Just some pictures of the dog, the JAZ Farm sunrise and Zina’s new grain mill and table.  We had all of the fixings but had JAZ Farm chickens instead of turkey.  We have spent the day making about 2 gallons of chicken stock and a gallon of chicken soup from the leftovers.

Zina is going to try out her new grain mill soon so we can attempt bread with our own wheat flour.  The dog continues to recover from her knew surgery, and of course the house is warm from the stove and all of the smells.

Hope everyone had as nice and relaxing a day as we had.  No stress, no strain, just rest.

We are waiting on Jon to finish the last of the chef-ing.  We have been fun recounting the JAZ Farm progression for the past couple years. December 4th 2012 was the closing on this place. Not quite 2 years. Basil the farm dog will have been with us 2 years tomorrow. I was sitting around Thanksgiving of 2012 wondering if the closing would actually happen (the first place we bid on fell through and I thought I would commit Harakiri). I started to think, whether or not we get the farm, I need a pooch.

I started surfing and found Basil. I emailed the powers that be and they held her for us. Off we went and the day after Thanksgiving the cutest little turd joined our family.
In less than two years we have refurbished a house, coop and garden from bottom to top and left to right. The farm in its second summer has produced almost all the core foods we need since around July of 2014. The work has been amazingly difficult but more worthwhile than anything I have ever done. We know the future includes more of the same and will soon include a huge greenhouse and a pig pen (if my wife can handle sending the “cuteness” of the piggies off to the bacon maker).
Our Thanksgiving dinner is all of the fixings but we are having chicken instead of Turkey. We did an inventory and the farm has produced far more of what we are eating than what we had to purchase.
We made the bread for the stuffing
The chickens were raised here
We raised the potatoes, onions, garlic, beans, carrots, chicken and squash.
We had to purchase the apples, raisins, canned pumpkin and cranberries and celery.
We figure that 85% of what we are being Thankful for today was grown by our own hands.
I love this place more than I have anything else ever. Happy Gratitude day everyone.

I have this habit of dreaming stuff up and then actually making it happen.  Most of what I make happen involves time, money and back breaking work.  The projects for 2015 are no different it seems.  Any new work on the farmhouse has gotten to the point that it is stuff that needs to be contracted out.  We have plans to install a wood burning stove, solar hot water, and eventually solar panels (although our electric bill here is pretty meager).  The heating and hot water are the two biggest expenses as propane is never going to get any cheaper.  Those things need to be professionally installed.   The farming infrastructure, however, still falls to my back and hips.  This year is going to be no different.  I just got off the phone with the manufacturer to order our new GREENHOUSE!

Ironically, because it needs to be assembled on relatively level ground, it is going in the area we laid out for the pig pen.  The pig pen is going to move over by the garden which actually makes more sense as they will have access to the garden when we want to have them go in and root around in the fall.

The greenhouse is coming in a kit.  It looks like it is a pretty straight forward assembly job but as with everything else I do it seems it will be bulky and heavy.  I am drafting my son and one of my other farmhand volunteers and according to the owner, I should be able to have the frame up and anchored in a couple of days.  Delivery is supposed to be sometime toward the end of December.  If true, then we very well may have the thing up and operational by spring planting.  Should that happen then we will not be planting the garden in the city this year.  It will likely get dismantled, salvaged, the dirt smoothed flat and Xeriscaped with pollinator oriented plants.  Zina will be happy because I will not need to hack back the ash tree that is back there as it has sprawled over the years and shaded large portions of that garden.

We will still be starting the seedlings in the grow room, but when they start to get lanky and need to be hardened off we won’t have to suffer from the pain of watching them get destroyed by hail.  Allegedly this thing can withstand 100 mph winds and golfball sized hail.  They have several pictures of ones they put up in Colorado and they look to be pretty stout puppies.

We will be adding ventilator fans to it and I have a solar charger that can power them so it won’t be grid dependent.  As with the garden in the city we will put in raised beds and drip irrigation for efficiency.  With respect to keeping it cool, the manufacturer suggests putting up shade cloth over it that lets a certain percentage of sunshine through but also helps keep the building cooler during the blast furnace of summer.

I guess, as I always say, if it isn’t fun I wouldn’t be doing it.  Should this all work out not only will we have the kind of harvest we had this past season, we will also have pork, eggs, chicken, our own home ground flour, and all the salad fixins you can shake a stick at.  Not to mention, just a really nice place to go hang out and meditate on my belly button.

Woohoo!

