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Welcome back to another episode of the Homegrown Liberty Podcast, this is episode 44. Today we’ve got some thoughts on preparing for winter and what I’m doing to get ready for the cold season. But first some news on what I’ve been up to and an update on the plant cuttings! 

Just got back from another week of teaching and consulting, and man, I’m so tired of traveling. I was gone for I think around 17 days out of 31 days in October. I most recently got back from a trip teaching about soil building methods at a workshop in the DFW area, and also made my way to 4 sites along the way to and from my teaching engagement. Helped several people get direction and overcome obstacles to the development of their properties. As well as helping one family feel comfortable in the plans they already had set in place. Overall, I had a great time, but I’m glad to be home and getting back to work on everything that needs to be done here. I need to get garlic in the ground asap, the weather has started to change, and we should start getting some rain in the next week or two now that the weather has shifted. I have a lot of plans going into winter! So let’s get right into it!

Garden Preparation

One of the big questions I’ve been getting recently is how can I gear up for winter gardening? Well, If you’re much farther north of me, then it’s probably too late to get much done other than quick growing greens and alliums that will be harvested next year. But I’ll get into some of the things I’m doing specifically.

Alliums –

It’s time for me to plant all my alliums here in Louisiana. I have a bunch of cool types of garlic I got from one of my contemporaries who has tons of market garden locations in and around St. Louis, and I have some perennial leeks and perennial onions to get in the ground. I’m really excited about all the cool new alliums this year. Next year will be chock full of onions and garlic if we have a good winter! I’ll be filming the planting of my alliums so you guys can get in on the action as well!

Mulching & Bed Prep –

I have some beds that need some renewing and mulching, so I’ll be cleaning them up and mulching heavily before planting this winter. I’ll be using some old moldy feed acquired locally to help build some soil, feed worms and increase biological diversity. It’s amazing what a little mulch and some worm food will do to build great soil!

Winter Greens –

I’ll be planting a lot of greens like spinach, lettuce, collards, arugula, and anything else that will grow through the colder weather and produce a leafy green crop for our salads. I’ll be covering with greenhouse plastic row covers to heat things up a bit and get some stellar growth out of them during the colder weather.

Root Crops –

It’s past time for me to get things like potatoes and carrots in the ground, but here in the south, the only time to really grow root crops like these is when it’s cooler. I’ll be getting them put in the ground soon so we can have some spring harvest. We have nice deep sandy soil so we should be able to get some long cultivars of carrots to grow nicely this year. In the past, my soils have been too compacted, it should be easy this year in the old garden spot.

New Garden Beds –

This is something we’re going to be working on all winter long, no huge rush since things are generally so warm here anyways. I might even be able to use some clear plastic to heat the soil and keep earthworms nice and active all winter long in the new beds and have a rocking start in the spring. I’ll keep you guys up to date on how that all goes. I am hopeful it works out like I think it might. All I have to do is keep the soil moist, warm, and keep food in there and they should go bonkers. Looking forward to trying that experiment out!

Cleanup –

It’s about time to make the last pile of compost for the year. I’ll have plenty of material between the chicken coop deep litter and the weeds in my overgrown jungle of what some people would have called a garden.  Earlier this year it looked good, but after the summer and all my traveling, it’s shameful what it looks like right now. Now is a good time to assess your garden and area around your homestead to harvest weedy plants to make a bunch of compost for use building new beds, amending current beds, or for heating areas in a barn or shed. Compost piles built right will stay hot for a long time if you use woody materials and keep adding nitrogen.

Winterizing The House

There are always things you should check for and make sure are taken care of before cold weather sets in. Your goals here should be to reduce your wintertime costs in heating and repairs. Remember, our purpose here is to be as resilient as we can be! If we ignore any of these items, it could mean days off work to fix something, which is a compounding cost, not only are we spending money on a repair, but it’s costing us lost income. So I know some of these things might seem kinda dumb and ordinary, but if one of these things reminds you of ONE thing you forgot to take care of, it could save you hundreds or even thousands of dollars. And if I achieve that, I’m happy.

Pipes –

If you have outdoor faucets and exposed pipes, now’s the time to get them insulated or otherwise protected. I use the foam pipe insulation and duct tape to protect the couple outside pipes we have that can freeze. And we use styrofoam cap looking things that hook onto and tighten down on the outside faucet valves. Not much is worse than dealing with busted pipes in freezing weather. It’s miserable to mess with plumbing, but even worse when your fingers are frozen solid cause you’re dealing with water spraying and dripping all over the place. So check those pipes ahead of time!

Well –

If you have a well like we do, check inside the well house or pump house. There are normally exposed pipes and often a pressure tank. We have a light fixture inside where we plug in a heat lamp that raises the temperature a few degrees higher during the colder weather. I’ll be making sure the bulb is working and that all the little air gaps are sealed up with some spray foam insulation to make sure we are good to go. I don’t want to be without clean drinkable water during a freezing weather event. If you’re further north you may need to take more drastic measures depending on your situation.

