ultrarunner

Another beautiful day of snow....love it

#shoveltilyoudrop

Greenhill

-10C here this morning, going up to +6C with rain later today then back to -7C.

I see on the weather that all of NB is lit up red with flash freeze warnings, just a heads up for those of you living there to get the **** out of the province now

Just get in the car, head south and don't look back.

Gozit

Sort of like the UK, am i right? And people over exaggerate alot... How is an Ontario winter better than a BC one? Yes it rains in BC but it doesnt snow like hell!

dbd33

There is as much snow here now as I have ever seen. Yesterday I cleared the driveway and it now has 4' drifts over most of it. There are trees about 30' from the house which we have not been able to see all day due to the blowing snow. Most roads locally are closed. It's really quite wintry.

Gozit

Oink

Its not. The only people who tell you it is, are stuck in Ontario.

The4BellsLondon

The foghorns have been a bit annoying the last few nights.

Hmm forecast says light snow next weekend .. What???

Oink

No chance. Winter's over its spring now. Its getting so much lighter in the evenings.

Gozit

So true!

BristolUK

Yeah I saw that earlier.
Is there a reason why a flash freeze should be more icy than a normal one?

I mean, obviously it might take one by surprise, but we had that same warning a couple of weeks ago and the ice on our drive, the street and across the street was the worst I've known it.

Almost Canadian

That snowblower will come in very handy!

We have just bitten the bullet and ordered our first tractor. Time will tell if that was a good decision.

dbd33

We have had so much use out of that blower. In fifteen minutes the drive and the path to the chicken coop are done. That'd be over an hour by bucket and unimaginably long by shovelling. I suppose we've done that 25 times and this is still January.

What type of tractor did you go for?

Greenhill

I think what makes a "flash freeze" unique is that there's a period of mild rainy weather, where snow and ice melts, causing an additional amount of water that is subsequently refrozen when the temperature plummets.

Not sure what it's like at your place but the weather is just plain miserable here, right now.

Atlantic Xpat

We have no snow here now. In December/early Jan we had over 3ft on the ground but several rain storms and +12C temps have taken care of that. My snow clearing equipment is gathering cobwebs in the garage. Doubt that'll last though...

Almost Canadian

Sounds like it is ideal for the job.

We are lucky in that our quad and blade usually makes light work of sorting out our drive. However, with the amount of snow Alberta has had this year, it was not able to cope with the drifting so, to get around that, we purchased a walk behind 30" snow blower. That worked very well.

However, it was not able to cope well with making pathways between the pastures. Frozen horse turds and iced walkways made by the animals walking around caused big issues for us so SWMBO decided a tractor was needed.

We have Kubota/JD dealerships less than 5 miles away. Our nearest Kioti/LS dealership is 2 and a half hours away and the nearest Mahindra dealership is north of Edmonton (3 and a half hours away). So, in essence, it became a toss up between a Kubota or JD.

We decided upon a Kubota L4600 with front end loader, quick attach bucket, front bale spear, rear bale spear and 7' rear blade.

We intend for it to become our snow removal tool when the quad is unable to cope and, if it is able to do a quick job using the rear blade, it may replace the quad for such tasks. However, it is normal for us to only have to deal with 6" of snow at a time, which the quad deals with much faster than a tractor would. However, I am curious to see how quickly the rear blade on the tractor deals with such a downfall.

A neighbour has agreed to hay our field for us this year. His equipment manufactures round bales that weigh about 800 lbs. However, we wanted the ability to be able to unload larger round bales (we appreciate that, once unload, the rear spear will enable us to move them around) and put them into round bale feeders that we have.

It should be delivered in the next week or two.