Winter. Hedging and walling.
Sky and slate, the coldest state and the quietest. It is also the state most people never see, because the site is busiest in August and emptiest in January, which is precisely the wrong way round from the farm.
Winter, in four numbers.
What changes on the site in winter.
Tokens and treatment
- Field pigment
- Sky #7FB6D9 becomes --season
- Secondary
- Slate #5A656B becomes --season-2
- Illustration set
- Bare fields, laid hedge, dry-stone walling, the night plates
- Sky treatment
- Grey, low, close — the heaviest veil of the four
- Ambient line
- "Hedging and walling"
- Beast
- The hedgerow mark, laid and staked
Where it is stamped
- Root element
- data-season="winter"Server-side, so it never flashes
- Body class
- season-winterFor anything that needs a class rather than an attribute
- CSS
- [data-season="winter"] redefines --season and --season-2And nothing else
- Poster palette
- UntouchedThe interface does not move with the season
What is actually happening on the farm.
Hedge laying
By hand, in the Midland style, which is slow and looks like nothing for two years and then looks like everything.
Dry-stone walling
Gerald’s work, and the reason a great many of these walls are still standing.
Machinery maintenance
In the shed, where it should have been done in October.
Winter crops sit there
Doing very little, which is exactly what they should be doing.
The accounts
Which is when everybody finds out what the year actually did.
The state, side by side with the other three.
| Season | Field pigment | Secondary | Ambient line |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spring | Moss #5C6B2F | Blossom #E9899E | Drilling spring barley |
| Summer | Corn #E9B93D | Moss-Lift #7A8C41 | Watching the wheat |
| Autumn | Sunset #F0794A | Furrow #6B4A2E | Combining, weather permitting |
| Winter — this one | Sky #7FB6D9 | Slate #5A656B | Hedging and walling |
The illustration set.
Every scene plate on this site is printed six times — reseeded land, re-inked sky, the subject nudged — and the winter set is the one that comes forward for these three months.
Which of the six a given page gets is decided by the page path rather than at random, so a card thumbnail and the hero it links to always show the same plate, but twelve pages sitting in one grid show twelve different pictures.
Plotting flips to "Next season" and the following year’s plots open.
- Printed states
- Six per subject
- Chosen by
- Page path, deterministically
Stamped server-side
So the palette never flashes on load.
No TTL
The season is the clock. It cannot go stale.
Two tokens move
--season and --season-2. Nothing else.
Nothing depends on it
No price, no availability, no legal text.
What the farm is doing in winter.
The farming year has the long version, with the dates and the reasons.
