snowdrifts

The thaw had begun by this morning, as forecast, and I squelched though the melting snow down to the gate, shovel in hand, to attack the drifts.  They looked long and large in the dismal light of morn, and I could not see anybody else moving anywhere on the farm.

The surface of the snow was already stained brown in places with blown soil, and I thought that is why you don't want to leave your ground bare for any length of time.  Your topsoil will drift away.  The old joke goes that there are farms up towards Thetford that are either in Suffolk or Norfolk, depending on which way the wind is blowing.  As I chopped through the edge of the first drift, where the wind had looped around the end of the boundary hedge, the snow fell away in layers and I could see how it lay in distinct deposits from the different periods of snowfall and the wind-driven drift in between.  The hedge on the upwind side of the lane had been no protection at all against drifting, in fact, it had made things in the lane slightly worse.  The hedge must have slowed the wind just enough for it to have dropped more of its load of snow than it would have otherwise.

After half an hour it became clear that digging out was not an option.  A builder's bag of snow would be lighter than one of gravel, but snow is still heavy, and this snow was tending to come up in such large slabs that each shovelful weighed about as much as one of gravel.  I had cleared half the width of the track to a distance of about four metres, and my right forearm was already starting to ache.  Bitter experience from shovelling gravel has taught me where that ends up.  I went back into the house and informed the Systems Administrator that I did not think we could dig ourselves out, and the SA, who had never seemed inclined to join in with the digging project, said No, he didn't think we could.

The chairman of the music society emailed with an update on tomorrow's concert for young musicians, saying that we now had seven performers and the weather was on our side.  I replied warning her that I really did not think I was going to be able to get out tomorrow, and certainly not in time to go to the supermarket and then make sandwiches before the concert.  After a while she responded that somebody else was going to do the sandwiches and she was sure I would be able to get out by tomorrow afternoon given the rate of the thaw.

I summoned the heart to go and look at the contents of the greenhouse and the conservatory, and found things not as bad as I'd been afraid they might be.  The conservatory has fared better, being double glazed and protected from the worst of the wind by the house and the wood.  In fact, if it weren't for the snow outside I'd scarcely have guessed that anything had happened.  The greenhouse had taken more of a battering.  Some of the Plectranthus were half dead from cold, a Melianthus major had gone yellow from either chill or incorrect watering, and the Arctotis and Gazania were mostly brown and shrunken and looked pretty dire, but enough had survived to make me think it had been worth running the heater.  The big specimens of evergreen Agapanthus would cost over thirty pounds a pop to replace in a garden centre.

By late afternoon the chickens finally consented to come out into their run.  I gave them a handful of sultanas, and reflected that at least I now didn't have to worry that they weren't getting any water.  I walked down to the gate and had a look at the lane, but the drifts did not seem to have shrunk appreciably.  The Systems Administrator had broken up some more of the snow next to where I'd been digging to encourage it to thaw faster, but there were still tens of yards of unbroken drifts between us and the open road of the farm.