I was out of town during the Solstice last week, and after getting home late last night I felt that my house was missing something related to the season. I hadn’t felt like doing much holiday decorating up until now, but today it was grey and rainy. All I wanted was some light and a reminder that despite it being the official beginning of winter, every living thing around will begin to respond to the now-lengthening days with new growth.

I put on my boots and walked the woods behind my house until I found a little cedar tree that would serve to celebrate both the Solstice and Christmas. I passed by many lusher, more evenly formed saplings, as they were well-positioned to grow into lovely trees. Instead of one of these more perfect specimens I selected a tree growing at the wood line with most of its branches on one side reaching toward the light—fitting for a Solstice tree.

It was growing in the shadow of a nice tulip poplar, and as tulip polars are the main source of nectar for the declining honeybee population around here, I figured I’d eliminate one of the poplar’s competitors. So with a few strokes of the saw, down came the cedar, and I dragged it home across the field.

Along the way I saw a few exquisite things, the first being this snail. After a week in big cities, including Manhattan, marveling at exclusively man-made beauty with nary a natural thing in sight, spying this perfect snail in the damp field almost made me cry with the relief and comfort of being home.

Then I checked up on the deer skull that’s been lying in this same spot ever since I moved here four years ago. The first year it was blazing white among the leaves, but each year the skull gets grayer and more of its nose is eaten off by rodents, giving it an ever more human profile. It’s a memento mori if I ever saw one.

Back home, my scrawny little cedar’s trunk was too small to fit in my Christmas tree stand. I screwed a few blocks of scrap wood to its trunk to pad it out enough to fit the stand.

Then I carried it inside and straightened it as well as one could a tree with a scoliotic trunk.

I tossed two strands of mini lights around the cedar, filled the holder with water, and threw a couple of old wool rugs around the base. My tree is free, free-range, sparse, crooked and lovely. Instead of balsam, it smells like cat pee. But it’s a reminder of light and life during these dark days, and this year it is all that I wanted.

Just now, at 9:00 at night, I was in my office downstairs on the computer when I heard a pack of coyotes set up a wild commotion right in my front yard. It was so loud that I heard it over my Skype conversation. I jumped up, flipped on all the outside lights, muscled my eager dog away from the front door, and ran into the pasture screaming, “Get the **** out of here! Go away!…” as loud as I could. I made it to the line separating the unmowed pasture from the lawn before the light dropped off and I stopped to listen. I could hear dozens of small feet running through the frosty tall grass. I turned and headed toward the lights of home, this little interaction having set all the neighborhood dogs to barking, and the entire hunt club’s hounds to baying. We all screamed together.

About an hour later my own dog was pacing at the front door, barking. Again I told him to stay inside and stepped out on the porch. Now the pack was back in my woods, where I could hear them singing and pacing. I yelled some more, gave up, and went inside.

In the almost four years that I have lived here, the coyotes have been a remote presence. I used to hear them crying, usually late at night and so far away as to be almost indescernible. But in the last couple of months they’ve moved closer. It started with them waking me up by crying in the field between my nearest neighbor’s house and mine. Then this week they woke me at 12:20 a.m. setting up a racket in the front yard. They were so close that it sounded like they were in my bedroom. I got up and turned on the floodlights to try to scare them away, but really all that happened was that I had a hard time sleeping that night from the adrenaline rush. In my intellectual mind I know that coyotes outside in the middle of the night pose no threat to me or my animals. The dog’s asleep in the laundry room and the chickens are safe in their coop. But there’s something so primally hair-raising about a coyote chorus that I challenge you to peacefully sleep through the sound.

Which brings us to tonight, and a coyote pack that obviously feels comfortable enough to try to claim, at a relatively early hour, my very lawn. I wouldn’t be worried about this but for the fact that when I got my dog, Tucker, from his breeder in Ohio, she told me that in her area coyote packs use their females in heat to lure unneutered male dogs from their yards and then the entire pack kills the dog.

As the caretaker of a dog that is not only unneutered, but that also believes it’s his duty to protect our farm and who runs without hesitation to make his rounds in the dark woods, I am concerned about having Tucker out loose at night when there is a large pack of wild canines very vocally vying for his territory. I always bring Tucker inside at sundown, and he’s let out again for only a moment right before we both go to bed. He always does a perimeter check during this trip, and I listen for him to run through the woods and fields. The entire time he’s outside I am anxious, listening for any sound of a confrontation.

