Chicks, Prairie dogs, Earth Day and Earthbags

Chicks in "brooder"

This past week we received 27 baby chicks in the mail from McMurray Hatchery. Some assortment of Jersey Giants, Cuckoo Marans and a surprise chick. My little surprise chick is yellow with feathered feet. I'm excited to see what it turns into.

It is rather challenging keeping the chicks at the right temperature (95 degrees F) when we don't have much electricity to spare. We can't really afford the energy pull of a 100 watt bulb on our batteries, so we opted for a 40 watt bulb, and keeping the chicks in the well insulated but unused chest freezer over night. During the day, anywhere near the front, south facing, slanted windows provides more than enough heat, in fact, too much and I have to move the chicks around to maintain the temperature at 95F. So far so good. We are on day three and haven't lost any of the little ones.

Freezer brooder, always propped open for air.

Richard has been doing chicken classes for interested folks looking to start their own backyard flocks. It has been going pretty well in our new community. There seem to be plenty of people interested in living sustainably.

Moved the ducks out, sort of...they get to spend the days in the chicken tractor inside the chicken pen, and come in at night. They are almost all feathered out, but the nights are still pretty cold, so we bring them in at night and they sleep in their rubber brooder.

Baby ducks out in the fresh air.

We also hauled our first load of water (1000 gallons) from the community well with our pretty new rainbow truck. That worked well. One of the cisterns here at our house is not pumping into the house, so Richard hooked up a pump he found in our utility room and spent a whole day transferring water from the non-working cistern to the working cistern on the other end of the house. The pump really taxed our electricity storage, and now with the new chicks, the power has been fluctuating on the low side. I'm back to candles and camp lanterns at night.  But, good news...we got our wind turbine and are ordering the rest of the parts so we can get it put up and running. That should help with the power. It seems the wind blows here nearly everyday. Richard used to hate the wind, but now he just thinks of the potential power it can provide.

I attended a couple of Thrive Taos meetings in town, which show a lot of potential. Unfortunately, it is rather difficult to attend because Richard works, I have both of the wild ones in tow, and now, they are closing the bridge to town over night for the next month, which leaves us stranded in town or taking one of the two other bridges which are miles out of the way and particularly unsettling for me with the switchbacks and short altitude climb. I won't do it. Scares me...anxiety attacks don't work on mountain roads. So, I'm most likely not going to attend the Thrive meetings for a while, although maybe we can be involved in other ways.

Discovered the Taos Food Co-op through Thrive, and we ordered a bunch of bulk items from Golden Organics. They have all of the flours we need for the kids' gluten-free diets. Wonderful!

Prairie dog burrow in field to south of house.

Richard has been volunteering at Cerro Vista Farm up in Cerro on one of his days off. He just felt the need to farm. In return for his work, he gets a "work share" of produce, which will help us out with clean, organic, locally grown food, since our ability to garden is limited here due to water and space. And, it turns out prairie dogs! It seems there was a reason we found chicken wired buried under the last residents' compost piles. There is a sizable prairie dog colony out in the field beyond our fence. And they have been burrowing into the yard in search of green grass, which there is, although we have not watered what looks to be the former owners' attempt at a "lawn."

Prairie dog burrow in new raised planter.

So now, Richard is putting chicken wire under the planter beds and we have to dig up the three we already put in to line them with chicken wire too.

What do prairie dogs teach us? About community...how about that. In our sustainable, off-grid community, the covenants do not allow for extermination of any of the natural critters, which is great, and I'm trying to find some natural prairie dog deterrents (haven't found any yet). Funny we found a crap load of mouse traps beyond the fence when we moved the llamas out there. Were they trying to deter the little prairie dogs or exterminate the field mice? Maybe it was a vendetta against the huge pack rat that lives under the wood pile.

Baby goats and little kids at Lettuce Grow Farm

For Earth Day (our new Xmas) we took the kids to a cute little farm in town that is focused on Permaculture and building community. Check out Lettuce Grow Farm in El Prado, NM. They played with the baby goats, baby ducks, planted seeds in eggshells, and picked dandelions for the ladybug farm.  We also took them to Twirl, a lovely local toy store with playground and found them an adorable board game focused on gardening. We went by the Fiber Art show in town and had a full day of fun things to celebrate our Mother Earth. I'd like to turn Earth Day into a big holiday in our house, maybe plant more trees and flowers around the house...when we build our own. Give the kids a meaningful holiday to replace the consumerist American holidays we are no longer celebrating (Easter, Halloween, Christmas...anything that requires spending money on things we don't need or want.).

