June 2015

At the end of May, I (Linc) flew to Boston and drove up Rt 95 to Maine, then onto Rt 1 along the coast to The Medomak River area to attend his mother's internment ceremony with family.  The ceremony brought up more familiar feelings of grief and loss experienced over the last year or two, while at the same time, being with family again stimulated a lot of happiness and healing.  The drive up the coast, on a beautiful spring day, smelling the ocean again, and stopping to re-experience familiar sights, sounds and smells, was intoxicating.  The following two youtube videos might convey the sense of wonder I felt at the lushness and beauty of the mid-coast region.

The first is of a small stream that flows into a salt water tidal pool off of the Medomak River in Waldoboro, Maine.  A few years back, Jeanne and I kayaked up into this pool at high tide during a two day sea kayak exploration of the tidal portion of the Medomak River, part of Muscongus Bay.  We're still eating the last of the seaweed that we harvested and dried on that trip!

https://youtu.be/hdbB_kGhpNs

The second is a view out onto a portion of Muscongus Bay from Martin's Point, in Friendship, Maine.  The strangely shaped rock in the foreground is known as Lobster Rock (see the resemblance?), the small island offshore is Ram Island, one of many islands that are open to camping as part of the Maine Island Trail, the land across the bay is a two mile-long island called Frienship Long Island, and the white cottage across the road is the Vannah cottage that my family spent summer vacations when we were kids.

https://youtu.be/Cq2kWwYvkwI

The day after Mom's burial, the weather turned to rain, and it rained fairly steadily for the remaining 3 days of the five day trip.  That was a good reminder of what led us to move back out to Colorado, and it felt good to get home to the dry, sunny west.  Here's our garden in June.  We started all of our squash in the cabin greenhouse this year to try to give them a headstart after being decimated by grasshoppers the year before, and they handled the transplanting really well
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Also, in an effort to keep the slugs, pillbugs and grasshoppers in the garden under control, we introduced ducks and turkeys to the farm this year.  The turkeys were spectacular at grasshopper control.  The ducks seemed too young to have much of an impact yet, but they sure did enjoy our irrigation reservoir pool whenever we could manage to catch them all and toss them in there (they could walk out on a wooden plank when they wanted, but tended to stay in the pool all day unless we shoo'd them out.



We use a ton of hay mulch in our garden, and get much of it from used goat bedding, but have been realizing that we can always use more, and that someday we might try to grow and put up our own winter hay.  Linc bought an old side bar sickle mower, used it to mow a section of field, then borrowed a friend's antique dump rake to try and rake it up into a pile.  We started out with the dump rake behind the Toyota pickup, with Linc driving and Gerald in the back pulling the dump cord to drop the raked hay where we wanted it.  It must have looked pretty comical t see us driving around the field with Gerald in the back yanking on the dump cord, with the rake clanking, leaving piles of hay scattered around.



While this worked, it seemed really inefficient somehow, so the next step was to try pulling the rake behind our friend Ryan's tractor. That worked better, more maneuverable, and one person could do the job.



But, at best, then we had several big piles of hay that were difficult to move, and we decided to keep our eye out for a more modern setup.

Linc ended up finding a package deal, with a 1950's vintage Massey Ferguson tractor, a ten year old wheel rake, and a 1970's vintage John Deere baler.  The tractor needed (and still does) some work, and we have no idea how all of this will work together, but if we have time this coming year, we'll give it all a try.  I don't seem to have photos of the rake or baler, but this one below shows a range of technology (1950's tractor, 1960's tractor, and new millenium solar PV.

May 2015

In late April, we had our first Wwoofer (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms intern) stay with us for a week.  He was a photographer from France, named Antione Bruy, checking out people living off the grid in the U.S.  I don't have a photo of him but he has a lot of us!  Antione helped Linc pour a foundation for our solar panel pole mount and installed some of the new garden fence.  Then, in early May, our second Wwoofer, Gerald arrived from Denver in his electric Fiat (it took him 2 days and for stops for charging to get here over the passes).  Here's Gerald on his second day, getting ready to ride the backhoe with Linc a few miles up a jeep road to a friend's property to excavate for a house foundation, mountain bikes for the trip back down in case we needed to leave the backhoe there overnight.

That backhoe has turned out to be very useful here.  We found the loader was the perfect thing for tensioning new fencing.

The hoophouse greens came back to life after semi dormancy all winter, most of them starting to flower, but still providing plenty of greens and scallions for early spring salads.  Everything on the farm looked better this year, between the added help from interns Antione and Gerald, and from a day in late April when our neighbor Dev showed up with about 10 students from his Adventure Semester program.  In a few hours, they planted several potato beds, weeded and mulched the hoophouse (below), and fired up our cob pizza oven and had a pizza party.

