False Spring and a Flooded Barn

This year has been rather steadily cold and snowy. This is the opposite of my prediction last fall… with cold temperatures dropping as low as 16 degrees Farenheight and snow piling on snow without melting in between, we’ve got rather a lot of snow melt happening quickly over the past few days. We usually have a short thaw in late January or early February, but really this is our first one. Since the ground is well and truly frozen, it’s not doing a good job sucking up the water as it usually does. We’ve got a wetland nearby and it is a real boon during heavy rains, but it does take a little longer to thaw than the snow. So the excess snow has flowed right into the barn where we have our meat chickens. The chickens retreated to the rafters. (They aren’t meat breed chickens, they’re crossbreeds, so they don’t grow all fat and crippled like production breeds do and they’re still quite young and small. They can’t fly exactly but they are very good wing-assisted hoppers.) There as a good 3 inches of water in there. I dumped all the woodchips we had in store onto the floor to soak up the water and shoveled out a bunch. I tell you what, I am pretty strong and hauling woodchips and straw full of chicken poop is one thing. Hauling woodchips and straw full of water is quite another. So there I was with bins I couldn’t move. I felt like rather an idiot. So I guess we will have a new and temporary compost heap in the barn chicken yard? I have no doubt whatsoever that they will use this to escape or at the very least, entangle themselves  in the cover over the pen. But it’ll dry eventually and I’ll move it. My husband picked up more straw and wood chips on his way home from work and I spread more to suck up the additional water that was, of course, still seeping in under the door. It froze again overnight so at least the flooding stopped, but it’s supposed to get up to 40 today so it’ll be flowing again in no time and I’ll be out there fighting a losing battle with my wood chips. If I can get them deep enough so the birds aren’t wading around in water when they come down to eat, it’s okay for overnight, but I can’t leave it in there like that for any length of time.

I am so angry because a few years ago we had a guy come replace our roof. He was recommended by my husband’s friend. I took this man outside and pointed at things. I showed him how the barn didn’t have gutters and how if the water flows off the roof between the house and the barn, it doesn’t really have anyplace to go except into the barn. We were in the process of digging a french drain in that area. I told him that I needed gutters on the barn, preferably on both sides, but at the very least on this side and he said sure, no problem as he was fixing the gutters on our house as he was doing our roof. But when he declared himself done and he and his guys cleaned up the site, there were no gutters on my barn (There was also no solar powered electric fan in my attic but for that he went on and on about he’d have to be a certified electrician to do that and he wasn’t and he would never have agreed to such a thing as he’d need to pull additional permits and hire another guy, etc. which is bullshit. Literally, you just drill a hole, stick in the fan and stick the solar panel on the outside wall, caulk around the fan to seal the hole gaps. Didn’t even need him for that. He just has better ladders than we do!)

He insisted I’d never asked him to do such a thing and he’d never quoted such a thing and went on his merry way. That bastard totally gas lighted me. My husband wasn’t there at the time, but when I told him later he confirmed that yes, he had heard me say that to him. As for the quote? I don’t know. I didn’t understand any of the stuff that was scrawled on it. I was livid. I swear I am never hiring some dude somebody recommends again. I want a business I can give a bad review to.

Anyway. The barn probably would have flooded a little bit anyway this year, even with gutters.

I can finally see my gardens which have been hiding under snow for two months now. They look like a muddy mess, but I can work with that. I am sure I only have a day or two more before they are lost to me again o I am going to hurry up and spend as much time on them as I can. Unfortunately, I have to work 8 hours today which means my time is limited. But tomorrow, I am all theirs.

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