We had an interesting situation this last two weeks. Last Sunday we suddenly got snow while we were in church and everything’s been pretty much frozen or just barely above freezing since. This makes doing winter chores a little (sometimes a lot!) less fun. It’s the same work, but it’s colder. {smile} Your hands are stiff or your gloves are in the way…gate latches are frozen and have to be thawed or busted open…and you’re wearing 27 layers of bulky clothes every time you try to move!

The really difficult part is that the hoses all freeze and watering becomes a much bigger chore than normal.

Normally we have a splitter so the hoses run to each bucket and you just turn them on while you do the feeding and all the buckets are filled by the time you’re done. Then you just shut the water off. The End. {smile}

There’s a couple stages to the frozen water chores. The first is when the hoses freeze overnight, but thaw during the day. The key is that you fill the water troughs to the tippy top every evening. The hoses freeze overnight so you can’t get water in the morning. But you just break the nighttime ice layer in the morning and they have water for most of the day. Then everything thaws out in the afternoon and you can fill again in the evening.

Stage two is when the hoses stay frozen–we got here on Tuesday this week. So it’s time to unhook the splitter and hoses before we freeze out the spigot. We can still get water from the spigot, but we can’t use the hose. This means we have to haul water. By the bucket full. I use a 5-gallon, almost full. The kiddos use a conglomerate of mop buckets, feed buckets, and big coffee cans–whatever they can find and carry without spilling all over themselves.

But at Stage Two we’re still in the fill-once-a-day mode because only the surface to 1/3 of the bucket freezes over at night and then we have some thaw again the next afternoon. So you haul buckets in the evening and just break ice in the morning. This is a good thing because the bucket hauling is ok for 30 minutes in the evening, but no one wants to add that extra time (and wet, cold, splashing water!) to the 6 am chore routine.

Stage 3 is when our 100 gallon troughs (the smaller black ones) freeze solid, or almost solid, every day. This means hauling water buckets morning and evening for the animals to have any. Thankfully we only spend a few days at this stage every winter. A week or two at the most. Virginia’s got a pretty easy winter, comparatively.

But Stage 3 is unpleasant. Good for the arm muscles, but unpleasant for the rest of you. Around here the munchkins end up earning their hot chocolate! {smile} We do have a secret weapon though–a de-icer! We don’t like to use it very often because we don’t like having electrical cords running haphazardly across the farm. But when the animals are close to the house, we can plug it in and keep the big trough ice free.

This keeps the cows watered, and they drink way more than the whole flock of sheep. This also gives us a way to water the chickens quickly. Their greenhouse coop design is working out pretty well and their water isn’t freezing, but they drink a lot as well.

The sheep bucket by itself takes about 10 minutes to fill if we all work together. 15 minutes if we have someone slacking off. {smile} 20 minutes if the dog insists on chasing the cat every other trip.

A farm-wide watering system with underground lines has been on the to-do list for several years, but it’s a big undertaking and it’s pretty far down there. It’s also not the kind of thing you can re-do easily if you put it in Place A and adjust your field layout to Plan B.

Do you have a winter water plan? Like I said, here in Coastal Viriginia, we don’t get really harsh winters so this whole situation is more of a blip and by the time you’re thinking, wow, this is really getting old–it’s over. {smile} If we lived further north, the watering system might move up the list faster!

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