Winter is rapidly approaching. Last Thursday the temperature dipped into the teens. Unfortunately we have been procrastinating getting the farm ready for winter. We had both created TO-DO lists of things that must be done to prepare the farm the winter.

The cold weather finally gave Laura and I a wakeup call. We could procrastinate no longer! Therefore we have spent the last two weekends working through our TO-DO lists.

We started by coming up with a solution to prevailing west winds that blow into the boys barn stalls on bitter cold days. These winds can be quite chilling on sub-zero winter days.

We came up with a unique solution: install vinyl doors over the stall door openings. Above is a photo op Pablo Cruz trying out his new door.

Another big job this time of year is raking up the leaves which have been falling like heavy snow the past two weeks. The leaves did not hit high peeks of color this fall. They just seemed to turn yellow then brown and fell off. Normally we can expect at least two weekends of beautiful fall color. I am not sure why they did this, but I know that they were late to turn this year. probably because we had an abnormally warm fall. The temperatures seemed to drop all at once and so did the leaves.

We don’t actually rake the leaves. Instead we mulch them with our tractor and vacuum the chopped leaves with our AgriVac. This sounds easy, but it still takes a lot of time. It is amazing how quickly the AgriVac fills when the leaves are a foot deep! At least Got My Vote was helping out by picking up a few choice leaves outside the fence!