December 2018

 In order to roll the hoophouse to its new location for the next year, the end walls need to hinge up to clear the ground.  The new metal frame (with Trex lumber sideboards) that Linc had fabricated and installed last summer worked like a dream compared to the rotten lumber that he'd replaced).  Below, you can see the hoophouse ready to move towards camera, and in the second photo in the new location - a 24'L x 24'W x 14' high structure moved 24 feet over in about 2 hrs by 2 people.  Nice!

For Jeanne's birthday, we drove down to Ridgway, went for a nice ski tour up Corksgrew Gulch off of Red Mountain Pass in chilly (10F) temps, then back to Orvis Hot Springs where we car camped, snuggling into our -40F down bags (temps down to 6F that night) and spent a lot of the evening and next morning exploring the various soaking pools, sauna, and then discovering the 55 F cold plunge pool next to the 110 F "lobster pot" pool, and spent hrs going back and forth between the two.

 That shiny stainless steel $4000 high efficiency wood stove that came with the tiny house on wheels never worked all that well.  Linc took it out, put it on Ebay with a description of the problems we were having with it, sold it immediately for $2500, and bought this replacement, a Grizzly Cubic Mini wood stove (12"w x 11"d x 15"h, that IS mini!) for $600.  A MUCH better stove.

Meanwhile, besides all of the usual farm chores, and getting out every other day or so for some exercise running, skiing or biking, we slowly worked on our larger "to do" list.  Jeanne decided she'd prefer that we restore the old 89 Toyota pickup rather than keep the 98 Tacoma, so Linc spent some time in the new workshop, popping out a couple of dents, then sanding and repainting the Tacoma to make it easier to sell.

Another project Linc finished in December was to pipe up hot and cold running water to a shower head above the bathtub in the cabin greenhouse.  So now, 9 years after we started building the cabin, we took our first showers!

Summary for 2018

Water

We received a total of 10.5" of precipitation for the year, lowest month was April 2018 at only 0.14" for the month - talk about a dry spring!  Snowpack in the mountains from the 2017-2018 season was a record low, 60% of the normal.  Irrigation water for our farm went off on July 4th, about 2 MONTHS earlier than normal.  The forests throughout the west caught on fire.  We stored what we could in the soil and in an old swimming pool and in the pipeline, and miserly watered it out over the rest of summer and fall, saving enough in the pipe for minimal winter hoophouse watering, and watched our healthy plants shrivel.  Still, despite the lack of water, we still harvested and ate pretty well - the farm is becoming more and more resilient!  

Farm Harvest

Chicken, duck and turkey Eggs - 260 dozen

Goat Milk - 540 gallons

Meat - 102 lbs

Asparagus - 21 lbs

Beets - 96 lbs

Broccoli - 16 lbs

Cabbage - 37 lbs

Carrots - 37 lbs

Corn - 65 ears

Garlic - 320 bulbs

Cooking greens - 185 lbs

Salad greens - 98 lbs

Onions - 65 lbs

Green onions - 41 bunches

Melons - 55 lbs

Parsnips - 45 lbs

Peas - only 10 lbs

Peppers - 28 lbs

Potatoes - 185 lbs (blighted, reduced crop)

Winter Squash - 282 lbs

Tomatoes - 120 lbs

Turnips - 65 lbs

Zucchini - 180 lbs

Garden Apples - 19 lbs

Garden cherries - 6.5 lbs

Grapes - 6.5 lbs

Garden peaches - 65 lbs

Plums - 1 lb!

Berries - only 2 lbs!

