December 2011

We don’t have any pictures from the farm for December.  Instead, here’s a picture of another project going on in our lives these days.  We invested some of our remaining savings in a small foreclosed house down valley a ways, in hopes that it might generate a little income.  A great couple responded to our ad to rent it, but Linc’s got quite a bit of work to do in the next week or two to get it ready for them.  The hope is that the rent from this, plus a little bit of whatever work we can get on the side to make up the difference, combined with continuing to learn to live on less money, while working on growing more abundance and diversity of food and life on the farm, and relationships in the neighborhood and in the larger valley community, might be a good way to go.
It’s been a cold month, with temps down in the single digits at night (cold for here), and a little snow.  On Christmas Eve, our neighbor Dev was walking by our place and saw something strange.  Linc and Jeanne, working out in the snow covered garden with gardening fork, dirt shovel and snow shovel, and a bucket.  “What in heck?” he probably thought.  He walked over and said, “Now that’s some hard core gardening!”  We were out digging up beets and parsnips for roasted veggies to go with a chicken we were cooking up for a Christmas meal that Dev and Jean shared with us.  Which brings us to the next photo.

The best thing about life here is the ‘hood, as Michelle calls it.  This is the nicest group of people we’ve ever lived around.  Here’s a shot from one of the potluck dinners the community has been having since sometime in July.  This one probably is from July.  From left to right; Linc, Jean, Eric, Emily, Michelle, Jaquelyn, Zoe, Jenica, Molly, Ben, Jack.  Missing from photo are Silvia, Nicoya, Sareya, Kahlia, Tyler, Colin, another Molly, Holden, Dev, Jeanne, Jordan, Pete, Siobhan, Randy, Sally, Cooper, Elizabeth and Robert.  Wow, are that many people in this neighborhood?  Nice.
Have a great year everyone.  Hope to see you all in 2012, and may the Mayan calendar be wrong, wrong, wrong if it’s forecasting the end of humanity in 2012, and right, right, right if it’s forecasting a change in consciousness to something even better!

On that note, we leave you with this link to a youtube video we posted featuring two of our goats, Gandalf and Eggplant, in a moment of mutual adoration.  Gandalf and Eggplant sure do like each other don't they?

November 2011

 

The only problem with trying to collect leaves for compost or garden in the fall is…goats will always find them, no matter where you put them.  Goats love leaves!

We picked a few bushels of Red Delicious apples in exchange for fresh cider at Art and Hillary’s early in the fall, then a few more bushels of Red and Golden Delicious at our friend Barbe’s in exchange for a some winter squash from the garden, then five 50 lb sacks of wonderful Rome apples in exchange for a some fresh Chevre goat cheese at Mary and Bobby’s orchard.  The Romes keep well in the root cellar, but the Red and Golden Delicious needed to be canned, frozen or dried before they went bad (well, or eaten, which we tried to do).  This required the construction of a second dehydrator rack to put up on the roof of the goat barn (where the goats couldn’t jump on it for fun).  We make these racks from window screen with hardware cloth backing attached to a big wooden frame, with a salvaged sliding glass door window over the top.  Greens and herbs dry best in the dark inside our solar dehydrator (see our High Mountain Homestead blog for construction of that), but fruit, tomatoes and squash dry best in direct sunlight.

 

Having grown all that food this past summer, we decided to get ambitious, and more than doubled the size of our garden this November.  The first two sections in the foreground are the old garden, and stretching out to the horizon are another 18 beds, each 3’ wide by about 38’ long. 

In a hurry as usual, we made the expansion using our typical sheet mulching methods, but this time decided to forego spreading newspaper or cardboard on the ground first.  Instead, we used our truck and trailer to haul several loads of horse manure in, before putting up the new fence.  We shoveled the manure from the truck and trailer directly onto the field, then just covered it with straw, moldy hay, leaves, whatever we could scavenge for mulch, and left it for the worms to work on over the winter.  Sometime this winter, we’ll also scatter the contents of a 55 gallon drum full of mixed greensand, rock phosphate, and glacial rock powders onto the beds to let it soak in with the melting snow in the spring. 

We omitted the cardboard this year because we’ve found that our most persistent weed, field bindweed comes right up through cardboard, so why go through all the effort?  Most organic growers around here that we’ve spoken to seem to pretty much concluded that you can’t really fight bindweed, unless you have a really small garden and a lot of time to pull it up every day for several years.  Besides, people reason, it’s bringing up lots of minerals from way down in the soil, which makes it a great bio-accumulator.  So, we live with it.

