January 2016

We spent January resting a little, sleeping a lot, skiing some.  The big hybrid battery on the Prius failed.  At $3000 for a new one, and $1600 for a reconditioned from NAPA, Linc used the Youtube approach.  That involves watching a few videos until you know how to do something that you normally wouldn't attempt.  In this case, it involved taking the 200 volt battery out of the car, finding the bad cell, ordering a functioning used one on Ebay for $40, making the swap, then reconditioning the whole battery bank using a strange assortment of lightbulbs and power supplies.  Luckily, he had an empty garage to use nearby with grid electricity and a wood stove for heat.  It took a few days, but it worked!  Here's the battery:

 

December 2015

Linc had a great drive down to Flagstaff, high on coffee, enjoying the views of the desert and mountains.  Here's a shot through the windshield of Church Rock, north of Kayenta, AZ, in the Navajo reservation.

Gretchen's arrival home was very emotional, partially because she had just had surgery on her left eye, had the bandage removed that morning, and found that she could see again, for the first time in something like six weeks.  We were all ecstatic.  None of us could believe that here she was, walking around her house, talking, (and making sense!) and joking with us.  It's hard to describe what's it's like to have someone leave, possibly for good, and then return.  Not that hard to describe actually - it feels GREAT!  Strangely, none of us thought to take photos, sorry!

Back home, the ducks and chickens worked over the harvested garden, cleaning up the last of those tasty slugs, pill bugs and squash beetles.  Go birds go!

Snow arrived, a little at first...

Then a lot!  This was the most snow we've seen since arriving here six years ago, and the locals say it's never been this cold and snowy here in their memory.

Happily, the greens in the hoophouse kept growing.  What a nice feeling to be able to go out through the snow and harvest salad greens!

The wood fired cookstove in the cabin got lots of use this month, but on sunny days it was warm enough in the cabin with the solar greenhouse that we'd heat up our mid-day soup outside on the propane cookstove, if we could find it...

As I write this, three months into 2016, I think, "Wow, what a crazy year 2015 was!  I wonder what the rest of 2016 will be like?  Maybe this year I'll start doing monthly blog entries so I don't end up trying to enter an entire year's worth of photos and memories at the same time....

November 2015

We don't seem to have any photos from this month at all.  Linc spent the first week or so with Gretchen in her acute care hospital room in Phoenix.  Gretchen was mostly delirious, but still had her (apparently innate!) sense of humor, politeness and caring attitude towards others, despite being the focus of everyone's concern and attention as she slowly recovered from brain surgery.  The sleep deprivation and psycho-active drugs and anti-seizure medications took a toll on Gretchen's ability to recognize reality, and Linc and family accumulated stories to tell her later about the things she said and did while she was in this post-recovery delirium.  And, we all learned a ton of new medical terms and became pretty well versed in the intricacies of subarachnoid hemorrhages.

Thankfully and amazingly, Gretchen turned a corner back towards the living, and went into inpatient rehab in mid-November.  Still temporarily blinded, she reported having many visual hallucinations, and continued to slowly recover from ICU psychosis, a state of delirium and paranoia that often accompanies long stays in intensive care.  She made rapid progress regaining some strength and balance and started going for lots of walks around the facility with family members, and we all started planning for her return to her home in Flagstaff.

Back home, Jeanne and Linc caught up on a few winter preparations before Linc headed back to Flagstaff to wait for Gretchen and Bekah as they drove up from Phoenix.  

October 2015

The root cellar foundation is coming along.  We had a shaky start (learning curve) when the first row was off by a couple inches in height from end to end, but our neighbor, Ian, came by with a laser level and some good advice, and things straightened out.  After awhile, it got to be easy, though the higher courses were some work, and adding rebar and filling every fourth core (so it can hold back the earth without buckling) added to the amount of mixing and pouring required.  The black hose is our cabin's domestic water supply, which we dug up in the process of excavating, and which we're worrying a bit about getting routed under the new footer and reburied and insulated before winter.  During the winter, all of the water for us and chickens, ducks and goats needs to flow through this pipe that is now exposed to the elements.

We also started expanding our domestic water storage by excavating for, and installing, two new 1500 gallon poly tanks up at the top of the land.  Once these are in place and connected in, we'll have 4000 gallons of storage capacity, enough to last us the entire winter.  Without them, we often have to put chains on the truck in mid-winter, put a 200 gallon tank in the bed and haul water from a pump station down by the highway.  Getting the tanks in place was easier than it looks in the photo below.  We were able to roll them off the truck and trailer and into the excavated spot where they'll be semi-buried without either of them getting away and rolling down the hill and across the garden.  Great!

Also, now that we'd finished digging behind the cabin with the backhoe, we were able to finish off the storage shed by adding a west facing shed roof with slabwood wall and shelving.  It was immediately filled with the outdoor fridge, freezer, gardening supplies, storage boxes, the hand crank cream separator.  Storage is good when you live in a 10'x15' cabin!

With the new garden fence complete, it's time for the goats to test it.  Here's Violet longing for all those tasty squash and tender little fruit trees on the other side of the gate...

And now, the fall harvest begins.  950 lbs of potatoes, 900 lbs of pumpkins and squash, 260 lbs of tomatoes.  Starting with a wheelbarrow load full of Delicatas.

Some enormous Blue Hubbards.

Or maybe they're Sweet Meats, I'm not sure!

