September 2015

September - harvesting and building!

It was a really cool and rainy spring and summer, so the veggies were slow to ripen in the garden, but once they started too, it was really hard to keep up with it all.  Eat it, give it away, dry it, can it, freeze it, root cellar, we tried everything, and somehow, it all got used.  We averaged 6 lbs of zucchini a day for a month or so.  Here's a sampler of our yearly total for some of the summer harvest from garden and hoophouse:

Cooked greens - 340 lbs

Salad greens - 65 lbs

Wax beans - 16 lbs

Zucchini - 297 lbs

Tomatoes - 270 lbs

Rhubarb - 27 lbs

With all of the rain and irrigation water, the pasture stayed greener longer this year.  The goats enjoyed all that greenery and Jeanne happily struggled to keep up with all of the milk, making yogurt, cheeses, cream, butter, and gradually taking on more customers.  The total for the year ended up being a little over 4000 lbs of milk!  Abundance is stressful in a ways, because you don't want it to go to waste, but it has a much nicer feel to it than scarcity.

Meanwhile, Linc kept building and digging.  He maneuvered the backhoe in behind the cabin and began excavating for an addition on two sides for a two room root cellar, a solar battery/outhouse room and an attached outdoor kitchen for summer cooking without having to carry pots up the hill to the current summer kitchen.

The backhoe also came in handy for digging up one of the main irrigation valves that was leaking.  Linc took it out, found nothing wrong, put it back in, and it hasn't leaked since.  This seems to happen a lot for him; take it apart, look at it, put it back together, and it's fixed, but no idea why! 

He also used the backhoe to excavate for the next winter's growing beds for the mobile hoophouse.  Because we were down to caliche (clay and rock-hard alkali mineral precipitate), he dug down two or three feet for each bed, threw cottonwood logs and branches to create sunken bed hugelkultur (see http://www.richsoil.com/hugelkultur/), backfilled, and then mixed compost and soil amendments into the top 4".  These beds were then planted with cold-hardy winter greens, carrots, and beets and left until we could find time to de-anchor the hoophouse, roll it down the rails over the new beds (once the tomatoes were done in the summer beds), and anchor it back down against the winter winds.

 

August 2015

August is the start of harvesting abundance at Frugalbundance, and this was our best year ever for the garden, by far.

Here's our garlic harvest, some of the biggest bulbs we've ever grown, about 360 of them.  I'm thinking, if it takes two wheelbarrows to carry the garlic, we might be finally growing enough!

The squash plants and weeds had a free for all in the garden to see who could grow the fastest, and the thankfully, the squash won.  Other than weed wacking the paths until the squash vines made that impossible, and Gerald doing some great hand weeding of garlic, onions, strawberries and potatoes back in May and June, we let the weeds and food plants battle it out, mainly because we didn't really have the time to do otherwise.

This was a really wet year for us, and we had plenty of water for the entire season, which for us is a rarity.

The shed got enclosed, and the first of two side sheds put on, with plenty of shelving for storage.  The happy pack rats moved right in, but only in the outside portion.  Linc finally emptied all of his tools out of the Toyota moving truck that we drove here five years ago, and spent a few days rediscovering and organizing them inside the much roomier shed.  Wow, to be able to find tools and supplies again - so nice!

July 2015

Welcome to July!  We tend to have our noses to the grindstone a lot here.  It's our choice - there's just a lot that we'd like to accomplish.  But we're also aware of how much beauty there is waiting for us to explore, only minutes from the door.  Once in awhile we're able to get away for a few hours of that.  Here, we're on the backside of Mt. Gunnison, coming back down after running out of time to try and climb an unmarked route up to an alpine lake.  Had to get back to take care of the animals, but we look forward to coming back here.

One of the many things we want to create on our homestead is a place to store things out of the weather, so Linc and Gerald started work on a storage shed (in background) after finishing installing the solar PV array on the new pole mount.

And the garden started to explode with summer growth, especially now that there we had domesticated turkeys wandering around eating all those grasshoppers that decimated last year's plants.

Our lovable neighbor Zoe stops by frequently on her daily dog walks.  Here, she and Jeanne practice their communication skills.

June 2015

At the end of May, I (Linc) flew to Boston and drove up Rt 95 to Maine, then onto Rt 1 along the coast to The Medomak River area to attend his mother's internment ceremony with family.  The ceremony brought up more familiar feelings of grief and loss experienced over the last year or two, while at the same time, being with family again stimulated a lot of happiness and healing.  The drive up the coast, on a beautiful spring day, smelling the ocean again, and stopping to re-experience familiar sights, sounds and smells, was intoxicating.  The following two youtube videos might convey the sense of wonder I felt at the lushness and beauty of the mid-coast region.

The first is of a small stream that flows into a salt water tidal pool off of the Medomak River in Waldoboro, Maine.  A few years back, Jeanne and I kayaked up into this pool at high tide during a two day sea kayak exploration of the tidal portion of the Medomak River, part of Muscongus Bay.  We're still eating the last of the seaweed that we harvested and dried on that trip!

https://youtu.be/hdbB_kGhpNs

The second is a view out onto a portion of Muscongus Bay from Martin's Point, in Friendship, Maine.  The strangely shaped rock in the foreground is known as Lobster Rock (see the resemblance?), the small island offshore is Ram Island, one of many islands that are open to camping as part of the Maine Island Trail, the land across the bay is a two mile-long island called Frienship Long Island, and the white cottage across the road is the Vannah cottage that my family spent summer vacations when we were kids.

https://youtu.be/Cq2kWwYvkwI

The day after Mom's burial, the weather turned to rain, and it rained fairly steadily for the remaining 3 days of the five day trip.  That was a good reminder of what led us to move back out to Colorado, and it felt good to get home to the dry, sunny west.  Here's our garden in June.  We started all of our squash in the cabin greenhouse this year to try to give them a headstart after being decimated by grasshoppers the year before, and they handled the transplanting really well
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Also, in an effort to keep the slugs, pillbugs and grasshoppers in the garden under control, we introduced ducks and turkeys to the farm this year.  The turkeys were spectacular at grasshopper control.  The ducks seemed too young to have much of an impact yet, but they sure did enjoy our irrigation reservoir pool whenever we could manage to catch them all and toss them in there (they could walk out on a wooden plank when they wanted, but tended to stay in the pool all day unless we shoo'd them out.



