by Chappell on our previous farm

in the middle of making seed lists, and reading about bee keeping while anticipating spring's arrival, a giant winter storm looms on the horizon. so many times forecasts of snowmaggedon produce little results. a part of me is betting the snow won't come... as is often the case with the projected forecast of apocolyptic storms. the fact that the european meteorological projections and the north american forecasts are coming up with the same blizzard-like conditions for our region with the same stupefying amounts of snowfall, makes me wary of discounting it all too blithely.

there was a time when not much thought was given to whether snow would arrive or not. but this year we have a green house to defend! we've calculated what 3" of snow on the roof will weigh: 1.5 tons. you can do the rest of the math for a foot and a half to two feet of snow! 
while we know that nature will do what ever she pleases, we have drawn up battle plans and comitted ourselves to spending tomorrow --from snow-start til dark-- trying to keep that estimated 9 to 12 tons of snow accumulation off the green house roof! 

a sense of adventure, is what this life is all about anyway... so another part of me is actually looking forward to it, as if it were some kind of friendly competition. whether there is victory or defeat in our valiant battle, i'll definitely try to post outcome pictures as a follow up. 

HOW to SAVE a GREENHOUSE in a BLIZZARD:

1) the three d's: dedication, determination, and drive! 

more seriously though, while gianni built the rocket mass heater in an effort to be able to heat the greenhouse, our initial runs had lead us to believe that enough heat would not dissipate in a manner conducive to melting the snow mass consistently. so against the great odds of losing our greenhouse to the elements, our steps were as follows:

1) suit up accordingly and manually remove the snow.
2) removal of snow was divvied into three horizontal sections along the established grid of the greenhouse structure, starting with the lowest third first and moving up to the highest third
3) i stood outside the greenhouse with a push broom raking snow over the side to the ground, while gianni climbed chairs & ladders to tap the roof from inside with his hands to slide the snow down to the lowest section.

we worked a total of 15 hours out of 30 before we could finally rest assured we had won in our epic battle with snowzilla!
for those of you interested in the scheduling employed to defeat the implosion from snow build up, our schedule looked like this:

DAY 1
11 am  - 3:00 pm
4:30 pm - 8:00 pm
midnight - 2:30

DAY 2
9:00 - 12 noon
3 pm - 5 pm