May is one of the most colorful months here at Frugalbundance, and as always, we never tire of the view of the North Fork Valley below and the West Elk Mountains on the other side.  It never looks the same and it's always interesting when you step outside and look.

April 2015

Spring?  Time for goat kids!

Here's the video:

https://youtu.be/PWLRLWGV5Jo

Violet had her first kids, two very cute doelings.  Jeanne named them Peppermint and Lavender.

Cute kids!

Violet was a good and definitely nervous mother.

Meanwhile, Linc puttered at adding a hot water heat exchanger to the stove pipe on the cookstove.

I'm sure there are more efficient ways of using wood, and I do intend to find them eventually, but this 100 year old stove is going to be hard to beat.  In the photo above, it's morning, and the stove is heating the cabin, heating hot water, cooking home fries, an omelette, veggies, making chicken stock, heating milk for processing into yogurt and baking squash in the oven.

We ordered 10 Indian Runner ducklings.  Linc picked them up at the post office one morning, and put them under a broody hen,  and removed the eggs she'd been brooding.  She sure was excited to have her "chicks" suddenly hatch, but she'd panic whenever they jumped in the water dish and started acting like ducklings.  She did OK as a mother duck, but we lost quite a few to a variety of predators and their tendency to wander off and get lost.  Ended up getting a second hatch that was put under another broody chicken, but kept in a smaller enclosure until they were really ready to be out and about.  Two from the first hatch made it to adulthood, and five of the second.

Whenever we had a spare minute, we'd put in a few more rails on the new garden fence.  The green mesh fabric shown in the above picture is the old fence.  The one will be slabwood on the lower half, and field fence (woven wire grid) on the upper four feet).

We also did some work on the irrigation system, installing an underground valve box for our garden takeoff so that we'd be able to use the system in the shoulder season without having things freeze and break.

Spring barn cleaning.  We use a deep bedding method during the winter.  We keep adding bedding throughout the winter.  The lower layers start to compost and provide heat for the goats lying on the dry newer hay.  This works well, but resulted in one huge cleanout job in the spring.  We ended up using the front end loader to transport all that used bedding to the compost pile area.

It took five hours and something like 25 bucket loads to clean out that barn, forming these two enormous piles.  Lots of mulch for the garden this year.

That's our 4" soil block press tool, and the resulting blocks.  The square indentations are for 2" soil blocks to fit into.  We start our seedlings in the 2" blocks, then stick the 2" blocks into the 4" once they've all germinated and grown their first set of true leaves.

Wow, we still can't believe that Roger Daltrey from The Who came to visit us.  But, why is he wearing a skirt?

March 2015

Looking at photos and our farm journal, it looks like we spent much of March working on the garden fence, family financial stuff for Linc's mother's estate, reseeding and re-mineralizing pastures, adding amendemnts to the garden, but we also had some fun outings, more than normal for us.

The first photo is of Ryan's tractor with disk on the back.  Linc added an old stock tank that he filled with rocks to try and give the disk enough weight to cut the sod.  This still didn't work, even though the ground wasn't frozen, so he used a two-gang moldboard plow to till a section of one paddock, then disked it, then seeded it, then harrowed it with the disk.

Early in the month, friends took care of our farm so that we could do a wedding anniversary ski vacation.  We traveled down to Red Mountain Pass, skinned up above tree line and skied some wind slab.  The views were outstanding, even if the snow and abundance of snowmobiles was not.  Linc had fun on some wide Black Diamond skis he'd picked up at a Flagstaff thrift store, but Jeanne's older style narrow skis, her engagement present, kept breaking through on turns.  We went out for dinner in Ouray and spent the night relaxing in the hot springs at Orvis, and car camping in the Prius (yes, it sleeps two short people just fine).  We must have forgotten the camera for this trip, no photos.  Just as well, Orvis allows nudity.

At the end of the month, we got another trip in.   This time, Jeanne picked the trip - no wind slab skiing for her.  She opted for a backpack down into Gunnison Gorge.  It was beautiful.  And the trailhead was maybe 30 miles from home.  If you click on the image to blow it up, you'll see a set of switchbacks in the trail, with Jeanne standing at one corner.

Our tent site on the river.

Another view of the gorge during our climb back out.

We stopped for a visit to a former hermit's homestead about halfway back up out of Gunnison Gorge.  Linc had to check out the open air latrine, perched so that the "product" would end up in a gully that would periodically flash flood and flush everything into the Gunnison River, just like the fancy porcelain flush toilets that most civilized folks use.

The hermit's cabin.  He had a nice, fairly sheltered spot.

Can't go desert canyon backpacking and not come home with at least one collared lizard photo.

On to April.