We ended up taking down all of our old garden fencing, and put up a new fence around the 155’ long by 55’ wide garden.  The new fence consists of 36” high field fence on t-posts with a top wire at 48”, corner “H” braces made of t-posts with special clips (quicker and cheaper than using cedar posts and a post hole auger on rented tractor).  Every few posts is 8’ high instead of 4’ high to allow for three strands of salvaged electric ribbon tape (but not hooked up to electricity) spaced every foot or so, as a visual barrier to keep elk and deer from leaping in.  At the bottom, we plan on installing chicken wire, skirted out onto the ground and up along the bottom foot or so of field fence, to keep the rabbits and prairie dogs out.  A frugal version of a “real” garden fence, but it seems to be working so far.

Here’s our goat herd this year.  From left to right we have Buddy (wethered companion to Gandalf), Gandalf the breeding buck, Eggplant’s two girls Sox and No Sox, and Phoebe.  Phoebe’s two girls, Flicker and Wren have moved down the hill to our neighbor’s Pete and Siobhan, where they spend their days running with two Arabian horses, two German Shepherds, and several chickens.  Gandalf goes down on scheduled dates, so there should be some new goat kids down there this spring too.

Now, how we are supposed to kill and eat these cute little ones, we haven’t quite figured out yet.  Sox and No Sox discovered the hay stash in our portable garage the other day.  They sure are cute, mischievous, friendly goats.

Our goat barn rainwater catchment system.  Hard to see unless you click on the image to blow up the photo, but the pipe leading from roof gutter to large tank at left has a tee with a valved pipe leading to the stock tank at middle right.  That way, we can choose which to fill, stock tank or the big cube (which has a hose to fill the stock tank from).

October 2011

I think Jeanne might be really happy about this beet!

One of the first firings of our new cob oven.  Lesson learned – if you put too much wood in it, the flames can get a little intense.  Good thing we’ve got a little metal on the underside of the roof.

And here are a few things ready to go into that oven.  Roast veggies, veggie and goat cheese pizza.

One problem with eating outside is everyone thinks you should share.

Our first pizzas from the new cob oven!  Basil pesto, garden veggies, goat cheese.  Delicious!

After the pizzas, we baked two loaves of bread, two pumpkin pies, a pan of roast veggies, and a chicken.  All of this cooked on one two hour firing of the oven.

Down the road, we noticed several trees full of wild plums.  The owner of the trees didn’t want anything to do with them, having had her share over the years, I guess. On several occasions over the next few weeks, we’d stop the car and fill a couple of buckets of plums, ending up with about 60 lbs.  What to do with them, they all had these big, hard pits, way too fiddly to cut them out by hand.  Linc had the idea of borrowing a cherry pitter.  It worked so well that we bought a second one so that we could both be pitting at the same time.  A little messy, but well worth it.  We ended up canning a few jars, eating some for breakfast, and drying several gallon bags full for winter.

The field peas grew really well, and we ended up hand harvesting a couple gallons worth to throw back out on a larger portion of the field next spring (after coating them with a legume inoculants this time) in hopes that they’ll grow into a nice big crop of nitrogen fixing field peas, helping restore the soil.

We also managed to get both end walls of the greenhouse in filled with light straw-clay, then a rough coat of plaster over the east wall, a bit of finish plaster on that wall, and the inside of the greenhouse all finish plastered.  It is coming out nice, and (as it turned out when I wrote this in December), made a big difference in keeping the greenhouse and the cabin both much warmer in the middle of winter.

The October garden.  We ended up harvesting a total of $2900 worth of produce from the garden this year (had to keep track anyway for an irrigation grant we’re working on).  The goats gave us another $1900 worth of milk, yogurt and cheese, and the chickens, about $400 worth of eggs and meat.  Towards fall you start feeling really thankful and appreciative of abundance on a farm.  We still have a long way to go before we’re able to grow all of our own food, but we’re headed in that direction, and it shouldn’t be long before we’re at least growing enough extra of those things that we can grow that we can use the surplus to barter, or sell for cash, to buy those things we can’t grow here.  That’s the goal anyway!

Sun dried tomatoes anybody?

