An icy Christmas

We had an ice storm a few days before Christmas followed by a frosting of light snow on top.  Here ice encases the branches of a lilac bush next to the house.

The bird feeders were busy with birds but wore a glaze of ice and icicles that grew through the day as the freezing rain fell.

A fringe of icicles formed on the tractor.

Ice coats the east fence of the garden and the lilac bushes in front of it.

The dormant grape vines are encased in a layer of ice and icicles.

Looking down the rows of grapes to the remains of last year's tomato patch.

The west side of the garden fence is encased in ice with the frosty forest behind it.

The rain that preceded the ice did melt much of the heavy snow that had lined the lane, but left the lane a sheet of ice.

The bee hives are protected from wind but are surrounded by the ice covered weeds.

A closer view of one of the hives with a fringe of icicles on the bottom of the hive stand.  The reduced entrance into the hive is covered to prevent mice from making a home in the warm hive for the winter.

The straw bales protecting the hives surrounded by a landscape covered in ice.

Heavy snow

The forecasters had predicted two to four inches of snow on Friday the thirteenth and overnight, but we woke up on Saturday morning to find much more.  I measured 11 inches in the lane in front of the house.  Here you can see snow stacked up 8 inches on top of the birdfeeder roofs.  It was a very pretty heavy wet snow that fell without wind and sticking to every branch and twig.

These are the trees on the North side of our front yard early on Saturday morning with the snow clinging to them.

Looking out our front door at the snow in the front yard, clinging to the garden fence and wires as well as the trees.  The electricity blinked on an off a few times during the morning, but thankfully it never stayed off.

My tractor was buried under the heavy snow too and I had to get all cold and wet wiping all of this snow off to get the tractor out to plow our road.

The snow covered our lane and the trees hanging over it.  You can see the tracks of where I came home on Friday when the snow was just a few inches deep, but the snow here was still 11 inches like elsewhere.

Around the curve and looking on west down the lane.

The woods across the field covered in snow.  When I first looked at the thumbnails from these pictures I wondered if there was something wrong with my camera as it appeared that they all came out in black and white.  Then I realized that black and white and shades of gray were the only colors available in the landscape.

Looking along the west fence of the garden to the forest beyond.  Note the show piled several inches high on top of each fence post.

My grape vines now brown and dormant in the winter, covered with snow.

The remnants of this season's tomato plants in their cages under the heavy snow that seems to fill the cages.

These are the bird feeders again taken from outside and down the hill in the back yard.  They have been very busy with all this snow cover and need to be refilled.

Snow covers the pine tree and play set and the trees hanging over them.

Snow covers the trees hanging over hte back yard gate.

The bees are all snug in their hives, now covered with snow.  I have placed bales of straw along the west and north sides of the hives to block the coldest winds in the winter.  I scooped away enough snow that their entrances were not blocked, though there is also a top entrance once they have eaten through a sugar block I put on each hive.

Here are the bales of straw protecting the bee hives from the back (west).

I thought this was an odd sight -- snow filling up the basketball net over our driveway.  It is hard to imaging snow falling fast and gently enough to be able to build up and fill something as open as a basketball net, but it happened here.

I spent most of Saturday afternoon clearing the lane with my tractor.  I wasn't sure it could handle the heavy deep snow as it does not have four wheel drive, but ti performed well, though it took three passes to get it this clear.  It is a narrow track but it is passable.

Fall has fallen

It has been over a month since I have posted.  I have been gone several weekends, and the early dark once the time changed earlier this month has made it difficult for me to get out and accomplish much outside.  We got a surprise snowfall on the evening of Monday, November 11 and awoke to this light snow on the ground on Tuesday, though it quickly melted off.

Snow on the trees and the side yard on Tuesday morning.

Today was an unusually warm day getting up into the mid-70s early on, though it had cooled off by the evening.  It was very windy with some storms and rain quickly rolling through and some bad tornadoes in the Peoria area. The trees have now lost all of their leaves that will fall.  Some of the oaks will retain most of their brown leaves for the winter.

 More of the bare trees with leaves on the ground.  I did get a bit of the yard mowed late today. I am trying to complete hte last mowing of the year but it has been delayed by several weeks by the dark evenings and absent weekends.

The peppers and tomatoes were zapped long ago by frost and freezing weather.  The temperature has gotten down into the teens a few times at night.  I did pick some of the birdhouse gourds that I had left in the garden and hope that they weren't harmed by the brief freezing weather.

The grapes are bare now.  The vines are pulled down from the wires in places due to animals climbing on them to get at the ripe grapes.  I am going to have to come up with an effective way to keep them.out.  I think it was possums or raccoons that did the damage.

Some apples still cling to the enterprise apple trees.   I picked several of these today.  There are a lot of apples on the ground and several of the apples in the trees showed damage -- from birds, I think.

I need to finish getting my bees completely ready for winter.  With the cold weather they are probably in cluster now.  I need to wrap the hives and add a sugar block of some kind for emergency food, and add some bit of ventilation to the hives, then let them be until Spring.

The fungus among us

I took the opportunity to take a walk in the woods on our property and down along a stream that passes through the east end.

There aren't any flowers to photograph this time of year, but I did find some interesting fungus that had sprung up in the fairly wet weather that we have had in the past few weeks.

This toadstool was popped up our of the leaves on the forest floor.

I saw several of these small white mushrooms with some speckles on top.  These were about an inch-and-a-half high.

These are some of those same mushrooms pushing up through some leaves.

This fungus was growing out of the side of an old sugar maple tree that had fallen across the stream.

Another of the same type of fungus, this one taken without a flash.  Some Virginia creeper grows down behind it.

Another type of fungus growing out of the same log.

Fall is here

It's been quite a while since I have posted.  We've been busy with various things.  Fall has been arriving around us.  I have taken the honey off of the hives and extracted about 115 pounds of honey.  Most of it is in two buckets -- about 10 gallons of it--waiting to be bottled.  The garden has been giving up the last of its harvest.  Near freezing temperatures are predicted for next week which will finish off most of the garden.

The trees are starting to show some color across this filed of soybeans ready to be harvested.  This field has since been harvested and is standing empty as of a few days ago.

Here is the soybean field from the east end next to the garden, looking into the sunset.

The sugar maple tree in the front yard is showing lots of fall color.

The Enterprise apple tree should be just ripening up now and both trees have quite a few apples.

The Golden Delicious apple trees are fully ripe and perhaps over- ripe now  I have picked a sack full to make a pie, but haven't made it yet.

The Red Delicious trees are full of large ripe apples and dropping many on the ground that are becoming covered in wasps and bees after the sweet juice.

Red delicious apples on branches that are hanging down heavy with ripe apples.

The tomatoes are about finished and will be killed by frost next week.  I left a lot of ripe fruit on the plants in the past month because we just weren't able to keep up with it.

Here is a cart load of pumpkins and a couple watermelons that we picked weekend before last.  We also picked a couple of large bags of ornamental gourds.

Here is a cart load of produce that I picked tonight -- pumpkins, eggplants, tomatoes, watermelons, birdhouse gourds, apples and a few ornamental gourds.  This is probably about the last of the produce we will get, other than some more birdhouse gourds and some potatoes.

I gathered this five gallon bucket of walnuts last weekend.  I had picked up some chestnuts and a few hickory nuts the week before, but the squirrels have finished off the rest of those crops.

I took advantage of the cool weather last weekend to put the scoop on the back of my tractor and use it to haul gravel to fill some potholes in gravel lane before winter sets in.