SlaterFarm
Chirping
Sunday, January 25th, 2026
We let our eight Cream Legbar hens out of the coop and into the run every morning, and then for a while each evening they are let out on the property free-ranging. I’m retired, and I spend a lot of time outside with them, I love my girls, and they are quite friendly. As you all know, they’ll march back into the run as daylight fades. Then, for their own protection, after they roost in the coop we close them up in the coop again until morning. They always have food and water in the coop, and in the covered run.
Inside the coop we use two of those small-mouth Mason jars for waterers, screwed into the little plastic tray. I have them lifted on a pedestal to keep litter and poop out, and it has been working very well. The girls seem happy and we haven’t bought any eggs since they started laying.
Now, we’re going through their first winter. As I write this the ladies are almost one-year old and we just started experiencing some minor freezing. Here, we don’t have what I would call real bad winters, and in the eight years we’ve been here we only had one winter where it went down to about ten. The lows are usually in the mid 20’s, and not too often.
We’ve been wanting to come up with a good way to keep the waterers inside the coop at night from freezing. I recently “Googled” a question on the internet and received this AI Generated quote as an answer: “A common trick to prevent a dog's water bowl from freezing in cold weather is to place a plastic bottle filled with salt water inside the bowl; the salt lowers the freezing point of the water in the bottle, helping to keep the surrounding water from fully freezing.” For the past two nights the temps here were reported to be in the high-20’s, and we had light ice on both coop waterers.
Tonight I am testing a Mason jar waterer out on the deck with a salt-water filled plastic bottle in the jar. [see pic 1] The lid on the small bottle is screwed on really tight, and despite the way the glass distorted the photo, the water flow is not blocked.
The local weather report says we’ll get a low of 24F tonight, and then warming into the high 30’s at night over the next few days. Of course the weather reports are always accurate, and I am looking forward to seeing the test results in the morning.
Monday, January 26th, 2026
This morning at 07:30 the thermometer on our back deck claims 29-degrees, and the Mason jar waterer is frozen in the tray and inside the glass jar. [see pic 2] When I shook the assembly a little bit there was no movement of water, indicating that the water was quite frozen in the tray and in the jar.
My conclusion is that the AI Generated answer to my search is completely fabricated, or maybe it came from a source that never actually tried their own suggestion. I’m wondering why it was mentioned as a “common trick,” when it obviously does not work. Maybe it only works in dog bowls.
We let our eight Cream Legbar hens out of the coop and into the run every morning, and then for a while each evening they are let out on the property free-ranging. I’m retired, and I spend a lot of time outside with them, I love my girls, and they are quite friendly. As you all know, they’ll march back into the run as daylight fades. Then, for their own protection, after they roost in the coop we close them up in the coop again until morning. They always have food and water in the coop, and in the covered run.
Inside the coop we use two of those small-mouth Mason jars for waterers, screwed into the little plastic tray. I have them lifted on a pedestal to keep litter and poop out, and it has been working very well. The girls seem happy and we haven’t bought any eggs since they started laying.
Now, we’re going through their first winter. As I write this the ladies are almost one-year old and we just started experiencing some minor freezing. Here, we don’t have what I would call real bad winters, and in the eight years we’ve been here we only had one winter where it went down to about ten. The lows are usually in the mid 20’s, and not too often.
We’ve been wanting to come up with a good way to keep the waterers inside the coop at night from freezing. I recently “Googled” a question on the internet and received this AI Generated quote as an answer: “A common trick to prevent a dog's water bowl from freezing in cold weather is to place a plastic bottle filled with salt water inside the bowl; the salt lowers the freezing point of the water in the bottle, helping to keep the surrounding water from fully freezing.” For the past two nights the temps here were reported to be in the high-20’s, and we had light ice on both coop waterers.
Tonight I am testing a Mason jar waterer out on the deck with a salt-water filled plastic bottle in the jar. [see pic 1] The lid on the small bottle is screwed on really tight, and despite the way the glass distorted the photo, the water flow is not blocked.
The local weather report says we’ll get a low of 24F tonight, and then warming into the high 30’s at night over the next few days. Of course the weather reports are always accurate, and I am looking forward to seeing the test results in the morning.
Monday, January 26th, 2026
This morning at 07:30 the thermometer on our back deck claims 29-degrees, and the Mason jar waterer is frozen in the tray and inside the glass jar. [see pic 2] When I shook the assembly a little bit there was no movement of water, indicating that the water was quite frozen in the tray and in the jar.
My conclusion is that the AI Generated answer to my search is completely fabricated, or maybe it came from a source that never actually tried their own suggestion. I’m wondering why it was mentioned as a “common trick,” when it obviously does not work. Maybe it only works in dog bowls.
