wood fired) hot tub, ran a few loads of laundry in our wash house, and filled our interior cistern (55 gallons) and hot water tank on the wood stove (23 gallons) with water from the well. These projects required some walkie talkie conversations while Bryan manned the pump and I filled the various containers. I am pretty much a techno-idiot, so Bryan has to remind me every winter that certain hoses/electric lines/valves/switches need to be turned on or off in a particular order. I have labeled many of them as a reminder.
Food is obviously a high priority any time of year, but especially during Freeze Up (fall) and Breakup (spring) when no plane or snowmachine can safely deliver supplies. So we maintain meticulous records of what we have and what we lack. This month, I was so disappointed to find that 9 quarts of vegetable broth cracked in the food shed during a quick drop to 0 degrees at the beginning of the month. I obviously needed to leave more space. Thank goodness for the extras we have on hand. I hope I have learned my lesson.
In terms of meat, a marten (“nature's cutest assassin”) killed two of our chickens. I still can't find where he got in and out of the coop and run, so I am more vigilant about locking up the remaining hens except for a few hours of run access / added ventilation each day. (Marten are related to mink, weasel, and otter – all of which we see occasionally, too).
Over 7 years of raising them, we have determined that the meat of rabbits over about 9 or 10 months old gets tough. We did a cost/benefit/time analysis of keeping animals fed, hydrated, warm, and healthy during the long winter (8 months) given their meal appeal after that age. Result? Time to go. This decision also relieves us of trail maintenance to their building. Efficiency is a value here, too.
Mid-month, Bryan dispatched and skinned the remaining five rabbits. Then I spent the rest of the day pressure cooking them, shredding the meat, and making broth. The hens get to nibble the remaining meat off the bones, after which, the bones go in the wood fire of the hot tub. The mama rabbit (about a year old) had a layer of fat along her back and her meat was tougher than the younger ones, so I ground it up and mixed it with pork lard, tomato sauce and herbs in a Rabbit Ragout over pasta. The younger meat is more versatile.
Then, Bryan salted and tanned the hides. Our home-tanned hides are not supple enough to turn into blankets, but I have sewn them into soft “rounds” over the armrests of our love seats. The leather is rather easy to puncture with a needle, so I anticipate more adventuresome projects in the future.
Other food endeavors involve some successes and some... not. We love Indian, Mexican, and Vietnamese food, so I have learned to make flat breads, like Indian chapatis and Vietnamese pancakes, which are rather similar, and tortillas made with butter (our favorite) or lard/bacon grease. I now keep a bag of tortilla dough balls in the (frozen) cooler on my porch, pull out a few to thaw overnight, and enjoy fresh tortillas from time to time for breakfast or dinner. I am also trying (again) to make a mead (well a melomel, as it contains fruit as well as honey) and a fruit/ honey based vinegar (with saskatoon berries). Both currently taste mild and rather watery. Perhaps patience is the key.
We certainly have many things to be thankful for, on Thanksgiving Day (and every day), among them, a front row seat to Mother Nature's whims in a lovely setting: the opportunity to experiment, make mistakes and learn from them; and some delectable fresh chocolate snow ice cream.
What do you make with rabbits
ReplyDeleteDear Albert:
Delete1) dinner: just about any recipe for chicken works with rabbit. Because the meat is so lean, the broth is milder and thinner than chicken broth.
2) fertilizer: their poop is one of the few that can be added to gardens fresh, not dried.
3) simple sewing: We aren't great at hide treatment, but I have sewn them as arm rests to my love seats. If we learn to make the hide more supple, I will have more options.
Thanks for asking. - Laura