Pumpkins!

And the question is, with the root cellar not done yet, where are we gonna store all of these?  The bedroom?  Sure, why not?

In the middle of all of this fall construction, harvesting, and food processing, Jeanne answered a call from Linc's niece Carrie.  Carrie's mother, Gretchen, had just suffered a ruptured cerebral aneurysm and was being taken by ambulance to a neuro surgery unit at St. Joseph's hospital in Phoenix, AZ.  Her two daughters, Carrie and Bekah, ex-husband Jim, and his wife Sarah, all drove and flew down to be at her side in ICU.  Linc got the water line buried, and some lose ends taken care of, and drove down to take a turn sitting with Gretchen in ICU for a week, then at the end of the month she was transferred to a room in the acute care wing.  Gretchen had regained consciousness and had begun talking with us, but then slipped into delirium for nearly a week.  Here, she greets her grand daughter Lily, during one of her clearer moments.

Back home, Jeanne worried her way through chores, work and homesteading while waiting to see what would happen with Gretchen.  Having Linc's mother pass away less than a year ago, our friend and neighbor Colin in January, and now Gretchen in the hospital, all reminded us of how short and unpredictable life can seem at times.  What a gift life is - so much to savor and appreciate!

September 2015

September - harvesting and building!

It was a really cool and rainy spring and summer, so the veggies were slow to ripen in the garden, but once they started too, it was really hard to keep up with it all.  Eat it, give it away, dry it, can it, freeze it, root cellar, we tried everything, and somehow, it all got used.  We averaged 6 lbs of zucchini a day for a month or so.  Here's a sampler of our yearly total for some of the summer harvest from garden and hoophouse:

Cooked greens - 340 lbs

Salad greens - 65 lbs

Wax beans - 16 lbs

Zucchini - 297 lbs

Tomatoes - 270 lbs

Rhubarb - 27 lbs

With all of the rain and irrigation water, the pasture stayed greener longer this year.  The goats enjoyed all that greenery and Jeanne happily struggled to keep up with all of the milk, making yogurt, cheeses, cream, butter, and gradually taking on more customers.  The total for the year ended up being a little over 4000 lbs of milk!  Abundance is stressful in a ways, because you don't want it to go to waste, but it has a much nicer feel to it than scarcity.

Meanwhile, Linc kept building and digging.  He maneuvered the backhoe in behind the cabin and began excavating for an addition on two sides for a two room root cellar, a solar battery/outhouse room and an attached outdoor kitchen for summer cooking without having to carry pots up the hill to the current summer kitchen.

The backhoe also came in handy for digging up one of the main irrigation valves that was leaking.  Linc took it out, found nothing wrong, put it back in, and it hasn't leaked since.  This seems to happen a lot for him; take it apart, look at it, put it back together, and it's fixed, but no idea why! 

He also used the backhoe to excavate for the next winter's growing beds for the mobile hoophouse.  Because we were down to caliche (clay and rock-hard alkali mineral precipitate), he dug down two or three feet for each bed, threw cottonwood logs and branches to create sunken bed hugelkultur (see http://www.richsoil.com/hugelkultur/), backfilled, and then mixed compost and soil amendments into the top 4".  These beds were then planted with cold-hardy winter greens, carrots, and beets and left until we could find time to de-anchor the hoophouse, roll it down the rails over the new beds (once the tomatoes were done in the summer beds), and anchor it back down against the winter winds.

 

August 2015

August is the start of harvesting abundance at Frugalbundance, and this was our best year ever for the garden, by far.

Here's our garlic harvest, some of the biggest bulbs we've ever grown, about 360 of them.  I'm thinking, if it takes two wheelbarrows to carry the garlic, we might be finally growing enough!

The squash plants and weeds had a free for all in the garden to see who could grow the fastest, and the thankfully, the squash won.  Other than weed wacking the paths until the squash vines made that impossible, and Gerald doing some great hand weeding of garlic, onions, strawberries and potatoes back in May and June, we let the weeds and food plants battle it out, mainly because we didn't really have the time to do otherwise.

This was a really wet year for us, and we had plenty of water for the entire season, which for us is a rarity.

The shed got enclosed, and the first of two side sheds put on, with plenty of shelving for storage.  The happy pack rats moved right in, but only in the outside portion.  Linc finally emptied all of his tools out of the Toyota moving truck that we drove here five years ago, and spent a few days rediscovering and organizing them inside the much roomier shed.  Wow, to be able to find tools and supplies again - so nice!

July 2015

Welcome to July!  We tend to have our noses to the grindstone a lot here.  It's our choice - there's just a lot that we'd like to accomplish.  But we're also aware of how much beauty there is waiting for us to explore, only minutes from the door.  Once in awhile we're able to get away for a few hours of that.  Here, we're on the backside of Mt. Gunnison, coming back down after running out of time to try and climb an unmarked route up to an alpine lake.  Had to get back to take care of the animals, but we look forward to coming back here.

One of the many things we want to create on our homestead is a place to store things out of the weather, so Linc and Gerald started work on a storage shed (in background) after finishing installing the solar PV array on the new pole mount.

And the garden started to explode with summer growth, especially now that there we had domesticated turkeys wandering around eating all those grasshoppers that decimated last year's plants.

Our lovable neighbor Zoe stops by frequently on her daily dog walks.  Here, she and Jeanne practice their communication skills.