February 2015

Welcome to Frugalbundance February

This was one warm winter month.  Most days the temps reached the 50's and several made it into the 60's (a high of 65.6 F according to Jeanne's weather journal).  The hoophouse did great, cranking out salad greens, greens for cooking, radishes, carrots and beets (above).

And, we took advantage of the warm weather by cranking up Ryan's tractor and put in 50 or 60 cedar posts for the start of a new, higher, stronger, more goat proof and wind proof garden fence (below).

It was so warm, Jeanne started making goat milk yogurt smoothies with berries from the freezer.  Here she enjoys one during a fence post digging break.  Her expression says, "Sorry, I've got several more swallows of smoothie left.  Since you finished yours first, you can do the next few posts."

Linc's response was to go mountain biking with Gabe and John on the Sidewinder Trail down in Delta.  It was great riding, especially for February in Colorado.

Warm enough to start the old backhoe, pretty much impossible to start below 50F, and dig a hole for a new solar panel array pole mount foundation.

All that work and play means time to relax and watch the sunset.

Add caption

I wonder if winter will return in March?

January 2015

Welcome to our Blog for 2015!

We've been burning a lot of slab wood from a local sawmill lately.  A bunk (about 1 cord) of spruce and fir slabwood costs 15 or 20 dollars.  We use a lot of this wood for building projects (siding) and for fencing.  The unusable pieces get sawn and split for cooking.  Linc put together a rack (above) to make it easier to cut them to length.  Always on the lookout for labor saving measures, he then screwed a salvaged ATV tire to a large cottonwood round and uesd that to hold the slabs together for splitting (below).

And then to the woodshed/outhouse.

Here's the interior of the addition to the goat barn, sided inside and out with slabwood, and hinged polycarbonate panels for light and solar heating.  Came out nice!

Our 1983 Toyota Tercel wagon, complete with multiple coats of house paint, expired at the end of 2014, and Linc bought a 2004 Prius down in Arizona to replace it.  Linc tried to revive the Tercel, but the engine had lost compression, so he got it running well enough to drive to the junkyard.  Sad to see an old reliable friend (machine or not) go.  We have a lot of great memories of times spent car camping and sightseeing in that car!  So, the Prius needed new headlight bulbs and ballasts.  The bulbs had overheated and fused themselves into the headlight assemblies, requiring the entire front end be taken apart to get them out and replaced.  Yikes!  Maybe it's not too late to go buy that Tercel back from Phil's Auto...

I don't remember when we did this exactly, but we added a solar electric system to the mobile camper chicken coop to power their portable electric mesh fence.  Our chickens have entered the solar age and now qualify for carbon credits!

Chanterelle, our Chanticler hen (one of two remaining hens from our first hatch purchased when we moved here several years ago) needed nursing for a few days.  Either that or she was faking it and just wanted to spend time in the warm, wood stove heated cabin.  Here she keeps Linc company in the office/dining/living room.  She made a complete recovery and was evicted from the cabin for defecating on the dinner table.

Still lots of apples in the root cellar we use (at a neighbor's place across the road).  With Linc down in Arizona much of last fall, we hadn't had a chance to press any for cider.

And, we were starting to get sunny days in the 40's, so we had a cider pressing day in January.

The cider was delicious.  We ended up with something like five gallons.  Drank some, gave some away, and bottled a couple gallons for vinegar - the best vinegar around.  We saved the pulp and dried it in racks on the goat barn roof and in our cabin greenhouse to use for treats for the goats.

Then came a shocker.  Our good friend and neighbor, Colin Dunbar, passed away unexpectedly on the evening of the 26th.  I know we're all unique, but Colin gave a completely new meaning to that word.  He was EXCEPTIONALLY unique, and his leaving us tore a huge hole in this entire community.  Writing this, a year later, I realize how often I still think about him, and miss his visits, long talks about the meaning of life, and his quirky sense of humor.  He is still very much part of our lives.  All plans were cancelled for several days as we all came together to give Colin a loving send off.  Lead by his former partner and neighbor Zoe Zappa, the community came together to bring Colin's body home from the hospital in Grand Junction (in the back of our old Toyota pickup truck), wash and wrap his body and set him on ice, dig his grave in frozen earth in a grove of junipers that he treasured, learn how to lower a body (we practiced by lowering Linc into the hole first), create a day-long internment and life celebration ceremony attended by a hundred or so people who were shuttled up the icy mountain road by volunteers, and place one of Colin's works of art on top of his grave.  It's been great knowing you Colin.  Thank you for being part of our lives.

Seeking solace and renewal in nature, Jeanne and I grabbed our skis and headed up to McClure Pass.  It turned out to be just what we needed.

We enjoyed it so much, we got a few friends together and went up onto the Grand Mesa for another tour a few days later.

 On to February...