The Tractor Supply store FINALLY got my bottom plow in this week.  I took Marvin the trailer up to Greeley to pick it up (Marvin is a utility trailer I use to haul my telescope around and it has Marvin the Martian characters on the sides – it always fetches a few stares).

I had verified online that it would fit a category 1 hitch but when I saw the thing I was very worried that I had made a terrible mistake.  The blade is huge and I was thinking that my hitch wouldn’t be able to lift it high enough off of the ground to maneuver.  This tractor has a “limited” category 1 hitch.  I had to do some Googling to find out what that actually means.  Indeed, it means that it won’t lift as high off of the ground as a standard category 1 hitch, so I guess I had reason to be worried – That and I’ve never had one of these beasties before so it is all sorta new.

I heave-hoed the plow out of Marvin without it landing on my toes.  Then I stood there and stared…..”now what?”  How does one hook one of these things up?  It weighs 250 pounds, you don’t just (unless you are me) lift it up and put it into place.  So after figuring out how to disconnect the roto-tiller from the tractor I backed the thing up and thats exactly what I did.  Voila! It fit and it works!!  I also figured out how to hook it up so next time it doesn’t cost me more vertebrae (before all the women jump all over this – NO it didn’t come with instructions – and yes, I do ask for directions when I am lost.)

I took it out onto the muddy front acreage (its been raining for 3 days) lowered it in and it sliced through the dirt like it was melted butter!  What a great tool!  I am very curious to look up some of the evolution of the blade design.  It rolls the soil over in a similar shape as a wave cresting over that surfers ride.  I can’t, however, imagine being out in the scorching heat and humidity trying to control an ox or a mule whilst trying to keep this thing going in the right direction.  One has to stand in awe of how we have developed over the centuries and how some of our machines were invented.  I am no Luddite.  I think things like this are amazing.  I just wish we, as the alleged most intelligent creature on the planet, would learn a bit more moderation.  My plow is one blade.  The guy leasing the back 30 from me has the same type of blade shape but there are a dozen of them and it is over 10 feet wide!

We decided this week that even though we are hoping to have the farm up and producing in the spring of 2014 that we ought to be trying as much as possible to get the soil up to snuff and start raising some crops for future chicken feed and litter.   We decided to plant about a third of an acre of black bush beans, a 1/4 acre of sunflowers and another 1/4 acre of feed corn (non-GMO on all counts of course!)  It will all be dry farmed as I don’t have the irrigation equipment out to it yet.

This was another milestone  for us that created a contrast between our JAZ Urban Farm and the Homestead.  At the urban farm I used to just order the traditional seed packets one sees at the nursery.  This time, I ordered the bean and corn seed by the pound!  After we till up the garden area we will be using push along seeders to plant so that we don’t spend our lives on hands and knees placing one seed at at time.  Ours will be an “Earthway” seeder.  It has a hopper where you place the seed and several plates that go into it that let seed through of specific size and places them the prescribed distance from one another.  It digs the trench for the seed, deposits the seed and covers the seed with soil!  Genius!  Brilliant!

Legumes (beans) fix nitrogen in the soil through their roots.  When they have run their course and dried, we will harvest the beans and then turn them over into the soil.  Once tilled in then we are going to plant clover over the whole area to be tilled in in the spring.  These “green” manures should help build some tilth and get some nitrogen into the ground.

The sunflowers and corn will provide us with some chicken feed in addition to the store bought stuff.  The stalks can then all be run through our chipper to make litter.  That litter will eventually end up as compost, thus completing the nutrient cycle.  As we are also hoping to keep a few bee colonies, these will also give the bees something to feed from.  In addition, we are going to cover up some pretty harsh areas on the property with a multitude of water efficient Russian Sage plants.  Those things are bee magnets!

So even though there was snow at the Eisenhower Tunnel yesterday (11,000 ft) it appears that the Front Range of Colorado is finally done with snow for awhile!

HAPPY SPRING!!!

Here is the latest evolution:

So spring has sprung on the first year of the JAZ Farm.  As I posted previously we agreed with our neighbor to let him farm the back thirty or so acres with wheat.  We hadn’t heard from him in a little while but then round about dinner time I heard the roar of a loud diesel engine, looked out back and there he was pulling this huge plow!  My tractor for the organic garden has a one blade mold board plow to turn over the soil.  This guy’s is 10 feet wide!!  He did about 3 passes and dug into the soil about 18 inches.  My goodness those things are powerful!!

I have to admit some hesitancy here.  While the land would simply lay unused if he didn’t lease it, it is still “conventional” farming.  In that, he turns up the soil and burns diesel fuel.  Because it is wheat, it isn’t a GM crop.  If it were, this would NOT be happening.  It is dry farming so there is little else being done to it until harvest. I get a tax break for Ag use of the land and I should get a huge load of straw from it come harvest time in July.  We have agreed that he will win row the stalks so we can have someone come in and bale it.  So to loosely quote an author:  It is the best of times and the worst of times.  I guess one shouldn’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good.  After all, I could be out there with my little putter tractor planting a sunflower or two.  This way I will have all the straw I could ever need for mulch and chicken coop litter.