Living in the country is a constant negotiation with all the creatures that called this place home before I, and since moving here I’ve had to assert myself against innumerable insects, snakes, mice, rats, moles, voles, opossums, raccoons, foxes and airborne predators such as hawks and merlins. But the coyotes are a new threat, and the one that most makes me feel as if I’m living in a Jack London novel.

Short of firing a shotgun in their general direction, I am all out of ideas about how to get this pack to choose a territory other than the one my dog and I have already claimed. Does anyone have any other ideas?

The sky started to clear just before noon today, so I ran out and got some photos. I love seeing my forest completely crystalline, and an iced-over Buck Mountain in the front yard is pretty gorgeous. Then the sun came out, and all the ice came crashing down with a giant melty sluicing sound.

Tonight a great fog descended after dark, and driving home was even more of an act of faith than usual. It’s a good thing that I have the feeling of driving my road burned so deeply in my kinetic memory that I don’t need to see much to navigate it. As long as the deer, foxes, dogs, horses, cows, possums, raccoons, and errant absentminded drivers stay out of my path, I’m okay!

Another storm is supposedly on the way. Maybe tomorrow we’ll have proper snow pictures!

Well, that was the best kind of winter storm. Hyped just enough to get us all excited, but delivering only enough precipitation to make things look interesting without damaging trees or taking down the power (at least not here—others in Central Virginia weren’t so lucky). Perfect. Here are some scenes from this morning. Too bad the sun’s not out—that would have made for some beautiful photos. Instead, it’s so dark out it looks like 4:30 p.m. After three days of grey, I am definitely ready to see the sun again.

But it looks like more snow is on the way tonight and tomorrow…and this storm hasn’t been hyped at all which usually means it will amount to something!

It’s 2:00 p.m. and the precipitation is really starting to come down now, changing from sleet to snow to freezing rain and back again.

I just spent some time outside to check on the chickens and refill the bird feeders, which are the most popular spot in the neighborhood right now. The birds know to gorge themselves when bad weather is on its way.

I suspect that if this pace keeps up we’re going to have a real mess in Central Virginia tonight. Most weather forecasters are calling for between a quarter and a half an inch of ice tonight, but some are predicting a severe ice storm with up to an inch of ice and several days without power. Bad news for the trees and power lines.

I just made a few more preparations for what is starting to seem like an inevitable power outage. I realized that if the power goes out in the night I would most likely damage myself trying to get on and off an icy porch in the pitch black with armfuls of firewood. So I brought enough wood for the evening and tomorrow morning onto the back porch and stacked it right by the door, along with kindling. Now if I have to get the wood stove started in the dark it’s less likely that I will break my neck in the process.

By the time I was done both the dog and I were covered with a nice coating of sleet.

Tucker was well on his way toward becoming a popsicle and seemed pretty ready to be let back in the warm house.

While I was out taking some photos the neighbor kid ran out to the road and gingerly stepped on it. Then he slid in his boots on the ice before turning around and running home. He seemed pretty ecstatic at the thought of what will most likely be a snow day tomorrow.

Tonight we’re under the first winter storm warning of the season. A real mess of snow, sleet and freezing rain is predicted for tonight into Sunday evening. With the possibility of ice comes the probability of power outages, so I took some time today to prepare.

Power outages in the winter are actually better than outages in the summer. It’s much easier to heat a space than it is to cool it. I have a wood stove, which keeps my home as warm as I want it without any electricity, and I can cook on top of it. Additionally, I can light my gas stove with a match and easily boil water for tea, to heat up my food, or for washing up. The biggest challenge is actually obtaining water, as without power my well pump doesn’t work. So any time a storm is due I go into water collection mode, filling five gallon buckets and storing them in the garage to water the chickens. I fill my big brew kettle inside for my drinking and cooking water. I also fill a bath tub in order to have water for flushing toilets and bathing. All this would last me about a week, in winter, maybe more. Beyond this, if I ran through my cut wood and drawn water and the roads were blocked, I know that I can walk into my woods and cut and carry enough dead, downed wood to run the stove, and I can haul enough water from the creek to boil and drink.

