The weather is a little bit strange this year.

Well now, it seems like it has been forever. Not much to write about, I guess. We have not been out to our land for some time, what with the snow and frigid temps, and now the melting of the snow and the mud. Hope everything is okay out there.

Unusual weather...you bet.

We suffered through a couple of weeks of absolutely frigid, below zero temperatures. We plugged in the light for the chickens at night and ran the generator during the day to boost our lost power. The llama water froze, in spite of the heater we put in it...that froze into the bucket of 24" of ice. Every morning Richard takes 2 hot 5 gallon buckets of water out to dump into the llama water. He then tries to break the ice out. It was freezing again by noon there for a while. And to my horror and dismay, a couple of wild bunnies got themselves into the water over night, but of course froze quickly and in the morning were just  an image frozen into the ice. Richard dumped them out and cleaned out the trough and filled again with hot water. A mess. So cold...wind chills down to -31 F overnight. Temps down to -15 F. I was so worried about the llamas that I have decided to make them llama coats from a pattern I found online. So I asked for donations of comforters, sleeping bags and horse blankets. Got a few things, including three horse blankets from a kind lady down near Santa Fe who runs a horse boarding facility. I think I can alter them a bit and they will be great for some of the girls.

With no snow to speak of...too cold, and no melting of the snow we did get previously...too cold, our water situation has been rough. So I hung the horse blankets out on the clothesline to get moisture to maybe clean them a bit. And Richard hauled water. Or tried to.

Every time someone used the water trailer, something broke. The fittings are all plastic, and with temperatures below freezing as our new normal, it wasn't too surprising, but it created a big headache for everyone. Richard found new pieces in town and managed to fix it. We had to put chains on the van to pull the water trailer on the snow pack and ice. Lucky the chains for our handy Kia actually fit on the van...not perfect, but well enough to make it work. We are thankful for those chains.

So, we hauled water, and blew through our stack of firewood. I have to say with some awe though, the Earthship  stayed at about 60 F overnight without heat. In the back room (Richard's office) it got down to 54 because the door is closed overnight. Still, we put every blanket we owned on our beds and slept in socks and full pajamas. It was fricken cold!

And being the person I am, unhappy with snow and cold, I began to research moving someplace warmer, someplace south. Although, it seemed that even Maine was warmer than we were at this point. So, I looked at Edgewood and Moriarty, in central New Mexico, because they were not experiencing the cold temperatures we were, even 200 miles south. We drove down there one Sunday to explore, but it was not what we were looking for. The mountains seemed so far away. And there was no sage brush. How could I live without the sage? All was not lost on our twelve hour trip...we did pick up those horse blankets and we went shopping and stocked up on groceries when we passed through Santa Fe.

So, back to where I am, again. The temperatures are back up, and for a week or so, a bit warm for the season. It rained. Melted the snow and turned the world to mud. Taos mud is unforgiving. And then it snowed again and refroze the world around me. Back and forth, but no where near as cold as it was a couple of weeks ago.

With the freezing and thawing, we seem to have developed a leak in our roof where the porch meets the rest of the Earthship. The porch looks to have been added on later. We have someone coming to look at it this week. The pipes to the cistern that take the water off of the roof were frozen solid, and some have come apart. That needs to be fixed too.

Roof is leaking.

That pipe is full of ice and this roof work is a mess.

We also inherited some chickens a week or two back as one of the men we sold chickens to last summer, brought some back. They moved into a house in town and could no longer have them. So now we are back into eggs. Lots of eggs. We get about a dozen a day now. We sell some to the neighbors, but they are stacking up in the fridge. The kids love eggs. How many ways can we eat eggs? Fried, scrambled, hard-boiled, and Richard made a souffle yesterday. Free range, organically fed chickens. Anyone want to buy some eggs?

So, except for experiencing global weirding first hand, there isn't much going on out here on the farmstead. Richard did get the second half of the roof on the girls side of the llama barn, just in time for the rain. He also put some boards on the front to block some of the wind. It's getting better all of the time. He's still making chicken coops out of pallets and selling them quickly on Craigslist.

 

Pallet wall on llama barn...and a little bit of siding at the far end.

Looking through the llama barn...see that NM sunset?

Metal roof on the second half of the llama barn

Maybe in the near future we can get back out to our place and see how well our mud plaster held up on the pallet shed.

