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idebar welcome welcome all i m a dreamer i hope you are too a posse ad esse or from possibility to reality is a general state of mind i hope you ll share your possibilities with me as i will with you namaste may 20 2013 farming when farming wasn t cool ok ok so that was a terrible play on a old country song but it s kinda how i feel today now mind you i m not a petty person by nature usually but i have to say i did get a good little chuckle to myself today when i was sitting in my office bsing with a couple of my friends that have know me since and gave me a good bit of ribbing when i started raising chickens and growing more food homesteading you know anyway i was sitting there with them as one was telling us how he s planning on building a chicken coop at his new house this winter so he can have some chickens next year i gave him a little bit of a hard time about how see i knew you d come around and then the other guy chimes in to say how yeah i need to figure out how to make a coop too my wife really wants to raise some chickens too oh man to say i laughed is an understatement i told them see you guys thought i was so crazy five and a half years ago when i started doing this stuff told me all the gonna be a farmer jokes and all now who s crazy i guess i was just so far ahead of the curve from them that they couldn t see ever being in the same place lol so like i said i was farming when farming wasn t cooooool hope all of you are doing great i ve been jobbing jobbing jobbing to finish up stuff here in time for both of our families coming out next week for my oldest sons graduation but i have lots more goings on espalier new garden areas and water harvesting swales to share hopefully soon best all p posted by paul gardener 1 comments may 7 2013 around the farm been a busy couple of weeks on the farm and somehow i don t feel like i ve gotten anything done the main project that i ve been working on has been our irrigation ditches they were neglected though not terribly but were in an unwieldy position for efficient crop watering as we plan to do the only thing they were ever put to use for was to flood the pasture and let grass grow with our significant modifications i hope to have a great deal more control of the water and can use it to it s most efficient end i often liken our property to a landing strip it s nearly 1300 ft long and just shy of 90 feet wide this photo is of the mass of the property the home is off the page but you can see on the far left side of the property our triangular marshland area which is at the lowest part of the property and on the right side the sweeping path of our main irrigation ditch as it was when we moved in here s a little closer image of the right side of the property so you can clearly see the irrigation ditch as it is or was i should say the old method of irrigation was to basically open gaps in the ditch bank and let water run to the left across the open field as you can see leaving quite a few un watered areas our primary modification to the irrigation plan has been to dig a new main ditch out into the property and then to add a three way split to send one line up to our neighbors property and the further down the irrigation line and the the other line further into our own property to another 3 way split this one will head down to our other new neighbors house for their fields to be irrigated a thing that has not been done in years apparently the existing ditch will be filled and our previously bifurcated front garden will be joined and of much greater use we hope when we brought the new ditch across the property we needed to replace the galvanized pipe that was there as a pass through allowing us to drive over i had a great idea to try to manufacture one on my own from some steel 55 gallon drums that i have i cut the bottoms out of a couple and banded them together upon bringing them over to the trench which had been dug for them and rolling them in they abruptly fell apart this did not work ha well dangit it was worth a try i guess so a couple of days later i bit the bullet and went ahead and paid 152 00 for a 12 foot section of shiny new corrugated galvanized pipe which i promptly buried beneath a pile of clay soil the next couple of day saw my back getting made sore by digging out cleaning and building up the head gates the one below is the second split which will head off to our south neighbors the right side head gate leads out into our back field and this is the main head gate coming in from the main ditch the concrete pipe leads out into our property and just on the right you can see the new steel pipe going up to our north neighbor i was lucky to be able to get the last head gate built just in time for the water to be turned down the ditch so like i said i feel like i don t see a lot coming along but really there s been quite a lot water is here spring is upon us and although i still don s have anything but fruit trees in the ground we will get there eventually more to come best to you all p posted by paul gardener 0 comments labels 2013 homescale farm irrigation april 19 2013 old garage recycle we have some serious structure building on the farm that will need to get done over the summer and that means lots of wood and building materials so what s a couple of frugal types to do look online to the local free classifieds and see what kind of building materials are available of course as luck would have it a local family is preparing to tear down this old garage and are giving away any of the wood we could take we focused on the siding which turned out to be tongue in groove 2 6 s that will be used it took a little time to get the rhythm but we pulled a big pile of good wood from the outside this was just the start we also were able to salvage a few good pieces of plywood some rain gutters and flashing all of which will go to use in helping us build a solid and permanent poultry coop one that we can house the birds in over winters and while they re not on pasture more to come as we put it all to use p posted by p 0 comments april 14 2013 long time gone well i m appalled at myself for my delay in getting a new post up i do plead for forgiveness however as i have been insanely busy and unfortunately many of the things that i would like to do have fallen by the wayside blogging being only one of many just to give you a bit of what s been going on i thought perhaps a brief rundown in photographic form we finally wrapped up the remodel of the basement living room and library areas my wife did an amazing job of updating our fireplace with a whitewash finish and we added new flooring to replace the terrible old white carpet that was in there as i said we also re finished the library adjoining the living room we ended up having to remove all the old shelving that was in there and it was a good thing as we found some serious concerns with electrical behind them problems resolved and a nice new functional area defined easter found us at a krishna temple an hour away to celebrate the festival of holi with them and a few thousand of their closest friends it was amazing and we will certainly be back we added a few new birds to our menagerie three turkeys two ducks and 9 new hens 3 buff opies 2 barred rocks 2 ameraucana 2 silver lace wyandottes they re growing up so fast lol i took cuttings from a friends old established grape vines a green seedless himrod and a concord grape varieties i currently have 109 