REGULAR WINTER JOBS AT THE RANCH

Besides feeding, there are a few regular jobs we have to keep up with to live on the ranch. Here is a list of those for this winter...

- Every day we have to bring in a cart or two (in really cold weather) of wood. Every few hours we have to remember to check the fire and put enough wood on to keep it going. At night we pile on a number of pieces and try to remember to throw more on if we get up to go to the bathroom in the night. If we let the fire go out, we have to start it from scratch.

- We need about 10 cords of wood to make it through the winter. Every year we have to bring that in. If we work together and hard, we can get about 1-2 cords in an afternoon by going around to dead and fallen trees with our chainsaw, limbing them, making a pile of the limbs and loading the wood into the truck in firewood-sized segments.

- We keep 2-3 cords of wood on our porch, stacked against the house. The rest of our wood we keep down by the big barn, in a wood-shed that holds about 15 cords. As we get low around the house, we have to take the truck and make 2-3 trips down there for wood, then stack that wood around the house so it is easy to get to every day. We go through all the wood on the porch about once per month during the winter and have to refill about that often.

- During the winter, when there is snow on the ground, or during the spring when there is water everywhere, we spend a number of days burning slash piles. These are the piles of limbs and brush left over after we have cut up a tree for firewood (or anything else). We leave these in the middle of fields, or by the side of roads, and when the world around them is wet, we pour old motor oil over them and stuff dry paper in them, then light them on fire. It takes most of a day to burn a pile and we may have a number going at once. You can't leave them unattended, so we have to choose a day when we are working outside anyway and can watch them all day. We have had piles that burned larger than our truck and as tall as our house.

- I should be keeping the stalls in the big barn scooped out every day during the winter, because if you leave them too long then the poop freezes and wont come out till spring. However, my energy this winter doesn't allow it, so the stalls get pretty yucky. The horses come in and out of those stalls to eat, so it is not as though they are stuck in the unclean stalls all day, but still I don't like it. When it is cold, the floors are a couple of inches thick with ground up poop that is frozen, and then each time we get a warm spell, it melts. It can only be cleaned up during the warm smells, as it is very hard to remove when frozen.

- I should also be scooping out the area around the outside of the stalls and even shoveling the snow every week, because the ground out there builds up to a point each winter that I can't close the stall doors anymore. But this too I often don't get to when I am on my own, and it all freezes into the mud out there and becomes unmovable as the weather gets colder.

- I should also clean out the inside of the big barn once per week, sweeping out all the fallen hay and picking up any stray bailing twine. This keeps the barn clean, prevents mold from growing near the feed and keeps the barn cats from getting use to having loose hay all over the floor (which they think they should be able to pee in). But again, I am not keeping up with that very well this winter.

- I should also clean out the goat stall at least once per month, scrapping the floor of the old hay and putting down new stuff. They make their own bedding out of trod-on hay and straw, but I should freshen it more often than I have been doing this winter.

- We have to keep the oil, oil filters and such changed on the generator (about once per month) and make sure that the batteries are topped off (with distilled water) about once per month.

- I try to keep a path shoveled to each barn and outbuilding I use all winter (I try to use the snow blower for this, as that much shoveling is usually more than I can do. If it is working this is a good solution that takes about 2 hours each time it snows). I have found that pushing my way through a couple feet of snow every time I feed takes much, much more energy than walking a clear path.

- Every time it snows, then warms up a bit, the barn roof drops a large amount of snow right in front of the Big Barn door. I either have to keep that shoveled (a few hours hard work each time it snows) or I stop being able to use that door for the winter and have to use the side door for everything.

- We have to keep cat food supplied to all the barns and the cabin, as well as keep the cat litters in the barns and the cabin cleaned out. About once per week I go to each building and clean out cat litter and re-fill cat food. About once per month I load up a sled and drag 4-5 bags of cat litter and food to each barn to re-supply.

- We have to buy bird feed about once per month and I have to load up the sled and take 6-9 50lb bags of feed to the big greenhouse.

- Inside the house, we have to keep the pets fed and the rabbits we have moved in fed. We also have to clean out cat litters and rabbit pans at least once per week.

- If we go away overnight (or, during the really cold spells, if we go away more than a couple hours) we have to have a neighbor come by and keep the fire full of wood. That is our only heat and if it goes out, our pipes will freeze.