December 2017

December brought potlucks, Christmas parties, and more of day hikes between AM & PM chores.

Linc continued working on the tiny house on wheels, upgrading the solar electric system with more panels, more batteries, circuit breakers and fuses, modifying the chimney to get the stove drawing better, bought a used storage shed to go with it, had it moved in and started renovating that too.

The photos are a little washed out due to some cloudy weather, but we had some nice hikes.  One to Green Mountain overlooking the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, one down to Morrow Point Reservoir on the Hermits Rest Trail, also in the Black Canyon National Park, and another snowy day hike to the hammock at high point on the Paonia Jumbo Mountain hiking/mountain biking trails.

View from Inspiration Point, Black Canyon NP

Hermits Rest Trail, overlooking Morrow Point Reservoir

Morrow Point Reservoir, Black Canyon NP

Jeanne in the Hammock on Jumbo Mountain, overlooking Paonia

And that wraps up our year.  Kind of a mostly work year, but with some spectacular adventures on occasion, ending with a sense of being slightly better off financially, even if we'd still be considered poverty level for income.  We have everything we need, live in a beautiful spot in a great community, enjoy some great friendships, and have lots of freedom (except for chores twice/day, but we love our animal and bird friends so it's nice to spend time with them and acknowledge how thankful we are for the gifts they provide us).  The longer we do it, the more we like and appreciate this homesteading lifestyle.

In closing, I'll list a few numbers from the garden harvest totals, plus goat dairy and poultry.  It was definitely not our best garden year due to the June frost, July hailstorm, and general neglect due to our other obligations this year, but it is still a serious endeavor that enables us to manage without working "normal" jobs.  This isn't comprehensive:

Goats milk - 514 gallons

Chicken, duck and turkey eggs - 236 dozen
Asparagus - 26 lbs

 Cabbage - 67 lbs

Broccoli - 34 lbs

Corn - 165 ears

Garlic - 350 bulbs

Cooking greens - 160 lbs

Salad greens - 90 lbs

Onions and leeks - 101 lbs

Melons - 38 lbs

Parsnips - 155 lbs

Potatoes - 410 lbs

Pumpkins - 121 lbs

Winter squash - 335 lbs

Tomatoes - 285 lbs (something like 151 lbs of them "green", but about half of those did ripen on the shelf)

Zucchini - 65 lbs

Total value of food from farm - $16,971

Time to start planning this year's garden!

November 2017

November started with another in between morning and evening chores adventure (gives us about six hours).  This time, we opted to attempt to mountain bike the Lead Kind Basin Loop, something we wanted to do when we lived in Grand Junction and were thirty-something years old.  For some reason, we waited until we were 57 to take on the 3000' elevation gain, 15 mile loop jeep road ride.  No regrets though - it was spectacular.  Here's a bunch of photos of the ride.

Jeanne starting out from town of Marble

About 1/3 of the way through the big climb

Oh no, snow and we're only 2/3 of the way up

High point - ecstatic!

Now for 3000' of downhill to the old mining town of Crystal.

Snowmass Peak in the distance above Lead King Basin

Facing south - not sure - Ruby Range maybe?

Nearly down to Crystal - an amazing road

Cliffs overlooking Crystal

Crystal, former mining town

Crystal Mill - one of the most photogenic spots in Colorado

Awe...NOW they tell us - this sign on way out

The tiny house on wheels in its new spot with a view

Completed hay barn!  Tiny house to left.

October 2017

October, two houses rented, time to take it easy!  Sort of.  Linc decided that the roof of the second rental house had two many hips and valleys to attempt a new metal roof without help (he and friends got the first house roof done the year before but it was a simple ranch house with a detached garage).  So, he contracted it out, then hired on with the contractor as a laborer/roofer to help drop the cost a bit.  He learned a lot and decided he'd made the right choice.  They did great work and it was over and done with in a week instead of dragging on for a month or more.

And, we decided that we really needed to build a new hay barn.  Our original one, a tarp garage, is starting to come apart, it's too small to put an entire winter's supply of hay in so we're always scrambling in March or April to find someone's barn stored organic alfalfa hay, and we had inadvertently erected our tarp garage on the neighbor's property (boundary confusion), so we're aiming to take it down sooner than later.  Linc designed a 24' x 12' pole barn, tried augering holes with an assortment of broken tractor driven augers, then just got impatient, hand dug the holes as well as he could and got to building.

