April 2013

We didn't have our white Saanen goat, Phoebe, bred last fall, but Eggplant was bred to a mixed Alpine/Nubian buck (named Homer) in the fall.  Eggplant got really big (below), and we wondered how many kids she'd have this year.  She'd had 2 kids her first year, and two doelings and one buckling the second, so we were curious, and worried, since Jeanne had needed to assist with the delivery last year.

As it turned out, she had three healthy doelings in a matter of 20 minutes or so, with no help needed.  Jeanne was ecstatic, and we were both happy that all girls meant that we wouldn't need to butcher a friendly little buckling this year.  Of course, we weren't sure what we would do with three doelings either...  One thing's for sure, they were some cute little goats!

A view back at Frugalbundance Farm from the south end of the meadow.

  And a view of Fire Mountain Canal, the North Fork Valley, and Mount Lamborn and Land's End, from the same spot.

March 2013

Linc joined a group of Paonian permaculture enthusiasts on a day trip to the Colorado Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute in Basalt, Colorado.  Here, Jerome Ostentowski and his crew of enthusiastic interns are growing an amazing array of greens, veggies and fruit in forest gardens inside greenhouses tempered by ingenious heat storage systems.  Here, some of the group negotiates its way through a banana grove, in Colorado, at 8000' above sea level...  A great cure for the winter blahs.

 In our own greenhouse, we were enjoying the warm spring sun on cold days, drying the last of the apples from the root cellar, starting new seeds in the beds, and, in the photo below, building a fodder rack and sprouting barley seeds into green barley grass for the goats and chickens to munch on.

 Jeanne placed an add in the local want ads, looking for a cream separator, and was surprised to be given one that just needed a little attention to work again.  Since it arrived, she's made cream at least once a week, and used that to make sour cream, butter, ice cream, buttermilk, and leftover skim milk for the chickens.

We dug the last of the sugar (mangel) beets out of the garden.  They run big!

 Linc took an old camper that we'd been given, gutted it, added roost bars, a roost ladder, and nesting boxes to make a mobile coop.

 He also made a brooder box for up to four hens to hatch and raise chicks in.

February 2013

February saw Jeanne planning garden beds, ordering seeds, and a trip to Flagstaff to visit Linc's mother and sister.  Linc also received engineering work from a friend that he was able to do from home, saving the weekly commute to Grand Junction.  In the meantime, the farm waited for the snow to melt, some of us more patiently than others...

Just to feel productive, we made a new hay feeder for the goats that allowed several to eat at once, without spilling as much hay on the floor.

January 2013

 Winter's a great time for a homesteader to make money, and Linc was lucky to get offered some engineering work in Grand Junction, so off he went for a few days each week, leaving all those farm chores to Jeanne. 

Around the 19th, we accompanied a group of friends on an epic cross country ski tour to celebrate neighbor Jack's 50th birthday.  The tour involved skiing the 23 mile Kebler Pass Road (closed in winter) to Crested Butte, spending the night with friends, and skiing back the next day.  It reminded us of all the outdoor adventures we used to go on, before we became attached to the farming/homesteading lifestyle.  Everyone involved had a wonderful time, despite the blisters, numb feet, and sore muscles.

Season's greetings everyone!  May we all have the time, energy, and especially, internal strength, needed to do what we feel drawn to do this year, in order to create the more beautiful world that our hearts know is possible.  And, may we be present enough to appreciate the beauty that is all around us already.

December 2011

We don’t have any pictures from the farm for December.  Instead, here’s a picture of another project going on in our lives these days.  We invested some of our remaining savings in a small foreclosed house down valley a ways, in hopes that it might generate a little income.  A great couple responded to our ad to rent it, but Linc’s got quite a bit of work to do in the next week or two to get it ready for them.  The hope is that the rent from this, plus a little bit of whatever work we can get on the side to make up the difference, combined with continuing to learn to live on less money, while working on growing more abundance and diversity of food and life on the farm, and relationships in the neighborhood and in the larger valley community, might be a good way to go.
It’s been a cold month, with temps down in the single digits at night (cold for here), and a little snow.  On Christmas Eve, our neighbor Dev was walking by our place and saw something strange.  Linc and Jeanne, working out in the snow covered garden with gardening fork, dirt shovel and snow shovel, and a bucket.  “What in heck?” he probably thought.  He walked over and said, “Now that’s some hard core gardening!”  We were out digging up beets and parsnips for roasted veggies to go with a chicken we were cooking up for a Christmas meal that Dev and Jean shared with us.  Which brings us to the next photo.

