The Black Cherry Azalea

Winter is a time for rest on the homestead. It does not mean that the work stops. Certain tasks or chores instead stop for the time being and how you approach them changes.

My chickens for example do not free range as much. They also are more cooped up and are more prone to pecking each other. This winter there were different challenges. Early on my chickens were afflicted with mites. It was too cold to simply clean the coop, as the poop was frozen to the boards. I honestly would not have known they had mites if not for culling some of my roosters and seeing the pencil tip sized black dots crawling out of the garbage bag where my friend Sheila and I had thrown the skin and feathers. Lets just say a well bought Elector PSP took care of my mites problem. I did have to do a reapplication around Christmas time due to them coming back.

I had some loss due to two of my roosters getting frostbite on their toes. I believe they got the frostbite from our first blizzard, shown above, in early December. There is not much that can be done to treat frostbite. The tissue dies and eventually falls off. I believe mine ultimately died due to malnourishment from not being able to get around easily. Even with easy access to food and water.

The water for my goats and chickens was more of a problem this year than in the past. Instead of filling the watering containers by hose, I fill milk jugs with water. That is not the problem. The problem came when the snow we had throughout the winter melted, refroze, melted again, then snowed more. I use extension cords connected to GFCI outlets to keep the water from freezing. With the melting and freezing, the connection became wet and tripped the GFCI, which means the water cannot be heated to prevent freezing. It gets better. With the melting, freezing, and snowing, the accumulation on my roof is slowly coming off in shelves of ice and snow. I had one of those shelves break off onto my goats water bucket and break it. Ironically it still heats up the water when power is running to it. But it no longer holds five gallons of water, but three gallons.

Now that winter is slowly coming to an end. I have revisited the tomatoes I froze in the fall. I made canned tomato paste and soup. I have started up incubating chicken eggs from my flock in my NR360 incubator. This time I am using a Govee thermometer/hygrometer and hope that I have a higher hatch rate this time around than in the past. So far I have had 11 duds out of the 34 I put in. Since then I added 16 more. I know you technically cannot put that many in the incubator; but I am using the stacker hatcher method of hatching. If you would like to know more about it, email me and I’ll send you the link to where you can learn about it.

I am still considering how I will garden this year. I am in a waiting place right now. I am trying to figure out how much longer I can remain at my rental. I would like to find a property and move this summer; but currently I am looking for a job and I want to have more of a remote source of income. I have worked in healthcare for over 10 years and as much as I like people, the past year has pushed me too far. So much so that I went to on-call at my job and have been searching for some other place that is not long-term healthcare.

The only plan for gardening that I think I will do is grow garden beans and canning peas in containers. Maybe lettuce again and above ground potatoes that I will cover in hay from my goats bedding.

When spring hits the babies will come. The garden will have to be prepared and planted. But in the meantime, plan for what the future of your homestead will look like. Revisiting coop plans, run and pasture layouts. What you will plant? What new animals you want to bring on your homestead? Will you start for the first time, restarting, continuing?