I don't know about anyone else but I am getting a tad bored with the Arctic high pressure that has settled over North West Europe and seems to like it here. While bright blue skies and crisp mornings are a pleasure, particularly if you don't have to scrape a car windscreen, walking timorously because of black ice loses its appeal very quickly. And I defy anyone to find early morning temperatures of -8 degrees C a good thing at all!
We are using up fire wood at a scary pace, although I guess that is what it is there for, but the chances of refilling the wood stack in the next couple of weeks are looking slim. While we will work with chainsaws in the afternoons in the wood if it is frosty, we won't do anything like that where there is snow on the ground - it is just too dangerous. And that is what we have - a rarity in Anjou we are told, but 4 inches of snow fell yesterday afternoon and with a high of -0.9 degrees this afternoon, it didn't do much about melting.
The cats have decided that snow is quite fun if they can come in again as soon as their paws get cold, and pink paws get colder more quickly than black pad paws - not a lot of people know that.... The chickens are beside themselves - they don't know where to put their feet, there are no grubs and other yucky things to find, and if there were, they would need to dig in the snow to find them. The chickens don't do going in the snow. Or strictly, ours don't - Joel's don't have the choice, although they have spend a lot of time standing on the garden chairs today.
However, one can't really grumble - this is what winter is all about and hopefully the prolonged frost will put paid to all the nasty microbes out there like peach leaf curl and tomato blight and codling moth and fleas (not strictly a microbe but something that needs dealing with).
Keep warm!
I never thought about the heavy frost killing off nasty garden bugs. Suddenly the freezing weather doesn't seem quite so bad!
Posted by: Elizabeth | 12 January 2009 at 06:33 PM