Wind and Winter Weather: Repairs and Shocks!

This has been an intense winter, as many of you know from first-hand experience!

We’ve had to make a few fence repairs from the wind, and “pick up the pieces” after winter storms came through and dropped inches of snow.

Here’s our adventure in picture form:

A few weeks ago we had a wind storm that blew gusts around 50 or 60 miles per hour. We never, in our wildest dreams, would have thought that the chicken fence would act like a sail and fold up onto itself like a fan:

Where’d the square-shaped fence go?

An airborne fence? Whoa!

Stupidly, for the most recent winter storm we didn’t prepare for a power outage at all. We over-prepared (is there really such a thing?) for the one before this last one, but not for this one!

Since we get our water from a well, our water doesn’t work when the power doesn’t. We utterly forgot to worry about this, and so when we woke up yesterday to find that our power was out, we realized that we had to find a way to get water for our ducks to drink. We decided that melting snow next to the wood stove was the best bet…

Jason scooping snow into “the bathtub” to put by the wood stove.

And we also forgot to remove the netting from the chicken pen to keep the snow from sticking to it…

The netting became so heavy with snow that it deformed the fence!

Luckily none of the netting ripped!

Yes, that’s a blanket of snow on top of our bird netting!

Even after all the cleanup and repairs we had to do, it still is lovely to have a blanket of snow on the ground. I’m still not sick of winter yet, not when we have views like this…

And of course, the geese were not phased by the situation at all and continued to bathe throughout the freezing temperatures!

They don’t look quite as white as they used to, do they?

.:.