December 2016

Early in December, we had some nice storms up higher, followed by beautiful blue sky days.  We drove up to McClure Pass with our telemark skis a couple times to enjoy a few turns.  Up there, the sky wasn't just blue, it actually had a purplish tint.  After I got home and saw it on the camera uploads, I though something had happened with our $13 Ebay-purchased digital camera, but the next time up, there it was again.  So pretty, and the skiing was spectacular.  Here's a link to a couple of Youtube videos I uploaded, one of Jeanne whooping her way down a backcountry powder slope, and the other with me chasing her through the trees on the way back to the car.  Days like this completely make me forget what cabin fever is, for a few days anyway.

 

 

Hey, who says I can't use our blog to sell things?  Here's a trusty 1993 Toyota UHaul box truck.  Only 204k miles, with 20k on a motor that was rebuilt by UHaul just before we bought it.  We used this to move ourselves back out to Colorado 9 years ago, then to move up to Paonia from Pagosa Springs, then as a tool truck for a home renovation project, then as a storage shed.  Having built a storage shed last year, it's time to see if someone else can use this beast.  Fixing it up to sell was one of Linc's December projects.  Might be asking too much at $3000.  It hasn't sold yet (as of Feb 2017).

Another of his December projects was to rebuild the front suspension fork on his mountain bike, then to forget to tighten the front stem before taking it for a test ride.  That bit of absent mindedness resulted in landing on the frozen dirt road on one knee, a couple weeks of hobbling around stiff-legged, and a couple acupuncture sessions from our good friend May.  Thanks May, this made for a nice picture.

Now don't you wish you could have a family Christmas photo like this one?

This is a better photo, even if it doesn't have a goat in it (well, it does, Tulip is there, she's just hard to see).  Happy 2017 everyone!

November 2016

Dev and his students from the High Desert Center for Sustainable Studies came over and helped us apply a base coat of earthen plaster to the new root cellar, and built most of a dirt-filled-tire retaining wall.  Linc continued on and got the new summer kitchen addition framed and roofed, graveled the floors and we moved our freezer over to the summer kitchen, and fridge into a new back room next to the root cellar.  Now, we'll be able to access our food storage fridge, freezer and root cellar (and compost toilet system) without leaving the protection of a roof.  That will be nice in inclement weather and mud season (which can last for half a year in these parts). 

The new summer kitchen area with freezer in place.  The summer cookstove and sink will eventually (maybe in 2017!) be installed under the shed roof on the left.  The door in the background leads into a room that will house our second refrigerator, composting toilet, solar storage battery, inverter, charge controller and switchgear.  Off of that room is a door that leads to the new root cellar located behind the cabin.

Here's the root cellar, getting filled up with fall harvested garden veggies and local orchard fruit.  Jeanne also intends to make hard cheeses, so this room will come in handy for aging those.  There is also a pass through from this room into the cabin above our kitchen sink, so we're able to move things from pantry/root cellar to kitchen and back without trying to work our way through four separate doorways with our hands full.

Linc finally built a small storage shed for building materials.  No more digging under tarps in the middle of winter for that essential two by four.

Apple cider pressing time.  Normally we make this a community thing, but this year we were lucky to fit it in at all.  We ended up with several gallons of cider, gave some away, brought some to holiday parties and are turning 2 or 3 gallons of that into raw apple cider vinegar.

Needing a break, when Linc's friend Dave emailed to invite him to bushwack up Coal Mountain, there was no hesitation.  It was a great climb.  Here Dave is, on top of the first of two false summits, with the final (steep!) summit cone in the background.

From the top, we could look down past the ridge we'd climbed, past Mount Lamborn, and into the North Fork Valley and our homes below.  It's always nice to get up high for some perspective on things, especially on a crisp clear fall day.

Looking back towards Coal Mountain from home.  Coal is the half cloud-enshrouded bump between the rainbow in photo center and Mount Lamborn photo right.  Hey, look, a rainbow!

October 2016

Neighbors and friends, PJ and Zoe, voluntarily helped us load, haul and unload countless truck and trailer loads of wood and debris from the house downtown after we had a tree trimmer come out and do several thousand dollars worth of tree trimming and felling there.  Here's a small portion of what we brought home.  No need to go looking for firewood for the next few years.

We also made some progress on the cabin root cellar addition, hoping to have it ready for the fall harvest.

And, Linc excavated up the hillside to run a buried pipe from the new cisterns that we placed last year, and tied it all into the original cistern, giving us four times the water storage capacity that we had before, enough to get us through an entire winter.

It's times like these that I'm thankful we have a backhoe, even if it's old and breaks down frequently.  The excavation, piping, backfilling, probably took a total of six hours over the course of a couple afternoons, forcing me to rethink my previous Luddite leanings.

September 2016

The garden continued it's fairly successful attempt at imitating a tropical jungle.  Other than running in and out to pick things, we didn't spend a lot of time here, but were always surprised at how hard to get around it was when we did.  Despite the lack of maintenance, it was one of our most productive gardens ever.

I truth though, with a lot of cool, rainy weather in early to mid summer, it wasn't our best year of tomatoes, and they didn't start arriving until September, but everything was delicious, and the variety at this time of year makes cooking both easy (plenty to choose from) and difficult (choices, choices, choices!)

