October 2013

 October arrived, and we were still living in that tiny crowded camper out in the driveway.  The nights were starting to dip below freezing, and we started using the propane furnace.  Well, one morning, the furnace sprung a gas leak, and it blew up as Linc sat at the computer.  There was a big ball of flame, lots of yelling and confused running around, and then flames licking up the walls inside, followed by more yelling, and beating out the flames.  It was over pretty quickly, with no real damage, but from then on, no heat in the camper.

 Cooking breakfast in the summer kitchen was no longer that much fun either.  It's hard to see, but there's a bit of snow on the ground in the back of this picture, and while the stove gives off some heat, it's still outside in the wind, and after awhile you just get tired of being cold all day long!

 So, we renewed our efforts to finish the inside of the cabin.  Jeanne applied marble tile to the new countertop,

 We used some limewash to decorate the east wall of the loft, built a bed frame, built shelving out of some 1x6 tongue and groove cedar a friend had given us,

 Built a dining/office nook downstairs, and forced the first neighborhood visitors to sit down and see if it was large enough for a future dinner party of four.  Barely!

 Based on an idea Jeanne saw in a library book on cabinetry, Linc made seven cabinets that drop down from the ceiling joist space, with the shelves sized to fit quart and half gallon canning jars.  Yay, we finally have a place to put those jars and jars of pear sauce, tomato sauce, ketchup, and salsa we've been canning all fall!

 And then the big day came.  We're moved in and warm, and wow does it feel good to be back in out of the cold!  Here's Jeanne in the dining/office nook, herbal medicine cabinet to the right, new larger chest freezer (running at refrigerator temperature with a remote bulb tstat), custom bulk food storage cabinet behind it, filing cabinet in foreground.  Overhead are the folded up canning jar cabinets.

 Here's a view of the west side with the old wood cookstove back in service keeping us warm, cooking hot meals, heating water.  We now have a sink!  But the greywater drain isn't hooked up to a mulch basin yet, so we're still carrying the dishwater out to the compost piles every day.  No hot water yet, other than that heated on the stove, but we've bought the supplies to install a hot water heat exchanger in the wood stove firebox, so soon....

 Here's our new (used, $60) miniature clothes washer.  It runs off of the solar electric system just fine.  Only handles about half of what a normal clothes washer would, but works a bit better than the old 1926 Maytag ringer-washer that we'd been using before.  Our water filtration system shows here, a 5 micron particle filter, a charcoal cartridge filter, then a UV sterilization light canister.  When the 1100 gallon cistern that's buried up the hill gets low, we hook a hose up to the irrigation system and pump water through this system and up to the tank.  Takes about a day to refill the cistern, and then we've got water for drinking, bathing, laundry, and for goats and chickens for another two to three months.

 This year's pumpkin and winter squash harvest.  Not our best ever, but not too bad either.  Squash bugs had their way in the garden this year...

 With frost predicted, we harvested all of the remaining tomatoes, and piled them on the counters to ripen.  Within a week or so, we had enough ripe to make several more quarts of tomato sauce.

 With the emergency of getting back in the cabin resolved, Linc went up the road and spent a day helping Eric and Cooper build an earth ship house using tires filled with compacted soil for the walls.  Eric has worked out an ingenious system for doing this that involves a few custom made tools and an old skid steer.

 Next, we spent a morning helping friends down in the vally pick wine grapes, and watched the de-stemming machine do it's thing.

 Back at our farm, we invited the community over to process apples into cider using our antique grinder/press.  The majority of the group worked on cutting out the wormy parts (above), while two of us worked the machine (below).

 And then, one day, an enormous semi truck came driving up into our field, right through the prairie dog town, his trailer full of 10" diameter piping, part of an NRCS fundshared project to replace the leaking, 6000' long irrigation ditch that serves this property with a buried pipeline.

 A shot of the contractor beginning to unload pipe. 

 One afternoon, I (Linc) bicycled a few miles up the valley to a neighbor's remote mountain home (an old school bus) to borrow his tractor.  Driving the ancient, puttering, diesel machine back down the dirt mountain road, with the mountain scenery slowly passing by, I experienced this timeless feeling of intense gratitude for where we live.

September 2013

 With the floor and walls done, we began installing new (used) cabinets in the cabin (above).

 The garden continued to grow like crazy into September.  Here's Jeanne next to the sunflowers.

 Linc next to some Reid's Dent Corn.

 A great harvest day from the garden (assuming you like fresh tomatoes and green beans).

 We've gotten a lot of use out of the Toyota former U-Haul rental moving truck that we bought in Boston a few years back.  It now serves as a mobile farm tool shed, complete with all of the tools required to do nearly anything.  Here, we're set up to build some custom cabinets for the cabin.

 A happy Waldorf school girl with one of our chicks.

The sky and the view here are so variable, inspiring, never boring.  It's one reason we've never gotten itchy feet since moving here (a former pattern).  I can think of a lot of places we've seen that are AS beautiful, but they were all in national parks or wilderness areas.

August 2013

 During August, the growing horns on the goat girls began to cause problems.  The would stick their heads through the fence to the "greener grass", and be unable to get back out.  The best solution we've come up with so far is to duct tape a stick across their horns for a couple days.  Here's Tulip modeling her new headware... hornware?

 The garden started really booming in August, as seen above from the goat barn roof, and below, with squash, corn and beans, and LOTS of weeds.

