Cooped Up

Poor chickens have been cooped up for over a week due to the blizzard and now are venturing out to eat snow because it's easier than trying to get to the water bowl, which is frozen solid anyway.

We don't expect to see temperatures above freezing in the 10 day forecast. Only a few of those days are showing positive double digits.

It's not just the chickens feeling cooped up. It's driving us a little bit crazy too.

All winter long, whenever the weather would allow, we've taking a quick drive up to the farm with our hound dog, Hank, and taken a walk about. Hank is there purely to figure out where the rabbits and moles have been and might still be. It is his personal mission to sniff them out and dig them out of the snow. Sadly, he has yet to figure out that letting out a loud howl when he smells something is a sure fire way to ensure that they won't be there when he gets there to start digging.

We've been playing a bit of a game this winter to see if and when we can walk on the pond. That was some time last week. It will most definitely still be that way with the current temperatures so there's no reason for us to go check on that.

This is our first full winter with a greenhouse, and we were thrilled that with just a little bit of overnight heating, we'd been able to keep many of the cool weather plant starts out there to soak up the sunshine. The daytime temps in the greenhouse have regularly exceeded 80 degrees and on particularly sunny days have gotten into the 100s. But that space heater has really only been able to keep the night time temps 10-15 degrees warmer than the outdoor temps.

Ten degrees was not going to be enough to keep it above freezing the next couple weeks, so we had to move all of our starts back inside the house for the foreseeable future. Our family room has been transformed.

We're trying to find things to occupy our time stuck inside our house for a couple weeks. Today we'll be canning the tomatoes we put in the freezer at the end of the season. Perhaps tomorrow we'll be grinding and bottling the herbs that have been drying in the basement. Maybe we'll even start a carboy of grape wine.

And even though I imagine we'll do better than the chickens in keeping ourselves occupied I can't help but commiserate with them during this unpleasant weather.

I can't wait until we can take Hank back to the farm. Neither can he.