Linc Vannah

Frugalbundance Farm (homesteading, goats, poultry, garden, natural building, off grid solar, tiny houses, permaculture) is seeking the right person or couple to come live (preferably long term) in a beautiful, professionally built, well insulated, off-grid tiny house on wheels with large storage shed/studio and garden space (if wanted), on a 48 acre parcel of rural land 2 miles from Paonia, Colorado town center.

Use of the fully furnished home and shed are offered in barter for help with milking and walking dairy goats and taking care of poultry the equivalent of two days/week worth of chores.  That comes out to something around 5 to 6 hrs/day for 2 days/week and/or 8 days/month, with some flexibility for when we’d like to go away for more than 2 days at a time.    

We could occasionally offer food (dairy products, eggs, garden veggies) or $ in exchange for additional help with projects, irrigation, putting up hay, etc.

The home is off-grid, so no electric bills, no water or sewer bills.  The occupant would need to provide a small amount of firewood for heating plus propane for cooking, hot water, and backup heat.  Internet service would require getting Rise Broadband wireless service or a cellular data plan.  

The right person would be strongly interested in animals, be willing to treat other species (goats, chickens, turkeys, guineas, etc) with respect and compassion as equals, have an interest in organic agriculture and a simple, self-sufficient lifestyle.  They would also ideally be physically strong and fit, able to lift 70 lbs hay bales, able to learn how to deal with fussy or unpredictable goat behavior, be quiet, gentle, mature, happy, internally motivated, a good communicator, curious and empathetic, reliable, and somewhat flexible time-wise.  We are interested in someone who doesn’t smoke and doesn’t have a dog.  

Perfect situation for a valley organic farm employee who needs housing, artist/musician/writer-farmer, or ?.  Please respond here, or call 970-fourtwotwo-1888, ask for Linc, to hear more about this barter offer, or to give us leads on someone who you think might be interested.  Thank you!

Thanks to everyone who responded to my original post on alternatives to boiled linseed oil. Unfortunately, I didn't know that people had been responding (I haven't used the Permies Forum enough to know how it works - maybe I was getting notifications but missing them in "junk" mail?)

Anyway, we had found a relatively cheap source for walnut oil at Libertynatural.com, and had a friend with a bunch of extra beeswax, so we gave it a try. We first coated the floor with two coats of warm walnut oil. This soaked in, and dried (more or less) in a few days (especially the first coat). But, it didn't repel water, and when we applied it to a wood floor, it attracted dirt (smudged easily), and didn't seem like much of a finish. So, we then melted beeswax into warm walnut oil (yes, carefully - major fire hazard), at a ratio of 1 part beeswax to 3 parts walnut oil, and applied this warm with a paintbrush, and also tried rubbing it on as a paste with a rag. We applied two coats of this, and waited a week or so, and ran out of patience. It stayed tacky the whole time. We had created a balm, not a floor finish (great for the skin!). I then rubbed the excess off using clean, old towels, and waited another week. Still not really a finish, and when the same process was used on the wood floor upstairs, it didn't seem to really protect the wood (smudged easily, attracted dirt, not a hard finish). I suspect that if we had waited MUCH longer (months), that eventually it would have "cured", but we couldn't wait that long, with the weather getting cold outside, especially after the furnace in our old camper trailer blew up one day. Time to move back into the cabin!

It's possible that adding hydrogen peroxide (as John Elliot suggested), to speed up the polymerization process, would have worked. I may try that on the next project. But, I hadn't seen that response, so instead, we bought a can of OSMO Polyx Hardwax Oil, a more or less natural oil-wax finish that we've had good experiences with on wood floors (dries fast to a fairly hard, semi-gloss finish that gets harder with time, and allows for spot refinishing, unlike polyurethane "toxic gick", as Paul Wheaton would say). The OSMO was the ticket, for now anyway. We put two coats of that on, and ended up with what, so far, has been a nice looking, durable earthen floor. We come in an out a lot during the day, tracking in mud, rocks, debris, and just sweep it up as it dries, leaving the same, great looking floor at the end of the day.

As far as I know, all boiled linseed oil is formulated with somewhat toxic drying agents, and the smell of linseed (and the drying additives) seems to linger for weeks after finishing the floor. So, we're going to try using organic raw walnut oil mixed with beeswax on the floor we're about to finish (this August). We'll heat the wax/oil mix before applying to get it to spread and soak in somewhat. Hopefully that walnut oil will dry! Has anyone else tried any other alternatives to boiled linseed?

Welcome to Permies.com Owen. Sustainable Settings, where you're holding your class, is just over the pass south of here. I'm in the process of trying to restore a 30 acre field of cheat grass, with very limited irrigation, to a perennial pasture mix, using rotational grazing, and possibly, keyline plowing. I'd love to participate in your class, but not sure that time and money will permit that this year, maybe next time!

Thanks Kathy, I'll try that, (spreading some soil from inoculated areas to non-inoculated). Lots of good ideas - what a great forum Permies.com is (thanks Paul!)

Thanks for the responses.

I'll try a mix of remedies, given time to implement. I usually try different experiments in different areas so I can see what works.

1. Try adding R. meliloti in irrigation water.

2. Try spraying water with R. melliloti.

3. Disk one area and replant with inoculated seed.

4. Leave one area as-is for a control.

May take me several months to find out what worked best.