We gave some away, but we dried a lot of these zucchinis too, and found out later that the goats love dried zucchini chips in the middle of winter.  It's important to have treats that goats really love at milking time, so I'm sure we'll try to grow even more next summer (this summer was around 6 lbs/day during the harvest season).

We're getting more and more into starting plants for the garden inside our cabin greenhouse (here we've got winter greens started for the hoophouse).  We have something (pill bugs for one) that tends to eat tiny greens as they first come up outside, but here we can often grow them big enough to be able to withstand some insect predation once transplanted.

Linc and PJ demolished the roof, walls and floor of an old porch on the south side of this year's green renovation project house.  The porch had been used as a commercial dog kennel, and smelled like it.  Linc repaired the water damaged frame and made the structure into an attached greenhouse for some passive solar heating and a nice place to start garden plants and sit outside on a sunny winter day.  We also added the solar hot water collector above, and with the help of friends back in the spring, replaced the decaying asphalt roofing shingles on the house and garage with metal.  Still to go - painting the exterior, repairing sheds, and reclaiming the yard from years of neglect.

Feeling caught up on the renovation house, we dug up our front yard and added a frost free hydrant hooked up to the irrigation system for filling goat water buckets, etc.

And designed/installed a county approved legal greywater system for the cabin.

We didn't make it up to the mountains much this year.  When we did, Jeanne would get SO excited to be there.  For good reason too, it's spectacular, and much of it within a 30 minute drive from home.

August 2016

Busy month, as we worked to get the green home renovation project done in time for people wanting to move in at the beginning of September.  Here are some before and after photos of the inside.  We repainted all walls and ceilings, stripped out all the old grungy linoleum, carpet and fake wood flooring, replaced several windows, replaced the leaking boiler and water heater with a high efficiency wall mount combination boiler and solar hot water system, blew another 10" of cellulose insulation into the attic, replaced all of the crumbling kitchen cabinets, and I forget what else.  The outside still needs work.  The photo above is the living room before we started.

Living room after.

Kitchen south view before

Kitchen south view after

Kitchen north view before.

Kitchen north view after, complete with Linc's idea of the ultimate heating and cooking appliance at the time, a Pioneer Maid wood cookstove.

Main bath before (I need a wide angle lens I think)

Main bath after

Boiler/laundry room before

Boiler/laundry after (well, trust me, there's a washer and dryer here somewhere out of view).

July 2016

Thanks to Phyllis, Steve and Carolyn, we got in a couple days on the Gunnison River this year.  So nice to play in that desert canyon water.

We got a new neighbor this month.  PJ, from Omaha, Nebraska, bought the strip of land at the bottom of the field, and arrived in an old RV (visible at upper right), carrying a complete workout gym.  He spent the first week or so recuperating from working for a living, then got bored and started helping Linc on the home renovation downtown.  This year, the goats decided they actually liked the grass/clover/alfalfa/weed mix we'd been cultivating for them and spent a lot of time down there, or maybe they were just spying on PJ.

This home renovation business started to pay off when a tree in the yard there yielded a bumper crop of sweet cherries.  Here's a small sample of the 90 lbs we picked, another 50 lbs picked by others, and more left hanging on the tree for the birds.  It was a wonderful year valley-wide for fruit.  Finally, no late frost to zap all those blossoms.

June 2016

Busy on the house, we let the garden go except for watering and occasionally weed wacking the paths.  Except for the voles eating all of our beets and carrots, it did pretty well without us fussing over it, even if it looks a little like a Colorado jungle.

May 2016

Despite thinking that we didn't have time to plant a garden this year, we managed to do it - still a few beds left to plant after the last danger of frost in June.

Hard not to be thankful and happy to be alive on a spring day in the mountains.

Eggplant, so pregnant she had to prop herself up on her front feet to give her belly room when not standing, thought it would be nice if her kids would arrive soon.

Linc planted 300 trees, with the help of a backhoe.  300 trees!??!

Eggplant and Tulip, both dark colored Nubian goats, gave birth to four hyperactive goat kids (two boys, two girls), that kept us pretty entertained.  This is what you watch when you don't own a TV.

Here's Jeanne, in the background, serving as an obstacle course for goat kids..

Really, I think the date stamp on my digital camera was off.  This was probably from May.  Anyway, here's progress on a home renovation we're doing downtown.  New paint, tile, bamboo flooring, cabinets, etc.

We managed to get a day off for our favorite summertime activity - caving, of course.

April 2016

The chickens rototilled our garden for us this year.  Here's what it looked like when they were done.

With 300 tree seedlings on order, we qualified for free fencing furnished (but not installed) by the Colorado Dept of Wildlife.  We pondered how to get seventy 10' long fence posts installed until someone mentioned that we could probably rent a skidsteer with an auger.  Linc had a blast putting holes all over the field, finished all the holes in a day then went over to the neighbor's and augered right into the public water line.  Oops!  Linc excavated the broken line in the dark with the backhoe and fearless Ian finished patching the break somewhere around 3AM (long after Linc had given up and gone home to sleep).

With some help from friends (thanks Dev, Ian and Kelly!), Linc and Jeanne managed to get about 1000 feet of 7' high deer fencing and four 16' long, 7' high gates installed in a matter of days.  This made Linc very happy.

Feeling accomplished, we joined some friends on a nice day hike in Dominguez Canyon to an abandoned homestead.