Snow Comment

Monday morning found me at Wisbech hospital for an Xray and a bloodtest. Needles and I do not exactly get on well, so the nurse was trying to distract me with idle conversation. I commented that we'd escaped lightly on the weather so far this winter.

I made the best of an unscheduled day off work and busied myself all day in the polytunnel. As usual, I fed the chickens late afternoon and as darkness loomed I locked them away. It had been a lovely, crisp winter's day. We've had a lot of those this year.

It wasn't much later that the security lights went on by the stables, triggered by... snow. Within half an hour the ground was covered. By mid evening, the scene outside looked like this...

Taken through the window from the warmth of the kitchen.

I still get very excited when it snows. I could watch it flutter earthwards for hours. And so, on and off, I did. And it just kept on coming, far outperforming the BBC's prediction of possibly 1-3 cm on the high ground (which most definitely does not describe our position here on The Fens).

Tuesday morning saw me up bright and early. There was lots to be done before I headed off for work and I was keen to take some photographs too.

A layer of snow makes everything even flatter!

 

Hopefully the bees are clustered
safely and warmly inside the hives

First job, in the semi-dark, was sweeping the snow off the polytunnel, then on to giving the sheep extra food.

Next the chicken houses were opened to let the chickens out into their snowy pen. They weren't too keen on coming out.


The guinea fowl, as usual, had toughed it out all night. They really are incredibly resilient birds.















The geese just waddled out of their stable in the usual orderly fashion, like soldiers, and stoically continued with life as normal.

The ducks, on the other hand, could not have been more excited. They dived into the snow as they would a pool of water, dipping their heads into it and quacking delightedly. They are never easy to photograph, as they never stop moving and always seem to be walking away. But their black plumage against the gleaming white snow gave me even more problems. Anyway, I managed a couple of half decent images.





I would dearly have loved to have spent the day with my camera. There are only so many different views to be had here on the smallholding, but some of the dykes and drains would have provided some excellent compositions cutting through the flat frozen fenland landscape.

As it was though, work beckoned. The best I could do was a quickly snapped piccie with the phone through the front windscreen.