Melting snow

Still it were a thick layer of snow but the days were getting warmer. The strong sun melted the snow during the days and in night it froze again and created a nice crust on top of the snow. This winter had not given us many days of strong walk able crust but still good for skiing. 

I dragged up all of the debarked logs from the old road besides the wet meadows up to the house. I did not really have a plan for them, but I guessed that most would come to use since I had planned many building projects for this year.

I started to run out of hay so I had to give the rabbits branches from spruces and aspen. They seemed to enjoy the branches and I realized that I probably had given them to much hay, next year I was going to mix the hay with many branches from the beginning of the winter.

The women from the Black forest wanted to go to the south, she was tired of winter and wanted to pick fresh greens. Now I was alone at the farm.

I was down the lake ice fishing a lot for me and for my chickens. I had not seen anyone else down the lake the whole winter except for Easter then it was quit many people down the lake out fishing with snow scooters. I was apparently the only one using skis.

I started to build a wood barn of some of the logs that I had dragged up. The construction of the woodshed was very simple. I put the logs overlapping each other with some cutting in the corners so that they would sink down a bit, but still leave a lot of space in between so that wind could blow through and dry the wood. I found old stone plates at he farm that I used as roof for the barn. I imagined that this wood barn could store about eight cubic meters of wood Its not enough for at winter so I would need to build another one later on.

I cut and chopped all of the wood that I had prepared in December. I could just get all the wood in the new woodshed.

I went with bicycle into town to buy some provisions and met there a man from Helsinki (Finland), who was on his way by bicycle to Trondheim (Norway).I invited him to the farm and he accepted gladly since the weather was bad for bicycling it was raining a mixture of snow and rain. He stayed for a couple of days and helped me with bringing up wood that I had chopped down at the wet meadow, we stored it in one of the old woodsheds since the new one was full.

It were still a lot of snow around but you could see spots of the ground here and there. I even found some small nettles that tasted really good. In town it was more green plants especially close to the warm walls of the big houses. Every time I went into town I picked a bag with greens for the rabbits.