Gutters –

If your gutters aren’t clean and free of debris, they can get choked up with ice and make for some serious weight and contribute to icicles forming which can really damage your house or be dangerous to little kids running around outside playing. It’s free and just takes a little work, get a high pressure water spraying nozzle and get them cleaned out before you have to pay someone to replace busted gutters!

Fans –

Our ceiling fans are set to push air down during the summer, but on most of them there is a little switch on the side of the motor unit that when switched will reverse the directions of the blades. Flip that switch, make sure you clean all the dust off the fan blades or as soon as you turn it on you’ll really regret it. Switching the air flow direction will help to distribute the warm air more evenly through the room and keep your house more comfortable and reduce your heating bill.

Weather Stripping –

Check the weather strips on the doors and windows of your house, it doesn’t take a lot of airflow to let a ton of heat escape your home. I’m not a huge proponent of sealing a home up airtight, but check for drafts and make sure you don’t have a door that has it’s bottom weather sealing strip ripped half off. That can let a lot of cold air inside the house and at that point, you’re burning dollars needlessly.

Chimney –

We have a garbage decorative natural gas fireplace in our house, they sell chimney balloons that will plug the chimney and keep it from sucking hot air out of your house. Just learned about them this year. We are either going to stuff some insulation into the space above the damper, or invest in one of those balloons to cut down on heat loss through the chimney. Heat rises remember, so if that thing is left open, it’s constantly sucking hot air up and out and pulling cold air inside from any cracks and crevices.

Varmints –

When cold weather starts moving in, all sorts of critters will be looking for nice protected places to live. Like your attic for instance. So go around and make sure any limbs are pruned back from your roofline to cut down on rats and mice getting into your house. You might even want to have a professional nuisance wildlife control person come seal up your house. It only takes one squirrel in your attic to burn down your house. Be smart! Seal up your house and keep the varmints outta there!

Animals

We all care about our animals, and with freezing temperatures approaching, you want to be proactive and prevent injuries and deaths to your stock and pets. We are stewards of the lives under our care and as such it falls squarely on our shoulders to be the protectors and caretakers. This isn’t something I take lightly and neither should you.

Chickens –

Chickens are pretty hardy and most will handle freezing temps fairly well. If you have a barn or a coop that they stay in, you might consider adding a heat lamp to raise the temperature a little. This is especially helpful if you have automated water like I do. Sealing up the coop well and installing a plastic door for them to push open can very significantly increase the warmth of the structure. All you need to do is make sure all the small air gaps are closed with scrap pieces of lumber. I suggest staying away from foam insulation, cause if any falls down, they’ll eat it and can cause intestinal blockages and it’s just not good for em to be around. Same goes for any other type of insulation, they somehow will find a way to eat it. So don’t use anything that they can’t peck at.

Another thing you have to decide for yourself is do you put a light on your birds or not. Two schools of thought here. Some people give their birds a rest during winter and allow them to stop laying during winter which they naturally will do when the days get shorter. That’s fine if you’re ok with not getting any eggs all winter. As for me and my house, we will be eating eggs. I raise chickens for eggs, not to sing songs and hold hands. If ya don’t feed ma family, yer outta here.

Rabbits –

These critters do fantastic in the cold weather and I rarely hear about people having problems with them. I don’t do anything special for my rabbits. If you’re up north in a colder clime, then you may want to move them under a shed, or into the chicken house so they can share warmth. But the main consideration is to make sure that they get water at least once a day during the cold weather. It’s easy to shrug it off and say, it’s super cold out, I’ll do it tomorrow, they don’t need much water, it’s not like they’re sweating out there. But they do! Don’t forget about it! Bass cage company sells an in-line water heater that runs a heating element through your pvc water system to keep the whole thing warm enough to not freeze. If I lived somewhere it was a problem, I’d use that. For me down here, I just have valves at the ends of all my watering systems so I can open the valves slightly to let water leak out and if it’s moving, it won’t freeze with our coldest nights.

Ducks –

Again, the main thing for the ducks is water. Make sure they have some kind of water heater to just keep it above freezing so they can drink and rinse their eyes. Ducks handle cold temps like champs!

Goats & Sheep –

All I do for my goats is to make sure they have someplace they can get out of the rain and wind and bed down dry. They have a 3 sided structure with a roof and they sleep there every night out of any bad weather and I’ve never had a problem. When we lived in Ohio on the family farm up there, my dad would put up a couple layers of that plastic sheeting and cut it into strips so the goats could walk through but it would keep out the majority of the cold air and just provide a little less draftiness.

