Lisa, congrats on the germinating lettuce!
I am very sorry for your snowfall.
Officially, Fort Dodge had accumulated 27 inches of snow in the first nine days of the month. I'm running out of spaces; I can't lift shovels of snow much higher.
While the one-warm-day break was great, what followed wasn't. Not only did all the melty stuff refreeze into dangerous ice, but they weren't fooling about the high wind advisory.
I went out yesterday morning to find the latch unhooked on the Taj Ma-Coop pop door and snow inside the coop, all the way to the back. I dutifully removed four 5-gallon buckets of snowy bedding and replaced it in the afternoon.
The driveway gate, which had been blown off its hinges in the last wind storm and had its frame broken, was only blown open this time. Lids off two of the feed garbage cans had also blown off. One was near the cans, the other up by the deck steps; both cans had snow inside that had to be scooped out. Ice had formed at the bottom of the run door to the young girls' coop and had to be chipped away, and the biggest, most expensive remaining run tarp was shredded.
This morning, coyotes decided to hold a Christmas concert off to the north. The yipping was so loud that I could hear it from the kitchen with (of course!) all the windows and doors closed. I did my crazy lady-yelling-into-the-night routine.
I've read that coyotes change the tone, pitch and direction of their calls to sound like their numbers are greater. I'm pretty sure there was at least a duet at 4:45 a.m. Tracks in the extremely plentiful snow show they've been the full length of the driveway and up near the duck shelter. The runners wouldn't even come out for breakfast yesterday.
