Farmers Market

Carrots

BEETS!

Washing Greens for baby salad mix

Harvesting Baby Red Mustard greens

Baby Salad Greens washed and ready to go to market.

Carrots and Beets

Chard and Baby Salad Greens

Kale, Scallions and Chard

Homegrown Pickles

Dill fresh from the herb garden

Grape leaves from our mountain grape vines and garlic peeled, cayenne peppers and dill heads.

A nice harvest of pickling cukes. 

Water bath

Plant, Harvest, Rain, Repeat

We have been busy planting everything from Red Russian Kale to carrots and beets, Broccoli, Lettuces, collards and all sorts of fall crops the last four days. Every day we plant a bunch of seeds it rains in the afternoon. Most everything is under shade cloth now (as far as the tender greens) with micro sprinkler irrigation with drip also set up. Infrastructure makes the farm what it is. Water cisterns are filling up and we are soon completing the irrigation system with 100% Off the Grid technology; solar panel, small pump, water from the sky and an old battery. Just waiting on some cables to connect everything and a transformer for backup.

Harvesting the first cutting of this Valentine Lettuce this morning for the Farmers Market this afternoon. That's fresh! 

Four days ago we planted all these seeds then got rain everyday since. 

Growing Food with Water Catchment

This is a February planting of beets, broccoli and lettuce.

Second cutting is going to be great on this patch.

New expanded beds all set up with irrigation from the cistern... Growing here now are potatoes , chard, lettuces, kales, cabbages,  radishes, beets, broccoli, mustards and soon sunflowers down the middle bed with the chamisa at the end. 

Inside view of the far left hoop.

Red Russian Kale 

Potatoes

Early Corn Planting

Blue Corn

Blue Corn plot to be a Three Sisters Garden across the driveway, next to perennial herb garden.

Second Blue Corn plot, also slated to become a Three Sisters Garden

Moving the Chickens

Mike came out early this morning to load up ten hens and our 10 x 7 ft. tractor to take to a neighboring farm at the Real Food Nation property.

Hens waiting for better pastures.

Just two miles down the road, these ten hens will have plenty of pasture for weeks to come, eating up and tilling 70 sq. feet per day. We are attempting a cooperative relationship with other small farmers in ways like this that can benefit everyone and the land and animals bugs etc.

Farm Work

New three hen tractor. 

 The new smaller design of this tractor is good for getting the birds onto beds in-between other beds in production. It is also easy to move around by yourself and they are drinking out of these handy rabbit water bottles. They're great, no poop in the water and no need to reach in the tractor but for harvesting eggs of feeding grain.

Blue Corn bed #2 

 For sale this week we have:

-Heirloom Italian Flatleaf Parsley
-Red and White Chard
-Baby Red Russian Kale
-Spring Garlic Greens
-Lettuce Cutting Mix (mild Plants of the Southwest blend)
-Pastured/ Farm-fresh eggs
-Email or comment for more info or prices.

Also for sale we have 1 gal. Chinook hop plants. These are a great brewing hop and have been wintered @7200 ft elev. for three or more winters, including last winter's 30 below. Each pot has compost blend and two to three rhizomes in there so it could potentially be three plants this year, or certainly next season.

contact for details on hops for sale.

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

New Year Green House

Baby Turkeys!

We got one Bourbon Red and a Broad Brested Bronze

Supermoon & Planting

Tonight's Supermoon rising over the mountains

Sowing carrots, spinach, mizuna, kale and lettuce.