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.

Hoop-Houses for Growing Food Year-Round

Beets, Lettuces and Broccoli

1/4 in. drip in place ready for a pump to deliver water we caught from the sky.

All the broccoli is doing pretty well, including transplants from thinning.

Pastured Poultry on Salad Greens

We thought we could salvage some seedlings we planted in this bed in Feb. but the aphids were just everywhere...so hens to the rescue!

It is so great to see chickens living in this environment and as farmers we have such great control of what they eat and how they impact the land by being able to move them on and off areas.

Planting Native Fruit Trees

Chokecherry trees from NM State Forestry 

Some of the Chokecherries had incredible root systems. These two are going to get planted in the ground somewhere, probably trade for smaller trees of different species.

Plums

The Four Seasons

This super wet snow came five days ago  

It was sunny and warm just an hour before this photo was taken

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

Pastured Poultry

We have built our second tractor for pasturing our hens. 

Last season we had built two pastures with four foot fencing and rotated between the two pastures. We also had built a smaller tractor for young pullets or just a couple hens. It worked okay but this new design is excellent. The 10x7 foot structure is moved every morning and the hens scratch thru all the native grasses eating bugs and fertilizing and aerating soil along the way.

 We have eight of our twenty one hens in this prototype, if we build two or three more like this we can have all our hens pasturing on a daily and then raise some new chicks in the shack.

In other news, we have planted two potato beds and built a bed for carrots, basil and tomatoes. We have all  lots growing under cover right now, including but not limited to: lettuces, kales, chards, broccoli, beets, radishes, cilantro, cabbage and mizuna.

Farming Isn't Talking, It's Growing Food

Semi-Dwarf Meyer Lemon Tree

Wild Alaskan Sockeye Salmon with lemons from our tree.

Chard from one of the hoop houses

Valentine's Dinner: Wild Salmon with lemon, Wild rice, blanched chard with fermented carrots and organic avocado

Chard, Kale, Radishes, Parsley and Lettuce

Winter Update

A-frame greenhouse with our three hoop houses and the cold frame behind them. We planted beets and cabbage in the cold frame today and last week planted chard and kale and broccoli raab and radishes in the hoop house to the left.

Carrots we bought from Gemini farms

Ginger carrots

Once we added salt and enough water to cover all the carrots they went in the closet to ferment for a week or two.

Fermentation closet; in there now is porter and red chile porter, apple cider and carrots, both ginger and garlic

Pantry above the washer 

Burning scrap wood 

Flower beds made from hollowed out pine logs 

Happy hens