July 2017

Let's see, what happened in July?  We continued focusing on getting that future rental house renovated, excavating for basement egress windows, cutting out the concrete walls, building window wells, installing windows, and so on.  We went for lots of short hikes together up to the pass behind our cabin for exercise, Jeanne walked with friends, Linc mountain biked on some Sunday mornings with a local group, and the new goat kids got their adventure legs and went on walks with Jeanne and the big goats.  The pasture responded really well to the new gun sprinkler irrigation, along with fertigation with raw milk, as well as microbial and fungal inoculants.  We had enough growth that we were able to cut and bale around 40 bales for first cutting.  Here's a photo of the three kids on a walk.  Pretty cute!

 And most of the herd (Eggplant not in photo) loving the results of water and inoculants.

Oh, and on July 16th, we had a hail storm that seriously shredded the garden.  Everything was just starting to recover from the June 13th frost damage and WHAMMO, set back again!  Hard year for the garden!

June 2017

We continued spending the majority of our free time working on the fixer upper home, did a lot of garden bed prep and planting, went to events in town.  Linc continued enjoying meeting with a mens' group every Sunday.  Jeanne got together with several friends for walks, movies and game nights, which Linc and a friend or two sometimes attended. Finally, we decided we really needed to get up to the mountains, got our morning chores done as quick as possible, drove 40 minutes or so, got on our mountain bikes and road up to Lost Lake campground, then went for a beautiful hike that took us to Dollar Lake (where Linc went swimming for 0.3 seconds), Lost Lake (Jeanne crossing outlet), and Lost Lake Slough.  I'll include a short video of Jeanne crossing the outlet log debris at Lost Lake, mainly because the ending is pretty funny!

Here's Lost Lake.

Linc in Dollar Lake (looking for money probably)

And Jeanne completing a successful traverse of Lost Lake outlet log jam, below!

Oh, one strange thing happened on June 13th.  We had planted our tomato and squash seedlings out a week or two before, figuring we were way past last frost.  It only got down to 43 F on our min/max thermometer overnight, but the night sky was perfectly clear, and we ended up with frost everywhere, including on the plants INSIDE our hoophouse!  In fact the ones inside the hoophouse were set back the most, but everything got frosted.  We lost maybe 20% of our tomato and squash plants, and the remainder got slowed down quite a bit as they recovered, as did our potatoes that had been growing up through the mulch in their four beds.  Wow, 43 F and freezing!?

May 2017

Another busy month!  We continued working on renovating the rental property.  We finished installing that gun sprinkler system for our paddocks, upgraded the solar electric system, welcomed three new baby goats to the farm, and planted a few trees that we'd mail ordered.  With the help of a neighbor of our occupied rental property in town, we installed another 1000 feet of 2" poly pipe from Stewart Ditch located halfway up Paonia Hill overlooking town, down several hundred feet through the briars, under the railroad tracks in an ancient wooden culvert, then behind several homes and through several underground sections of culvert (requiring floating a bobber on fishing line to pull a rope through to then pull the pipe through, with one section being about 150' underground!) so that the renters would have pressurized irrigation water for free (no pump) to water the lawn.  This also required a fair amount of backhoe work, which made us appreciate our old 1965 Case loader hoe even more.  Whew.

Our solar system required a major upgrade - the lead acid storage batteries had been failing for several months, so we replaced them with a new industrial, custom made battery provided by Global Industrial Battery, similar to ones used in forklifts.  The manufacturer says that this battery should last 20 years instead of the 7 or 8 that the L-16 batteries we'd used before last.  That's good, because at something like 700 lbs, it wasn't easy getting these in place in the new PV room we built last year off the back of the cabin.  We also upgraded our inverter to a 2000 watt Magna Sine pure sine wave inverter charger that can handle the startup loads of power tools and laser printers (instead of having to run the gas generator for those) and that can quickly recharge the batteries using our generator if we ever have too many cloudy days in a row again.  In the process of wiring all of this up, Linc finally installed a small circuit breaker panel, and ran a wire out to our tool shed for charging the e-bikes and running power tools.

 We kept working on preparing beds in the garden.  This year, with everything else going on, bed prep was minimal and consisted mostly of reforming beds torn apart by the chickens, guineas and turkeys that spent the winter in the garden, and where time, doing a little broad-forking to loosen things up.  Here's an early spring harvest of greens, asparagus and lots of rhubarb.

Our Alpine-Nubian doe, Jasmine kidded successfully, with some minimal assistance from Jeanne, and delivered three beautiful goat kids, (two doelings and one buckling).  We don't name the bucklings in case we can't find a buyer and have to butcher them at some point, but we get attached nonetheless.  Meet Dandelion (black, brown and white in foreground), Sunflower (white and brown to right front), and well, the buckling!

And, we now have a working gun sprinkler system serving our goat pastures (below).  This is a great improvement because it uses a little less than half the water, can run fine on the low pressure silty irrigation flow, and will still work when the flow drops below what we flood irrigate at (which was anything less than around 100 gpm).  We used to have trouble keeping two acres of pasture watered until the end of July.  Now we should be able to easily water three acres, and possibly one or two more through to near the end of August, enough to provide a second cutting of hay and great fall pasture for the goats and birds.

April 2017

Wow, spring is busy here!  Jeanne worked to finish up the taxes, Linc continued renovating the rental property.  We also prepped and started planting the garden, installed an in-ground big gun sprinkler system for watering our paddocks consisting of 1100 feet of buried 2" pipe, 8 standpipes, and 2 gun sprinklers.  