Lettuce, radishes, strawberries.

Our garden is pretty tiny this year with a few raised beds outside and our Earthboxes inside. I don't think we'll have any problem using the share from Cerro Vista Farm.

Up next: more chicken classes, in partnership with Thrive Taos, and on the near horizon, another Earthbag building event! This time we are going to build an Earthbag water catchment cistern. We just have to decide when and where, and collect enough polypropylene bags to get it done. If we close on our land in the next week, maybe we'll do it there. Or maybe at one of the Thrive member's homes. It seems we all need a little extra water here in the arid Southwest, and if we could all build cheap, and easy cisterns, wouldn't that be a great thing!

Thrive, the movie

I just watched Thrive online at their website...for free. People have been offering screenings here and there, but usually  I can't go and for some amount of money I don't have. Here it is for free. Watch it and pass it on. I really think there's something to this. It's along the lines of what I've always thought anyway. If you've seen it, pass it on anyway and let everyone know they can watch it for free.

Thrive

Wake up world!!!!

Occupy the planet! Occupy your own sense of responsibility.

I've been hiding out here in my desert house, enjoying the sun and the sage, pretending that if I stopped participating in Western culture, maybe it would all change. Ha. I think it's time to get involved again and maybe put the Facebook page back up. How is the Occupation in Canon City going?

Weird energy things have been going on in my little world, which opens my eyes to the possibilities of even bigger energy things...solutions, whether that be for power or for healing, love/energy is the answer, we just have to connect to the Source and to each other.

And, still, stop participating in the Corporatocracy in any way you can! Move to your own land and go off grid. It's not as hard as you think.

Share the knowledge. Share the energy. Share organic food. Share the passion for change. Share the love. We can make a difference if we all work together.

Peace.

New Mexico Adventure

News and more news...

We have been crazy busy this past month and with our tax refund, have been able to get some things done, including adding two new (used) solar panels to the existing array. The guys at Paradise Power figured out how we could do it and not add another inverter. So, Richard added onto the frame and hooked it up.

The new panels were a bit larger than the old ones on this array.

We put a deposit down on a wind turbine/generator (home windmill) and surprise, it's already arrived at Paradise Power...we were expecting it in about four weeks.

It has been crazy windy out here for the past few weeks and a turbine would come in handy to boost our power that much more, especially on those cloudy days.

Raised planters in southwest corner of yard.

Also started seeds for the outdoor gardens, and decided to convert our indoor planters into herb gardens. In pots. We are still not sure what is going on underneath the gravel and brick in the planters and since we are renters, it's best not to go digging around too much. Richard built some great raised planter beds out in the yard and we have been transferring dirt from the planters in front of the sloped windows outside to the planters. The E-ship guys told us the dirt was too high and sloped toward the glass when it should slope away from the house, so we are correcting that issue and re-using the dirt for our garden beds.

Herb garden in the kitchen windows.

Work truck

We had our first load of water brought in last week too. One of our cisterns is full, but we can't seem to get the water out of it, so we decided to fill up the two working cisterns on the other end of the house. We are entitled to 2000 gallons of water per month from the community well.. There hasn't been much rain or snow lately so we thought we should learn how to get water before we really get desparate. In addition to the community well,  there is a community water hauling trailer, but you have to have a truck or big enough vehicle to tow the trailer. Some of the other residents can do this for you and we were happy to pay $50 for delivery of 1000 gallons of water, rather than ruin our one vehicle. But, then we decided to invest in a truck...a typical Taos work truck, and she's a beauty...a bargain at $650. I think she's kind of cute and when I look out the window and see that old truck, I just smile and think New Mexico. Fits right in with old "Lucky" the ugly horse trailer we've had for a couple of years now.

I was debating buying an old Mercedes we could convert to veggie diesel, but when the water issue came up, the truck seemed the better choice. I'm still keeping my eyes open for a little fuel efficient commuter car though.

