El Nina Visits Central Oregon

Bend was pummeled in snow this winter - the most snow in 100 years! We were expecting it, since last year was El Nino, but we ran out of places to put the snow. For this Chicagoan, I was reminded of my adolescence with all the constant shoveling. Sometimes, Mike and I were out there 5 times a day just to keep our driveway and sidewalks clear.



the chickens were snug, thanks to their well built coop.

It made for an amazing season of snowboarding, and Mike and I tried out quite a few new activities...

 

Snowshoeing, which is a very good sport for beginners. It's basically wide legged walking and a great way to get out and enjoy nature. You can pack a lunch and hike off just like in the summer, but without any bugs or people, and with lots of quiet and solitude. Good snowshoes, however, run around $300.00, so we rented and may have to save up for our own pair...

 

Josh snapped this pic while we were on the trail

Can you see Mike? He's smack dab in the middle of the pic.

Another "Where's Mike" pic - you can see the top half of his body;
he's lifting his trekking poles up.

Cross Country Skiing - NOT a good sport for beginners. I think I fell down like 25 times this day in 5' deep snow, which sounds soft and fun, but is like getting yourself out of quicksand. On the bright side, I probably burned off enough calories to justify eating a whole cake. 

at least we could say it was beautiful.

As you know, Mike likes to "Go Big or Go Home," so we cross country skiing amateurs took a backcountry trail THREE miles from Mount Bachelor to Todd Lake. All I can say about this day is - I survived.

the mountains peeking through the trees.

Hope you don't have to use the restroom!

 

Mike breaking a path across the lake.

 

The funny thing is, you'd think 3 miles into the wilderness in the dead of winter would be a deterrent, but in Bend, it's a challenge. There must have been at least 50 people out there, on snowmobiles, snowshoes, cross country skis, and ski skates. And many, many of these people were older than us. It's so inspiring for us to stay fit and stay active.

We also went dog sledding with a friend from work, who let us drive the dog sleds ourselves. It wasn't as easy as it looks - at first, the dogs had a mind of their own, and took Mike far, far away from the trail. That's him below, in the center of the picture, driving the team!

At least I got this cool shot!



 

  

My view from my dogsled

 All in all, it was an awesome winter - tons of snow and lots of new experiences. It went by super fast and one day, the snow was all melted. Here in Central Oregon we don't get a spring, really. It goes from freezing cold and snow on the ground to shorts and flip flops. But we're not complaining - it's gardening season! I'm knee deep in dirt, plants, chickens, and flowers right now, and loving every second. I've got my chickens hopefully hatching some new friends, and we're back at work on our yard remodel. Garden pics next! 

 

Summer Stay-Cation

Summer is here, finally! You may laugh because I bet it's warm where you are. Well, in Central Oregon, we still got below freezing nights all the way up until June 20th. Yeah, you read that right. About two weeks ago, I was still wearing a beanie and puffy jacket in the evenings. But we're holding steady at 80 degree days and 50 degree nights now, and it's blissful to get outside and get some Vitamin D.

Us at a concert on June 13th - heavy sweaters, scarves, and beanies.

We're relatively far north, and this means loooong summer days. It's light from 4:30am to almost 10pm. You can get a whole lot accomplished (apparently not blogging, though - haha) in 16+ hours of daylight. It's very motivating! A siesta and a couple cups of coffee don't hurt, either. 

Here is our original front yard! Two dog-pee-burned trees blocking the front door, a dead tree in the middle of the yard, and patchy, scratchy grass with weeds and clover; all of which cost a ridiculous amount to water in the summer.

Water costs to maintain this grass ran us at least $50/month in the summer!

We got rid of several trees, took down the front porch railing, and put in a new, more modern fence. 

The scraggly rose bush in the foreground eventually got ripped out as well.

We went and picked out some boulders and flowers...

The fence color is accidental...and now sanding the fence is on our to-do list!

...and added some woodchips and a large dead stump we found while hiking...