Somewhere in there, Linc fell off his e-bike and suffered a 3rd degree shoulder separation.  It's actually kind of a funny story, so here it is.  It was starting to rain and we were both in a hurry to get down to the fixer-upper rental house on our e-bikes to get some work done.  It started to pour as Linc started down awhile after Jeanne, carrying a backpack full of tools and a huge Blue Hubbard winter squash (to bake in the oven at the house while we worked).  He was also towing a BOB trailer full of carpentry and tiling tools behind his bike.  At one point, heading around a hairpin at 15 mph or so, he noticed a stick between his front tire and fender.  Rather than do the rational thing and stop to pull it out, he decided to save time and just pull it out while riding.  As he pulled it out, it caught on the fender, causing the fender to catch on the tire and get jammed up between the forks, locking up the front wheel.  "We're going down!" thought Linc, and so he did, scattering tools, pieces of broken squash, scraping his face and separating a shoulder in the process.  Only, he didn't know it was separated, he just knew he couldn't seem to use it, so got everything loaded back up with one arm, rode down to the house, and worked on tiling the kitchen floor.  A week or so later he finally got the x-ray and found out what had happened.  The doctor's advice was, go easy on it, but don't stop moving it, so he kept on working.  Other than a strange looking bump, it mostly healed just fine.  Moral is, don't be in too much of a hurry, especially when you see that stick in the wrong place!

We did suffer what was for us, our biggest loss of our homesteading career.  Our beloved herd queen and first goat we ever got, Phoebe, had complications in labor, lost her kids, got torn up internally in the process (they were REALLY tangled), and died a couple days later.  Her absence still feels like a huge void on our farm.  Here's a couple of photos of her, one posing for our 2010 Christmas photo with Eggplant, and the other with her two doelings, Flicker and Wren in 2011.

We did take a break or two to recover from that.  Here's one of us hiking to the pass up behind our cabin.  In the middle of the photo below you can just make out most of our goat paddocks in the green portion of a large brown field.

And Jeanne took care of all of the chores for a couple of days while Linc went backpacking with the guys into Big Dominguez Canyon.

Then it was back at it.  Here's a photo of some of the 1100' of trenching Linc did to install the sprinkler piping.

 Followed by a nice sunset shot!

What did we learn this month?  Let's see, don't be in a hurry to pull out a stick, things happen in life that hurt a lot, there's more strength in each of us than we know until we need it, and there's unexpected beauty when we stop and look.

March 2017

March was mostly work for us.  Besides 5 hrs of farm chores each day, Jeanne cranked away on our taxes, which are getting more and more complicated with the rental business, buying and selling homes, the capital gains associated with that, farm related activities, and then we're members in another LLC, the one that owns the land that we live on - whew!  We tried to get a tax attorney, but after they heard what was involved, their fee estimate skyrocketed from affordable to not.  

Linc cooked most of the meals (same old thing just about every day!!), helped a bit with the chores, and spent most of each day cranking away on the unoccupied fixer upper home we'd purchased in early February, refinishing wood trim, remodeling part of the kitchen, painting, repairing appliances.  

We both worked on concluding the sale of our second former rental home down valley, located in Austin.  With it sold, we went from owning two fixed up (by us) homes 25 and 30 miles away, to two that are both within 2 miles of home, but both still in need of plenty of renovation work.  At least one had rented by this time, so we had some income coming in.

With the gains from selling the two down valley homes, we didn't qualify for any assistance from the ACA, and with an annual income predicted around 10k, we decided that 12k/yr for catastrophic health insurance coverage wasn't affordable this year, and did our best to not injure ourselves or get sick.

Linc had a great idea to spread the compost pile out in the pasture for the chickens to pick through so there would hopefully be fewer of the seedling-eating pill bugs in it this year.

Permaculture in action!

The only problem was that one day later it looked like this.

And a few days after that it was just a big flat brown spot on the field.  Those chickens work fast!  But, it probably worked.  We scraped it up a while later and piled it back up elsewhere for the garden.

And here's just a nice photo of Eggplant and one of our Midget White Turkey hens.  Eggplant LOVES getting her back scratched and if there's no human around to do it, she's happy to encourage a turkey to fill in!

February 2017

A fairly normal February for us.  Jeanne continued to make delicious hard cheeses from our goats' milk and gradually filled a shelf in the new root cellar with them.  Linc strained his back badly enough to require a few days of being a man-baby, moaning and groaning as he hobbled around our tiny cabin, which drove Jeanne slightly crazy - luckily her goats were always willing to listen and things improved after a few days.  After the back improved, Linc spent nearly all of his days down the road at the new rental property, tearing out old flooring, repainting, replacing a moldy subfloor in a bathroom, and repairing the boiler plant (new circulator, zone valves, boiler controller and a tune up).  Once he had a warm place to work, he brought the seized injection pump from our 1988 VW Jetta diesel veggie oil car down there and rebuilt it (not reinstalled in the car yet to test, as of Feb 2018).

Wonderful Goat Cheeses!

January 2017

According to Jeanne's weather journal, January brought us 39.5" of snow down here in the valley, much more up in the high country.  Great for skiing and for the coming irrigation season.  Looking back at our farm journal (as I type this in February 2018), Linc's knee recovered slowly from his December mountain bike crash, he fixed up and sold our former U-Haul moving truck, we sold our rental property in Delta, purchased a fixer upper to replace it a mile down the road here in Paonia, replaced our 8 year old laptop computer with a new used Dell, and did a lot of cross country and backcountry skiing (and edited and posted the 2016 Frugalbundance Farm Blog).

On one of our outings up TV Hill (now closed by new owner ☹), Linc discovered he'd forgotten his poles (second time in 2 years, getting old!).  All we could find in the car was a broken broom, but that and an avalanche probe pole were enough to save him from a 14 mile round trip drive to get his poles at home.  A photo and link to a video from that outing below...