Freeze Warning

Oh, my little chickie babies are NOT going to be happy tonight.  The official "killing frost" hits tonight, taking with it what remains of my garden.  Pretty soon there won't be fresh tomatoes to munch on, or grass, or weeds...

I'm not sure what I'm gonna do this winter.  I'm thinking about starting some tomatoes from seed and trying to keep them going under the grow light in the basement.  Or maybe I can till up the ground a bit and plant a bunch of lettuce - they love lettuce and it grows pretty well in the cold.

As the nights get cooler, the kids don't really want to come out of the coop.  Now when I open up the door in the morning, they look at me like "yeah, I'm not leaving this cozy coop."  When they do come out, everybody fluffs up their feathers and they look like they're wearing feathered puffy coats.  I haven't started knitting for them but I'm tempted.

Right now I've got the heat lamp from when they were babies in the coop and it seems to be working pretty well.  Some people are really anti-heater in a coop and I can understand why (electrical fires are never fun), but they don't have a coop that's getting near-constant breezes from the river.  Lemme tell ya, it gets really really cold.  If the heat lamp was good enough when they were babies, it's good enough now.  It's securely clamped to one of the perches and away from any bedding.  The kids love it, they take turns toasting themselves in front of it, like the cats and dog do with the registers.

FYI, if you get a heat lamp, don't get one with a Teflon coating.  Someone wrote in to Mother Earth News in the current issue (Oct-Nov. 2012, I think) and said when they tried one, several chickens died overnight from the fumes.  Not good, and I'm really rethinking using nonstick coatings on pans.