The Basic Rule

Only six months to go!

The basic rule of surviving winter in style ’round these parts is real simple (actually, there are a ton of rules, but it’s Friday and I don’t want to burden you before the weekend): Half your wood and half your hay by Groundhog Day.

This year, we’re golden on the hay front, but unless someone cuts us a break and moves Groundhog Day up a few weeks, we’re pretty much hosed on firewood. (That’s a joke, right? Because even if Groundhog Day got moved up, it wouldn’t actually change the…. oh, never mind. You got it). As of 4:45 this morning, when I brought in a couple armloads, we’re at 50%. Maybe even 49.5. It’s embarrassing, really: Here I am, portraying myself as some sort of rusticated sage, and we’re gonna be short firewood?? Friggin’ A. I grew up in northern Vermont! I was raised by a pack of surly wolves in the dark recesses of a cave with absolutely no backup heat. I mean, sure, the past few winters have been feeble little half-baked things, which may or may not have lulled me into a stupor of complacency, but still…

Truth is, it’s not as bad as it sounds. One of the handful of things we did right when we built this place is situate it to maximize solar gain. And just about now is when the sun starts coming ‘round a bit more often. Like yesterday, which was actually a might nippy, but other than a morning fire in the big stove to take the night chill off, we pretty much coasted on the cook stove and the sweet, sweet sunshine. So we actually never burn half our firewood from Groundhog Day onward, and I suspect that this year, we’ll end up having almost exactly enough, rather than the extra 3/4 cord we usually carry into the following winter. Still and all, I’ve sort of gotten used to having that 3/4 cord. It’s like money in the bank. No, it’s better than money in the bank, because you can burn it. Well, I suppose you could burn your money, too, but it’d make a pretty small fire. Ours would, anyway.

I got distracted, because I actually meant to write about hay. I honestly don’t know what my life would be like without hay. In my forthcoming book (the one from Roost, about our experiences unschooling and our life with the land, not the one from Chelsea Green about how we actually make this life work [see, they're different, which means you're going to have buy ‘em both!]), there are not one, but two chapters that feature hay and/or the act of haying. At one point, my dear editor asked if hay really featured so prominently in our lives as to deserve attention in two of 10 or maybe 11 (12?) chapters. When I mentioned this to Penny, she chuckled. “It should be eight of the chapters,” is what she said, or something like that.

It’s true, you know. Hay is the shit around here, which funny enough is literally true because of course it’s what our animals use to make the manure that grows so much of the yummy stuff we eat. Hay is huge. It is sunlight, it is sweat, it is devotion, it is responsibility, it is friendship, it is exhaustion, it is craft. It is breaking open a bale in the middle of January and sticking your nose into it and inhaling because you’re aching for just a little piece of summer to get you over the hump. And there it is. In your hands. The act of haying influences our summers in vast disproportion to the number of hours we actually spend haying. That’s because we put up dry hay, and you can only put up dry hay when you have three and preferably four or five straight days of sun. Which means you spend the whole month of June on call to the weather Gods, waiting for the moment to roll out onto that great, green ocean of grass. Then comes second cut six weeks later, and it starts all over again.

(By-the-by, if you want to read more about our haying adventures, here you go. I might’ve linked to it before, but then again, I might not have. My apologies if it’s the former)

I’d actually meant to do a pretty straightforward post on hay, all the pragmatic things you need to know that took us a bunch of bumbling years to figure out because no one sat us down and told us. But as seems to be my wont, I’ve gotten distracted, so such will wait for another day.

In the meantime, half your wood and half your hay by Groundhog Day. Remember that, my friends, and you’ll be just fine.