I have a refrigerator and freezer full of food, and when that’s gone there are enough stapes—flour, yeast, canned beans, tinned fish, sugar, etc. in my pantry that I’d be fed for quite a while. A friend who was here for Thanksgiving took a look at all the packaged broth I had stored and joked that I was preparing for the apocolypse. Maybe. And outside in the winter garden are rows of frost-sweetened arugula, kale, mustard, chard and broccoli raab, all of which are happy to hibernate under snow, so I won’t want for fresh greens. And if push really came to shove, I’ve got ten fat chickens roosting in the coop, and the tools and knowledge and mental willingness to turn them into meat. I’d start with the roosters, then move on to the nonproductive hens, and so on.

Food storage during a power outage in winter isn’t usually a problem, as if it’s cold enough to make an ice storm it’s most likely cold enough to use the back porch as a refrigerator. So anything perishable gets moved from the fridge to the porch. And I’d eat my way through what’s left in the freezer as it defrosted.

So heat, water and food are taken care of. The car’s full of gas, for charging a cell phone that doesn’t get much of a signal here anyway. That leaves light, which some could argue is really a luxury and not a necessity. But light is easily accomplished with an arsenal of rechargeable lanterns, flashlights and carefully-contained candles. And even in the absence of light, remember I built this house from a hole in the ground on up, repositioning light switches as they were installed to most easily meet my grasp. Sometimes I feel like I wear this building like a second skin, and to navigate it in complete darkness is as intuitive as reaching out to touch my toes.

As I put the house in order tonight, thinking ahead in anticipation of potentially losing power and being house-bound by ice, I kept coming back to this idea of survival. Of course this concept is relative, and compared to many in the world even suffering through an extended power outage in my home would be their very definition of luxury. But I live here, not there, and this is the survival that is relevant to me. I am also a relatively young, single woman, making these winter preparations on my own instead of counting on a husband or boyfriend to take care of me, my animals, and my home. Other than a few bloggers, I don’t know any one else in this position.

Fortunately survival is really more a state of mind than a set of strapping male muscles. Thankfully I was raised by parents who between the two of them, had they been born 150 years earlier, no doubt would have been leading the Conestoga wagons across the frontier, such was their self-reliant determination, intelligence, and ability. I spent years during college and after camping across the U.S., Canada and Mexico, and that helped hone my ability to stay warm, fed and hydrated in all sorts of backcountry situations. And finishing school was living in an off-the-grid, no road access log cabin in Alaska, where I learned how to run a wood stove and take an entire bath in a saucepan of melted snow.

All of these experiences culminate in nights like tonight, when I go to sleep knowing that no matter what the weather brings tomorrow, I will survive. I will be fine. I will be better than fine. As the ice sluices down, whether the power is on or not, my animals will be fed and watered, I’ll be curled by the wood stove with a hot mug of tea in my hands, and I will thrive. There is hardly anything I’ve done personally or professionally of which I am proud. But to be able to say that I have the knowledge, skills, and mindset to survive when the comforts of modern life disappear under a quarter inch coating of ice is the greatest accomplishment of my life.

Another olive egger pullet has come online. Yesterday I got two olive pullet eggs, and I figured out that their mother Dahlia is responsible for the big brown egg. She’s setting a good example!

These little olive eggs are so amazing. They’re like the eggs of some exotic species. And today I got one more! The pullets are twenty-one weeks old this week. Eventually the pullets should produce full-size eggs—these are just their starter eggs. Thus I am especially appreciating them because I know they are a fleeting phenomenon.

Something I never knew before I had chickens is that a hen will consistently lay eggs of basically the same shape and color, with the same amount of speckling. If you pay attention, this makes it easy to know which bird is laying which eggs, and how often, and gives you a good idea of a particular hen’s productivity. For example, I can tell from looking at the photo above that different pullets are laying the olive eggs, even if I didn’t know they were both laid on the same day, as one egg is browner with speckles, and the other is a clear, lighter olive. And the first egg I got this week was laid by the pullet that produces speckled olive eggs.

