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.
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