Rhubarb - 35 lbs

Hay baled - only 65 bales (about half of previous year)

Total farm product (not all shown above) - 6700 lbs, not counting hay

Market value of product - $18,800

We started out the year continuing at the daily routines of homesteading, gradually taking on projects, doing what we've done for 9 years or so now.  It's a satisfying life, and has its inspiring moments, and is a strange mix of being tied down with daily care of domesticated animals and birds while feeling a strong sense of belonging and attachment and love for the land, water, plants, animals and birds that have co-evolved with and sustain us.  Missing, at times, has been the opportunity to really get out in the wilds and feel the awe and inspiration that comes from that.  That all changed after Amber arrived and we started getting out for longer hikes, then an overnight backpacking trip, and the bike packing adventure in Moab.  Life is suddenly changing for us.  We probably get a little less done on the farm now, but we're super energized and becoming more and more inspired.  Nature is the source, and wild nature is the strongest source there is.

On to 2019!

November 2018

November!   Well, at least everything being brown like it was for much of the summer, seems normal now with the cold weather.  During summer, it was because it almost never rained.  What a strange year.  Despite our fields looking brown and lifeless, our goats continued to go out to graze in the paddocks each day, which surprised us because we've had other years when the grass looked green and they wouldn't eat it.  There's so much we don't understand about farming - it's a continual learning curve and source of inspiration.

 Last month, Linc spent some time making a car workshop.  Cleared some land behind the cabin, leveled it with the backhoe, bought a used 20'x10' hoophouse frame from a friend for $75, put it up and anchored it, added some used hoophouse plastic from our hoophouse renovation project this year, and "Voila!", a $100 workshop!  Solar heated, even!  Later, for cloudy days, he added a wood stove.  Here, we've got the Prius in there, gradually making all of the trouble lights on the dashboard go away.  So nice to finally have a dry place warm place to work in the colder months.  Linc likes the combination so much that for our final, larger workshop, he's thinking of doing the exact same thing on a larger scale and with a cement or adobe floor, and shade cloth for summer.

In the hoophouse, beneath the secondary protection of row cover on PVC hoops, and with the addition of beneficial nematodes and fungal insecticides, we are finally starting to have success at growing winter greens again (our winter crops were decimated by root aphids the last few years, so this is a nice change).

Linc realized that Amber would need a wood box for storing wood for her tiny house on wheels woodstove, and came up with this structure from scrap materials.  The boards in the front are removable so that wood can be added and removed easily, and the shade cloth that's flopped over the roof drops down to protect the wood from windblown rain and snow.  This was one of those projects that kind of evolved into something better than the original vision.

October 2018

 OK, so I'm sure that we didn't spend the whole month of October playing in the desert, but the photos sure make it look like we did.  We are definitely making up for not having been able to do overnight trips for a few years!  Amber took care of the goats and birds for two multi-day stretches, which allowed us to fit in two trips, both to the Moab, Utah area, both with mountain bikes.  One involved car camping and day rides on several trail networks.  The second was a five day adventure, towing off-road bike trailers for two days up one canyon, across the high desert for a day, then back down to the trailhead through another canyon.

The first photo above is from the bike packing trip, in Pritchett Canyon, with Jeanne negotiating a portion of a (jeep!) road that required taking off the trailers, carrying everything down over the ledges and reassembling.  This happened a few times on that trip!

The next is from the first part of the trip, as we traveled 20 miles or so up Kane Creek Canyon, crossing and recrossing Kane Creek (over 50 crossings in 2 days).

Near the head of Kane Creek Canyon, we climbed out along a jeep road with the La Sal mountains peaking up over the rim, our route visible halfway up the canyon wall.

 Below shows Jeanne soaking up some morning sunlight while sitting high in an alcove on the SE side of Prostitute Butte.  The desert colors are intense, and have a way of burning into your memory.  When I see this photo, I can immediately feel the warm sun, rough sandstone, cool morning air, and smell the sage and juniper (and even the rocks!) around that morning's campsite.  It all stays very vivid.

Below is shot from our campsite near the head of Hunter Canyon.  The large pour-off beyond forms an alcove with springs and hanging gardens of water loving plants clinging to the wall.  A beautiful spot to spend a night under the desert stars.

 Another photo of our campsite at the head of Hunter.

 Jeanne pedaling into the head of Pritchett Canyon, near Pritchett Arch.

 Desert pothole water, the La Sals in background.

