When I pried a rock up with a mattock the other day, rushing to finish a small retaining wall before the ground froze, I inadvertently disturbed a hibernating spotted salamander’s winter home.

“Oops, sorry about that,” I exclaimed, replacing the rock and tossing on a few handsful of leaves as extra insulation.

I imagined how I would have felt if some giant creature tore the roof off my house while I was sleeping.

Sometimes I wish I could hibernate, particularly at 2 a.m. when the wood stove has gone out and sleet rattles against the skylight.

All kinds of critters and plants go into cold-weather mode – even ants, I discovered when I split an oak log for firewood and a gazillion of the moribund insects spilled out, dazed and confused.

I feel less compassion for ants than for spotted salamanders, so I basically let them fend for themselves in the near-freezing temperatures. It’s a cruel world. They could have been worse off – I might have been an anteater.

Actually, I typically undergo the opposite of hibernation as the temperatures dip. You could call it hypernation.

Summer may be a wonderful season for kayaking, swimming, hiking, biking and various other fun activities, but it’s a wretched time for cutting wood, pruning blueberry bushes, moving rocks and other chores, what with the heat, humidity and bugs.

That’s why I either save the most laborious tasks for this time of year, or they happen to coincide with naturally occurring phenomena.

A few weeks ago I finished raking the leaves off all the trails surrounding our house and stuffed them into barrels that I dragged over to and dumped around hundreds of evergreen seedlings as mulch. It would be so much easier to simply toss the leaves along the side of the trail, but the mulch aspect is an important component of my microcosmic ecosystem, so into the barrels they go – tripling the time and effort.

I’ve already extensively chronicled my never-ending firewood-gathering operation so won’t repeat myself, but on a related note I just today finished a project that wound up consuming an inordinate amount of toil: replacing the floor on one of my twin woodsheds.

Last winter when I went out for one of the half-dozen or so daily trips to the shed my foot broke through the plywood I foolishly had employed in construction instead of floorboards – a sin compounded by my failure to use pressure-treated joists. Bottom line – this fall I’ve had to rip out all the flooring and start over. But first I had to finish emptying the shed of a cord or so of seasoned wood.

Those logs are now stacked beneath the eaves of our house, and I then went about the loathsome chore of tearing up rotten floorboards with a wrecking bar, sledge hammer and reciprocating saw. If you added up the expense of replacing them and also factored in my labor, I wouldn’t come close to earning minimum wage even when weighed against the cost of running the oil furnace.

Unfortunately, I’m stubbornly devoted to heating with wood.

Not all late-fall projects are unpleasant, though.

A couple weeks ago I planted 200 garlic cloves – double last year’s crop. This has turned out to be one of my most successful gardening ventures.

I started a few years ago with about 25 bulbs, which each contain four cloves for planting. The following spring all 100 cloves sprouted into 100 fresh bulbs, and we ate or gave away all but 50.

Those 50 produced the 200 cloves that just went into the ground, covered with about 150 pounds of composted cow manure and six inches of shredded leaves from my neighbor’s lawn.

At this rate I’ll be able to plant 400 cloves next fall, 800 the year after that, and 1,600 – well, you get the idea. You can’t have too much garlic.

Soon the ground will be as impervious as obsidian, or, I hope, be covered with snow, so there will be plenty of fun things to do – cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, tobogganing – that will distract me from chores.

Then before you know it, the sap will be flowing, it’ll be time to make maple syrup; then the garlic shoots will poke up, which is right around when you plant snow peas and start the whole cycle over again.

Oh, and I also have to fill the newly repaired woodshed with the following season’s supply. It holds about six cords.

The fun never ends.