Last Saturday was not the best day for it, but Ron had already made arrangements for Peter and Christine to drop off the first load of mushroom bolts. As I said before, the man would not let a little thing like sub freezing temps get in his way. If is was over 80 outside, that would be different.
As the plan was to meet them at THF at 9 am, so of course, we left the house two hours earlier.  Dress code was warm clothes and layers with tall boots. Just so you know, I consider Smartwool socks a necessity of life. Their long johns are pretty good too. Ron bought those for me several years ago. To use when we were out shoveling snow. Never imagined I would be needing them on our own farm. Before the logs arrived, we have a few things to get ready. The 4 wheeler and wagon tires needed air added. We had to move some of the pallets down to the tent area and Ron wanted to get the burn barrel going.  Everything got done quickly and we waiting for 9 am to get here. Thank goodness, they arrived early.
With the ground frozen solid, Christine was able to drive their pickup in with trailer attached. Ron and I disconnected it, then Peter helped us unload the back of the truck and they headed off.

The small trailer was hooked up to the 4 wheeler and we loaded it full of logs and Ron drove it down to our soon to be work area.  There we sorted and stacked them onto our pallets in groups of 25.  Easier to keep track of that way, with 400 logs to process.

Ron had us pile the sugar maple logs separately.  He is planning to try growing lion’s mane mushrooms this year.    Apparently you grow them on logs just the like shiitakes.  But that is all on him.  As Jo likes to tell me, I am not mushroom people.  Log hauler, that is me.

Once we finished unloading the logs, we headed off to Peter and Christine’s place.  They have a few more logs waiting for us, and we wanted to get them out to THF.  As it happens, Peter was having his own adventure.  He had to rebuild the carburetor on his lawn tractor before he could use it to move the logs.   We loaded them onto the trailer and headed back to THF.  By now the wind had really picked up and we were feeling the cold even more.  While we had been working,  we were warm enough.  Now it was time to go home.

We left behind Ron’s chickens to enjoy the cold.  Brother in law Don was the one who created the coop for them. He really has a great imagination.

These guys should do well on THF. I do have to wonder how we will handle real ones running around the property in a few years. But that again will be on Ron’s shoulders. I will just use their lovely fresh eggs to bake cookies.