Behind the stump is a baby apple tree with 5 different kinds of apples grafted to it!

...and now, I pay only $15/month to water our drought-tolerant, food-and-herb-providing, pollinator-friendly front lawn! Some of the things we've got here: an apple tree (which will produce in about 2-3 years), blueberry bush (already producing!), sage, 2 kinds of lavender, peonies, Icelandic poppies, 2 kinds of elderberry bushes (with which you can make wine and syrup), sunflowers (to feed the chickens), catmint (similar to catnip), rhubarb, and a Nanking cherry bush. They'll all grow in a lot more next year, and hopefully the yard will look a little closer to how I imagine it in my head. Plants definitely require patience.

Meanwhile, in the backyard...potato boxes/towers are all the rage on the internet. Since we have the space, I thought I'd try one. The idea is that you cover up the bottom 6" of the plant continuously as it grows, encouraging it to put out extra roots (and therefore, extra potatoes). You stack it up higher and higher, and ideally you should be able to harvest insane amounts of potatoes. 

Potato box at the 4th level. This was about 1.5 months into growing.

The potatoes at 5 levels high...we had to build more!

We used to be able to get German Butterball potatoes easily, at the Hollywood Farmer's Market. They're small and creamy and so good! While potatoes grow well up here in the Pacific Northwest, I haven't seen any of that variety at the markets, so that's what I'm growing in here.

We didn't know how well they'd do but we had to double the number of levels we had! It's only the beginning of July and we have at least 70 more days to go in the growing season. If this works, we will definitely build another one for next summer.

Our backyard was disgusting when we bought the house: it was basically a gravel dog run, with weeds, unkempt bushes, and a broke-ass fence in the back. The fence is the builder original, from 1992.

We got rid of all the gravel, weeds, and since we're on a slope, decided to put in a sunken patio, to help make the yard areas more level. We also replaced and upgraded the fence.

We had professionals put in the patio, since it involved heavy machinery.

The first night the patio was done, we ran out and bought a firepit! It's the perfect little space to relax in, although I hope to get some actual patio furniture in the future, rather than our camping chairs. 

All the backyard work means the chickens no longer are free range. They have the entire side yard, though, with compost bins and a pear tree, so I don't think they're sad about it. 

One of our three compost bins starting to sprout some "volunteer" squash.

The compost bin and squash just recently - it's doing REALLY well!

Our little baby chicks turned out to both be girls, and their rapper names (Tupac/Two-Spot and Notorious B.I.R.D.) stuck. 

The chicks at 2 days old.

At 5 weeks old, they still lived in the house with us.

At 8 weeks old, when we finally knew for sure they were girls.

They are now 10 weeks old and almost completely feathered out!

The baby chicks are Mottled Cochins, a Chinese breed that is hardy in the winter, with their little feathered feet! They are the sweetest things and are about 1lb each. They're almost full grown and will stay tiny. For comparison, here's a picture of our regular sized chicken in the background, and these two in the foreground:

Those are plums from our neighbor's tree all over the ground. 

So, that's the domestic side of our life right now. It's sort of amazing how much we can get done by staying home (and admittedly, working part time with a short commute - that sure helps as well). That travel bug itches pretty bad, though, so we've got some small trips planned at the end of the summer to visit friends and family, and a big trip in the works for the end of the year. But for now it's nice to make a home, which makes us want to stay home!

Feathering Our Nest - With Chickens

One of my daydreams, once I had a yard, was to get chickens and have fresh eggs. If you have researched anything about homesteading, then you know that almost everyone has chickens (if not goats, sheep, cows, pigs, ducks, geese, etc.). So we jumped on the urban-backyard-farmer/homesteader bandwagon and started building a chicken coop. 

Luckily, we have awesome friends! Josh and Bernice pitched in to help us build our ambitious coop and run, which turned out being a lot more expensive and labor intensive than we realized. But it was a great lesson in construction. We situated it in our side yard, in between the compost bin and the pear tree.