Wells Fargo repossessed the truck we had. I'm surprised they found us. But they did. We decided we couldn't really afford that big old diesel truck anymore and could use that money for...rent! They are still trying to get $8K out of us. Good luck. Bail us out oh great American government? I don't think so, but wouldn't that be nice. They could pay my student loan too.

rain barrels

We headed down to Santa Fe to stock up on some bulk items at the health food stores, picked up some barrels from the Coca-cola distributor for water catchment, and I even found two Pekin ducklings at a feed store in Espanola.

It seems Spring makes me yearn for babies.

A Cuckoo Maran, Charlie, and an Americauna.

We got rid of most of our chickens. Sold them on CL. Producing hens are popular when chicks are for sale.We had someone come all the way up from Albequerque for hens. It didn't seem cost effective for us to keep feeding fifty chickens when we can't find egg customers around here. Plus the weird neighbor complaints about chicken noise and what not. I even found Gideon my yearling Roo a home. We kept old Charlie and 11 hens. It has taken a while, but the girls are finally laying again...I got 8 eggs yesterday.

Richard still wants to raise turkeys, but I'm not sure where we'd put them after processing, without a working freezer. We need more power! And an efficient freezer. One of the many things, in addition to a Laptop computer, that we are shopping around for.

We are also selling most of our electrical appliances on CL...fridge (gone), dehydrator, alarm clocks, heaters, crock pot, phones, etc. Even when we build our own house, there will be little need for the plug in appliances we have become accustomed to. We don't need them. We've been doing great out here without all the gadgets, and hardly any power, compared to people tied to the energy grid. Simplify! Do we really need all these extras? Not so much. But, maybe someone else thinks they do and will buy our old stuff.

We are expecting a shipment of chicks at the end of the month. Jersey Giants and more Cuckoo Marans, which seem to be very popular around here. They have gorgeous dark brown eggs. I love them. We will keep some and sell the rest, hoping we get a roo in our straight run selection so we can raise them. They are a heritage breed. I'm sure the neighbors (?) will be pleased with more roosters crowing in the wide open desert spaces.

Honey Bear behind the straw bale insulated chicken coop.

Honey is doing so much better out here, but the wind seems to upset her a bit. When the wind blows, she hangs out inside, wandering back and forth along the length of the house, barking at phantom noises.

Yes, that is a toilet...comes with the land purchase.

And the best news...we found some land! 10 acres out on the southern edge of the valley/plateau/mesa. The owner is willing to carry it for 5 years, although I think we can pay it off much sooner. It has a clear title and we are even having a title company do the closing, with title insurance and everything. That's a big deal here in this area. It's a great place with soft, red dirt and so much fragrant sage. I long to run barefoot among the sagebrush, connecting to the soft earth. It even has a hillside dug out, where the previous owner was going to build his house. He's now in the Alaskan bush somewhere. (Taos has the most interesting people connected to it!) Hopefully by the end of the month the deal will be done and we can begin to build our house! We will be collecting earth bags again and may utilize some cob, some can walls, maybe some tires, but most certainly south-facing passive solar!

It is all coming together now. It feels right and I'm back on the path! Started writing again and even did a watercolor of the view out the south windows.

Welcome home to the sage! The New Mexican adventure has begun.

What just happened?

So that was weird.

Now we are in an Earthship out in the middle of the sage, soaking up the sun...those healing rays. Let's just say the last few months were a test of the mountain, and let's agree that if we look at it from a spiritual perspective, it was one major lesson in creation and psychic vampirism (more on that later).

So, now, the chickens and the llamas and the dogs and the kids all have a place to run and romp and be who they are. We are indeed lucky to have found this place...or to have this place find us. The owner of this magnificent house lives in Australia and has agreed to rent it to us at a price we can afford. Remarkable. Thanks A.

And, when we were moving in, some guys from Earthship Biotecture were out working on the windows...replacing some rotted trim boards and replacing the flashing. Very nice and helpful guys who understand my love of the Earthship. Now...this is more like it, I have to say, and these are more like-minded people, and everything is going to be just fine now.

Earthship kitchen

The sage is grounding. The house is grounding with mud floors and earth plastered walls. I sit in my big old arm chair facing the windows and watch the sky. A lot. I watch the clouds come and go. I wait for the sun in the morning and wait for the darkness in the evening. This is the most wonderful and beautiful place.