Spring has sort of sprung here!  After a very white April we are starting to see signs of growth and green!  Of course we are expecting snow this Wednesday but we’ll take the sunshine and warmth while we may!  Almost overnight the prairie flowers shot up.  Our entire field is purple!  After doing some research we found the flowers to be called “Purple Mustard”.  Evidently they are invasive (figures) and wheat growers hate them because they reduce yield.  They like to invade land that has been tilled up and not used for a season or two (like ours).  They have a distinct (but not too unpleasant) smell.  During the sunrise and later on in the afternoon the sun really brings out the color.  Zina got a shot or two of them.

When we decided that buying our homestead was something we wanted to pursue, I told Zina, “I built the urban farm by hand.  I wheel barrow-ed all the top soil in and I man-handled all the landscaping stone needed to Xeriscape the front yard.  If we are going to do this and it is going to be on the scale that it has the potential for, then I must have some machinery to help out.”

Of course I didn’t want to have one of those ginormous tractors with the eight wheels that are 6 feet tall, pulling a huge disc, seeder or sprayer behind it, but a little putz around tractor to haul inconveniently shaped or heavy objects would sure be handy.

Wishes fulfilled.  A couple of weeks back the local dealership dropped off a compact John Deere tractor.  It was too late for one blizzard and just in time for another.  So far it has a front loader (already coming in handy) and a 4 foot wide rototiller to help with the garden.  On order is a middle buster and a 1 blade mold board plow (the gizmo you often see in pictures being pulled by a horse and a thread bare farmer sweating in the summer sun.).  The middle buster is a piece of steel with kind of a heart shaped blade on the bottom designed to “bust the middle” of a row in order to plant things like potatoes.  It can also be used to help harvest them.  All I can say is thank goodness for some forms of technology.  The farm was never intended to make us a family of luddites.  It is simply healthier, better for the soil, and for the environment to engage in locally grown food production.  Starting this whole production in our 50’s demands a certain amount of convenience.

Here she be:

Of course, you can see from the images that my son – the mechanical engineer wanna be who starts college in the fall, thinks all of the hydraulics and moving gizmos are just all that!  Who-da thunk you get a teenager to WANT to come and help out with farm chores?  Just give em a nifty toy to mess with and you’re good for at least a few days!

A few days after these photos were taken we got hit with a typical Colorado spring blizzard.  The drifting would have had us all but snowed in save for the new tractor.  Here is what Aaron did for two hours the next day:

The humor in this story now begins.  While digging the family a trench out to the main road, our neighbor, whom we had never met, drove down to meet us……..in one of those very same ginormous tractors (I am six feet tall {the guy in the hat and overalls}) – you can get an idea of the size simply because the tires are almost as tall as me!.  He decided that it would be nice to come down and help out and finally meet the new neighbors.  He had a snow plow blade on the front that was as wide as my pickup is long.  Aaron was pointed away from the main road and didn’t see this beast bearing down on him.  When he did notice it was hilarious – it looked like a go cart being chased down by a semi!  We were wondering if we fed and watered our tractor if someday it might grow up to be like this one!  What had taken Aaron two hours, this guy did in a matter of a minute or two.

It turns out that the farmer (Brad) is the one who has been leasing the back 30 acres of our property to farm it with wheat.  He wanted to come by and see if we would still be interested in doing that.  I told him as long as he doesn’t spray pesticides on it and because wheat isn’t genetically modified, we would be happy to have him do it.  In return I will get an enormous amount of straw that can be used for the chickens and for mulch and general composting.  He gets to sell the grain.  He said that right now he is working upwards of 5000 acres of land… none of which he owns.  The main method for non-landowners out here is simply to dry farm.  The ground gets tilled, the seed gets planted followed by lots of praying and hoping for sufficient moisture and then, around the 4th of July, comes wheat harvest.  Last year’s drought left us with 30 acres of unharvested, stunted wheat.  Considering that as I type this we are getting another 6 inches of snow, the moisture levels are quite a bit above last year…. but that’s not saying much.

The organic garden I am going to put in is around half an acre – Easily that if you take into consideration the seed corn and sunflowers I want to grow for the chickens.  It is HARD packed right now as it is where an old horse corral was.  Many hooves have pounded it down – but all of those horses have also made it the most fertile land on the farm.  Brad has volunteered, when he comes out to disc the back 30, to run the disc up through the garden as well!  Said he’d have it busted up and tilled in about 5 minutes.  Woohoo!  Gotta love other people’s machines!

So the JAZ Farm has a tractor and has networked to have access to some folks with much bigger toys to help get the big jobs done.