Category: Farm/Country Living

We’ve got a little early snow here in Blodgett, Oregon. It started coming down a few hours after I finished winterizing the two water wells and the pump house. Whew!

Our climate is just cold enough that it’s best to use pipe heating cable in addition to pipe insulation, so that’s what I did.

Sadly, this particular industry is very inarticulate. The Frost King heat cable I used never mentioned the wattage of the cable, and while it seems to be a fully waterproof, outdoor-rated product, the packaging never says this anywhere. But they go to great lengths to assure me that the cable must be used with fiberglass pipe insulation. I hate fiberglass — it’s nasty stuff — and refuse to use it, so I always use foam or bubble insulation. I’ve done this for years and it has always worked perfectly, and I wish that the manufacturers would get their acts together and write directions that actually acknowledge successful ways to use the product. I’ve also used heater cable without pipe insulation, which they say doesn’t work, but it works fine in draft-free areas, down to 15 F, anyway, which is as cold as it ever gets around here.

I tried three different kinds of pipe insulation: the long foam noodles that you slip around the pipes, aluminized foam tape, and metalized bubble insulation. Of these, the metalized bubble insulation was the most flexible and trouble free. I bought mine at the local True Value hardware store. It looks sloppier than the other stuff but goes on fast and deals with things like pipe elbows easily. The pre-formed pipe noodles don’t really work on anything but straight lengths of pipe, and they’re undersized when it has to go over a heater cable as well as a pipe.

My next cold-weather task is to put the studded snow tires on the vehicles, and to put birdbath heaters in the chicken waterers. In my climate, the hundreds of feet of garden hose on the pasture usually thaw sometime during the day, so the main thing is keeping the waterers themselves from freezing.

And of course this is Thanksgiving Week, and today is the day Karen starts butchering turkeys for our customers. Wednesday is the last farmer’s market of the year, and given the weather, it’s just as well!

Suppose you moved into a house on a cliff over the ocean, with the world’s best view, and then discovered that it was everyone’s favorite place to commit suicide?

Don Ritchie accidentally bought such a lover’s leap house. (Click the link to see the article.)

His solution? While yelling at the realtor and moving out immediately must have crossed his mind, what he actually did was go out and talk to the jumpers as they’re getting ready. Given the option of jumping off a cliff and stepping into his kitchen for a nice cup of tea, hundreds have opted for tea over the years.

The weather is turning colder but we’re having an unusual string of sunny days. This is good! The cool temperatures are a clear warning about winter coming, overcoming my procrastination, and the sunshine makes it easy to prepare. My wardrobe has already changed — I’m in flannel-shirt mode, and will be until April.

Because of the work we had done on our water wells, we have exposed piping that has to be winterized, and it’s time to mow the pasture one last time before winter sets in. It won’t do to have tall grass up against the sides of the house in the winter — it leads to rot.

We’ve got about two years’ worth of wood in the shed, so that’s no problem.

While our hens are out on pasture all winter, in small draggable houses, little needs to be done for them. The last step after all the mowing is to string several hundred feet of extension cord so we can put birdbath heaters in all the waterers. The garden hose will freeze on cold nights, but the daytime highs are almost always above freezing in this climate, so keeping the waterers from freezing solid is adequate.