Living room mud floor with rock left in...very grounding.

The house is heated by the sun. There is one wood stove in the living room and we have used it several times, especially when the snow storms move in. The day time temperatures get up to about 85 F in the house and down to around 60F at night. It is a perpetual summer place. It took about a week to acclimatize, but now, we are all adapted. It is like those hot summer days and cool summer nights and I swear I feel like I'm camping again, or living in my tent (archaeology field school, summer 2000). I take showers in the sunshine...in the south facing bathroom with windows looking out at the sage and the mountains in the background. We had to buy a stock water dish for the kids to take a bath...there is no bathtub in this water conscious house.

Little boy in the bath.

The house sits on 20 acres in a sustainable community (although I think the residents might have some differing opinions about the definition of sustainable). The house relies completely on solar energy for power, and although the system was recently updated and probably adequate for commuters, we have lost power twice, during two periods of cloudy days. Richard's work computer is an energy hog, but we are lucky he gets to work from home. So we sacrifice. I don't use any electricity at night when he's working. We light the house by candles and battery run camp lanterns. We hardly ever watched TV anyway, so that was easy to abandon. All of the electrical appliances are a no-no, unless we really need that Kitchen Aid, which we can run in the middle of  the day with full sun shining. Mostly, we enjoy the natural beauty and try to get by. The stove and hot water are on propane...there's a tank behind the house. And we are lucky to have a septic system in our off-grid house.

Solar panels behind E-ship

We are learning. And, we are searching for our own piece of affordable land to build our own off-grid house. I'm still having trouble trying to find a place big enough to have the animals and keep nosy neighbors minding their own business. What is with people? Bored? There was a rumor our chickens were too loud...the nearest house is what 20, 30 acres away? Whatever. Release and move on.

Coop with E-ship in background

Richard built a passive solar coop for the chickens. We are trying to downsize our flock as there doesn't seem to be the interest in eggs here that there was in our small community in Colorado.

There is a little snake that lives above the front door. It turns out there are at least two...I saw them yesterday...two little heads poking out, they just hang out and watch and smell with their little red tongues. I think they are bull snakes or maybe garter snakes. I can't ever really see enough to tell for sure. They are pretty small. The snake represents healing and transformation. We are okay with them living up there. They are the guardians of this house...here before we came.

There are also two ravens that hang out in the south meadow. Magic and creation. It is all good here.

Now, we conserve energy like crazy. We came in with our freezer (unplugged after first power outage) and our big fridge (unplugged after second power outage) and now we use the little two compressor energy Vestfrost fridge that was here. It isn't big enough, but we are learning. We keep a lot of food in the pantry...potatoes, apples, tomatoes, jars of pickles, and our jars of flours around the corner from the kitchen (it gets too hot), and our bread in a drawer under the cabinets. Richard goes out and manually moves the solar panels with the sun every few hours to get the maximum input. And we are researching and talking with our landlord about more solar panels and possible a wind turbine. If he's not up to it, but lets us install them, we can always take them with us when we move to our own piece of land and build our own off-grid house.

We also conserve water like mad. The house is on two cisterns from water catchment off the roof. We have reduced our showers and baths down to about twice a week.

Perpetual camping. We are tuning to the rhythms of the house and the rhythms of nature, as Michael Reynolds, the designer of Earthships (and yes, he designed, but did not build, this house we are in) intended. These are houses for "direct living" as he explains in his A Comimg of Wizards book (very good, spiritual book, by-the-way) and an opportunity for people to live simpler, get closer to nature and evolve into the spiritual beings we are. Wonderful.

I am in love with this house and the landscape surrounding it. And now, we are living more responsibly, being the change, and reducing our carbon footprint by remarkable amounts. So glad to be here and thankful every single day!

Moving back to Toas...the Universe is talking to me

My own silence weighs on me with the burden of a necessary self-examination. Trust your intuition, even if it appears there are no options. When your body and emotions are telling you something is not right, when your kids are acting crazier than normal, and your dog/puppy has turned into a psychotic attack dog, when your house plants are suddenly all sick and dying, and the recently (past two and a half years) quiet parrot has started screaming like a banshee again, when you're afraid to go outside and feel like a prisoner in a strange house, maybe it's time to listen to what the Universe is saying.

