It's a sunny, bright day at the farmette. Everything is coated in a couple of inches of snow, and it looks quite festive for less than a week before the big day.
Yesterday, while the white stuff was coming down, I took a turn through the property, snapping pictures as I went. So here's what it all looked like through my iPhone lens.
This is my wee blue spruce. We bought it at the local conservation area's spring sale about seven years ago. A slow grower. It started at about two feet tall, and now it's my height - five foot five. It'll be here long after Rob and I have shuffled off the mortal coil, which is fine. The next farmette inhabitants will enjoy it, I'm sure.
Here's our ''Group of Seven" white pine. It's not supposed to be able to grow this far south, but it seems to have thrived lo these many - probably a hundred+ - years.
The nuthatches love to walk upside down on the trunk of this one, and it provides good shelter for all the cardinals, mourning doves, chickadees and juncos that also visit the bird feeder, which is just placed strategically - for kitty television - in front of the west-facing windows.
The cedar hedge that lines the western most edge of the property is dense, and makes for a great hunting ground for the feral cats that hang around the farmette. Lots of voles and other rodents rummage about under the canopy. Smells terrific, too.
My 'winter interest' hydrangea are looking pretty splashy with the coating of snow that looks like frosting.
I did manage to salvage a few before the winter started. I just brought them in, and let them dry out. Now, I have a bit of decoration for my office. Pretty good, eh?
The big row of sentinel spruce in the south provides a kind of wind break and delineates the 'nice' part of the property and the scrubby back pasture. In the past week, there have been horrific winds - up to 70 and 80 kilometres an hour - and these guys just sway and swirl - never cracking or breaking. Yet.
There have been a few victims of storms past. This is one of Hagar's limbs. She's an ancient maple that I named after the Margaret Lawrence character in The Stone Angel. She's now basically a tall trunk with tonnes of bolt holes for birds to nest in.
We have quite a bit of detritus from all our maples as a result of the howling winds of the past few weeks. I gathered a whole bunch of branches and it's all piled up on the western most edge of the property. Have to try and clean it up in the spring.
Anyhow. I hope you liked my little saunter around the property. And I hope everyone has a safe, happy, COVID-free Christmas next weekend. Will catch up then. Cheers.