Just enjoying our time in the Earthship, waiting for Winter to be over.

Honey on the planter box, rain coming down and a rose in bloom, next to the avocado tree.

Holidays...or not.

So, it's that time of year again...that time I love to hate. And this year we aren't even pretending to celebrate any of the traditional consumerist holidays. They are all tainted with lies and consumerism. We decided not to participate, but to make our own traditions and celebrations instead.

This year when everyone was spending their Thanksgiving stuffing themselves, we decided to go out into the woods to search for sticks. I read about a Native American custom of making prayer/spirit sticks, which then would be planted in the ground on the Winter Solstice by the head of the family. We thought we would give it a try.

Into the woods.

While most of the nation was inside watching football and eating turkey, we spent the day hiking through the pristine, quiet woods (no hunters out) looking for our perfect sticks to transform into objects of power.

Looking for sticks.

The next day, which Americans celebrate as Black Friday, the biggest day of greed, we cooked our organic, free- range turkey, which we bought locally from a turkey farm down in the river valley. The turkey was delicious, and expensive, but a nice treat. We never did get around to raising turkeys this year. I also made the kids a homemade and handmade gift to show my gratitude for being their mom.

Car bridge over the Rio Grande...to the turkey farm. One car wide and a little scary.

Homemade dinosaurs from scrap material.

The prayer sticks turned out great. We worked on them December 20th, in celebration of the Winter Solstice--a big one this year. Residents in our town of Taos have been working toward raising money to install a pyramid on their land. There is a lot of talk about pyramids working with the energy during this Winter Solstice to bring in good things. Pyramids. Hmm...

So, we decided to build one. At first we were going to build one out on our land (with pallets) and then anchor our spirit sticks to the directional corners. But, it began snowing here around December 14, and hasn't really stopped, or at least the dirt roads haven't cleared, and it is so cold. We haven't been out to our place for a while. So, with time growing short and the Solstice fast approaching, Richard decided to build the pyramid out of conduit from his hoop house projects and put it in the house. The only place it would fit was in the kids' room. So, that's where it is, with the prayer sticks anchored to each corner. It looks cool. We meditated in the pyramid on the Solstice, and yesterday when I had a stomach upset, I sat in the pyramid for a half hour and felt energized and my stomach issue cleared up.

Pyramids are said to have healing properties. No, it doesn't seem to matter if it has solid sides or not, only that it is angled correctly, in direction and in how it is built. Richard spent a lot of time figuring out the dimensions and angles so it would be correctly energized. We added distilled water and crystals, plus the prayer sticks that have copper wire...all to pull the beneficial energy in.

Pyramid

Prayer /spirit sticks on the pyramid.

Duck and chickens in the snow.

Before the snow and the freezing temperatures came, we did manage to get some mudding done on our pallet shed out on our land. That was great fun. We hooked up the mixer to the generator, which made it go a little faster. I really enjoy the "flow" of putting the mud plaster on the walls.

Doesn't look like a pallet shed anymore.

We also decided to insulate the shed with a light straw and mud insulation, which we packed into the spaces in the pallet walls. This is still ongoing. We had to clear out a rat's nest and cover the floor with a few inches of gravel, which we also filled inside the first few inches of the pallet walls. We hope this will keep the critters out of our shed. We did get all of the outside walls plastered with the first layer of mud before the snow came. And it all dried. Lucky.

Light straw and mud insulation.

Richard has also been building chicken coops out of disassembled pallets and selling them on Craiglist to raise money for hay for our llama herd. The girls and boys are all doing great, but they sure do eat a lot (well, not as much as goats, or horses, or a cow).

Richard's pallet chicken coops.

Big bale of oat hay.

We have made several trips around the area to find hay. One to the San Luis Valley for alfalfa, one to Espanola for oat hay, and then another to Espanola for some wonderful grass hay. Richard has been building chicken coops like mad....until the snow came.

Llama smorgasbord.

The pallet feeder works great. It is between the girls and the boys on the fence line so they can all get to it. The little llamas reach up from underneath and the rest dig into the hay from above. So many of them are now spitting at each other, to try to scare off the competition. It doesn't work--the spitting, but it is funny to watch the llama antics at feeding time.. Everyone gets their share and everyone seems happy enough.

