Jack Frost Nipping at your Nose

We're in South Louisiana so our winters are decidedly mild.  Sometimes they are warm and balmy.  Snow is pretty rare and some years we don't even have a hard freeze. In fact, most of my pepper plants in the garden this year are two years old as the freeze didn't kill them last year.  They kept right on producing for two seasons. We're not accustomed to the cold, so when it gets a little chilly, I always think that people snowed in in the North must laugh at us having a hard time dealing with a little blast of cold air.

The other morning I was off work on vacation and we went out to milk the cows a little later than normal. (Yes, cows don't care when I'm on vacation!  They still need to be milked.)  I noticed that we had a pretty good frost on the ground from the night-time cooling.  The sun had already melted a lot of it, but you can see in the picture below that where the long morning shadows still occupied the ground, the frost was hanging on for dear life against the rays of the rising sun that had already turned the white ground back to greenish-brown.

I'm melting, I'm melting...

Here is a little frost on top of the chicken tractor.  Chickens do remarkably well in the cold.  They can withstand the cold better than the heat.  I guess their feathers provide great insulation.  I read on a website that a person in Ohio posted that at -20 degrees Fahrenheit, their chickens are out foraging and that they don't even provide a heat lamp until it is -15 below zero.

Milk cows are a somewhat different story.  They can withstand the cold and they can withstand being wet, but both conditions together cause problems.  It is best to have a wind break for them and a place to stay dry.  They also need plenty of hay and feed to replenish the calories they are burning in trying to stay warm and produce milk.

Frost on the chicken tractor roof

I love this picture.  It is a piece of wood that broke off of a homemade chicken feeding trough I made.  It had a screw sticking out of it and I didn't want the animals (or us) stepping on it, so I threw it on top of the chicken tractor.  The ice crystals from the frost made unique designs on top of it.  It's weird the way that works!

Here's some more ice crystals on a piece of tin on top of the tractor.  It is only December.  Normally January and February are pretty cold months for us. Thankfully we've got plenty of firewood cut and ready to burn.

I only need to remember the heat and humidity of July and August to make me appreciate the chilly days of our mild winter.  I'll take our cold weather over the hot any old day.