Freezing weather and gardening preparation

After a week long cold spell including ice, snow and lows in the single digits, we are expecting highs in the seventies this week!  Hooray!  Three of the garden squares have been prepared and it shouldn't take us too long to prepare four more.  We have two bags of red onion bulbs, two sets of 1015 onion sets from the Farmer's Market in Weatherford, seed potatoes from the H Brand feed store in Jacksboro and Asparagus crowns to plant this weekend.  We are so excited to finally be planting our asparagus bed.  The potatoes will be going in months earlier than last year, so we're hoping for a larger crop.  We also have lots of seeds that we hope to get in the ground this week.

Lacey is being milked once every other day and gave a scant quart yesterday.  I'm about to start skipping an extra day to finish drying her off.  I think I felt her baby kick the other day!  I can't wait to see the little guys.  I'm also interested to see if the feed we have will last the winter, now that we're not feeding Lacey as much for the milk.

The freezing (over 100 hours below freezing - pretty rare for our part of the state) weather caused one of our copper pipes leading to our upstairs hot water heater to freeze.  I thawed it out using a heater and of course, there was a hole!  Water rained down through the light fixtures of our master bathroom.  Great.  I ran to turn off the water and the hot water heater.  Also, I got to unplug the still running heater and drag it out of 2 inches of water by the cord!  We've repaired many PVC pipes through the years, but we had no experience with copper pipes.  After looking around on the internet, I decided we would try soldering a coupling on the pipe ourselves.  Unfortunately, the hole was located on a wall behind the hot water heater!  So to access the pipe (without removing the hot water heater), we had to lean over the top of the heater.  My arms were just long enough to touch the pipe.  Probably not the best circumstances to try out soldering for beginners.  Anyway, with the supplies borrowed from our neighbors (thank you, Chris for the propane torch and Terry for the pipe cutter), we attempted to fix the pipe Sunday (Superbowl) night.  We soldered one coupling and it leaked.  So we (I should say Jason) cut it out and tried a second one (always buy two - just in case!)  It was much more secure, but a drop still seeped every minute or so.  Grrr!  Mom and Dad thought they had pretty good luck with plumber's epoxy putty, so we tried reinforcing the coupling seams with putty - still seeping.  Added some more putty - still seeping.  Conclusion - plumber's putty doesn't work under pressure.  Dad's pipe was still leaking, as well, so I advised him to buy a 'sharkbite' or 'gatorbite' cap which doesn't require soldering.  They got one and I pushed it on the end of their pipe - no more leak.  I went looking for a 'sharkbite' coupling for my leak!  Today, I finally found something that I think will work (of course, they were out of couplings - we Texans are just not prepared for such cold weather!)  So perhaps tonight the water will be on again permanently.  By the way, I did not forget to buy insulation to add to the obviously inadequate insulation around the hot water heater and its pipes.  Also, I'm planning on an attic excursion to find out what kind of insulation is protecting the rest of the pipes up there!