The best thing about life here is the ‘hood, as Michelle calls it.  This is the nicest group of people we’ve ever lived around.  Here’s a shot from one of the potluck dinners the community has been having since sometime in July.  This one probably is from July.  From left to right; Linc, Jean, Eric, Emily, Michelle, Jaquelyn, Zoe, Jenica, Molly, Ben, Jack.  Missing from photo are Silvia, Nicoya, Sareya, Kahlia, Tyler, Colin, another Molly, Holden, Dev, Jeanne, Jordan, Pete, Siobhan, Randy, Sally, Cooper, Elizabeth and Robert.  Wow, are that many people in this neighborhood?  Nice.
Have a great year everyone.  Hope to see you all in 2012, and may the Mayan calendar be wrong, wrong, wrong if it’s forecasting the end of humanity in 2012, and right, right, right if it’s forecasting a change in consciousness to something even better!

On that note, we leave you with this link to a youtube video we posted featuring two of our goats, Gandalf and Eggplant, in a moment of mutual adoration.  Gandalf and Eggplant sure do like each other don't they?

November 2011

 

The only problem with trying to collect leaves for compost or garden in the fall is…goats will always find them, no matter where you put them.  Goats love leaves!

We picked a few bushels of Red Delicious apples in exchange for fresh cider at Art and Hillary’s early in the fall, then a few more bushels of Red and Golden Delicious at our friend Barbe’s in exchange for a some winter squash from the garden, then five 50 lb sacks of wonderful Rome apples in exchange for a some fresh Chevre goat cheese at Mary and Bobby’s orchard.  The Romes keep well in the root cellar, but the Red and Golden Delicious needed to be canned, frozen or dried before they went bad (well, or eaten, which we tried to do).  This required the construction of a second dehydrator rack to put up on the roof of the goat barn (where the goats couldn’t jump on it for fun).  We make these racks from window screen with hardware cloth backing attached to a big wooden frame, with a salvaged sliding glass door window over the top.  Greens and herbs dry best in the dark inside our solar dehydrator (see our High Mountain Homestead blog for construction of that), but fruit, tomatoes and squash dry best in direct sunlight.

 

Having grown all that food this past summer, we decided to get ambitious, and more than doubled the size of our garden this November.  The first two sections in the foreground are the old garden, and stretching out to the horizon are another 18 beds, each 3’ wide by about 38’ long. 

In a hurry as usual, we made the expansion using our typical sheet mulching methods, but this time decided to forego spreading newspaper or cardboard on the ground first.  Instead, we used our truck and trailer to haul several loads of horse manure in, before putting up the new fence.  We shoveled the manure from the truck and trailer directly onto the field, then just covered it with straw, moldy hay, leaves, whatever we could scavenge for mulch, and left it for the worms to work on over the winter.  Sometime this winter, we’ll also scatter the contents of a 55 gallon drum full of mixed greensand, rock phosphate, and glacial rock powders onto the beds to let it soak in with the melting snow in the spring. 

We omitted the cardboard this year because we’ve found that our most persistent weed, field bindweed comes right up through cardboard, so why go through all the effort?  Most organic growers around here that we’ve spoken to seem to pretty much concluded that you can’t really fight bindweed, unless you have a really small garden and a lot of time to pull it up every day for several years.  Besides, people reason, it’s bringing up lots of minerals from way down in the soil, which makes it a great bio-accumulator.  So, we live with it.

We ended up taking down all of our old garden fencing, and put up a new fence around the 155’ long by 55’ wide garden.  The new fence consists of 36” high field fence on t-posts with a top wire at 48”, corner “H” braces made of t-posts with special clips (quicker and cheaper than using cedar posts and a post hole auger on rented tractor).  Every few posts is 8’ high instead of 4’ high to allow for three strands of salvaged electric ribbon tape (but not hooked up to electricity) spaced every foot or so, as a visual barrier to keep elk and deer from leaping in.  At the bottom, we plan on installing chicken wire, skirted out onto the ground and up along the bottom foot or so of field fence, to keep the rabbits and prairie dogs out.  A frugal version of a “real” garden fence, but it seems to be working so far.

Here’s our goat herd this year.  From left to right we have Buddy (wethered companion to Gandalf), Gandalf the breeding buck, Eggplant’s two girls Sox and No Sox, and Phoebe.  Phoebe’s two girls, Flicker and Wren have moved down the hill to our neighbor’s Pete and Siobhan, where they spend their days running with two Arabian horses, two German Shepherds, and several chickens.  Gandalf goes down on scheduled dates, so there should be some new goat kids down there this spring too.

Now, how we are supposed to kill and eat these cute little ones, we haven’t quite figured out yet.  Sox and No Sox discovered the hay stash in our portable garage the other day.  They sure are cute, mischievous, friendly goats.

Our goat barn rainwater catchment system.  Hard to see unless you click on the image to blow up the photo, but the pipe leading from roof gutter to large tank at left has a tee with a valved pipe leading to the stock tank at middle right.  That way, we can choose which to fill, stock tank or the big cube (which has a hose to fill the stock tank from).