With winter right around the corner….or a couple of corners, I hope…..I decided our hens would like a warmer coop.  They survived the last couple of winters, but just the same, an uninsulated coop here in norther Minnesota is still cold when it’s -35!  I don’t knit or I would have knitted them little jackets!

So in lieu of that, I decided to take the scraps of insulation board laying around the yard from our house, the old pieces of paneling Tom had given me from his mobile home storage building and scraps of miscellaneous lumber and put it all together to make a warmer hen house out of our old thrown together one.

Last week I used the short scraps of tongue and groove 2″x6″ lumber to side the coop.  Yep!  That would definitely make it warmer because our chief wind comes from the west.  But I still had all this insulation and paneling to get rid of.  And what better use for it than to insulate the inside of the coop to make it even cozier.  So starting with the ceiling, I cut pieces of insulation board to fit right over the rafters, leaving an air space above.  This will cut down condensation that can sometimes be a problem with a chicken house.

First I tacked the insulation board to the rafters, making kind of a patchwork quilt ceiling.  By measuring, I was able to cut pieces to fit, utilizing the leftovers I had.  It was easily cut with a carperpenter’s hand saw.  Before I saw Tom cut it this way, I’d always used a knife to score the board.  The saw is definitely faster and easier!  It’s like cutting butter.  Well firm butter anyway.

Then I sorted out the old paneling and began cutting that to fit as well, trying to make as nice a job as I could out of it.  I don’t suppose the hens will care, but I have to look at every day too!  If you don’t cover insulation, the chickens will actually eat it.  They seem to enjoy it too, but I don’t suppose it’s good for them.  And it soon makes big holes in their nice warm walls.

Now I only have one more end to go, and the weather looks good for tomorrow.  I even took a break this afternoon and made a window box for the coop!  I had this neat worm hole piece of 2″x6″ I had to get rid of, you see….  It turned out nice and is now on the west window of the coop, all set for spring flowers.  They can’t reach it, to eat the flowers either.

If I can only have enough warm weather left to slap a coat of stain and sealer on it on the outside and finish up the insulation on the inside.  It’s like that here on the homestead….always a project to get finished and not enough time, money or good weather to get it done.  But we live with dreams; it’s what life’s made of.

I’ve printed readers’ questions with my answers below:

Bread will not last that long

I recently purchased some German made bread at Aldi’s, it contains no preservatives, however, it indicates the expiration date as a year from now, is that possible, my daughter seems to think it
was a mis printed expiration date. The ingredients are simple, whole kernel rye, water, wholemeal rye flour, salt, oat fiber, and yeast.

Lou Jensen
West Winfield, New York

Sorry.  It’s a typo.  No bread will last that long and remain good, not even in the freezer!  Boy I wish it would.  Most homemade bread starts to go moldy after several days….if it’s around that long, that is! — Jackie

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This last few days have been sort of a blur of frenzied picking, hauling, digging, hauling and stacking garden produce in the new greenhouse, away from the freezing cold that has suddenly descended on us with a vengance.

For the last three days we’ve been picking, then going out, remembering another section of freeze sensitive plants that we missed and picking them too.

But one of the benefits of this sudden harvest is that we get to eat up all our “mistakes” and very ripe produce. Or produce that will not keep and doesn’t lend itself to canning very well. Included in this are potatoes that I’ve cut or skinned with the digging fork, bits of Swiss Chard that aren’t worth canning, tiny summer squash, big cucumbers and very ripe tomatoes.

So this time of the year we eat well. Really well, as I try to use up all those vegetables before they go bad. For instance, we have winter squash that the stem broke off while we picked it. They are prone to rotting in storage, so (Gee!) we have to eat them! Now we eat our fill of all sorts of odds and ends, joyfully.I picked half a dozen small ears of sweet corn; our very last, three large cucumbers we’d missed, two sweet onions that got stepped on during harvest, a dozen summer squash and a small basket full of Swiss chard. So for dinner tonight, we had corn on the cob, a cucumber salad with sweet onions sliced with them, fried sliced summer squash and more onions, with a sliced green pepper and steamed Swiss chard. I also opened a pint of sliced ham, and we had a harvest feast.

I smiled. Our feast was just to keep food from going bad. Gee ain’t life hard here on our backwoods homestead???

I’ve posted readers’ questions and answers below:

Blanching beans

We made a mistake on our green beans process for frozen beeans we froze them without blanching we wanted to know if the beans have been the freezer a month and we blanch them now and re-freeze will they be ok or have we lost that crop?

Daniel Leitch
Fremont, Michigan

If I were you, I’d just leave well enough alone and eat the beans relatively soon. Blanching stops the ripening process and maintains the best flavor. But I’ve frozen some vegetables withouth blanching and they turned out perfectly fine. For long-term storage, though, blanching makes a big difference in the flavor so it is recommended. — Jackie

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