Steve Mendez

Being one legged means I have trouble standing and using a long handled shovel, spud fork, hoe, or rake. I find it much easier to sit on a tall 6 gallon fermenting bucket with a bucket seat to work in the garden or yard. This necessitates the use of short mostly D handled tools since I'm less than 5 feet tall on the bucket seat. Sitting makes it much easier to use my foot to help push a shovel or spud fork into the soil.

We have two plum trees that we brought back as seedlings from Utah 20 years ago.  They have been producing a good number of prune/plums for about 15 years. This year after a very mild  winter we had a very hard frost in April that killed the leaves and buds on our trees.  New leaves grew on the trees but they are kind of sparse and odd looking. Some of the leaves are curled. I took  a couple of photos of the underside of the leaves and they have quite the aphid infestation. This is the first year we've noticed anything like this.    

Set it up and try it out. Is the condition of the rope so bad that you can't practice with maybe a 5 gal. bucket of water? I've used set-ups with similar looking rope to lift a 200 lb deer. I did use leather gloves to handle the rope.

In the mid nineties when we first discovered how to spawn Bullfrogs; the dragonflies decimated our first couple of tadpole crops.  We could see the Bullfrogs in the spawning pens catch and eat dragonflies and thought "oh cool, another natural food source".  We failed to realize that the dragonflies were laying eggs of their own. The dragonfly nymphs which were hiding in the muck on the bottom of the pen ate a big portion of our tadpoles before we figured out what was going on. Straining the nymphs out of the muck and covering the pens with 1/4 inch plastic mesh solved the disappearing tadpole problem but another problem cropped up when we excluded the dragonflies from the pens. The nymphs had not just been eating  tadpoles but also mosquito larvae. We had to develop a skimmer apparatus to send the mosquito larvae down the drain to the settling pond until the tadpoles grew large enough to eat the mosquito larvae.
So yes I would say that dragonflies are definitely predacious.

There is a not quite abandoned 100 year old cabin in the mountains south of our town. It's still mostly weather proof inside and there is a table, a couple of chairs, a wood burning cook stove, and a cupboard stocked with some canned goods. I talked with a guy who claimed that he stayed overnight in the cabin a few years ago when his side by side broke down during a hunting trip. He waited there for a day until someone came along and gave him a ride back to town. There is no cell phone service in the area.
I took this pic last October during an Elk hunt.

We purposely declined to take any public funds for research, construction, and operation of the farm. We were actually offered several sizable grants early on when we started having some success. My professor and mentor Dr. Herschel Boydstun cautioned us that if we took public money, we would be obligated to share any of our Bullfrog farming discoveries with the public. There is quite a bit of proprietary information concerning our Bullfrog farming methods and that is what we sold (with an NDA) when we retired from farming. We don't reveal any proprietary info to the public.  

I recently read the book The Light Eaters by Zoe Schlanger. This well researched book makes a case for many plants to be at least conscious communicating individuals who can express joy and stress (pain?) to other plants through the air and through the soil.

In winter at our farm we would leave for up to ten days, by first informing our customers a few weeks in advance of the days that we would not be shipping. The day before leaving we would bypass the warm water straight to the drains, raise the water levels a bit, and turn the cold water down to a trickle. Before leaving town we would make sure the Bullfrogs and tadpoles were in torpor on the bottoms of their troughs.
Several times, upon returning there would be a skim of ice on the surface of the water in the troughs. Our animals suffered no morts or ill effects once they were slowly warmed back up.
In warmer weather we had a renter who was happy to spend an hour and a half a day feeding and cleaning in return for a $75.00 per day discount on his rent.  

What are your reasons for purchasing this property?  Is it in California or Nevada?

We planted Kentucky Wonder and Blue Lakes pole beans. Both varieties would have probably grown to 20 feet if our trellis was that high.