This winter has been a pretty brutal one for our area. It’s been the coldest and snowiest winter since we’ve started the farm with the longest periods of sub-freezing temperatures. We are very glad to see temps finally rising above freezing again and the slow thawing of ice and snow beginning to take place.

So what have we been up to this winter and how have we been coping with the winter weather here at Hundred Fruit Farm? Mostly it’s been a lot of time indoors staying warm and cozy. Also, Sunghee and I were in South Korea for nearly the entire month of January. We didn’t exactly escape the cold weather though because Korea has virtually the same climate as our area so it was still quite cold there too – although not nearly as snowy. We had a great time seeing Sunghee’s friends and family, eating lots of delicious Korean food, exploring some new areas of the country, and meeting up with some Korean permaculture activists and farmers.

We came back home to the farm a couple weeks ago just after the big snowstorm. I was supposed to come back earlier, but the storm actually delayed my trip home by a couple days. With all the brutal cold we’ve had since we came back, we feel very fortunate to not have a flock of sheep to look after anymore. Although sheep do pretty well in cold weather with their thick wool, the constant emptying of frozen water basins and the pile-up of ice that results from that is always a bit of a pain to deal with, especially when it doesn’t go above freezing for weeks at a time.

Another thing we feel fortunate about is that we managed to get the plastic back on our high tunnel in late autumn. We can grow some winter veggies in there now that we’re back and temps have risen a little. It also means we will be able to use the central space in the high tunnel as an occasional classroom for our permaculture design course which starts this weekend.

Speaking of the course, we are working hard this week to get everything ready for hosting and teaching the course – setting up the classroom space, cleaning, communicating back and forth with students, stocking up on teas and coffee, and most importantly, brushing up on our lesson plans. We are looking forward to meeting this year’s group of students and helping them along on their permaculture journey.

Another big thing we’ve been working on this winter is working with our architect, Sigi Koko, to design our strawbale house addition that we will (hopefully, but perhaps optimistically) be beginning construction on later this summer. Being a permaculture designer, it’s interesting to be on the other side of design for once, acting as a client instead of designer. And it’s a reminder of how important good design is, as there are so many countless decisions in designing a house that we weren’t even aware of.

Of course, we’ve also spent some time this winter rebuilding our HFF website and creating our new site for Heartnut Permaculture (which we are still working on). In truth, our intern Naomi is doing all the heavy lifting here, but there are a lot of design decisions that we all need to make together. With ever revision, it’s been getting better and better and it’s great to see the (mostly) finished results!

There’s still over a month to go until winter is officially over (though it feels even further away than that right now), but our winter to-do list is far from finished. We still have loads of pruning to do (and scionwood to collect), design projects to complete for clients, seeds to order, seedlings to start, dead trees to chainsaw along the property margins, fence maintenance, and a whole bunch of other tasks I don’t even want to think about right now.

On that note, it’s probably time to stop writing this post and get back to work!

-Adam