We moved the farm to New Mexico over the past two months. We are just outside of Taos in a place that is not unfamiliar, but strange with the taint of money. Is all of Taos like this? I just don't remember. Maybe I didn't care.

Tipped trailer, surprisingly not damaged...except the hitch.

On the move, I wrecked the trailer on La Veta Pass...flipped it on its side on a patch of ice...thought I was going to flip the car too, but managed not to. And as we came to a stop facing the wrong direction on the wrong side of the road, facing the guard rail a few feet away, my adrenaline shooting through my veins, it did not occur to me how close to death I had brought my children and myself, but how that damn pass seemed to have it in for me. It was on the other side, heading up from Taos that I hit a deer some years ago and trashed the front end of my Xterra to the tune of five grand. Lucky for me no one was hurt in either of my La Veta Pass adventures, but I sure have a hard time driving through there now without a full blown panic attack coming on.

E-ship shell, sage and Taos Mountain

But now we have landed in northern NM and the weekend we had to build a chicken coop was one of the coldest all year. The arrangement we have now puts the llamas and chickens some miles away at another property until we can build them fences and shelters here near the house we are renting. They are in the shell of a burned out Earthship on the north side of Taos, but you can't see them from anywhere, unless you are really looking for them.

Passive solar chicken coop in Earthship shell

We managed to get the coop built and everyone arranged, but it still took several lights for warmth and a few weeks for our hens to start laying normally again. I guess they are traumatized too. We did lose a few to coyotes, I'm guessing. All we found was a mess of feathers that might have once belonged to one of the four missing hens. Now, the chickens are guarded by llamas who are enclosed with electric wire.

Nothing is ideal, but we are getting by. We have found a few egg customers already and Richard touched base with some old co-workers at the Corps.

Taos is Taos...so much the same but with more people now. There are places built up here too, just like in the big cities. There are kiddie car shopping carts here too, but some of these have their own bumper stickers, reminding the young drivers to treat everyone with kindness. There is an Occupy Movement here too, but I have not met anyone or gotten involved yet. It seems I'm too caught up in the drama of my own life. I was reading Howard Zinn's A Peoples History of the United States... and got way too angry with the founding peoples of America to continue, convinced that we are now in some strange tenant farmer situation, and I'm angry and disappointed at the elitist, judgmental folks who run the world. (Yes, I have been examining my anger issues and trying to release my need to draw these situations into my life.) It would seem that 1% of the white and powerful, the rich and corrupt, have been doing bad in this country since it's very beginning.

I am driven more than ever now to find a community of like-minded folks who want to be the positive change this planet needs to survive the coming downfall of the powerful American reign. I think a lot of the west gorge area and the mesa where people seem to make their own rules. I long to meet and talk with some of these open minded folks to see how their community differs so vastly from the mainstream world where resources are hoarded and people are exploited to gain more.

We are still searching for our piece of land to build our little sustainable farm, and I'm afraid that the place we are now is not really doable for more than the very short term. It is an emotional minefield of some variety, and the energy is wrong. I'd love to have some peace and not have to worry about my dogs and where Richard left something, and how the llamas and chickens are so far away.

Since we moved into this house, I have been dreaming of Paris. Weird. At night I dream of moving to France...packing, getting on a plane, making all of the arrangements. Can't figure it out. When we lived in Portland, Oregon for a total of four miserable months, I dreamed of Africa. I never did figure that out either, but I'm guessing it has something to do with being in an unhappy situation and looking for a way out.

I certainly don't want to offend anyone, and hope I don't, but when the kids, the dogs, the bird, the houseplants and my dreams are all telling me that something is not right, shouldn't I do something about it?

Maybe the Mountain is testing me again. But you know what...I won't be chased off this time. It doesn't even matter. I won't go back to a house that is on the verge of falling into an old mine shaft because of earth tremors caused by fracking. No way.

I made it back to my beloved NM and I'm not leaving. Stay tuned though. We may end up out in the sage sooner rather than later.

This is my new kitchen view.

An Arroyo Seco sunset through trees...another view  from the house.

Nothing beats a New Mexican sunset when the sky is on fire and the day goes out like a fresh painting. I have come home to the land of art, where every scene is a magnificent creation by the Master Artist.