There are chores you can do when everything is frozen rock hard and certain chores that will have to wait till warmer days.

Barn cleaning is a chore that has to wait until the weather is above freezing for more than one day otherwise you would have to use a pick axe to get the job done. The good thing about it being that cold is the animals stay mostly dry because everything is solid. The bad thing is that if you wait until warm spring days you will be shoveling 2 ft. worth of crap out of one stall.

So what do you do?

Take advantage of itty bitty warm spells. We had three days where it was almost above freezing. It was warm enough that the barn started to smell and the animal pens started to get gooey. We picked the worst one to clean on our day off and hoped the weather held so we could go the other two. It didn’t but at least the piglets have a nice clean run now. The goats and chickens will have to wait until the next warm spell. Hopefully it’s before April.

Sled Train!

Cleaning the barn in the winter has it’s own challenges. For instance, how to transfer manure from the barn to the compost pile. Today it was by sled!

Even though we were working to clean out the barn we had the kids with us so they could take advantage of the nicer weather. My kids love being outside and I hope that stays with them their entire lives. My goal is to try to teach my children that working on the farm can be fun.