Yesterday we went to a Solstice ceremony at the New Buffalo Center, and to see the pyramid they brought up from central Mexico. It seems more like an art piece to me, but was still designed to capture the energies. We participated in another labyrinth ceremony, but this time my little girl was a little bothered by the crowd moving in for a group hug (of about 50 people) and the humming (Ohm...) so we snuck out and missed the talk around the pyramid. Too bad.

But, we have our very own pyramid at home in our warm and sunny Earthship. I love this house. I hardly even notice how cold the temperatures are outside. Except when we brought the chickens into the spare room for a night with temps around -11. That was a bad idea. The roosters started crowing at 3am. It was a night of little sleep and I found myself eagerly awaiting the rise of the sun so the flock could go back out to the coop. Now we put heat lights in the coop. The downside is the power drain. Being on solar, the lights suck up the power over night, and we usually lose power in the morning sometime, before the sun comes up. This morning we hooked the generator up to the house. This is only going to work while Richard is on vacation for the week. When he goes back to running his computer for eight hours, we won't have enough power for the lights.

How we took our on grid lifestyle for granted, with heat lamps and electric water de-icers for the livestock. Life is more interesting and more challenging now for sure. But, we love it and we are doing great figuring it all out. And, it's kind of fun.

Adding llamas to the farmstead

This week has been about llamas. Getting more llamas. Having them delivered. Setting up more fence, and thinking about what to do next.

We have been in the process of acquiring four female llamas. There were seven available, but I decided if we were going to have to buy feed, it should be for the younger ones who are at reproductive age. We settled on three young girls under a year and one mama to one of the crias who is seven months old.

Richard built a hay feeder out of pallets that will hold a bale of hay.

pallet hay feeder

And, while we waited for the girls to arrive, he put a new trailer hitch on the van that also showed up via UPS. We ordered the hitch online, and it came just in time for us to get a load of water before our cisterns run dry. We have not had any moisture in this desert land, ironically, while we watch the northeast United States recover from Hurricane Sandy and the over abundance of moisture they have received. I would not want that kind of flooding, nor that kind of damage to deal with. I am glad we chose to stay in the Rocky Mountains when we decided to move. I wish everyone the best of luck in recovering.

hitch on van

The new llama ladies arrived in a big fancy horse trailer. I could see it ambling across the dusty road, heading towards our place, and I yelled at Richard, "The llamas are coming!"  The kids and I could hardly contain our excitement. It is always so much fun to have new animals come to the farm.

Arrival of new llamas.

It was quite a challenge to get the llama girls out of the trailer and into their new yard. They had never been in a trailer, and weren't real fond of the harnesses, which unfortunately didn't fit real well. We only have large harnesses here on our little farm, and no access to a store with llama gear. But, we got the harnesses (adjusted as small as they would go) and leads on and proceeded to pull and push the frightened critters into their new yard, taking breaks now and them to let them (and us) adjust and relax for a minute.

Meet and greet.

The boys were very curious about the new ladies, and all came running to introduce themselves over the fence that now separates them. After the girls were released, they quickly found the hay bucket and got to eating. There wasn't too much nervous humming that went on, and overall, I think everyone handled the arrival pretty well. We've got our work cut out, with training these girls to lead and load into the trailer, not to mention just get used to human handling so we can brush them and trim their nails, and one day milk them.

Llama girls.

Paddie the cria.

So today, I find myself researching how to clean and card llama wool. This past week I also found a set of carders on Craigslist for really cheap, and a friend picked them up in Santa Fe on her monthly shopping trip to the "big" city. (Thank you Susan!)

Hand carders.

I am almost ready to get out the bags of stored wool I have been hauling around, and deal with it. And, I'm not so afraid of it, having watched countless videos on You tube on how to clean the wool and card it. So happy for the internet.

Bags of llama wool.

I am so looking forward to the day when we can be on our own land, with a barn for the animals and places to do all of the things we want to do.

Haven't had much interest from other parents about helping out with the cost of the "llama dairy." I guess we will proceed ahead by ourselves and hope at some point other people will want to join in. In any case, our kids will benefit from this little experiment, I hope. I am eager to get these girls bred and get on with it, but we can't really breed them until Spring, when the weather is warm enough to support baby llamas. The girls will be in gestation for one year, and all of them will be at a healthy breeding age come Spring. That also gives up time to find an intact male to breed them with.

One step at a time. One day at a time. It is taking shape.