Saturday was the day to check the farm after the historic Winter storm.

There was still ice on the steps.
And on the North side of the house, in the shade, there was still some melting snow. The ground was also super saturated everywhere from the melting snow and runoff. The house was fine, thankfully.
The water heater stayed unfrozen, we had rigged up some lights on old school hooded reflectors. They hang with a clamp and as fate would have it the doorknobs in the bathroom (where the water heater is) were shaped to have a foolproof way to mount it with zero danger of falling off. This angle looks like it's close to the door but it wasn't. There wasn't anything flammable nearby. Even with the rolling blackouts on the grid, it was on long enough to keep the area warm and above freezing in the house (small bathroom with both doors closed).
The water was turned on to see if any obvious leaks. We didn't see any but we decided to turn it back off until we could take a closer look by crawling under the house next weekend and inspect the pipes for small leaks that are not so obvious. The p-traps in the the sinks were fine with the RV antifreeze inside.
Looks like the house dodged the freezing problems. 2nd Family had one burst pipe under their house. When we're not in the house, it's easy to drain, flush and shut off water. When you live there, even with heat on, you have to have water and then you battle the temps but the pipes can still freeze.
It was time to uncover the citrus trees to see how dead they were (ice still around the outside of them).
This is the lime tree. Dead. Dead dead. I bent a couple of branches and they snapped right off. I figured that was going to be repeated two more times.
This is the orange tree.
If I didn't see it with my own eyes I wouldn't have believed it. It's still green! The branches don't have any visible freeze damage. I could be wrong, maybe it will never leaf out again or next weekend it will melt into a puddle, ha, but we were still cautiously surprised. We have NO idea how this survived single digit temps. I never put the Christmas lights on the timer under the cloth because we figured even if they were 10 degrees warmer with those turned on, it wouldn't help with a low of 8 or 9. Somehow it looks like it survived.
And here is the lemon tree.
It's ALSO green. Well, kind of. There seem to be a few brown ends but for the most part it is green. Again, we have no idea how it survived. It could still die and we're planning for that occurrence. But maybe we'll be pleasantly surprised? Heck, one out of three would be great. Two out of three would be amazing!
We're rethinking the citrus though. We'll see what survives. They are still so small and frail and haven't grown much since we put them in the raised beds. They do well and then are set back by a freeze. These are 2 years old. If the orange makes it, since it's in the middle, we'll leave it and do something different with the lemon and lime.
Stay tuned.
Remember the beautiful peach tree blossoms from a couple of weeks ago?
Yeah, not so pretty now. We had read that they were hardy to about -25 degrees so we didn't bother to cover it for this freeze. Not sure if we made a mistake there. I guess we'll see what happens in a couple of months.
Come back tomorrow for some fun pictures of the snow at the farm. 2nd Family took some for us and then the trail cam captured a beautiful one of the front yard.
MONDAY UPDATE:
They citywide boil water notice was lifted!
We've followed the instructions and things are back to normal...though we did think twice about the first few times of using it but they say it has passed all the tests.