With that started (below), we went for a day hike up the road and realized we really wanted a longer hike to celebrate getting the house renovation done and rented, so got our chores done early and made it up to Gunnison Lake (a 4000' in four mile up more or less bushwhack that we'd never managed to make it to before), admired the view while we hastily ate lunch and ran back down in time for evening chores.

Future hay barn in progress (tiny house on left)

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A half mile up Pitkin Road from home on mid-day exercise hike.

Jeanne part way up to Gunnison Lake

Feeling happy we finally made it here after hearing so much about it.

Gunnison Lake - don't ask how to get there, it's a secret!

Coming back down with a view of the Beckwith Range

September 2017

So, what to do after eight months of home renovation?  Well, the garden was cranking, having somewhat recovered from frost in June and hail in July, so there was lots of harvesting and food processing to do...

And we cut, raked, baled and stacked 78 bales of hay in our second cutting.  Not enough legumes in it to be prime goat hay, but good to supplement the alfalfa bales that we buy from a friend across the valley.

We'd been realizing for some time that Jeanne couldn't milk goats twice/day forever without a break, and that we really needed to get something built or bought that could be offered to someone to live in as barter for them helping us with the farm so that we could occasionally have a break.  We hadn't managed to find the time to build another tiny house (or to even finish our own, which still has no shower, an unfinished attached greenhouse, unfinished attached summer kitchen, and unfinished exterior walls).  So, Linc found this nice tiny home on wheels on Craigs List, at the right price and had it delivered.  It weighs 9000 lbs, but we found that our 89 Toyota could move it about the farm as we worked on setting up a spot for it.

 With the old backhoe, which is seriously in need of some TLC, we dug a trench 150 feet up the hillside to where we buried a 1000 gallon cistern, and installed a water line to a spot that we leveled out above the garden for the tiny house.

Linc's sister Gretchen and partner Ken showed up on the way home from their trip to Wyoming to watch the solar eclipse, and boy was it great to take a break and spend some time with them.  Here are Jeanne, Gretchen and Ken on a hike around the Lost Lake trail that Jeanne and I hiked back in June, and the photo below that is what they were all pointing at.  Hard to believe this is all so close  to home.

August 2017

August was the final push to get the fixer upper ready for renting, then showing it.  Part of the push involved blowing 12 to 16" of cellulose insulation into an attic that must have been 130 to 140F.  Thanks to our neighbor PJ for running the insulation machine for Linc, who did the attic crawling.  We spent the last week or so of August finishing up final details and cleaning, advertised the house and showed it to over 30 families who came to look, about half of whom filled out applications.  The hardest part was selecting one family out of that group and letting the others know that their search wasn't over.  It's really hard to find a place to rent in the North Fork Valley this year.

What follows are a series of before and after photos of the house.  We either replaced or refinished every floor, refinished all existing wood trim, added new trim (much of it was missing or damaged), straightened and repainted all baseboard covers, repainted all walls and ceilings, repaired all appliances and windows, re-insulated the attic, replaced all light fixtures, garage door opener, toilets, rebuilt or replaced all faucets and shower trim, repaired leaky pipes, rebuilt a front railing and stone wall, added basement egress windows and window wells, did a rough scrape and paint of the exterior walls and trim, rebuilt cabinets, removed a kitchen island and replaced with something that fit, tore out and rebuilt the water damaged bathroom subfloor under and around the tub, and I don't remember what else.  The inside is done, the roof was done later in the fall, and exterior painting and reroofing a shed is for 2018 or 2019.

Living room before.

Living Room after

Kitchen before

Kitchen after

Main bath before

Main bath after

Basement main room before

Basement main room after

Bsmt north bdrm before

Basement south bedroom before

Bsmt north bedroom after

Basement south bedroom after

New bsmt windows and window wells

And that's it.  Big relief.

July 2017

Let's see, what happened in July?  We continued focusing on getting that future rental house renovated, excavating for basement egress windows, cutting out the concrete walls, building window wells, installing windows, and so on.  We went for lots of short hikes together up to the pass behind our cabin for exercise, Jeanne walked with friends, Linc mountain biked on some Sunday mornings with a local group, and the new goat kids got their adventure legs and went on walks with Jeanne and the big goats.  The pasture responded really well to the new gun sprinkler irrigation, along with fertigation with raw milk, as well as microbial and fungal inoculants.  We had enough growth that we were able to cut and bale around 40 bales for first cutting.  Here's a photo of the three kids on a walk.  Pretty cute!

 And most of the herd (Eggplant not in photo) loving the results of water and inoculants.

