Hi, Phoenix here continuing the blog series on winter homesteading. In this post, I want to talk about the challenges of cold weather on the homestead. 

1. Watering the animals is very challenging off-grid, especially with frozen water barrels. For the past few weeks, we’ve been hauling water from the house in watering cans to give the animals water. They do eat some snow to hydrate, but it takes a lot of snow to meet their water needs, and the snow lowers their body temperatures when it’s already cold outside.
2. Frozen dirt roads turn to muddy river beds when they start thawing. We’ve gotten stuck a couple of times this winter and have seen several neighbors in the same situation. Many times, the roads turn muddy during the daytime and freeze during the night so the car tires are stuck in place.
3. This winter has been colder and wetter than normal. And with firewood prices increasing, we’ve been relying more on propane heating. We ran out of propane earlier this month and the muddy roads delayed the propane delivery for two weeks. We use propane for most of our heating, and all of our cooking, so it was a difficult couple of weeks.
4. Our water pipes in the house have frozen twice this winter, making it even harder to get the animals some water. The water eventually starts flowing again later in the day, but till then we ration the water in our water filtration containers.
5. This morning, there’s ice on our solar panels, preventing them from generating electricity till we scrape the ice off. We’ll wait till it gets a bit warmer.

K and I mitigate these challenges by setting up redundancies. For example, as mentioned in the last post, we use oil lanterns when we don’t have as much electricity from the solar panels due to short and/or cloudy days. We also have motion-activated lights that run on rechargeable batteries in the bathroom so we have light at night without having to rely on the solar batteries. We also have small solar panels with USB ports to charge cell phones and small flashlights for nighttime use. When we can, we use wood for heating to supplement the propane, especially when the tank is running low. Unfortunately, the higher firewood prices are making this redundancy more difficult to achieve. When we know the temperature might drop below freezing overnight, we try to store some water in our water filtration containers. We also close the door to the pump room so the hot water heater can keep the pipes from freezing. These redundancies and backups are also useful for people on the grid.

This lifestyle is difficult, and those thinking about pursuing it need to take these challenges into consideration. They might make you ask yourself why you’re doing this. But if you’re like me, you’ll cuddle with a baby goat while feeding the animals, wash your hands afterwards with your homemade soap, and pull out your homemade cheese, preserved vegetables, and eggs for breakfast. And you’ll realize, yeah, it is so worth it!

Next blog post: Part 3: Winter homesteading–social isolation (by Phoenix)