#witchy winter

[ghostsofwintersnight]

✨𝔅𝔩𝔢𝔰𝔰𝔢𝔡 𝔜𝔲𝔩𝔢 ✨

[aranell18]

Finally got my new winter coat ordered. It's coming on Friday, so I'm pretty stoked for it to get here🖤

[sandra1219]

Witchy Winter - Nurse House, Salem, Massachusetts - Danvers Archival Center - Peabody Institute Library

[ghostsofwintersnight]

[ghostsofwintersnight]

[ghostsofwintersnight]

[onewitchwrites]

Getting Ready for Winter

For me, fall is the time to start thinking about prepping for winter. I live on a homestead, so that means a lot of stuff centers around my animals and preserving stuff for winter. Hay needs to be stored for my horse to eat and as ground cover and nesting material in the coop.

I don’t buy much fruit and vegetables during the winter. I don’t like the taste of imported or greenhouse grown. I grow nearly everything I eat and what I don’t grow is bought or bartered for from other locals.

Winter means canned stuff. Jellies are a personal favorite. Especially wild blackberry, muskadine, and scuppernogg (pronounced scuplin in my area of the south). Blackberry jelly is done in spring, but my family picks a few 5 gallon buckets full. That turns into a lot of jelly. We only make about 5 jars each of the other two.

Soups are made and frozen for days when I’m not up to cooking. Potatoe soup is my go-to. I love it.

At this time of year the coop has to be winterized. I usually tack up tarps or plastic in places they need more protection from the wind. Where they roost is partial blocked by a sheet of ply wood as a wind break. I don't have to worry about frostbite in a few of my chickens since they're cold hardy breeds. My cold hardy birds are White Chantecler, Buckeye, Easter Eggers, and Dominequers. My heat hardy birds are Production Reds, Black Australorp, and Partridge Rock. They need some protection from the cold to prevent frostbite on their combs. Bonus points if you notice I only raise dual purpose birds.

Normally I would be collecting pecans in the next month or so, but there won't be any this year. Why? Squirrels. No one in the area hunts them and the predator population is low thanks to idiots. Over the summer the squirrels looked starved. It's a sign that the population is out of control. As soon as the pecans got some size to them the squirrels started destroying them. They chew the tops off the still green pecans and drop them if they don't have enough nut to them. Sometimes they'll go after the dropped ones after they dry, but mostly they just waste them. Pecans are a source of income here and we make pies out of them. This year there won't be any income from the pecans. No pecan pie either.

The squirrels are ignoring the over abundance of acorns on our massive oak tree. It's always a good year for the oak tree. We have five pecan trees. Each tree produces close to 200 pounds of pecans on a good year. That's a year when the squirrels aren't over populated. On a good year we lose 50 to 55 pounds of pecans to the squirrels in total, which is fine. That's not much when you consider that all five trees together produce around 1000 pounds of pecans.

This year we need to knock back the squirrel population to more healthy numbers. I've never had squirrel because there's never been a need to hunt them. I don't like to waste anything either, so I'll probably come out of this winter with some stuff made from squirrel fur. I've been looking into tanning for a few years now and I may have figured out how I want tan them.

There's even more that needs to be done, but I try to focus on just a few things at a time.