Another week has passed, and with it, the weather has changed. We got our first snow! And the ground has frozen.
No one is happy.
I do not usually keep a heat lamp on in any of the barns, but I have them on hand for emergencies. Well, I felt sorry for the baby goats, and turned it on. This is how they now live. Haha!!!
(Note, for any readers who do not own goats, they like to exaggerate!)
A little over 2 inches of snow fell.
Our property is steep, so snow changes things. So far I’m living a little bit of rebellion by continuing to pick out the narrow, safe paths down the steep, instead of getting my ice cleets out!
We have an outdoor spigot, that is insulated and wrapped with heat tape, but when the temperature is hovering just under freezing, it doesn’t always kick on because of where the sensor is located. Morning and evening we take water to our animals, so morning and evening we try using the spigot. If it is frozen, we resort to filling the buckets in the bathtub, and life becomes even a little more difficult.
Three times when this happened, we inadvertantly left the water on. When the temperature then rose above freezing, the water ran, unchecked until we saw/heard it. That is how this ice mess happened. Yep, you guessed it… now my rebel state is just slightly more dangerous with all of that slippery ice to navigate twice a day in addition to the rest of the snow!
Since I’ve been very motivated to keep the ducks laying their eggs, now that we had eggs start appearing again, I tried to be faithful in letting them out for fresh air and exercise every day. They, however, do not much like the snow, and were congregating in the goat barn and wrecking the place. I have had to listen to their cues and leave them in their duck house (to save the barn!), and I just hope they keep laying!
So, to recap, the goats are not happy about the snow. The ducks are not happy. And chores on the farm are suddenly much harder than they were before.
Another major change is that we can no longer drive up to our house. That’s right, we have to park AT THE BOTTOM of our hill, and transfer us (and everything with us) to the UTV for the final leg of our journey. It is fun, but COLD, and we have to plan an extra 5 minutes for every trip out.
One final problem that I’m still puzzling over is that with the snow, my potatoes have become much more difficult to get to! It is yet to be seen if I will still get the rest of them, or even just more of them harvested. If not, I know SOME will survive for a spring harvest. I know this because I always miss a few, and find some good ones when planting the next spring. I just don’t know if ALL of the potatoes make it, or if some freeze and rot, and some survive.
We have snow on the ground December – March, most years, but occasionally it comes early. It hasn’t melted yet, and a little more keeps coming, so I’m afraid this very white view will be all I see when I look up the hill until spring. We shall see…
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We had 2 tables reserved at an annual local craft show. My husband used to go to these regularly with his woodwork items, but my daughter and I are trying to break into the world of handmade craft shows with our crochet items, and this was our first attempt.
Wouldn’t you know that it would be snowing (again!) for packup?
We made it through though, and had a good show. Someone bought the wooden train, which was a big ticket item, and now Dan has to make another one! haha! And Emily had enough sales to pay for the other table and encourage her that this may be a viable small business for her.
She creates her own designs for her stuffies, so each sale also serves as a compliment, that she has made something someone considers worth spending money on!
I had disciplined myself to finish my grandson’s afghan before starting any projects for the craft show, so I was crocheting furiously the whole day, only to finally complete my first baby blanket for the show on the way home from the show. Oh well, you win some, and you loose some!
Now that I’ve updated you on the snow, and the craft show, I’m just left with the rest of the actual “homestead” type things that happened this week. It wasn’t a big homestead week, actually! But one day when I checked on the ducks it was a 4-egg day. That was exciting.
Another exciting development was that my thermometer and hydrometer came, and now I can monitor the root cellar. It is quite a distance from our house, and I wasn’t sure it would reach, but it does – just barely! I have to keep it all the way down at the end of our house, and it doesn’t always pick up, but most of the time it does!
More good news: It hasn’t dropped below freezing in there, even though it’s not buried yet!
A bonus is that it came with 3 outdoor sensors, and so now I have it set up to read the deck temperature, and the doe barn temperature as well. 🙂 (I had always imagined I was warmer inside the barn, but I’ve discovered it’s really the same temperature as outside, just without the wind! haha!)
The final bits that I got done this week, for the homestead, is I ran a few fecals for the goats, for a health-check. One goat is producing SIGNIFICANTLY less milk than usual, and I wanted to make sure there wasn’t some unseen, underlying health problem. Nope, she’s good, just producing half of what she was at this many days’ lactation last year.
And I got all of my (already harvested) potatoes washed for Thanksgiving! Woo hoo! (And they look so pretty!)
See you next week! Don’t forget to stop and take time to think of some of the ways God has blessed you and your family this week!
