Getting ready for winter
What to do in autumn: the harvest before the frost, a root cellar, hay for the animals, and how the cold treats food.
Autumn is the busy season. The days are still long enough to get things done, and everything you put by now is something you won't have to scramble for once the snow's down. The Lantern tells everyone when the first frost is about a day off, so nobody gets caught out.
The harvest#
Crops stop growing at the first frost. Anything still green in the ground then is frost-bitten: you can still dig it up, but it gives 50% of what it would have and no seed back. Nothing can be planted again until the frost comes out of the ground in spring. Potatoes take 74 hours, Carrots take 60 hours, Wheat take 86 hours, so get the last of them in by early autumn.
Flowers die back to the root when the ground freezes and come up again in the spring, and berry bushes stop putting out berries once the frosts start.
A root cellar#
A root cellar is a yard piece dug into the ground with earth heaped over it. You need Digging 5 to build one. It holds 300 kg, food keeps 10 times as long in it as in your pack, and nothing in it freezes. Open it the same way as a barrel.
How the cold treats food#
Once the snow is lying, anything that goes off keeps 6 times as long left outside in a pile or a cart, the way meat hung in the cold keeps. Root vegetables are the other way round: potatoes and carrots left out in the snow freeze and go soft, a few at a time. Keep them under a roof, in a barrel, or best of all in a root cellar.
Hay#
Once snow covers the grass, farm animals can't graze, and they live on whatever's in the trough. Sheep and cattle eat hay. You get it by cutting long grass with a knife before the snow flattens it: Trim grass on a patch of tall grass gives 9 hay. Your animals won't die if the trough runs dry, but they'll get thin, stop laying, milking and growing wool, and stop having young until they're fed again.
A checklist#
- Get the last crops in before the frost
- Split a good woodpile beside the stove
- Sew or knit something warm
- Cut hay and fill the troughs
- Put roots in a cellar or a barrel
- Make a pair of snowshoes
- Haul your boat out before the lakes freeze