12 AMISH Things We Do Before the First HARD FREEZE

🔗 Save $6,000 A Year with My Complete Amish Home-Saving Method I teach: https://eliasyoder.com There is a morning coming and you do not know which one it is. You will come down and the grass will be white and stiff, the puddle in the lane will have a lid on it, and the ground will have gone hard as a road overnight. And every job you meant to do outside this autumn, you will now be doing in the cold, or badly, or not at all. That is the part nobody tells you. It is not that the jobs are difficult. Most are an hour each. It is that they have a deadline, the deadline does not announce itself, and some of them cannot be done after that morning arrives. My grandmother taught me with a list on the back of the pantry door, and she taught it by not saying a word. Jobs down the left in pencil, crossed through as each was done. I was fifteen and had reached the age where a boy knows what wants doing without being written at, so I let two of them go. The grading at the back of the house and draining the line out to the trough. The freeze came the second week of October, three weeks early and hard, and by morning the ground was iron and the line had split. She never said one word about it. She simply did not cross those two off, and that list stayed on the back of that door all winter. The twelve, in the order of what you lose if you leave them: The outside tap, and why a connected hose causes more burst pipes than anything else Your main water shutoff, and why you want to turn it once while nothing is wrong Pipes in cold places, and how to thaw one safely if it does freeze The stove and chimney, and why October gets an appointment and December does not Firewood, covered on top only and open at the sides Gutters, ice dams, and where those upstairs ceiling stains come from The ground against the foundation, which you cannot move after it freezes Grit rather than salt, ready before you need it What must not freeze in an unheated outbuilding Light and heat that depend on nothing A week of food and water, and a way to cook it without power The animals, and the neighbours The part the list does not show is the order. The ground, the grading, the gutters, the outside tap, the chimney, anything on a roof and anything needing a tradesman all have a last day. Do those first. The pipe sleeves, the lamps, the food and the torch can be done in December in your slippers. And the ten minutes nobody spends: walk slowly round the outside of the house looking at nothing in particular. Loose siding, a cracked pane, a gutter hanging, a gap under a door. Everything on that walk is small in October and large in January. Not all of this applies to everybody. If you rent, half of it is somebody else's to do and your job is to tell them in writing and early. And none of it is a reason to panic or spend much. There is a trade in frightening people in October and I want no part of it. Today, go outside and take the hose off the tap. Then write your own list, on paper, where you will see it, and cross them off as you go. A list in your head is not a list. It is a worry. Tell me in the comments which one you had forgotten entirely, because there is always one. And if you have told me your county before, tell me instead when your first hard freeze usually comes and whether it has ever caught you out early. Next time we go to the thing underneath half of this, because a well with no power in it is not a dead well. I gathered the whole of it into a book at eliasyoder dot com. The people who built this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it. #EliasYoder #WinterPrep #FrozenPipes #OutsideTap #IceDams #Firewood #HomeMaintenance #Winterize #OldWays #SelfReliance #Homesteading #Preparedness #HouseholdTips #Autumn #DIY