Our First "Real" Freeze

We have had an unbelievably mild winter so far.  In fact, I was telling my wife just the other day that the grass is still green in the pasture.  Although we're in the deep south, by late January the grass is usually dead and brown.  We've had a few frosts that has burned the grass a little bit, but you can see in the pictures below that there is still a lot of green grass in the pasture.

Saturday morning we had our first real freeze in which there was a thin coating of ice on the top of mud puddles.  It wasn't a heavy freeze and the water in puddles underneath the live oak trees didn't freeze, but it was a freeze nonetheless.  After milking the cows Saturday morning, I walked out to feed the pullets in the chicken tractor and heard, "crunch, crunch, crunch" underneath my feet.  The morning sun was shining and had melted the frost on the grass that had escaped the shadows of the oak trees.

Frost in the shadows

The remaining green on the grass will be turning brown now from the coating of frost that covers the pasture grass.  We have been supplementing the little remaining pasture grass with hay.  The cows are eating a round bale of hay every 6 days and we feed them 1 square bale each day of the "good stuff": Alicia 'horse' hay.

Old Jack Frost

The five gallon bucket that sits atop the chicken tractor where the pullets live had an interesting collection of ice formations in it.  It's almost as if the Almighty was giving a lesson on the different types of triangles as I can see an equilateral triangle, an isosceles triangle, a scalene triangle, and a right-angled triangle in the bucket pictured below.  (I had to look those up. I never was much good at geometry.)

Fortunately, the tubing that carries the water from the reservoir bucket to the waterer that hangs in the chicken tractor below, is located on the very bottom and it didn't freeze.  Folks in northern climes have to put heaters in their water troughs during the winter so their animals can stay hydrated.  Not down here - especially not this year.

A perfect "Home School" lesson

As you can see, the water in the water trough in the chicken tractor is very much liquid.  The heat that 30 pullets put off keep the area warm and toasty as opposed to the frosty landscape that you can see right outside the tractor.

Body heat

Although it is cold, I think the frost is beautiful with the crystals sparkling in the morning sun that stretches across the landscape.  We've still got some cold weather left - that's for sure, but the days are getting longer and springtime is on its way.  In fact, as I look at the weather forecast, I see that it will be in the 70's on Saturday and Sunday of this week, January 30th & 31st.  It looks like our inventory of firewood will hold out for this year.

In just a couple of weeks at the latest, I'll plant onions and potatoes.  The ground has to do a little drying up before then, but it is almost time to get things started!