After all of the worry and anxiety of trying to grow our first garden at the homestead with so many unknowns, the fall harvest is turning into a doozy!  We have been canning and freezing and threshing and winnowing and we couldn’t be more amazed as to how well things have gone.  There are lessons learned but over all the amount of food we have been able to produce on a half an acre has been pretty amazing.  Next year we are going to be trying some new things (like wheat and trying to get the corn to succeed with some better soil conditioning) but the first year has been amazing. Even the eggplant and peppers, that we had given up for dead, have produced more fruit than we could handle.  The Acorn squash is superb and we have Butternuts on the way.  We have quarts and quarts of green beans, beets, carrots, and corn.  The chickens are in the freezer, the cucumbers have been epic and we even have tomato sauce from the city when we didn’t think we would have any.  We have 3 more rows of Black Beans to pick and winnow and the onions look like they are going to provide us with enough for the winter.  The biggest thrill has had to be the success of the potato crop.  We have pulled up two of the three rows and have well over 200 pounds (Thank goodness for the Middle Buster Plow for the tractor!).  I am continually amazed at how much more flavor home grown produce has versus the grocery store.  Most potatoes are kind of lifeless and are in dire need of toppings.  Not these!  They are milky in texture and have an amazing flavor.  We will be putting them in kind of a root cellar in the basement for storage and we may also dry and can some.  I have eyes to build a real root cellar soon as well.

The culmination of it all was a dinner on Saturday night that was grown and raised, processed and cooked 100% on the property.  It was probably the proudest meal I’ve ever eaten.

So the 2014 year of the JAZ Farm experiment has been quite a success.  So much has been learned and there is much more we hope to accomplish.  At least this next year we won’t be refurbishing a foreclosed on home at the same time.  While this has all gotten us in shape physically we are learning that if we want to be doing this in our 70’s we need to keep up on the aerobics and light weight workouts.  There are days after processing food all day that I have never been so sore, even when I was powerlifting for sport.  Anyone complaining that our food pickers want a fair wage will have to answer to me.  What incredibly difficult work.

Roasted Chicken and Vegetables…. all from the farm.  Distance to table… practically zero.  Woohoo!

The end results:  Black Beans, Canned Green Beans, Cooling down the Eggplant and Peppers, Red Potatoes, and Yukon Gold Potatoes

Black Beans    

The farmer couple picking and digging.  Jon harvesting potatoes and Zina picking green beans.

Took a drive the other day.  Looked in my rearview mirror and this caught my attention.  If you have the eyes for it, the vastness of the high plains is stunning.

The road home took me around behind our place.  Turns out there are several homesteads back there.  One with Llamas.

We went out today to pull beets to pickle and can.  While we were at it we began to check the rest of the garden.  The fun part was getting to eat two whole strawberries.  The patch is a disaster but there were two very sweet and very red strawberries for a Saturday morning snack!  We weeded the Asparagus and then started picking eggplant.  Wow they have recovered and we will be having many different eggplant dinners here shortly.

Remember these?  These are the peppers that were completely stripped during the first of the hail storms this spring.

They have since recovered pretty well and this is what we picked from them today:  Purple Beauty, Green Bell, Anaheim, Serrano and a couple of Poblanos.  The Jalapeños are not doing well but this is just the start of the harvest.  Stuffed and grilled peppers!  Yum!

The Acorn Squash have also survived and have taken over.  There are several dozen on their way to ripening.  We may actually get a Butternut Squash or two as well, but those poor things really took a beating during the storms.

The Black Beans are doing their thing, some of the potatoes are dying back which means we will have to go out and see if any actually made potatoes.  The Amaranth is HUGE.  I’ll post pictures later but we are going to have to cut the seed heads off and get those stored.  The onion harvest looks like it is going to be very good as well.  The corn?  Meh.  We’ll see but it appears that we have a soil deficiency of one kind or another.  They are getting ears but they are small and the plant itself is kind of a lighter green.  This, at first glance, tells me its nitrogen.  I’m going to have soil samples done in the fall so we will know more then.

This is our project for the rest of the day:  Pickling and canning about 30 lbs of beets.  Hope they don’t taste like crap because we have at least twice as many than pictured here.  We do use them quite a bit in our juicer too.  As I write, the chickens are chowing down on the greens!

So on our counter today we have a chicken thawing, 2 dozen eggs gathered this morning, summer squash and Zucchini, Acorn Squash, Carrots, Beets, Peppers, Eggplant, and home made bread.  All from the farm!  What a tough growing season this has been!  So very nice to see things maturing in spite of it all.

Sunrise and wheat fields, a sunny day for weeding and projects!

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Every time I build something or we have something done, Zina follows behind with a brush, a roller, and some sort of goop.  Finally a dry few days to get the new deck water sealed.

The mowing deck for the tractor finally arrived (only ordered it the end of MAY!)  Spent two days cutting down a whole lotta grass and weeds!  Sometimes it was upwards of 2 feet deep.  It is so nice to have the place trimmed back.  I was starting to feel like the scuzzy neighbor!

As of today the paper says the wheat harvest is about half in for farms along the I-70 corridor.  The wet summer delayed cutting by about 2 weeks but the reports are pretty good.  It sounds like yields are high.  Our field was abandoned by the farmer leasing from us because of the hail storms.  I am still contemplating cutting a bunch and see if it grinds.  No sense in letting it go to waste!  This time of year Byers turns into Big Ag central.  The combines are turning and the harvest trucks are stacked 20 deep at the elevator.  The trains continually come through town to fill up the grain haulers.   Doesn’t look like there will be a shortage of hamburger buns!