Real January Weather

 In the past week, we went from above normal temperatures to real January weather for Michigan.  Which means snow, blowing snow, single digit high temperatures and below zero wind chills.  The kind of weather where I leave the cellar light (incandescent bulb) on round the clock to help keep it warm enough that the temperature down there stays above freezing.  I actually considered swapping out the bulb for the chicken brooder heat lamp bulb (250 watt), but that wasn't needed.  The regular old 100 watt incandescent did the trick.

Meanwhile, in the chicken coop, I kept the doors shut for a couple of days; both because the chickens weren't about to come out in blowing drifting snow and so that it stayed a little warmer in there and their waterer didn't freeze quite as quickly.  Once the weather cleared a bit and we had a non-windy sunny day I shoveled the drifted snow away from the front of the coop and opened their door.  I even spread some apple peels (from canning more applesauce with the apples in the cellar) on top of the hardpacked snow in the hope of enticing the chickens outside.  They weren't so fond of the idea.

Several chickens peeked outside, but only one ventured out, 

judging from the tracks I saw later that day.

Speaking of tracks, while there was a noted absence of deer tracks in the yard and the woods, indicating they were hunkered down on someone else's property (typically the one that used to be a Christmas tree farm and still has lots of large pines to shelter among and under), there were rabbit and bird tracks everywhere.  Including many with wingtip impressions in the snow where the bird had taken flight.

The cold weather, when it wasn't blowing snow, was perfect for pruning the orchard.  DH and I spent about an hour and a half one afternoon giving a hard pruning to the pear trees, including cutting off all the vertical branches at the top of the tree to keep it from getting too tall and spindly (something we didn't get to last winter) and encourage it to grow more outward.  They look rather sheared now, but will rebound and look very nice this summer.  Another afternoon, while DH was away at work, I pruned the three apple trees from the ground as far as I could reach with the (extendable handled) loppers.  We will still need to get out our mechanical lift system (aka tractor) to finish off the tops of the apple trees.

The picture below doesn't do it justice, but one very cold morning we had a beautiful sunrise.

For the most part, horses were turned out all day everyday.  I double blanketed the Poetess (being a thinner coated Thoroughbred and all) and kept checking on the horses to see if they looked cold but despite the --to us humans--bitter cold windchills, she and the LBM seemed content to hang out in their pasture the normal length of time.  They especially liked the larger lunches I brought to them to help keep their internal furnaces stoked.

I also did something I typically don't do, and fed the birds!  Years ago I used to put out feeders, but as the flora around this little place here has grown, developed, and spread, there's a lot more habitat for them, including year round natural food sources.  With the super cold weather though, I put out a couple of suet feeders so they'd have a quick and easy place to eat making it possible to hide back in the shelter of the bushes more and spend less time searching for food.  It took less than a half an hour for the birds to find the two suet feeders, including this red bellied woodpecker on the feeder I hung from the plant hanging bracket on the front porch.  (Picture not great; it was taken through kitchen window--and window screen).

I do have to confess that part of my decision to help the birds with 'fast food' during this cold spell was brought on by the discovery that mice had found and gotten into a suet cake that DD2 had left here when she moved out.  And that not only was there one partial container of DD2's suet cakes still in my garage, but there was also an entire unopened box of them!  She has nowhere at her apartment to set up suet feeders, so we decided that I would use them up here during the nastier parts of winter.

Indoors, my amaryllis plant had four big blooms open at once.  That gave the house a little warmer touch during the really cold days.

Outside, though, there was no mistaking that we were deep in the throes of a Michigan January.  The only thing there even remotely summer-like was the wind blown ripples in the snow, which remind me of sand at the beach of one of our Great Lakes.