Winter All Wrapped Up

[twilightpony]

Spike dragged his feet a bit yesterday morning so we weren't in the front row for Mayor Mare's speech, but close enough. She got us all raring to go, then the Team Leaders got to work splitting up their crews according the Winter Wrap Up itinerary that I'd made.

The first priority is clearing the snow off houses, trees and the higher elevations to avoid flooding the animal burrows. That required all of the weather crew, except for two flight crews who were pointed south to fetch the birds, and half the Animal Team.

The other half of the Animal Team got to the task of with stringing up the bells while Rarity started building nests.

The plant crew delivered Rarity's supplies and got down to clearing, plowing and planting the fields in a regimented formation. Snow plows are not as bereft of magic as they may first appear. The motor pushing a snow plow is an earth pony, and earth pony power and skill is magic. That's how they clear the snow so well. Yoke a manticore to the driver's bar and the best it would be able to do is push the snow. A manticore-powered winter wrap up would take weeks.

Once the higher snow had been cleared, the Animal Team reformed, picked up their animal care material and went to wake up the sleeping critters and help Rarity make and install nests. As the critters awoke to baskets of food, the weather team donned skates and went to score the ice by crisscrossing the lakes and ponds.

Fluttershy and her animal waking crew reported success. All the critters were awake, fed and their homes dusted clean. I tried to break up some clouds. It's harder than it looks.

Finally Rainbow Dash's Weather Team formed a controlled tornado and swept the skies clear, and what was left of the snow with it. The afternoon sun beamed down, breaking the ice and the free members of the Weather and Animal Teams joined the Plant Team in finishing up the planting and watering of the fields. The southern flocks arrived this morning to green fields and open water.

Applejack's Plant Team ponies are looking a lot perkier now that they have fresh dirt clinging to their hooves. I feel more awake now than I have in the past month. There must be something in the soil.

The sky is clear, the birds are singing and the air smells like spring. Winter wrapped up on time in Ponyville, check!

Spring is here.

Comments

[flareblitzfury]

A nice Winter Wrap Up! Good to hear!

Interesting to see how most was done!

Hooray for the arrived Spring!

[twilightpony]

Winter holidays are over. It will be good to have fresh greens on the menu again, apart from alfalfa and corn sprouts, that is.

[flareblitzfury]

Yeah! That should be good!

[borglord]

I wish we had that sort of control over the seasons on Earth. Where I live, we'd use it to keep winter longer. We ran through spring in late February, and now it's been summer for a while, which on a small scale is pretty nice, but on a larger scale is a complete disaster. We get all our precipitation in winter, and this was the fourth year in a row that we didn't get very much of that, leaving our water supplies in a truly alarming state. I do my best not to remember the precise levels of our reservoirs and the snowpack in our mountains, because it's just too depressing.

Meanwhile, much of the rest of the country is still deeply frozen, and there are many places where people have had to regularly dig tunnels through the snow to get out of their homes. If all our weather science is wrong, and there's just some secret weather god or something faking it, he or she has a really nasty sense of humor.

[twilightpony]

There is a real advantage for us in running our weather and environment ourselves. And there is the disadvantage of the risk of disastrous consequences when we mismanage things, as it happened with the ponies before the first Hearth's Warming.