Winter – Beautiful Chaos

We got snow and some beautiful winter weather with low frost temperatures. To protect the bottom of the caravan against to much cold we collected snow and piled it up against the caravan to close the gab underneath. This way we can keep the wind out and it is a nice hide out for our cats.

We have icicles building on the outside of our windows. The windows do not close nicely everywhere, so there are some gaps. The extreme temperature difference between outside and inside makes for a lot of condensation on the inside of the windows. I need to wipe it of every day, but partially it already runs down the window and makes these nice icicles.

Inside the caravan we have it nice and warm. We still did not need to put the heater on its max. We did encounter some problems though. The drain of our small sink in the back was frozen and we could not use that. Obviously that is not a big issue, since we still have the sink in the kitchen, which did not freeze. A bigger problem was that our water source froze and we could not fetch water. Of course we already expected this and put some extra water in containers in our barn. The warmer wetter came just in time. Our water was used up right at the time we where able to get fresh water again.

Our new planted food forest needs a few years to grow before it will give any protection against the harsh winds we have here, so we needed to do something so our children can play outside protected against the worst of the wind.

So we have decided to turn this pile of straw into a sort of protective fencing.

We chose a spot direct beside the playtent of the children and beside the caravan. This spot is also already some what protected by a large stone building, so we only needed to close 3 sides with the straw bales.

We used the Tractor with front end loader to put the straw bales in place.

After closing two sides we brought a few tractor buckets of sand to make a hill in the middle. Our children love to play with sand.

After that we closed the last side leaving a small hole where we can walk trough.

We finished this project just in time, because that night we had a snow storm. The branches standing up are “trees” our oldest planted. He makes his own “food forest”.