Rolling Dog Farm Blog

Our snowpack is finally starting to melt — we call this time of year "The Big Melt."  I took this photo of our drive on Sunday afternoon, and then we woke up Monday morning to three inches of new snow on the ground and a drive that had disappeared.  But the three inches has melted away, the drive is visible again, and that pond is even bigger today. 

The Big Melt happens in fits and starts, because new spring snowstorms keeping adding some new stuff on top … like the three inches yesterday and the three to five inches of snow we're forecast to get tomorrow.  How fast it melts depends not just on daytime temperatures but also on how cold it gets at night.  We're forecast to be at 13 degrees tomorrow night (-10 C) and 7 degrees (-13 C) Thursday night.  When it gets that cold, it obviously takes longer to warm up enough the following day to resume melting.

By the time we get to this point in late March, we are really, really ready for spring.  The songbirds have returned, the geese are flying north overhead, the days are getting warmer, and the evenings are staying lighter longer — but there's still almost two feet of snow out there.  Scooping poop right now is also rather annoying, since we're often sinking down up to our knees — and sometimes to our thighs, if a dog has helpfully pooped on top of a snowdrift — because the snow is all mushy and still deep.

At the same time, the later the snow stays on the ground, the better it is for the pastures.  But while the grass farmer in us appreciates a long, slow melt, the other part of us would really like it to hurry up!