Went for a hike up Mt. Lamborn across the valley with Holden, who interned next door at the High Desert School for Sustainable Studies.  Didn’t quite make it to the top, but it was nice to get up high.

Then it was apple season.  We ended up buying this antique cider press that weighed about 400 lbs and needed a lot of repair.  We got it more or less functional, and our neighbors Hillary and Art offered to let us pick some of the apples in Art’s orchard in exchange for some cider.  Friends Zoe and Colin came over to help run the grinder and press.  We developed a good working team, with Zoe cranking on the grinder, Jeanne feeding apples, Colin cranking on the press, and Linc, well, what was Linc doing.  Taking pictures, yeah that’s it!  And testing the cider…

Just before the first big frost, we ran out in the dark with headlamps and wheelbarrows, and harvested 250 lbs of pumpkins and winter squash.  Those are Hubbard Squash on the lower level, left.  Some weighed close to 20 lbs each!  We stored them upstairs in the “office”.

After drinking cider and giving cider away, we took the remainder, bottled it, put cheesecloth on it to let it breathe, and left it to turn into raw apple cider vinegar.  As I write this in December, it’s just starting to taste like it’s ready to be capped and stored.  Great stuff.

We kept picking apples after cleaning up the cider press for the year, and started to make applesauce, then spread a bunch on dehydrator racks in the greenhouse.

August 2011

Coming home from a trip to Flagstaff to celebrate Linc’s mother’s 90th birthday, we car camped by Comb Ridge, near the town of Bluff, Utah, and hiked to a couple of beautiful petro glyph panels near the San Juan River.  These ancient people lived in some beautiful spots.


Like this one, in Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, one of dozens of ruins we walked past on a nice six mile loop hike.

Continuing towards home, we car camped near Telluride, and hiked up to an old, mostly abandoned mining town near Alta Lakes.  I think that is Mount Wilson and Lizard Head in the background.

Back home, the first layer of cob had dried enough on the oven that we could open the door and scoop out the sand form.

Leaving behind a thin layer of newspaper that we’d placed over the sand so that the cob wouldn’t stick to the sand mound.  This burned off during the first firing of the oven.

Wait, gotta put in a gratuitous poultry photo.  Here’s the proud papa, Brownie, with his wonderful hen, Chanterelle the Chanticler, and the six chicks she brooded, hatched and raised, teaching them all about the ways of finding food on the farm.

Here, we’ve added a three inch insulating layer of high-straw-content cob to the oven.

And followed that up with a finish coat of plaster.  Done!  When can we start cooking pizzas in this thing?  Well, it took a good week to get dry enough to do that.  Good thing we live in a dry climate!

Linc’s college buddy, Rob, showed up on a motorcycle with sleeping bag, clothes, laptop computer and a guitar even, for a visit.  Eggplant’s kids really liked him (OK, Eggplant’s kids really like everybody, but it’s a good photo).  We had a little neighborhood get together while Rob was here with a potluck dinner and a music circle afterwards.  Fun time for everyone.

Jeanne and I get out every few days for a run, hike, or bike ride.  This time, we drove up the road a few miles and biked along the Overland Canal in the Aspens.   We had a nice ride and harvested lots of stinging nettle, dandelion and plantain to take down and dry at the farm for winter teas and soups.  Also discovered a nice patch of Osha to come back to in the fall for the winter roots, great immune system boosters.

The greenhouse roof comes in handy as a place to dry yellow squash and zucchini for winter soups.  When not using the space under the polycarbonate clear panels for drying racks, the white rigid board insulation panels (covered with aluminum foil on the side facing the sun) can be slid down to either block the sun in the summer, or trap the heat in on winter nights.  This greenhouse is turning out to be a nice, multifunctional addition to our little cabin.

The garden in August.  Lots of summer squash and zucchini, bolting lettuce and spinach and mustards, plenty of kale and chard, strawberries, beets, a few early dug potatoes, 150 garlic bulbs, lots of basil, beans, tomatoes, cucumbers.

July 2011

Jeanne, pouring footings for the new summer kitchen.

East half of the garden.  It's come a long way in a month.  Cabbages, summer and winter squash, raspberries, blackberries, horseradish, rhubarb, pumpkins, strawberries, asparagus and sea kale in this section.

