Despite all the reports calling for ice, icy rain, sleet, and freezing rain to begin about midnight, the freezing drizzle waited for daybreak. After glazing the branches and wires, and shining up the steps and sidewalks, the ice changed into snow. The falling snow was gorgeous... big, fat flakes falling in such quantity you couldn't see farther than the end of the driveway (about 100' in my case). Looking rather like a scene from a movie, it continued for hours; near noon I realized we had about 4", which had accumulated in less than four hours. By late afternoon, the falling snow changed back to ice and then gradually stopped. By that time, we had about 6" of very wet snow, the kind that is so heavy even the strongest young men only pick up a few inches at a time when heaving the snow shovel. The nice thing about snow on the weekend is that it's the weekend. The snowplow came by just before dark, pushing 2 foot tall ridges to block the driveways and leaving a wide trail of sand behind him. This means I go to work on Monday... not like the last storm, falling during the workweek which seemed to prevent our street from seeing a plow until long after the event. The last storm was mostly ice, which packed quickly into concrete-strength ridges resistant to snowblades and apparently impermeable to both chemicals and sand. Four days after the event, I was driving with caution along icy road-lanes narrowed by peninsular mounds of snowy iceblocks pushing into the right lane. This morning, the pavement was clear, occasionally wet but nowhere icy. A complete contrast.

You could get a load of wood chips delivered from a tree trimming services and mix the manure with the wood chips. If you left these in a pile in the corner of your garden, you could then use the enriched wood chips to heavily mulch the the middles of your rows when you plant. Once your crops are growing, you could pull some of the mulch from the row middles up closer to your plants to prevent weeds, conserve moisture, and give your plants a side dress of fertilizer. The two posts above are correct about being careful using fresh manure to avoid contamination of food crops. It is less of a problem if you know where the manure comes from. I don't mean the obvious source of the manure, but under what conditions the animals were raised and what they were fed. Manure from large scale factory farms (like the egg farms recently in the news), are much more likely to contain harmful pathogens because of the bizarre feeds given to them. While home poultry keepers feed their animals primarily grains and vegetable matter, factory farm chicken and egg producers routinely feed the chicken the remains of diseased cattle that are deemed unfit for human consumption. The manure from these chicken is then fed to the cattle, whose remains are then fed to the chickens again. This pathogen "merry-go-round" produces the contaminated meat and poultry sold to consumers. The meat and eggs produced from these systems are bad enough, but I can't imagine the pathogens in the feces of these animals. You friend is more likely feeding grain, hay, and grass to his donkeys, while his birds eat corn, oats, soy meal, bugs, and maybe a lizard if they can catch it. Unlike commercial producers, he probably is not feeding his peafowl manure to his donkey, donkey manure to his chickens, and sick chickens to his emu. Leaving the manure on your garden for 5 months would be safe. Composting the manure for 3 months will give plenty of time for the beneficial mesophiles and thermophiles in the compost to dispose of any pathogens.

I grew up in northern New Hampshire - the White Mountain region - before moving to the NH Seacoast area in my teens. Back then snowblowers were not common and most families had a snow scooper, in addition to an arsenal of regular snow shovels. The scoop was constructed of wood. It was sort of like an enormous wooden dustpan with 2 waist-high handles coming up on either side connected with a wooden bar that you pushed to "scoop" the snow. The bottom of the scoop usually had flat metal runners that helped it skim over the snow as you pushed a full scoop out of the driveway to dump elsewhere. So, back in the day, I scooped and shoveled. These days I shovel where we can't "snowblow." Except when using an actual scooper (which I haven't seen in years), I've never heard anyone here in NH (or in Maine, where I lived for 20 yrs.) refer to snow shoveling as snow scooping. I, too, enjoy hearing about these regional terms.

So. What you are saying is in addition to the wind blowing existing snow all over the place (which I am assuming accounts for the drifted in gates) there WAS something falling from the sky as well? (Why didn't you tell the puppy get off the shovel we'll play in a minute? What kind of puppy?) LOL That's what happened here last night. I talked to my brother and he scoffed when I said it was snowing. Their skies (90 miles north in Wyoming) were clear and it was ten below. He said are you sure it is snowing and I, like a dummy and I know better, started doubting myself so stuck my head out the back door and ducked back in quick but not quick enough for the snow to not blow on my glasses and said to him, on the phone I can't tell because the wind is blowing too hard. Custer shoveled a good 8 inches off the deck. A tractor is needed to plow out the drive way so we're still wallowing to the barn. Four wheel drive helps a lot. Then he gets to the ranch and the road is blown in at the gate there too. He had to get the tractor out to plow an approach. He had the trailer on so didn't dare bust a trail with the truck. Did it ever get warm down there? We haven't gone over fifteen degrees all day even though the sun shown most of the time. This IS the final storm for a few days, isn't it? I'm gettin a little sick of winter...... Note: forget the heating pad and make the puppy cuddle up to you! LOL Lori