Building the frame - after a whole day of digging the foundation.

Working on the floor of the coop

Harvesting pears while the guys are working on the coop

In case you're wondering how we figured out how to build a coop, we solved that as we solve all our problems - by Googling it. I researched the hell out of coops and chickens, learning as much as I could about their needs, health problems, climates, etc. After hours upon hours of staring at the computer screen, I concluded that it was well worth the $30 to pay for plans - so we bought the "Garden Coop," which you can find online. It's very well designed and super easy to alter, customize, and make to suit your space and budget. 

Mike made it all pretty with cedar siding, to match the fence.

Part of the roof and wire up, and Bernice staining the wood

We got all fancy on the inside - painted the walls a cheerful yellow and insulated them with styrofoam packing stuff (so proud of repurposing the styrofoam from all our boxes!). We also cut way bigger doors than they proposed, and laid vinyl parquet tile floors, for ease of cleaning. Turns out this was great foresight, because I clean the coop every day. I can't stand poop.

The inside of the coop after we laid the vinyl tiles and painted

Almost done! We got a proper lock for the human door and finished the roof
and the siding on the coop wall that faces the run. The chickens also get
to forage around the side yard, pear tree, and compost bins every day.

Learning about chickens has been fun and life-changing. Chickens can be nasty. The term, "pecking order" really has meaning now. Their hierarchy isn't a pyramid; it's a linear line. There is one top chicken, and everyone else falls in line below, and there truly is a bottom chicken on the totem pole. It took us a little bit of time (and some re-homing of a little tiny fluffball chicken we named "Death Metal" because she was so mean) to get the balance just right. We still have one "bully" chicken (the 2nd to last on the hierarchy), but no one is bleeding and for the most part, they like each other.

Upper left is our best layer - about 5 eggs/week. The white is the sweetest,
the silver (lower left) is the mean one, and the littlest one (lower right) is the smartest!

I'm not sure if we'll end up naming them. Chickens are weird little creatures - pretty closely related to dinosaurs, actually - and although ours are all friendly and you can pet them and pick them up, there is something really primitive and savage about them. Did you know they can cannibalize each other and their eggs? 

Regardless, we do nothing but the best for them. I clean their coop and run every single day, we spend hours playing with them in the backyard, and we sprout and ferment all their food. Everything they eat is organic, whole grains or veggies, non-soy, non-corn, and real (I don't believe in those pellets, crumbles or "feed" you buy in the store - it looks too much like kitty litter). 

Fermented grains in the jars, and sprouting mung beans, lentils and wheat.

Despite all this, Mike is still weirded out by the fact that the egg comes out of a chicken's butt. The first egg tasted like tuna fish because I had been feeding them tuna (high protein) to help them through molting season. After that, we switched to an all vegetarian (plus bugs) diet, and they get greek yogurt, peas, lentils and sprouted beans for protein, plus these disgusting mealworms that I've been raising in a bin - I won't gross you out with a picture of that. The eggs taste MUCH better now. But Mike still isn't a fan because now we know how dirty chickens can be, and we see how eggs are produced. I'm slightly weirded out but less so (I've eaten some pretty crazy stuff in my life), and even though I think bugs are THE WORST, chickens can turn earwigs, spiders, and mealworms into some pretty yummy eggs!

Seeing where our food comes from makes me believe that if we got more involved, like raising a pig, goat, sheep, cow, etc, it'd be pretty easy to go vegetarian or even vegan. It's so easy to eat something that's packaged pristinely in the grocery store. You never see the poop and the blood and the feathers and the fur. There's a lot of labor, and life, and sweat and dirt that goes into making a meal. If it's this disgusting on an organic-free range-happy life level, imagine how gross it is on an industrial-battery cage-stockyard level.

We've had the chickens about one month now, and our conclusion...

