I refused to read this thread because I preferred to stay in denial. We had record warm temps a couple of days ago.
Now it is snowing. Wet, icky snow. Not light, fluffy, sparkly, beautiful snow. Pain in the butt, get all wet and cold, turns into mud snow. In fact, I keep typing snot instead of snow, three times in a row!
So today I ordered more hay, and cleaned the entire barn and bedded it...the hens and turkeys with more shavings, and the goats with a thick, thick layer of shavings with a foot or more of oat straw on top. That is it for big cleaning until spring.....just spot cleaning and adding more bedding on top to keep them high off the frozen ground. Last year I put three feet of dry leaves in the barn and coop, this year it didn't stop raining long enough to gather usable leaves that wouldn't...or hadn't already.....get/gotten moldy.
Then I scraped up the mucky area in front of the door where everyone poops, (I was waiting for it to dry a bit....of course not!) and went way out back and got some loads of dirt in the wheelbarrow to fill in the areas in the kidding stall that the chickens had excavated from the outside and bedding was falling out.
Fixed a broken fire brick and got the stove going again. All the wood is stacked and covered with tarps. I'm ready! Bring it on!
