Spring in the Mountains

Garlic bed closest to cistern, with plum and currant and chokecherry trees

Another shot of that same garlic

Currant

Happy hens come running

We Don't Buy Lemons Anymore

 We have just this one lemon tree and for over a month now it has supplied us with all our citrus needs. So add lemons to the list of things we used to buy at stores or wherever... now we grow them ourselves. We have not bought eggs since we first got chickens almost two years ago, we harvest our own wood heat, tons or veggies in season and whenever else possible. We have slowly shifted our growing efforts to being a 365 days a year operation. Water catchment and irrigation is about to be a full blown, off the grid operation. With an upgrade of a water pump and setting up irrigation hoses we want to get a solar panel and batter hooked up to the electric pump and make that whole system self sustaining. Everything on our small farm is a low input work in progress. The lemon tree is a lot of work but the rewards are immeasurable.

Anyways, enjoy these photos of our lemons all in different stage from a budding flower to a fully ripe meyer lemon hanging off the tree in our living room not five feet from me as I type this .

Growing Food @7200 ft Year-Round

 We have so much growing outside. We have been harvesting chard, kale, radishes, lettuce, parsley, chives, garlic tops, thyme and whatever else looks ready. The season extension is working out well. We are purchasing a water pump and setting up drip irrigation and some soaker lines soon. The gravity feed off the big cistern has been ok even with a 100 ft hose. So we have been able to irrigate most of our crops off our water catchment. With an electric pump (that actually works) we can pressurize that water instead of flood irrigation, making the whole system much less work by setting up drip with just a valve changing which bed gets irrigated and for how long. More on that soon, in another post. Enjoy the photos of our food crops. More photos of greens and garlic coming soon. They are all growing so well and some of these photos are already two or three weeks old and we've had some warm weather.

Lettuce

Beets 

Tons growing under this row cover...we just ate a big salad from here last night