We use a ton of hay mulch in our garden, and get much of it from used goat bedding, but have been realizing that we can always use more, and that someday we might try to grow and put up our own winter hay.  Linc bought an old side bar sickle mower, used it to mow a section of field, then borrowed a friend's antique dump rake to try and rake it up into a pile.  We started out with the dump rake behind the Toyota pickup, with Linc driving and Gerald in the back pulling the dump cord to drop the raked hay where we wanted it.  It must have looked pretty comical t see us driving around the field with Gerald in the back yanking on the dump cord, with the rake clanking, leaving piles of hay scattered around.



While this worked, it seemed really inefficient somehow, so the next step was to try pulling the rake behind our friend Ryan's tractor. That worked better, more maneuverable, and one person could do the job.



But, at best, then we had several big piles of hay that were difficult to move, and we decided to keep our eye out for a more modern setup.

Linc ended up finding a package deal, with a 1950's vintage Massey Ferguson tractor, a ten year old wheel rake, and a 1970's vintage John Deere baler.  The tractor needed (and still does) some work, and we have no idea how all of this will work together, but if we have time this coming year, we'll give it all a try.  I don't seem to have photos of the rake or baler, but this one below shows a range of technology (1950's tractor, 1960's tractor, and new millenium solar PV.

May 2015

In late April, we had our first Wwoofer (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms intern) stay with us for a week.  He was a photographer from France, named Antione Bruy, checking out people living off the grid in the U.S.  I don't have a photo of him but he has a lot of us!  Antione helped Linc pour a foundation for our solar panel pole mount and installed some of the new garden fence.  Then, in early May, our second Wwoofer, Gerald arrived from Denver in his electric Fiat (it took him 2 days and for stops for charging to get here over the passes).  Here's Gerald on his second day, getting ready to ride the backhoe with Linc a few miles up a jeep road to a friend's property to excavate for a house foundation, mountain bikes for the trip back down in case we needed to leave the backhoe there overnight.

That backhoe has turned out to be very useful here.  We found the loader was the perfect thing for tensioning new fencing.

The hoophouse greens came back to life after semi dormancy all winter, most of them starting to flower, but still providing plenty of greens and scallions for early spring salads.  Everything on the farm looked better this year, between the added help from interns Antione and Gerald, and from a day in late April when our neighbor Dev showed up with about 10 students from his Adventure Semester program.  In a few hours, they planted several potato beds, weeded and mulched the hoophouse (below), and fired up our cob pizza oven and had a pizza party.

May is one of the most colorful months here at Frugalbundance, and as always, we never tire of the view of the North Fork Valley below and the West Elk Mountains on the other side.  It never looks the same and it's always interesting when you step outside and look.

April 2015

Spring?  Time for goat kids!

Here's the video:

https://youtu.be/PWLRLWGV5Jo

Violet had her first kids, two very cute doelings.  Jeanne named them Peppermint and Lavender.

Cute kids!

Violet was a good and definitely nervous mother.

Meanwhile, Linc puttered at adding a hot water heat exchanger to the stove pipe on the cookstove.

I'm sure there are more efficient ways of using wood, and I do intend to find them eventually, but this 100 year old stove is going to be hard to beat.  In the photo above, it's morning, and the stove is heating the cabin, heating hot water, cooking home fries, an omelette, veggies, making chicken stock, heating milk for processing into yogurt and baking squash in the oven.

We ordered 10 Indian Runner ducklings.  Linc picked them up at the post office one morning, and put them under a broody hen,  and removed the eggs she'd been brooding.  She sure was excited to have her "chicks" suddenly hatch, but she'd panic whenever they jumped in the water dish and started acting like ducklings.  She did OK as a mother duck, but we lost quite a few to a variety of predators and their tendency to wander off and get lost.  Ended up getting a second hatch that was put under another broody chicken, but kept in a smaller enclosure until they were really ready to be out and about.  Two from the first hatch made it to adulthood, and five of the second.

Whenever we had a spare minute, we'd put in a few more rails on the new garden fence.  The green mesh fabric shown in the above picture is the old fence.  The one will be slabwood on the lower half, and field fence (woven wire grid) on the upper four feet).

We also did some work on the irrigation system, installing an underground valve box for our garden takeoff so that we'd be able to use the system in the shoulder season without having things freeze and break.

Spring barn cleaning.  We use a deep bedding method during the winter.  We keep adding bedding throughout the winter.  The lower layers start to compost and provide heat for the goats lying on the dry newer hay.  This works well, but resulted in one huge cleanout job in the spring.  We ended up using the front end loader to transport all that used bedding to the compost pile area.

It took five hours and something like 25 bucket loads to clean out that barn, forming these two enormous piles.  Lots of mulch for the garden this year.

That's our 4" soil block press tool, and the resulting blocks.  The square indentations are for 2" soil blocks to fit into.  We start our seedlings in the 2" blocks, then stick the 2" blocks into the 4" once they've all germinated and grown their first set of true leaves.

Wow, we still can't believe that Roger Daltrey from The Who came to visit us.  But, why is he wearing a skirt?