November 2014

 OK, that photo should have been in October's entry.  Jeanne, at her Pippi Longstocking best, for Halloween.  She even wore this to her physical therapy job.  Linc dubbed it "Hippy Longstockings".  Go Jeanne!

 We made a bit more progress on the goat barn addition in early November, installing roofing and wall plates.

Also this month, we dug into our potato beds and found mixed results.  One bed provided 10 lbs of potatoes for every lb planted.  Great!  Another bed was only 2 to 1.  Hmm...  Both beds were prepped with the same technique, and grew the same variety.  Linc thinks he remembers that Jeanne weeded the bindweed from the higher producing bed, carefully untangling the bindweed from the potato plants, and that he weeded the bindweed from the poorly producing bed, quickly ripping the bindweed from the potato plants, damaging the potato vines in the process and figuring that they'd recover.  Looks like they didn't!  Well, we still managed to harvest 460 lbs, or about 6 lbs for every 1 lb planted, slightly better than the year before, so we're improving, and we've got lots of potatoes to eat for the winter, again!

The photo above shows our new mobile solar powered vehicle battery charging cart.  This had been used as a solar electric fence charging cart for the electrified poultry netting system we surround our pastured chickens with, until Linc decided to get a larger panel, install it directly on the chicken coop camper trailer, put the battery in the camper, and run a wire out to the fence charger (forgot to take photos of that, will include in next year's blog).  Now the chicken fence always has plenty of electricity (except for when the goats chew through the wires), we don't have to drag this cart around through the tall hay when we move the chickens, and we've got this mobile solar panel and charge controller that we can use to keep batteries charged up on infrequently used cars, tractor and backhoe.  Cool!

Later in November, Linc drove back down to Arizona to replace his brother Bill, who had been keeping Mom company while his sister Gretchen visited daughters and new grand-daughter in the upper midwest.  Mom's health was declining again, so Linc stayed down there at his mother's, getting out occasionally to explore the canyons at the base of the Mogollon Rim by mountain bike.