 Jeanne up on the canyon rim overlooking Kane Creek, looking down at the route that we had bicycled up a couple days before.

Jeanne negotiates a typical ledgy downhill along the jeep road route we took through the Behind The Rocks area to get from Kane Creek to Pritchett Canyon.

 Petroglyphs found in Kane Creek.

 Same spot on rim overlooking Kane Creek as before, just looking up canyon.  You can see the road that we'd traveled 2 days earlier at bottom (before it began crossing and recrossing Kane Creek).

Kokopelli lives for sure - we saw his shadow!

 Jeanne drags her bike/trailer combo up a ledgy section on way out of Pritchett Canyon.

 More ledges in Pritchett.  It's amazing that rock crawler vehicles can climb this stuff, some of it was difficult enough to scramble on and down on foot, never mind a bicycle and loaded trailer.

This is what the inside of the Prius looked like, packed for the bike packing trip.  Putting the bikes on a rack on the back would have decreased the gas mileage by 10 mpg.  Not frugal!  So, we crammed it all in and smugly got 45-50 mpg on the drive over and back.  Only problem with this method, is that when you want to sleep in the car at the trailhead, you've got to remove just about everything to do so...

 Third morning out, we climbed up to Picture Frame Arch for a morning view of the Behind the Rocks WSA.  Picture frame - I wonder why they called it that?

 Obviously no particular order on these photos - another shot of Jeanne sunning herself above our campsite by Prostitute Butte rock.  I've got to say, that's a lousy name for this intensely beautiful rock monolith, perched by itself up in the middle of the Behind the Rocks area.  It looks and feels more like I imagine this spot in Australia, sacred to the native people there, does.  Uluru - Australia

OK, so we did play a lot this month.  Great pics though, right?  

Other than that and the usual farm chores, Linc started building a workshop out of a salvaged 20'x10' hoophouse frame, some leftover greenhouse plastic and an old wood stove for heat, started (finally!) cutting, splitting and stacking firewood for the winter (I know, it's supposed to be done a year ahead of time, but that hasn't happened since we moved here 9 years ago).  And, it was time to finish harvesting everything out of the garden and getting it inside before first frost, so that occupied some time too.

Wait, just one video from the bike packing trip.

September 2018

 Well, on to September.  Despite the drought and no irrigation, there were still apples to pick at a friend's orchard, and press into, what, 10 gallons of cider.  We drank a couple of gallons and inoculated the rest with last year's vinegar mother (we use a lot of vinegar for salad dressing, fire cider, etc).

 We dried all of the pulp on screens under glass up on the goat barn roof and in the cabin greenhouse, resulting in many gallons of winter goat treats.  Goats love bribes.

With Amber more comfortable with the goats and milking, Jeanne and I set out for our first backpacking trip together in years.  This one was up the Spud Pass Trail to Deep Creek Lakes, a place we'd been wanting to see for awhile.  Despite the low water levels and muted fall colors due to the drought, it was still really nice, and the wildfire smoke that we'd experienced for much of the summer mostly gone.  Thank you Amber!

 Again, with Amber's help, we started really making up for lost time over the next few weeks, going on several long day hikes together.  The next three photos are from a day hike to East Creek Pass, near Redstone, Colorado.  Can you find the gnome in the picture below?

 Autumn sky wildness at the farm...

 

 Day loop hike up Black Canyon, and over the Ruby Munsey Stock Driveway.  We also climbed part way up Mt. Gunnison, far enough to realize we'd need to make it an overnight to make it to the top, and looking at the scree slopes we'd need to climb, not sure that it was worth the trouble and hazard.

 Linc's men's group climbed Mount Lamborn together and enjoyed a sunset together afterwards.

