Deep freeze
We've
been operating under deep freeze conditions all week. Friday
night, the snow started falling, and by the end of the weekend we had
about four inches. Then the temperatures dropped way down, with
days below freezing and nights in the teens and single digits.
For the sake of comparison, December's average high is 48 and our
average low is 26 --- waking up to ice in my water bottle inside the
trailer is highly unusual, but that's what Thursday morning was like.
Even though our water
line is buried to within four feet of the house, we didn't finish it up
because of a
kink in the plan.
Usually, a frozen water line isn't a big deal --- you fill up a few
pots with wash water and a few jugs with drinking water, and the line
thaws out in the afternoon a day or two later. Not this
week. Instead, it stayed so cold that the snow sat on the ground
and the line stayed frozen solid until Mark
busted some ice out of the thousand gallon tank to carry wash water to
the house.
The positive part of
this deep freeze is that it's been a real test of our other winter
projects. Mark's homemade
heated chicken waterer was still operating on a 9 degree Fahrenheit
morning, which is just about as cold as it ever gets around here.
And when the snow finally melted enough that I could pull back the row
covers in the mule garden, I was able to pick fresh, beautiful mustard
greens for our lunch.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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