The first snow was the week before Thanksgiving (hasn’t snowed since then), and the first hard frost was Tues. Dec 11.

Current projects:

• Piling up leaves where I want new beds to be
• Covering previous beds in leaves
• Leaves between the beds where the soil eroded and is exposed
• Small-scale hugelkultur beds (logs with leaves and soil on top)
• Landscaping the front yard with leaves between all the decorative shrubs and plants
• Pieces of log as I get them to landscape along the front yard garden beds
• Using leaves and branches for erosion control near my driveway
• Making *delicious* kombucha every two weeks. That’s about eight 16-ounce bottles, so four bottles consumed each week!
• Listening to Paul Wheaton’s very entertaining and educational “Permaculture Podcasts”

December has been cold in Frederick, MD, but not as cold as Boston, MA. Whenever it’s been raining here, the temperates have been pretty warm — not just “warm enough so that it rains”, but between 7 and 12 C.

Other minor things I noticed in the yard:

• Friend’s dog found the vole, but the vole had died some weeks before 🙁
• There are definitely some small rodents/mammals living under the shed. My cat hangs out obsessively by the shed now, that means there’s something there. I’ve also found a clearing made between the ground and the shed, so something can pass through, and mysteriously, a lot of small twig pieces I had strewn for ground cover are gone too. Most likely used to make a comfy bed for whatever’s living there now.
• Found a molted snake skin, I hope this means that snakes are starting to be attracted to the yard. But even more than that I *really* hope my cat doesn’t kill them all off (kill meaning “play with for hours while the creature slowly dies of torturous pain”). That would be a sad situation.
• The ground is clearly sinking in where the tree roots, of the willow tree I chopped down, have decomposed. I need a strategy for building up the ground. I might have to do some soil-building on a larger scale than I had planned earlier.
• Frozen soil is impossible to dig in
• Rain is good and all for soaking leaf piles and helping accelerate decomposition, but the frosts that follow create a lot of ice
• Fall is an AWESOME time to collect leaves!

One more random note, I’ve given up on trying to ferment vegetables. I think I need to take a class on how to do it. My latest batch of fermented napa cabbage and carrot isn’t bubbling, but it smells a little bit sweet, in a nice organic way, though doesn’t look too appealing.

Settling in for winter by mehron is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International