Storm Preps

I think it’s always a good idea to be prepared to weather any storm event for a minimum of a week. We don’t get snowed in, but if the right conditions happen, we get some pretty nasty ice storms that can take out the power for days or keep us housebound due to road closures. So take a little time to think about the potential and likely weather events and consider how they might affect your daily life.

Water –

I think minimum, you should have a week’s worth of water for each member of your house. Ideally a gallon per day, per adult. Don’t forget your pets drink too, it’s easy to overlook them when you’re quickly calculating these things. For us it means a minimum of 28 gallons. I have a 55 gallon drum filled with clean drinking water though, so we can get through 2 weeks. And if worse comes to worse, we have the whole 1300 acre reservoir right out the back door, and we can put that water through the berkey for clean drinkable water. So I don’t really have to store water, it’s just convenient in case we should ever need it. But not everyone gets to live on a large body of water, so don’t forget the most essential thing to life!

Food –

Make sure you can handle being cooped up in your house for a couple weeks. It doesn’t take much food to get through a couple weeks. So stock up on that pantry a bit and even if you think you are good to go, maybe this is a good time to assess your pantry, clean it out and take stock of what you actually do have. Check for bugs like weevils and miller moths. This is the time of year when people were bringing the harvest in and settling in for a long winter through much of the US. I think that even though we have the luxury of running down to a big box store when we need something, that we should still observe those seasonal fluctuations and be mindful of the yearly change. Take the time to get ready. You might be surprised to find that you aren’t as prepared as you thought you were. And it’s always a good thing to find that out before you need to rely on those preparations.

Morale –

I’d make sure you have a blackout kit ready to go with light, a board game or some card games, some fun stuff for kids, maybe some brand new coloring books, something like that is really helpful for distracting a kiddo from being scared or intimidated by introducing the novelty of something new to explore.

Heat –

As for supplemental heat, don’t discount the value of some simple tea lights to raise the temperature of a room several degrees. If power goes off and you depend on it for heat, bundle up into warmer clothes, bring everyone into a single smaller room, make it a game, light some tea lights where they’re safe and won’t catch anything on fire and have fun! Make a blanket fort for the kids, it’ll be much warmer inside there and you will have consolidated all the body heat into a single room.  As for us, our central heating unit stopped working a couple years ago, so I got some plumbing materials, and piped over some natural gas and installed one of those ventless natural gas heaters for our house. It works great, and we don’t need anything more than that to be honest. We save on heating costs, and it works no matter if the power is on or not. So we are much more secure in our heating needs than we were before that heater was installed.

Other Considerations

Vehicle –

Where I live, we have lots of rain and some ice during the winter. We don’t have big snows, but when it does freeze, the roads will be solid ice in parts and can be very dangerous because you never know when the road will go from just fine, to frozen. We often have fairly large rain events during the winter. The main thing is to make sure your vehicles are ready for the shift in weather and capable of handling the different weather conditions. Now is the time to check on that and get ready. If you are in more northern reaches, you might want to check your antifreeze and switch from a 50/50 mix to a straight antifreeze in your radiator. It’s also a good time to think about your battery, if it’s old, you might want to go ahead and have it checked, and possibly replaced ahead of time. When they start to wear out the cold cranking amps will drop and you or a loved one might be out and about when a cold weather event rolls in, and someone could get stranded due to a vehicle not being able to start. Checking on something like that now might save you from having to call in to work and explain why you are late or unable to make it in to work. It’s always better to be preventative than reactionary when it comes to problems like this.

Another thing to consider with cold weather moving in, is what if you do get stranded in your vehicle due to a snow storm? Or you’re driving along a stretch of road and hit a patch of ice and you end up in a ditch. Do you have clothing that will keep you warm until someone can come help you? What if you’re stuck and run out of fuel? Can you make it for a day or two with no outside help from what is already inside your vehicle? A couple small sleeping bags, some water, some long term storage food, the means to start and fuel a fire as well as some other emergency response equipment might be a good idea. I try to keep at the minimum some blankets along with a jacket, hat, gloves, and all the earlier listed items in my truck. You just never know when you might need to depend on it, or when you might be called upon to help someone else in need.

What I really wanted to convey here was a list of some of the things I’m thinking about moving into colder weather. There’s a lot that changes and adjustments need to be made. Most of these things might be old news and mundane tasks that you’ve been doing for years, but maybe I had just one single thing that made you think “Oh yeah! I forgot all about that!”. Or maybe you’re new to this whole way of thinking and self sufficiency. No matter where you are on the spectrum and scale from novice to expert, I hope this was enlightening and encouraging. If I left some things out, please share with everyone on the blog comments or the facebook group!   

Alright guys, that wraps things up, I hope you enjoyed this topic, if you want to follow up on this or ask questions, please hop on facebook and join the discussion in the community group, lots of great ideas and encouragement get shared there every day!

Until next week

I hope you have a wonderful day, God Bless. And as always “Go Do Good Things”