August 2018

Over the years, the wood framing in our hoophouse had rotted.  It's a mobile hoophouse with end walls that fold up and sits on rails so that we can roll it back and forth 24' each year so that the soil gets a chance to be flushed out with rain and snow and to accommodate a winter/summer planting schedule.  With the winds we get here, the rotting wood was requiring more and more bracing, which made moving it each fall a longer and longer chore (undo all the braces, move it, screw them back together).  We decided it was worth replacing the wood framing with metal, so Linc took off the plastic, removed all the wood, ordered and cut metal studs to replace the wood ones, reassembled it, and with the help of Jeanne and two neighbors, got new plastic installed.   We also went with a plastic that has an radiative heat loss barrier in hopes of raising our clear sky night time temps (it can get colder inside the hoophouse than outside due to focusing effect of the parabolic shape, cold high altitude night skies, and no air movement - we've had plants frosted inside at 43 F outdoor air temps).

 Another project was moving our summer kitchen (which had been up on the hill by the cabin) down to the cabin outdoor addition that we'd finished constructing the year before.  Our neighbor Dev came up and helped Linc finish plastering the walls.  We moved the old sink/cabinet unit, a wood cookstove and installed a propane cooktop, and a few cabinets, and did a little plumbing and wiring.  Now we've got a place to cook outside if it's too hot inside, a place to process garden produce, chickens, etc.  Nice!

A couple of different people that had responded to our tiny house barter ad came for separate trial runs to see if we all thought they were a good fit.  They both were great, so we had a tough decision on our hands.  As it turned out, one was still traveling on a long distance bike trip, and by the time he had made his decision to join us, the other was already here.  She (Amber) immediately started working with the goats, and had much better success with Jasmine, now that we had learned a thing or two about how to keep her from butting people.  As she got more comfortable with everything, we took off on a few longer day hikes.  Yule Pass and Carbonate Creek over by Marble, Colorado, and up Mount Lamborn, directly across the valley from our farm.

  As you can see in at least one photo below, the west was now on fire due to the drought, the streams were low, the vegetation muted even in the mountains, and the air constantly hazy.  It still felt like heaven every time we got up to the high country.

July 2018

 So, did I mention that we're in a record drought in Colorado?  Almost no snow last winter, hardly any rain all spring, and super hot and dry this summer.  I probably forgot to mention it, because we've got irrigation and when you have water, you tend to forget how good it is to have.  Well, that ended on July 4th, when our irrigation water went off for the year, about 2 months earlier than it normally would.  What?  We've got a garden full of plants that are just really starting to get going!?  Luckily, we'd anticipated this a little, and Linc had been watering pasture and garden like crazy since early spring.  The garden saw something like 10" of water applied during the last 10 days leading up to the end of irrigation.  Still, 110 F out, and no irrigation, it's a little unnerving.  

L repaired the electric brake controller on the old Toyota pickup, in case he had to try pulling the 9500 lb tiny house on wheels down the road (while Jeanne herded goats) in case of wildfire (we live at the edge of highly flammable Pinyon-Juniper forest).  We talked about what we wanted to take with us if we had to evacuate quickly.  Linc started prioritizing what plants in the garden would get water and what wouldn't over the next few weeks (we had 6000 gallons stored in an old above ground swimming pool, and a few more thousand backed up in the underground irrigation pipeline).

Needing to take our minds off of all this, we went for a couple of day hikes in the high country.  They were both beautiful, but our favorite was the one up Buckskin Basin to Avalanche Pass in the Maroon Bells Wilderness.  Spectacular.  Here's one of Jeanne on final approach to pass.

Wildflowers on way up ("Mules Ears" and Lupine, I believe).

View at the top.  Mount Daly to left, part of Capital Peak, a 14'er with a crazy knife edge climbing route to summit, to right.  Video (by others!) of the Capital Peak knife edge route.

Other projects included getting a coat of finish plaster on the east and west walls of the cabin, finishing up some electrical and plumbing work in the greenhouse, work on one of our rentals, continuing to interview people for the tiny house on wheels barter and for one rental, and mechanical work on a 98 Tacoma pickup that Linc had bought as a non rusty replacement for our rusted out 89 Toyota pickup (that Jeanne had owned since new).

Jeanne continued coordinating Jean's care for her broken shoulder, as she recovered smoothly.