Hi fellow permies,

I've come up with an herbal "ley" (salad bar pasture mix) of seed to use in reseeding our predominantly cheatgrass/goatgrass field to a diverse, nitrogen fixing, mineral mining, insect attracting, goat/chicken/human forage source. Before I knew about herbal pastures and about the importance of nitrogen fixing bacteria on alfalfa/clover rootlets, I planted an acre or so of the field with a mix of cool season grasses, alfalfa and clover. I didn't innoculate the alfalfa/clover seed with rhizobium meliloti at the time, figuring that the bacteria would show up somehow on its own. It established well, but this spring I dug some alfalfa up in the field and couldn't find any of the nitrogen fixing nodules. I did find them on alfalfa that was growing in my garden though, not sure why (I inoculated black bean seed planted there last year, but that is a different Rhizobium species than R. meliloti.

Would any of you know of a way to introduce Rhizobium meliloti bacteria on already planted Alfalfa and clovers?

Thanks in advance.

Adam,

That was great information about your observations regarding water transport from the swale and irrigation ditch in our heavy clay soil, thanks. I suspect that your theory is right, the clay soil is so tight that water doesn't carry far in it. It may be that with our dry climate, the moisture capillaries back up to the surface and evaporates faster than it transports (which could be resolved with mulch in the swale), or, it could be percolating down through the caliche and into more porous substrate below rather than moving horizontally to the garden. How long does it take the water in that swale to disappear after it's been filled?

I'm still hoping that a hugelkulture mound on the downhill berm of a catch swale will get enough water to keep the wood in the mound moist and decomposing, but I'm thinking I'll charge the mounds with water initially with drip tape laid along the tops. I can't help experimenting - it's just fun.

I need to start a new thread about how to get rizobium nitrogen fixing bacteria into the soil on an established field of alfalfa (my pasture alfalfa does not seem to have any nitrogen fixing nodules on the root hairs, though some growing in the garden did). The alfalfa seed was planted without inoculating the seed first.

Kelly,

You're thinking about a lot of the same things as I am. I'm from western Colorado (hi Adam, it's Linc over on Pitkin Mesa). My land is similarly sloped as yours and has furrows to carry the water from the gated pipe at the top downhill to the tail ditch. I have plenty of early (snowmelt) water (lasts from end of May to as long as end of July), then very little (5 to 20 gpm) water for the rest of the summer (or last year, until only July 23rd, when the reservoir emptied).

I've divided the 3 acres of the field that I farm into four fenced paddocks for rotational grazing of goats, chickens, possibly other livestock in the future. Between each paddock is a fenced 15' wide strip for trees as windbreak, orchard, coppice material for the goats, etc.

Because of the limited water after the snowmelt water is gone, and because I really like the idea of a storage pond like Adam mentioned, along with swales with tree-planted hugelkulture mounds on the downhill side of the swales, I am starting to convert one paddock from standard gated pipe flood irrigation to a series of on-contour swales, each fed off of a ditch that runs downhill along the side of the paddock. I'm doing this mostly by hand, with not a lot of time this spring to work on it, but am hoping to have at least the first 100' or so of the first paddock done in a couple of weeks. I am thinking of creating a series of 70' wide (width down the hill) "terraces" with a feeder swale at the top of each terrace, and a catch swale with hugelkulture mound at the bottom of each terrace, then repeat. The feeder swale would be fed water by tarp dam (flag dam) out of the main ditch. This feeder swale could be called a Spreader Drain (see this link the basics of permaculture design) that hopefully will allow me to flood irrigate each terrace with the small amount of water that I may have available (first pond I make may be pretty small). The catch swale at the bottom will then catch the excess flood water and let it soak into the hugelkulture mound on the downhill berm of the swale.

I have never seen this done - just hoping it will work. If it does, I may convert more of the paddocks to this system. My main concern is that this system will be more labor intensive than the gated pipe and furrow system, but it may allow me to make better use of the small amount of water I have in mid to late summer.

The next problem will be figuring out how to keep the goats inside movable electric fencing and off of the trees on the hugelkulture mounds.

I am also planning on ripping the soil in each terrace on contour (not on keyline, just right on contour) this fall. I don't have a Yeoman's Plow, so will just use a single shank ripper (Northern Tool has one for $109, but it appears to not have any shear bolts, so risky in our rocky soil). I don't know how well ripping on keyline or contour will work if you also intend to have furrows down-slope. Seems like you'd have to remake the furrows after ripping. Might be better to do away with the furrows if you try the swale system so that you can sheet flow out of the feeder swale. Again, I don't know how well an on-contour feeder swale (or Spreader Drain, as described above) will work until I try it.

By the way, I planted a dryland pasture grass mix (cool season grasses that go dormant in summer), along with a mix of drought tolerant Ladak Alfalfa and Yellow Sweet Clover two years ago when we had a wet spring. It came up great and made it through the drought with no irrigation from late last July until this spring. That Ladak has some great water-seeking taproots.

We have another permies list reader in this valley who is doing somethings similar (hi Lisa, if you're reading this). She and her husband are in the process of creating a series of on-contour swales about 20' apart in their pasture. Each swale is fed by a main ditch that runs downhill along the side of the pasture (as I'm working on doing). On each side of each swale, they are planting trees. They are not planning on flood irrigating the pasture between each swale, but instead are hoping that the water in each swale will seep through the soil to sub-irrigate the pasture.

Anyone else out there with flood irrigation that has tried to go to contour irrigation, or swales instead of the downhill furrow flood irrigation?

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