It's been super educational, in terms of getting to know your food and learning about the care of another animal. We'll have to have chickens for at least a year or two to "re-coop" expenses (see what I did there?), but they're relatively inexpensive to maintain, even doing all organic, non-soy, non-corn, *true* free range. I'd say that our 4 chickens probably cost about $20/month. This just about breaks even for what I'd pay in the store for free-range organic eggs ($4.50-$5.00/dozen large), but I have peace of mind knowing exactly what is in my eggs, I can control the nutritional content of the eggs through what I'm feeding the chickens, I know the chickens are truly happy, safe, and loved, and they are really fun to have. We'll see how we feel after a year! 

What We Did On Our Summer Break

I can't believe how fast the summer went - my last post was in early June and it's already mid August! Whoops. I guess we just got wrapped up in home life here in Bend. Although it doesn't feel like we're getting much done, when I look back on the last couple months, we have been moving forward, slowly but surely.

We've taken a little break from interior home remodeling and moved our attention to the outside, which is really refreshing. The inside stuff started to feel like homework.

Mike mowing the lawn with our new lawn mower.

We put in an all new fence, which you can see was desperately needed! The old fence was original from 1992, had never been taken care of, and the posts were just plain wood, so it blew down in a storm we had in February (our neighbors put up the lovely black plastic to show where their property line is). 

Side fence and back corner, before

Side fence and back corner, after

Mike did all the work of clearing the yard, getting rid of the weeds, raking up the gravel, and supervising the fence guys (who we found off Craigslist - we never learn). They weren't the most professional, but hey, they did the heavy lifting. And now our yard is a blank slate to start designing!

Back yard and fence, before

Back yard and fence, after

One thing I'm working on is making our whole yard edible. In with food - out with grass (mostly). We will have one little area of grass in a shady spot in the backyard, where the cats can lounge. But I'd like for everywhere else to have native plants or fruit/veggie/food bearing flora, and pavers/woodchips/etc. 

We have a good starting point with our fruit trees. We've got three - red plum, large crabapple, and Bartlett pear. The plum tree is being strangled by an aspen, and our neighbor hates the crabapple (and keeps bribing us to remove it), but the pear tree is doing well.

the plum tree in the background and the one delicious plum I ate!

the crabapple tree - I'm going to attempt crabapple jelly.

the pear tree in July

the first pears I picked, in mid August

I'm already learning so much about pears - for one, they have to be picked unripened, because otherwise they ripen from the inside out, and get all mealy. You turn them 90 degrees and if they snap off the tree easily, they're ready to be picked. Then you put them in cold storage, and after that, take them out as you want to ripen them. Whew! If you want to can or preserve them, that's a whole other process (which I'm going to attempt here in a few weeks).

In the meantime, we have lots of fallen, wormy pears and crabapples, so we got going on our compost bin. Mike built it from all the scrap wood and leftovers we had from the fence.

Having a garage is the best!

Framing it out - these are leftover 2x4 scraps.

Creating sides with leftover fencing strips

repurposed the old fence for slats in the front, which slide in and out

I love that the sides and the top are all thin slats, I think it gives what could be a very rustic and disgusting compost bin, a little bit of modern urban flair. 

Mike in his handiwork!

In the backyard and ready to be filled!

We still have to get some chicken wire or something for in between each bin, but I have already started filling box #1. I saw this method online and it sounded awesome - basically you start with one box, and once it's filled, move on to box #2. At some point, you can shovel out box #1 and dump it into the next empty box (hence the sliding front pieces). This way it gets turned/aerated, and composts faster. Once you're done filling box #2, the first box you aerated should be done composting and you can empty it into your garden. Then just repeat!

Hopefully by next growing season, we'll have some nice compost for our raised beds. It's pretty awesome to have this box for our veggie/fruit/coffee/egg/paper waste. We're cycling stuff back into making our food, which is way better than having it sit in a landfill somewhere. Our garbage has already reduced by half.

Now I'm off to go chop up some of our tree trimming pile to throw in my new bin!