Half of west garden.  This section has corn, beans, one winter squash, parsnips, carrots, tomatoes, garlic, beets.  The remaining part to the west has more corn, more tomatoes, kale, lettuce, spinach, cucumbers, melons, wax beans, green beans, lima beans, millet, oats (for oatstraw infusions), turnips and rutabegas, and outside the fence, more tomatoes, a grape, and along the top and bottom of the fence, peas and sunflowers.  Above the garden, towards the camera, we have a few more beds with calendula, stinging nettle, comfrey, lavender, lots of basil, nasturtiums, yarrow, lemon balm, sage, oregano, thyme, and I’ve forgotten what else.

Here, west of the fenced garden, we experimented with seeding things in a portion of the field that had been tilled but not seeded by the hired custom farmer.  Linc planted rye, oats, quinoa, three heritage varieties of corn, black tepary beans, field peas, fava beans.  Some seeds he hand broadcast, others he planted with a stick or a thumb, others he raked a bit of soil over them, and most he got a thin layer of straw spread on top.  This got sporadic water through the end of July, but not much at all after that, very little attention, no weeding.  The field peas did great, a few corn plants came up a foot or so and stopped, a couple of the rye made seed heads, fava beans came up but didn’t produce seed.  In other words, this field is hurting for fertility.  We’re having a soil test done before next year’s planting season.  The field below, which was seeded to dryland pasture mix and Ladak Alfalfa, did much better than we’d hoped.  The seeding job was really irregular, so there were bare patches and green patches, but the alfalfa and grasses did pretty well, especially the alfalfa, which should help restore some fertility to the soil.  We also had a great crop of wild sunflowers, primrose, prickly lettuce, bindweed and a wild mustard, all of which were appreciated by our goats whenever we let them out there (nearly every day).

On July 11th, Eggplant gave birth to her first kids, two incredibly cute little half Boer-half Nubian doelings.  Here Jeanne is weighing one of them.

Full moon rising over Lamborn through the goat barn.

Phoebe, Eggplant and their kids, lounging by the barn.

Meanwhile, the summer kitchen has progressed with a peeled pole timber frame, a roof made of pallets and 2x4’s with recycled metal roofing, and an old cook stove for cooking summer meals on.

Eggplant turned out to be such a good mother that she wouldn’t leave her kids to graze in the field unless Jeanne offered to babysit for her.  Jeanne would bring the kids up to the cabin so that she could work on things while she was playing foster goat Mom.  The kids would explore for a few minutes and then curl up in a corner for a nap.

Our next project was to build a wood fired earthen (cob) oven.  It took awhile to decide what to use for a base, wanting to get the oven itself up at waist level or higher, and not wanting to spend a lot of time mortaring rocks together or spending a bundle of cinder blocks.  Our solution was to mortar one course of salvaged cinder blocks in a square, fill that with rocks, then put two layers of straw bales on top, covered with a thick layer of earthen plaster (which Jeanne is happily slathering on in this photo).

The finished cob oven base.

We now interrupt this cob oven photo series for an obligatory cute goat picture.

To insulate the oven firebrick floor (which can attain temperatures of over 800 F) from the strawbale base, we built a cob retaining ring and filled that with perlite.

The perlite got an earthen plaster cap, which is drying as Jeanne cooks a summer meal on the outdoor cook stove.

Next, we added the firebrick hearth, and discovered that we had to build a temporary support shelf to hold the front row of bricks up (later we replaced this wood shelf with cob).  On top of the hearth, we put a cardboard form to use as temporary support for a mortared common brick arching doorway.

Our neighbor Zoe, and HDCSS intern Molly, came over to help Jeanne and I create the oven doorway, mortaring the bricks in place with an earthen mortar (probably should have used cement mortar in retrospect, but it seems to be holding up pretty well so far).

A second intern, Ben showed up to assist with the finishing touches to the doorway.

Followed by construction of a wet sand mound.  The sand is sculpted to the exact shape and height you want for your oven, then covered with 4 to 6” of earthen cob, which is allowed to dry.  Afterwards, the cardboard doorway form is removed and the sand is scooped out, leaving a completed oven.

Ben, Molly and Zoe applying the first layer of cob over the sand form.

Leaving the cob oven to dry for a few days, we’re back to gardening.  We might actually get some heads of cabbage this year!

Things are really growing in the west garden.

And the zucchini and yellow squash are taking over the east garden.