Oh, and on July 16th, we had a hail storm that seriously shredded the garden.  Everything was just starting to recover from the June 13th frost damage and WHAMMO, set back again!  Hard year for the garden!

June 2017

We continued spending the majority of our free time working on the fixer upper home, did a lot of garden bed prep and planting, went to events in town.  Linc continued enjoying meeting with a mens' group every Sunday.  Jeanne got together with several friends for walks, movies and game nights, which Linc and a friend or two sometimes attended. Finally, we decided we really needed to get up to the mountains, got our morning chores done as quick as possible, drove 40 minutes or so, got on our mountain bikes and road up to Lost Lake campground, then went for a beautiful hike that took us to Dollar Lake (where Linc went swimming for 0.3 seconds), Lost Lake (Jeanne crossing outlet), and Lost Lake Slough.  I'll include a short video of Jeanne crossing the outlet log debris at Lost Lake, mainly because the ending is pretty funny!

Here's Lost Lake.

Linc in Dollar Lake (looking for money probably)

And Jeanne completing a successful traverse of Lost Lake outlet log jam, below!

Oh, one strange thing happened on June 13th.  We had planted our tomato and squash seedlings out a week or two before, figuring we were way past last frost.  It only got down to 43 F on our min/max thermometer overnight, but the night sky was perfectly clear, and we ended up with frost everywhere, including on the plants INSIDE our hoophouse!  In fact the ones inside the hoophouse were set back the most, but everything got frosted.  We lost maybe 20% of our tomato and squash plants, and the remainder got slowed down quite a bit as they recovered, as did our potatoes that had been growing up through the mulch in their four beds.  Wow, 43 F and freezing!?

May 2017

Another busy month!  We continued working on renovating the rental property.  We finished installing that gun sprinkler system for our paddocks, upgraded the solar electric system, welcomed three new baby goats to the farm, and planted a few trees that we'd mail ordered.  With the help of a neighbor of our occupied rental property in town, we installed another 1000 feet of 2" poly pipe from Stewart Ditch located halfway up Paonia Hill overlooking town, down several hundred feet through the briars, under the railroad tracks in an ancient wooden culvert, then behind several homes and through several underground sections of culvert (requiring floating a bobber on fishing line to pull a rope through to then pull the pipe through, with one section being about 150' underground!) so that the renters would have pressurized irrigation water for free (no pump) to water the lawn.  This also required a fair amount of backhoe work, which made us appreciate our old 1965 Case loader hoe even more.  Whew.

Our solar system required a major upgrade - the lead acid storage batteries had been failing for several months, so we replaced them with a new industrial, custom made battery provided by Global Industrial Battery, similar to ones used in forklifts.  The manufacturer says that this battery should last 20 years instead of the 7 or 8 that the L-16 batteries we'd used before last.  That's good, because at something like 700 lbs, it wasn't easy getting these in place in the new PV room we built last year off the back of the cabin.  We also upgraded our inverter to a 2000 watt Magna Sine pure sine wave inverter charger that can handle the startup loads of power tools and laser printers (instead of having to run the gas generator for those) and that can quickly recharge the batteries using our generator if we ever have too many cloudy days in a row again.  In the process of wiring all of this up, Linc finally installed a small circuit breaker panel, and ran a wire out to our tool shed for charging the e-bikes and running power tools.

 We kept working on preparing beds in the garden.  This year, with everything else going on, bed prep was minimal and consisted mostly of reforming beds torn apart by the chickens, guineas and turkeys that spent the winter in the garden, and where time, doing a little broad-forking to loosen things up.  Here's an early spring harvest of greens, asparagus and lots of rhubarb.

Our Alpine-Nubian doe, Jasmine kidded successfully, with some minimal assistance from Jeanne, and delivered three beautiful goat kids, (two doelings and one buckling).  We don't name the bucklings in case we can't find a buyer and have to butcher them at some point, but we get attached nonetheless.  Meet Dandelion (black, brown and white in foreground), Sunflower (white and brown to right front), and well, the buckling!

And, we now have a working gun sprinkler system serving our goat pastures (below).  This is a great improvement because it uses a little less than half the water, can run fine on the low pressure silty irrigation flow, and will still work when the flow drops below what we flood irrigate at (which was anything less than around 100 gpm).  We used to have trouble keeping two acres of pasture watered until the end of July.  Now we should be able to easily water three acres, and possibly one or two more through to near the end of August, enough to provide a second cutting of hay and great fall pasture for the goats and birds.