The Snow Report

Do not adjust your screen.

Those pictures aren't blank, though they do have a lot of snow in them. If you look closely, you can see bits of buildings and other small signs of life peeking up out of the snow banks. Take, for example, the view out our back door toward the workshop:

I took this in the morning. It snowed all night, so there's a good 6 to 10 inches of fresh powder. It has been snowing steadily all day, so it's up to about 18 inches, I think. (On top of the previous 40+ inches, that is.) It's hard to tell, since it's still blowing and drifting quite a bit.

This shows the expanse of the garden from the kitchen door. You can see that there's probably a good 2  1/2 feet of snow on the roof of the chicken coop. Those little humps in front of the workshop are our greenhouse tunnels, from which we have harvested nothing for the last two weeks. It's nearly impossible to get to them, much less dig down to the ground to lift up the plastic.

Our kale tunnel and the tall carrot cold frame in close up. (I hit the zoom — no way was I going to be pelted by snow with a wind chill of 5 degrees this morning for a photo op.) Yesterday Kirk brushed these off and reopened the path to get to them, but they were almost covered again by morning. The kale is probably slowly dying in the dark, and the carrots will be frozen in place for quite some time.

Without the zoom, they disappear from view:

This is a cat's eye view from the kitchen door. That wall of snow is the snow pack over the garden, with a path cleared parallel to the house to take out compost and get to the driveway. It looks like it's about three feet high right now, but this area is well scoured by winds. In other places we have 6-foot drifts.

Take the front yard, for example, where every fruit tree in the orchard is covered past its main trunk:

They all look like little bushes now, and you can see the drifted hills and snow-covered street. Our driveway is in there somewhere.

These photos don't really do it justice, but I have another snow day tomorrow, so I'll try to take some pictures with humans for scale. 

If it ever stops snowing, that is.