WINTER PREP ON THE HOMESTEAD

OCTOBER 20, 2019

preparing our land for the cold winter months

SLOW LIVING

Notes on slow, seasonal + intentional living from a Windy Peak in Montana.

WINTER PREP ON THE HOMESTEAD.

There is quite a bit that goes into preparing our land for the cold winter months. Every Autumn we learn a little more about what that means and get a bit more efficient with our work. Here is a look at what we did this year.

First things first, we harvest the remaining fruit and vegetables in the garden before the temperatures drop too low below freezing. We pick the remaining tomatoes in the greenhouse and pull the stocks out and feed them to the rabbits and chickens. The greenhouse becomes our shed in the winter for storing all the garden tools, hoses, etc. One of these years we will build a shed for year round storage.

After the garden beds are all cleaned up we cover them with the compost that we have been creating all year using food scraps, chicken poop, coffee and tea grounds, etc. The compost will nourish the ground and create a rich soil for Spring planting.

We plant garlic and onion sets in the garden beds and assorted flower bulbs randomly throughout the yard because there’s nothing like those first Spring blooms to make you feel alive.

When the temperatures start to hover around freezing during the day we turn the water lines off to the yard and chicken coop. This prevents the pipes from freezing and bursting. From there on out we have to bring the chicken water inside to refill and won’t water the yard until Spring.

Last but not least (I’m sure I’m forgetting a hundred things), we prep the chicken coop. We roll out the extension cords and plug in their electric water holder and have the heat lamps ready for extremely cold temperatures. We wait as long as we can before we heat the coop because the chickens adapt to the cold naturally. We get hay bales from the local feed store and stack them around the outside of the chicken coop to help insulate and protect them from the wind.

And when winter comes, we rest.