The Beginning Hours Of A March Nor'easter

Another (our third in a row) nor'easter had just begun and it was frosting the woods and fields like white cotton candy. I'd recently taken the tractor driving tour around the north field but decided to hop into my car and start down the gravel road to again see what beauty the snow was creating. I began with this field, backed up by a brushy woodland:

A former gateway into a field which hasn't been used in many years:

A patch of Staghorn Sumac, the red clusters of berries seemingly covered with powdered sugar:

My neighbor's maple sap lines. It was certainly sugaring season, but I hadn't seen him out and about. I worried if something had happened to him:

But then I found him and his uncle stopped along the road, transferring the sap into a giant tank to be boiled down. They are friendly and some of my favorite people. I'm always glad to stop and chat:

I continued on my way and began looking for places where beech trees added a bit of color to what otherwise might make the photos look like they were in black and white:

A beech tree and pine tree among the aspens, with an old barbed wire fence paralleling the road:

An old stone wall where I once released a mouse I'd caught in a live trap:

The snow was sticky and causing an intricate, lacy beauty:

I'd been expecting the Red Pines to be exceptionally lovely, but they seemed to be holding less snow than the hardwood branches. They were still beautiful, though:

More piney woods:

Pines and beech. I stopped at my Amish neighbor's field where he appeared to be digging a well. I asked him if he'd come and trim my horses' feet on Saturday, which is the day he has assigned for such jobs. He said he'd be there in the morning. This was the end of my driving tour, so I headed home to get some work done:

Wintry Beauty On Denton Road, Town Of Lawrence

It had snowed all morning but was beginning to slow down and might even turn sunny, so I decided to take a drive down the a gravel road and see the snowy scenery. This old gate led into field, unused for many years, perhaps decades:

Hardwoods and Red Pines mixed along the road, punctuated by the white trunks of Birch trees:

An old barbed wire fence still ran along the road:

Someone had planted Scotch Pines beside a potato field:

I tried to make a mental note of which pictures were of White Pines and which were of Red Pines, but when I got home, I couldn't remember. These, however, were obviously Red Pines:

Everything looked as if it had been dusted in powdered sugar:

Blue pipelines for maple sap ran all through the woodlands, indicating an abundance of Sugar Maples. This farmer produces a lot of maple syrup every year:

Hardwoods mixed with pines:

Only the Beech trees held on to their coppery leaves, adding color to the scenes as I passed:

All the woodland scenes looked inviting and friendly:

I passed by an active logging site, where many pines had been cut for pulp and for telephone poles. They were being loaded as I went by:

Across the road were shorter logs of bigger diameter, so I assumed they were saw logs, on their way to becoming lumber. It is a blessing to live in the midst of such beauty:

What's New Around The Farm

The pace of life has increased as the snow has melted. The chickens, locked up for a week to keep them safe from our marauding fox, are once again free to roam during the day. I round them up about dinnertime and herd them back indoors for the night. As for the fox, I presume that something or someone killed it because it has disappeared:

As the ground thawed and the spring rains began, I used the tractor bucket to reopen the trench in which water drains away from the barn:

The drainage trench runs from the barn to the dirt road:

My thirteen bantam hens were laying so many eggs that I was feeding them to the dogs. Alas, both Seamus and Jack (especially Jack!) were rapidly gaining weight. This pan of 27 eggs was their last breakfast of scrambled eggs. Since then, I've been giving the eggs to the family across the road who plows my snow in the wintertime:

The fantail pigeons have bill billing and cooing in a most charming way, but now that the weather is warm enough to raise babies, they aren't:

The hens check every inch of ground for possible edibles and tractor tire tracks are a good place to look for earthworms:

And bugs might be hiding along the base of the barn:

Every morning I open their door and watch them all scramble down their ramp, excited to begin their adventurous day:

Both the house and barn have filled with flies. The flies (and ladybugs) in the house seem to die as soon as they emerge, but the flies in the barn are alive and active, crawling all over the windowpanes:

The neighbors were actively sugaring this spring. They seem to be all done now, though the lines are still up:

I open the pigeons' window on nice days, but they have not been going outside. This one bird got as far as the windowsill for a look around - and that's about it. I guess they figure they're warm, safe and fed indoors, so why invite trouble?:

A lawn full of chickens. There are rotten apples all over the ground there, but the chickens don't seem to be eating them:

Maple Weekend In St. Lawrence And Franklin Counties

I'd been seeing online references to the two Maple Weekends for some time. But winter stayed so long that I waited for the second. Then I chose two local sugar houses who were participating. The first, the Fine-N-Dandy in Norwood, New York (St. Lawrence County), turned out to be a real, honest to gosh log cabin in the woods:

And inside the sugar house, the owner was preparing things and I was greeted by the St. Lawrence County Maple Queen:

She offered me samples of maple syrup, maple donut holes, maple sugar candy and maple covered walnuts. I chose the walnuts:

It was still cold and apparently the sap wasn't running well yet, so there was no sap boiling. A young lady warmed herself by a heater, though, as I looked around:

This may have been in an old log cabin, but the equipment looked state of the art to me:

I walked out back, where two men were discussing the modern collection system:

There was an outhouse:

And what I think used to be a sawmill but had, over the years, fallen into disuse and become a storage shed:

I bid farewell to the sugar house and hopped back into my car. My next stop was in Brushton, New York (Franklin County), about 40 miles to the east:

When I arrived at the Tower Sugar House, I once again saw no smoke or steam:

I walked around back to see the thick pipes which carried the sap to the sugar house:

And then I entered. Indeed, this was another operation with modern, impressive equipment, even though it wasn't operating yet:

I was impressed and people were friendly, but there wasn't much else to see or do. So I returned to my car and began the journey home:

Golden Roads Of Autumn

I was lamenting the end of colorful leaf season and the dropping of most deciduous leaves until I took a shortcut via Converse Road on my way to Potsdam. Everything was golden and lovely, so I got out my camera and took a few pictures:

I kept my camera out and snapped photos every so often. There may not have been any reds, but the golds, mostly maples, were incredible:

I crested a small rise and the colors got more vivid:

And the maples grew older and more stately:

It was all so lovely that I decided to take a longer driving tour in search of autumn's last gasp of glorious golds:

I found this incredible farm field, split rail fence and golden trees on Days Mill Road, somewhere between Hopkinton and Nicholville:

More outrageous orange, also on Days Mill Road:

I returned to Converse Road in Fort Jackson where I snapped a picture of this farm, surrounded by golden maple trees:

And then I turned down a narrow lane which was a sort of back road into the Fort Jackson Town Park:

And back up onto Converse Road, where I saw farm fences, gates and maple syrup hoses running between trees:

A small herd of Holstein heifers was excitedly eating their morning grain up on that small rise:

And then I began to head home again, taking one last golden photo. But I had enough photos for two blog posts, so you'll see another autumn leaf post tomorrow: