Winter is coming!

First snow was on November 4th this year. Of course we HAD to go to a town meeting that night :(

Starting in September, I began to prepare for the upcoming months of winter. A few of the tasks were:

Cutting, hauling, splitting and stacking firewood...

Shifting the portable solar kit and heat lamp to the pump house...

And adding some extra weather protection for the chicken coop...

Our chicken guru (Harvey Ussery, who wrote "The Small Scale Poultry Flock") suggests that cold hardy breeds such as our Barred Plymouth Rocks do quite well without an auxiliary heat source as long as you protect the birds from drafts and humidity. I initially thought about building a winter coop, but ultimately decided on a wall tent that I could set up in the cold months and pack away during the other three seasons. Time will tell if my plan is successful.

Recent doings

I have fallen a little behind on the blog and I apologize. This post should bring us up to date on our recent activities here at Mariposa.

We attended the 4th of July parade in Fence Lake. We met a few more neighbors and had some more good food. The parade of course was awesome :)

Parade video

We helped our neighbors with the branding of their new calves. Our contribution was at the "unskilled" end of the spectrum, moving the cattle around and keeping them in place. All in all it was a fun morning. After the branding.....more good food.

In late July came the Fence Lake reunion. An amazing number of folks showed up; there was a car show, a chainsaw cutting contest (I was the official timer and served with honor), a dance, and of course..........more good food! For a LOT more pictures of this event check out the official Fence lake Facebook page: Fence Lake Breeze

In addition to the various fun activities, we managed to get a few projects done around the place.

Using reclaimed lumber which I got from our neighbor Kenny Monday, I built a cold frame. Hopefully it will extend the growing season for the Swiss chard and tomatoes much later into the fall. I will cover it with plastic and a tarp when the temps start to drop, and heat it with a Dietz oil lantern (designed back in the day for heating greenhouses) when it gets really cold.

We moved and leveled the chicken coop. I plan to cover the whole thing in a 8'x10' canvas wall tent in the winter to help protect the hens from drafts.

Using sophisticated tools (shovels and a wheel-barrow), we hauled several more tons of road base and finished out the circle drive in front of the house.

We have been enjoying the fruits of our garden, such as potatoes, beets, radishes, zucchini, squash, and lettuce. The chard is coming along and I hope to be able to harvest it before the serious cold sets in.

We still manage to find time to walk the dogs, shoot the guns, read our books, and sit around on the porch. Life is good.

Next on my agenda is cutting more wood for the coming winter, never a dull moment here at lovely Mariposa :)

One Year at Mariposa

June 27th 2015 marked the one year anniversary of our arrival at Mariposa. It has been a GREAT year, in many ways even better than we had hoped. I am going to attach a few videos to this entry to try and give you an idea what is what here at the homestead.

I apologize in advance for the quality of the videos. I made them with my tablet, and had to reduce the video quality due to the amount of time and data use it was costing me to upload them to Youtube.

Walk up to the house:

Walk up

Walk around the exterior:

Exterior

Interior:

Interior

Garden:

Garden

Chickens

It has been our plan all along to have chickens. The first step was getting a coop. Originally I planned on building one, but I have to admit I got lazy, and I really wanted the starter coop to be well built. I found a coop company online that builds quality coops, and was able to ship them. We ordered a mid sized coop and it came just in time for my brother Austin to help me put it together!

It proved to be a little harder to get the chickens I wanted than I had assumed. I had no interest in dealing with a brooder or trying to heat the coop, so I wanted young adult hens (pullets) of a cold hardy breed. The REALLY cold hardy breeds that I was interested in, Chantecler and Icelandic, were impossible to get, even chick and eggs were very hard to find. Two other breeds I was interested in, Buff Orpingtons and Plymouth Barred Rocks, were available, but usually only as chicks. I contacted quite a few breeders through Craigslist, and was generally disappointed until I finally hooked up with a lady near Show Low, AZ. We bought 4 Plymouth Barred Rock pullets and brought them home on May 11th. One of my concerns was how Zuno was going to react to the chickens. As it turned out, with some supervision and correction, he was convinced that they were not vermin and quickly became bored with them. Fortunately we were in full lizard season so he had better things to occupy his time.

We kept the birds in the coop exclusively for close to two weeks, then started to let them out to free range during the day. It has been fun to watch them scuttle around the yard, scratching and pecking.

Since that first day, they have spent more and more of their day outside the coop. They have become especially fond of a juniper near the bird feeder. They created their own little dust wallow, pretty much ignoring the dust bath I had set up in the coop (other than to throw straw into it). I liked the nipple waterer which my parents had bought to go in the coop, so I ordered a 10 pack of nipples and made a little water station for the juniper hangout.

I will update this post as the chickens mature.

Recent projects

As I mentioned in the last post, now that spring has sprung, I have been getting back into the puttering mode. The following are a few of the recent projects.

Built a stand for the cool bell that Jill's folks gave us. While scrounging some wood for that project (as well as the gate project) from our neighbors Gene and Karen's yard, we saw a buffalo skull lying near the scrap wood. Being the shy folks we are we asked Gene if we could have it :)

I finally got around to making a wood rack. The top drawer that holds the newspaper was left over from some of the weird stuff I found when I bought Bonnybank. The rest is scrap wood from other projects. Once the wood-stove season is over, I will haul it out and paint it dark green so it matches the breadboard behind it.

Cut the sidewall out of the big old tire Laurel let us have for a raised bed planter. It actually wasn't quite as bad of a chore as I thought it was going to be. I also cut a piece of chicken wire to keep the larger burrowing rodents out. Pretty soon I will get around to filling it with earth. Not sure yet what I am going to plant in it.

I hauled rocks to build a little erosion barricade around the base of the "man shed". I'm not sure if I will fill in with smaller rocks or not. I was afraid if we have really heavy rains during the monsoon season, it might undercut the skids.

Last winter when the mud was so bad, we had a couple of sawhorses blocking our drive to keep it from getting so chewed up by the folks who don't seem to mind driving over soft mud and destroying other people's driveways. Anyway, I went ahead and built a little gate to take the place of the sawhorses. It stays open most of the time, but we can swing it closed in inclement weather.

I built a sandbag barrier around the base of the pump house, partly for erosion control, and partly for insulation. I filled the bags with the loose gravel that the local red ants were so kind to pile up all over out here. I never thought I would be saying "thank you" to the local ant population.

In honor of my brother Austin's visit, we actually did some spring cleaning. I went old school (since we no longer own a household vacuum cleaner) and hung up the few rugs we own and whacked them with a stick. So much fun.

Austin gave me a hand and we spent about 3.5 hours putting together our swanky new chicken coop.

I have been keeping busy, not too many hours a day, but steady. I still laugh when I think of the people who used to ask (on hearing that I planned to retire) "what are you going to do all day?!"

Spring has sprung

As Jill so correctly pointed out the other day, it has been a long time since I have lived in a place where the vernal equinox actually seems to herald spring. I am pleased to say that here at Mariposa, spring has sprung.

On March 22nd, we saw the first lizard of spring. A number of the bird species which were gone for the winter have returned. And of course, porch setting has become a regular pastime again.

In addition to sitting around, we have started taking longer morning walks; 1-2 hours on average. I have also started to get back into the swing of morning chores, with such activities as cutting firewood and hauling rocks to put around the base of the man shed.

We are looking forward to the arrival of the chicken coop I ordered, so that we can start having fun with chickens.

I would have to say, life is good.

New Toys

When Mike Gray from Beehive came out in December to finish up some solar stuff, he brought a cool little portable battery kit with him. He said he brought it to work sites in case he needed auxiliary power. He had designed it for an emergency preparedness seminar that he had given, but felt like he would like to build another one with a larger inverter. The kit consists of two 55 amp/hour AGM batteries, a charge controller, an inverter, and a trickle charger (in case the sun doesn't shine). All wired and fused in a heavy duty rolling case.

I had been thinking about a second solar system to run the heat lamp in the pump house during the winter, and to run a fan, or light, or battery chargers in the man shed during the summer, so I offered to buy it from him. He had only brought one panel with him, but promised to deliver the second panel as soon as possible. Last Wednesday he dropped off the second panel. In the mean time, I had built a rolling rack for the panels, with angle adjustment for the different seasons.

Now that it is all hooked up, I am quite pleased with how it is working.

During our last monthly trip to Gallup, I picked up a large drop-side wagon. It has a 1200 pound capacity, and should be better than our little lawn cart or the wheel barrow for hauling firewood, rocks, and gardening stuff.

On a rare (for  me) impulse buy, I bought a Black and Decker cordless drill. It is a 20v unit with a lithium battery. It probably isn't as robust as a Makita or Ryobi, but it cost about half as much. I used it to install the carrying handles on Jill's tray and it seemed to work very well. I am psyched about not having to drag out the 100 foot extension cord quite as often :)

Garden fence

In preparation for the spring planting, I put up a fence to hopefully keep the deer, elk, and cattle out of our garden.

16 T posts, and 100 feet of 5 foot high hog wire.

I picked a level spot below the pump house, so it wasn't too bad of a chore. Fortunately Dad had given me a fence driver before we moved out, it has really come in handy.

The old truck tire is a gift from our neighbor Laurel up the road. After I have cut out the side walls, it will be used as a raised bed planter.