I had a completely unexpected surprise today as I was feeding the chickens. I glanced into their nest box and saw this:

Ever since the girls quit laying for the winter—many weeks ago—I’d stopped checking their nest box for eggs. But it turns out that even without any supplemental light, and headed into the darkest days of winter, at least two chickens are making an effort. One, laying the large brown egg, is either Dahlia or her Black Copper Marans sister. And the other laying chicken is a homegrown olive egger pullet, which is a total surprise as the chicks were born so late this summer that I hadn’t expected any of the four young pullets to lay before next spring.

This little olive pullet egg is the first egg from a chicken born and raised right here on Bonafide Farm. She’s a second-generation Bonafide bird, and a science experiment begun two years ago when I raised her Wheaten Ameraucana (blue egg-laying) and Black Copper Marans (dark brown egg-laying) parents with the hope that their genes would combine to produce a chicken that lays an olive egg.

And today, with this first beautiful olive pullet egg, I can claim success. Well, as much as one can having not actually laid the egg myself!

For more on how this pullet came to be, head on back to July 2013…

As we head into the last month of 2013, I figured I better record some of the larger projects I undertook this year but didn’t manage to write about. I know they’re no longer newsy, but I find that I frequently refer to my own blog to jog my memory about when I did certain projects, so it’s important to get them up here even if they’re month’s late.

First up, the ironic hydrant installation. Backstory: for the first year I gardened here, I carried 5 gallon buckets of water, one in each hand, to water the vegetable garden. Then I wised up and ran a few hundred feet of garden hose from the spigot on the well house. It lay across the field and driveway all summer, in all its crappy artificial green glory, and made not only an eyesore but a pretty annoying mowing obstacle.

Of course, each of these summers saw record high temperatures, summer droughts, and even some pretty serious storms that killed the power for sometimes up to a full week. I did my best to keep the garden watered, but finally told myself my plants had better grow some deep roots and fend for themselves. I threw on a thick layer of straw mulch and walked away.

Come spring 2013, I decided it was time to get some proper water out to the vegetable garden. So I called a nice guy and we set a date for him to come install a water line and frost-free hydrant. And then it started raining. And didn’t stop all spring. Which was great for my young garden, but we kept having to push back our installation date because it was raining too much to open the deep trench that was required to house the water line. And so, with these flooded conditions it was June 25 until it was dry enough to install the hydrant.

But the crew arrived that morning and within a few hours had opened a deep trench all the way from the wellhouse, where all my plumbing is located, to the garden.

They installed a new water line coming through the foundation of the wellhouse basement and ran pipe in the trench…

...and out to a new hydrant right next to the vegetable garden. I chose to not put the hydrant within the garden so I could use it to fill the chicken waterers without going in the garden. The photos above give you a good sense of the native red Virginia clay that I’m working with as I build my gardens, and is a good illustration of why I get so excited when I can eventually turn this into black, crumbly, worm-filled soil!

And now I have an awesome water source right where I need it. That I used to water the garden exactly twice this year, as the rain continued and kept things so happy that supplemental water was totally unnecessary. You can see in that photo how far along the garden was on June 25, without any extra water at all.

I know there are bound to be more summer droughts, but I sure was laughing that the year I chose to install the water line is the year I didn’t end up needing it! Oh well. Every little bit of infrastructure I add to this property improves it and takes me a step further along the path of carving a working homestead out of a field.

A friend and Tuck and I took a long hike up to Blue Hole and further up the mountain to Shenandoah National Park.

Tuck in one of the swimming holes along the North Fork of the Morman’s River. It hasn’t rained in a long time, and the water was low and crystal clear, the rivers easy to cross. This is the first and last time during the hike that Tuck got totally submerged. He figured out pretty fast that mountain streams in late November aren’t the same temperature as they are in summer!

The last of the fall color. Just about all the leaves are down now, and it’s looking very wintery.

Blue Hole. This is where my friends and I did most of our swimming growing up. With the water snakes, timber rattlers, copperheads and ticks. Rural childhood. You can jump off those big rocks below and not hit the bottom of the hole.

Yesterday I gave away one of the roosters that hatched this past summer. He’s turned into a handsome guy, but there’s no way I need three roosters in a small coop. This guy went home with a jolly lady and her young son—found via CraigsList—to rule over his own flock of hens. So he’s on to a better life, and I am happy about it. I knew he would be well-treated when his new owner asked what he prefers for treats! HA!