Freezing rain

The weather event we most dread – other than twisters and hurricanes which are pretty unlikely here – is freezing rain. The forecast yesterday was for up to 10” of snow followed by wind followed by freezing rain followed by more snow. We made preparations to deal with these threats. What we got was a sifting of snow, some wind, some freezing rain, and now its raining again this evening but it is staying in liquid form. The ice wasn’t too bad to deal with and was already softening when we went out to do chores.

The worst part of the day for Don was getting the net-wrap off the 4 bales that he was feeding.  Hehad to beat on the icy surface with a shovel handle that travels with me in the tractor cab for just that purpose. Net-wrap is very light plastic webbing that we have started to wrap our large round bales with. It holds the hay in snugly so that a thatch is formed that prevents rain from going more than a ½” or so into the bale. This allows us to store bales in long rows – we call it tootsie-rolling – rather than having to tarp the hay. A lot of labour is saved with this technology and we will no longer have to buy the large tarpaulins that we’ve used since 1978. We should make the time to repair all our tarps and store them away for future use. We have been stuffing the used net-wrap into heavy duty plastic garbage bags and we hope that it can be re-cycled.