cuttings in the ground hoping to have at least enough viable starts to begin a vineyard on the property we also finally got out pigs out of the well house in which they ve lived since christmas eve we cleaned out and renovated an old barn in on the property and with all recycled materials that were pulled from the grounds we fabricated a nice new pig pen the pigs needless to say are much happier rooting and wallowing away in snortingly happy tones last week i managed to get a few of our 9 new bare root fruit trees into the ground this row is of two apple trees and two asian pears i need yet to add a bartlett pear to the lineup these will be trained in an espalier living fence and finally last weekend my wife got a great idea to complete one of our final big home projects our upstairs bathroom we had to remove two layers of underlayment to reveal that we had some rot in our subfloor around the toilet and bath tub got these removed and a got the walls painted and some new flooring put in place she s working on a cool board and batten treatment for the walls that will really bring it up to date so you can see i haven t been completely lazy just a wee bit occupied there were lots more things as well but not enough time to put them all down here i ll just say that i have big news coming up soon with relation to this blog and our farm itself i hope you have all been well and look forward to hearing from as many of you as possible take care p posted by p 3 comments january 27 2013 a shameless plug i mentioned a little while back that i was fortunate enough to get to be teaching a class in vegetable gardening basics coming up just next week with the university of utah s lifelong learning program just one more week can you believe it i hardly can seems it crept up on me if you ve heard of the class and are sitting on the fence as to whether you d like to attend i thought a nice little teaser of some of the things i ll be covering would be a good idea and a few bits of garden eye candy to go along with it couldn t hurt either if you re looking to get a great start on your garden this year now is a great time to learn some of the basics and i d love to be the one to do it hope to see you in a little over a week you can go here to register for vegetable gardening basics or check out all the lifelong learning classes at http continue utah edu lifelong classes click image for better quality version posted by p 0 comments labels 2013 teaching vegetable garden basics january 14 2013 upside down fire and efficient energy use a friend of mine linked to a really interesting article about fire the other day and it sparked my curiosity i know fire the oldest of mans arts how interesting could it be right well it was an article from milkwood permaculture about a thing called an upside down fire i ve seen fires that are fed from the top and burn sideways a la rocket stoves but never heard of an upside down fire i had to give this thing a try the idea in a nutshell is to stack the fire inversely to how you would typically start a fire by putting the big heavy logs on the bottom first and then slowly getting smaller towards the top ending with kindling and some starter paper or whatever on top i went ahead and stacked mine three levels deep in our wood burning fireplace and got it started i have to admit i was vocally pessimistic about it the idea is to capitalize on the fact that while the flames smoke and gasses in a fire may move upward away from the fire that the radiant heat from the actual combustion moves equally out away from the fire in all directions as the combustion heat from the fire radiates downward as well as up it preheats the wood below it prior to it catching fire this aids in it s more efficient burn and reduced smoke the picture above was was about the time that i started thinking you know this may just work and then by this point i was sold more so even than the fact that it continued to burn downward which honestly did kind of amaze me but the fact that i didn t have to do anything to it i just sat back watched some tv with the wife and our boys and enjoyed the heat and you have to understand i have a bit of a fire obsession i am always moving the logs and re stacking when they re not burning evenly but there was really none of that i only had to adjust them once then when the initial wood load had burned down i moved some of the coals off to the side added new wood and stacked coals on it poof right back on fire and much much more efficient burning over all if i had to try to put a number on it i would guess somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 added efficiency then when we were getting ready to turn in and the fire had burned down to a pile of very nice orange coals i decided to live up to milkwood permaculture s suggestion and put those coals to some use i don t know how it will work out but before we went off to bed i added a couple of foil wrapped potatoes to the coals to see how they cook up over night i don t think it will have enough heat to finish them but i am going to cube them and fry then with some eggs in the morning anyway we ll see if this saves me a little time i ll finish this post in the morning with the verdict and the clear answer to the question of if that will work is yes this worked fantastically i got up in the morning unwrapped these and they were cooked to perfection we had baked potatoes a few nights earlier and these potatoes were really hard to cook very firm this way though they were perfectly done i chopped them up the next morning and gave them a quick fry for some breakfast burritos and they were delicious so i heartily give this a thumbs up wishing you the best till next time thanks for dropping by p posted by p 3 comments january 8 2013 lifelong learning vegetable gardening basics you may remember me mentioning in my last post that i would have some great new news to share with you very soon well i do the university of utah lifelong learning program has asked me to be one of their instructors during the spring session and i have agreed to whole heartedly i will be teaching a vegetable gardening basics class for five weeks beginning on february 5th and running through march 5th in addition i will be teaching another class at the end of march on maximizing your garden production focusing on space saving techniques trellising and other ways to maximize your garden in small spaces that class will run from march 26th through april 2nd i was flattered greatly that they thought of me for these classes and although a little nervous i am super excited to get to do them i ve taught vegetable gardening basics a number of times with the master gardener extension service program but they have always been in relatively short one session classes they always seem to feel rushed and i always felt like it would be great to really get to dig into some of the topics more deeply this will be my chance if you are reading this and are in the greater salt lake city area and are interested in the class please go to the lifelong learning website at the university of utah website and register for that matter if your in the area at all go to the site and check out all they have to offer from gardening to pasta making to photography and chinese for travelers they have to much to offer it s a great program and i m so proud to be a part of it for those interested i will post more details of the topics to be covered in the days to come i look forward to seeing you there p po...