 With the finish plaster on the walls done, we tackled the finish plaster coat on the earthen floor.  Same mix as for the walls, except that for each gallon of earthen plaster, we added one raw egg (for strength).  We later finished the floor with two coats of walnut oil, then two coats of walnut cut 25% with beeswax (and applied hot), then rubbed off after a week, then another two coats of OSMO Hardwax Oil.  We were very happy with the final result.  Very durable, slightly glossy, and feels great under bare feet.

 We wondered if the pastured chickens were missing the dust baths that they had so enjoyed back when they were free range.  Their favorite dust for bathing was the duff that accumulates under the Juniper trees, so we shoveled a bunch into a kiddy pool that someone gave us, put it on an old trailer, and moved it around the pasture with their camper coop and mobile fencing.  They do enjoy it!

 Jeanne harvested over 360 garlic bulbs from the garden!  She hung them in bundles, still attached to their stalks, from the frame of our portable storage garage/hay barn.  I don't think we'll run out of garlic this year!

 The peaches came on in an orchard up on the opposite side of the valley, and we needed exercise, so we hooked a trailer up to Linc's bike, bicycled to a You-Pick orchard, piled 30 or so lbs of peaches into the trailer, and biked home.  It's doable, but Linc is now looking into adding a small, electric assist drive to one of our bikes for when we want to haul groceries from down in the valley back up here.  We could recharge the battery off of our solar electric array.  Beats burning gas.

 We did get out hiking about once a week in August, while a friend took care of our farm for the day.  Thanks Siobhan!  Here's Last Dollar Lake (below).

 Jeanne, during a rest break below the Beckwith Range (probably telling me to point the camera the opposite direction!)

 We're starting to learn about edible wild mushrooms.  Here is what we tentatively identified as an edible King Bolete, but being tentative, we never did get up the nerve to eat it.  Next year, we'll try and get out with some of our mushroom hunting friends to learn more.

 This year, we finally made it to the top of Mt. Lamborn, just across the valley from our home.  Here, we're looking down at the North Fork Valley, the town of Paonia, and our homestead across the valley.

 Here's the same view, but zoomed in on our homestead quite a bit.

 And zoomed in even more.  Our place is at the top middle of the brown field in the center of the photo.  You can even see some green streaking where we put the last of the irrigation water on the field below the garden.

 On the way home, the truck managed to levitate one wheel on a tricky section of road, causing both of us to abandon ship long enough to get a photo.

July 2013

 So, July was a bit of a blur.  Mid-summer should be like that, right?  We moved out of our cabin into a tiny camper in the driveway, and started applying finish plaster to the walls of the cabin, both upstairs and down.  The plaster consisted of clay-earth sifted through a screen, water to make a slip, sifted sand, and boiled wheat paste.  We had some major help on this project when our neighbor Ian came over for a day and helped us do three of the four walls downstairs.

 The summer kitchen got a facelift when the old cabinets from the cabin were moved out there.  It became a focal point both mornings and evenings, as we could no longer cook in the cabin, and the camper was really too small for much other than sleeping and a bit of engineering work.

 The overhanging porch off the west end of the cabin became our pantry, with chest freezer, another chest freezer wired to run as a fridge, the cream separator, grain grinder, cabinets, bulk bins.

 At the same time, we used the backhoe to level out a spot in the woods, added carpet as underlayment, and installed a used above ground swimming pool that we found for cheap in the want ads.  The pool was 18' wide, and big enough to store around 6000 gallons of water for the garden for the end of August when our irrigation water typically runs out.

 It also made for a nice swimming hole on hot days.

 Towards the end of the month, we traveled down to Flagstaff again for Linc's mother and sister's birthdays, and did some car camping and hiking near Telluride (Lake Hope above), and Monument Valley (below).

 Stopped for a look at the Sneffels Range on the way back up.

 And took a selfie at Gretchen's place as we worked on Mom's taxes.

 Meanwhile, the garden was progressing, with the 3 sisters (corn, squash and beans) growing nicely below, surrounded by the ever-present bindweed and prickly lettuce.

 And, the snow pea harvest started, along with lots of greens.

 Here, we tried making a trellis of cattle panel to use to grow squash up.  Unfortunately, the squash never got big enough to climb it this year, but someday we'll get it to work!

 Linc helped out a bit with a community art wall downtown as part of a Village Building Convergence project.

 And, there was always the community garden asking for attention.  We wanted to help with this project a lot more than we were able to.  It came out great!

 At home, Linc installed a fertigation system in the irrigation pipe feeding our garden, and used it to innoculate the soils with beneficial microorganisms.  We used a purchased product called EM-1, and also fed extra whey, from making goat milk cheese, through this.  Hard to say what effect it had, since we didn't use a control in this experiment, but the garden did really well this year.

 We also periodically used the truck to move the chicken coop around the field, moving a portable electric mesh fence and solar powered fence charger with it.  The effect on the vitality of the pasture after the chickens had been there was dramatic and unmistakeable.

 Jeanne continued taking the goats on daily browse walks up the ditch...

 For a scale perspective of the landscape we inhabit, Jeanne and the goats are in this photo, just below a solitary tree in the center of the picture, walking along the ditch.

 Same photo, just zoomed in.  Now you can see them!

 And, the interior of the little camper we called home for four months or so this year.  I don't miss living in it all that much!