January snow

 It’s been a week of cold punctuated with snow. We got 5” on Tuesday. It was pretty coming down, but Terry had to run the snowblower twice because he had an early doctor appointment. The first time was so he could get out of the driveway, and the second time was after the snow stopped.

Tuesday brought a beautiful snow

We have one more houseguest while Jane is in Florida. She’s had a box turtle, Dutchy, for a long, long time. (technically, all completely terrestrial “turtles” are tortoises. True turtles inhabit the oceans. Fresh water “turtles” are terrapins, winning the award for the prettiest name.) Dutchy goes dormant in the winter, sort of. She hasn’t eaten since she got here, but she has had some water. The day she put her head down and looked dead, however, I was a bit alarmed. But after a day, she opened her eyes and looked around again.

Dutchy having a winter's nap

The big storm was scheduled to arrive on Saturday evening. The forecast was dire—a mix of rain, sleet, and heavy, wet, heart-attack-inducing snow. I prepared by doing all the things I had to do outside, with included cleaning Skippy’s litter box. We use pressed wood pellets and a double litter box system. When the pellets get wet, they disintegrate into fine sawdust. The top box has an open grid at the bottom so the wet sawdust, in theory, drops through. In practice, it needs quite a bit of encouragement. I take the litter box to the compost bin and shake it over that. That’s the outside part of the chore.

Skippy and a clean litter box

I also gave the chicken coop a good cleaning. The wood chips stay clean a lot longer in the summer when the girls run around outside all day. In the winter—hoo-boy!—the wood chips are barely distinguishable in the solid mass of chicken poop after a few weeks. TMI, I know. It looked and smelled much better when I was done.

Clean wood chips in the coop

The girls are laying very well. We’ve been getting 4 to 7 eggs a day. The pullet eggs are getting a little bigger all the time.

Seven eggs on one morning

When I was done in the coop, I took the old water (I put fresh water in the waterer daily) to the high tunnel. Amazingly, the lettuce, mâche, and spinach look pretty good still. The beds get dry, though, so I water sporadically. In another month, who knows? Maybe the plants will pick right up where they leave off. Still not sure about the sad, sad, little onions.

Lettuce on theleft, mache on the right with dying radishes in between.

Spinach on the left, more lettuce on the right

With the outdoor work done, I turned to the kitchen. I suffer from SABD—seasonal affective baking disorder. I started with bran muffins (sort of healthy) and orange chocolate chip scones (chocolate has antioxidants).

Bran muffins in the back, orange chocolate chip scones in front

Now that the sourdough started is ready, I made the sourdough pizza dough. It needed to rest frequently before I could get it stretched to 12”, but it made a lovely chewy crust.

Pizza with sourdough crust (tomatoes have health-boosting lycopenes)

I also started a batch of sourdough bread, which was really the whole point of putzing with getting the starter going. The recipe, recommended to me by my brother, requires an overnight rise. On Sunday, I got out my new ceramic bread pan, formed the loaf, and left it to rise. It was the best loaf of sourdough bread I’ve ever made, maybe the best I’ve ever eaten.  Just as Doug said, the crust was shatteringly crisp.

Sourdough bread (the staff of life, after all)

And I still have six sourdough recipes to try, and those are just the ones I’ve printed. King Arthur has many more.

The storm came on schedule, dumping another 5” of snow along with a wicked east wind. The deck, on the lee side, got buried.

Drift on the deck

There was a big drift between the house and the chicken coop, coming all the way up to the top of the propane tank. While Terry was slaving in the driveway again, I helped with a little tiny bit of snow removal by tunneling through the drift and clearing a little bit of the run so the girls could stretch their legs.

A path to the coop through a drift

And now it's February, the short month when winter gets very, very long. Only baked goods will carry us through.