Prior to the Deep Freeze

The deep freeze that affected much of the fruited plain last week reached down into the deep south, too.  The freeze from the previous year killed some of our citrus and knocked all of it back so much that we cut numerous limbs off.  We had no blooms and no fruit last year, but we were hopeful for this year.  In fact, if you look at the navel orange tree below, you can spot blooms that were just about to open.  There's even some small fruit that had evaded my notice.

In only a week or two, the blossoms you see below would have opened and you would spot me out by the trees enjoying the great aroma.  The honeybees would have been all over them, too!  Why am I talking about them in the past tense?

Well, with freezes incoming that dip down in the low twenties and upper teens, I fear the blooms and fruit are gone.  We did our very best, piling mulch around the base of the trees, ensuring to insulate the area with the graft with thick layers of wood chip mulch.  Then we finished wrapping our trees in tarps before the cold north winds began to blow.  We also wrapped pipes, doing our due diligence to mitigate against broken pipes.

The next morning we had to go out to all the water troughs and break thick ice so that the cows, goats, and chickens could drink.  There were long icicles on the blooming camelia shrubs.

I had rolled out a fresh round bale of hay for the animals.  It's always important to give them plenty of hay to eat.  The animals didn't seem fazed by the temperatures.  Belle was watching them nonchalantly.

Her thick white coat apparently provided thick insulation to make her indifferent to the cold.  After sitting for a bit, she ran all throughout the pasture with reckless abandon.

Just prior to the freeze, we picked lots of broccoli, kohlrabi, peppers, sweet peas, snap beans, mustard greens, lettuce and kale.  We covered everything with tarps and anchored them down so that the plants would stay covered when the winds began to blow.

We anchored down the chicken tractor with laying birds with tie down stakes on all four corners.  The tractor was covered with a tarp and we ran an extension cord to power a heat lamp that would keep the hens warm.  It worked.  They were comfy.

With everything prepared as well as we could expect, we went inside.  The heater in the den was off and even ahead of the cold, temps had dropped to 53 in the house.

Time to change that.  With our firewood inventory in very good shape, we stoked up a nice fire and kept it burning for hours and hours.  It heated up our den and we enjoyed the warmth and ambiance that a fireplace provides.  We get plenty of use out of it.  I was toying around with putting some sort of a mechanism in the fireplace wall to hang a cast iron dutch oven and cook over the bed of coals?

Happy to say that the garden fared well, all the animals survived, too!  The jury is still out on our citrus.  All the trees are stressed, for sure.  I hope they make it.  If not, we'll have to start over.  Not ideal, but we'll push forward once more.