Steve Mendez

We covered our tomatoes and sweet peppers with plastic tarps the last two nights when temps were forecast to drop into the low 30s. Our uncovered beans, squash and cucumbers took a hit and the leaves are wilted and dark green. Now we can see the few unharvested beans, squash and cucumbers that were hiding out in the dense foliage. Now we have at least a week ahead of us with lows in the mid 40s and highs in the upper 60s so we can take our time harvesting the last of the crop and won't need to worry about covering up with the tarps.

We've kind of lucked out this year. After a devastating late frost in May that killed almost the whole garden (even the peas), we replanted late, and now our first frost is a month later than usual, so in the end our harvest has been similar to previous years.

Like Douglas, we also like to pick the green tomatoes just before the real hard frost and store them in the garage. They'll slowly turn red and we can have "fresh" red tomatoes for Thanksgiving and beyond.

I wonder if installing a very tall perch for large raptors in the vicinity of the town would discourage the Prairie Dogs?  

I think my wife and I are "hybrid" Gerts because we were employed full time while developing and running our farm.

Our family struggled and scrimped and worked on the farm for years before the farm turned a profit. Once the farm business started making money we invested in infrastructure and improvements even though we did not own the land. Plowing that money back into the farm paid off with a drastic increase in production and profitability. We then used those profits to pay off our debts, and then to max out our 401Ks, IRAs every year, and to purchase rentals as well as a new home on a half acre with irrigation water.

The farm also paid for college for two of our kids (oldest son is an ER physician, youngest daughter graduated from an Ivy League school with a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Environmental Engineering and now designs solar farm sites). Our other daughter went to college for one year and got married and put her husband through school, they have a successful I.T. security company. Youngest son joined the Marines in 2004 at age 19 and came back much matured and with a love for operating big trucks, he and his family live locally.

I retired from my job with a maximum pension at age 64 when I reached the Rule of 90 (age and years of service equals 90). I was fortunate in that I loved my job.  
All the while we paid self employment tax in my name on the farm income so I qualified for the maximum when we sold the farm business and I took Social Security at age 70. My wife retired from her job early at age 60.

I'm occupied in my retirement with managing rentals, Wed and Sat morning coffee at the diner with friends, exploring the desert and mountains on the side by side, gardening, fishing, hunting, traveling to visit friends and family, and restoring antique vehicles and other projects in a recently purchased shop in town.

My wife is busy with irrigating, yard work, reading, relaxing on the deck in the mornings with coffee and me, riding her bike, daily exercise classes with friends, traveling, and playing the violin with the local symphony orchestra.

Winter cold, snow, and ice on crutches is taking a toll on me and we're seriously considering getting a little winter place with palm trees in the yard and a local orchestra in a town a days drive south of here.

Being Gerts, to us means healthy eating from our own land, no prescriptions (so far), no debts, no payments, no competing, no set daily schedule, no alarm clock, and no boss.

I have waited until after your successful knee replacement to relate my knee replacement experience.
In 2013 I had left knee (my only knee) replacement surgery after suffering severe bone on bone pain for years, cortisone injections and a knee brace had done very little to alleviate the situation. My leg had become very bowed at the knee. After walking with forearm crutches for 39 years
my height had gone from 6'2" to 5'10". The orthopedic surgeon had told me in 2010 that I was the perfect candidate for a knee replacement. He said I would know when it was time to have the surgery but it had to be done before I retired from my job which provided excellent medical insurance. My retirement was set for 2015 on my 64th birthday.

The morning of the surgery I was assured that I would be up and crutching around the next day.

In the recovery room the surgeon came in with a grim look on his face and showed my the x-rays of my new knee. They revealed a spiral fracture in my tibia from the knee to the ankle. During the surgery when the surgeons were pounding the anchor for the new knee into the cut off end of the tibia the bone had split open and the crack extended to my ankle. He explained that I had the hardest bones he'd ever worked with.

I was sent home in a wheelchair three days after the surgery with a machine that flexed my leg every minute or so while lying in bed. For the next two and a half months I went to he hospital for physical therapy sessions several times a week.

After ten weeks I stood up on my crutches for the first time, totally pain free, with full range of motion in my leg, and restored to my original height of 6'2".

The knee has been working fine ever since. The hardest part now is complying with the 25 pound weight restriction for lifting and carrying.
 

Hey Ryan,

There are plenty of potentially valuable wild/rare plants and animals that are just waiting for someone to develop the parameters for farming them and supplying a lucrative niche market.
The same goes for off the wall services that others haven't thought of or figured out how to do.

While working on your project/career/business/farm (whatever it may be) you'll need an income, possibly from a job you don't like and with people as you've described in your previous posts.
Suck it up and get busy. With study, hard work, dedication, and single mindedness towards a goal, you and your wife can overcome failure, disappointment, and setbacks to achieve a great outcome.
Try to stay positive and keep your future in mind.

You might try going out into your yard on a warm night with a UV flashlight. I know that scorpions and some centipedes really "light up" under a strong UV light.

I wonder if perhaps you are drowning the newly deposited eggs and newly hatched larvae. In my experience there is a fine line between feed too wet and feed just the right dampness for starting the maggots and for the flies to lay viable eggs. It doesn't take much to drown fly larvae, especially the small young ones.

Thanks for your interest Mallory.
Once we found our niche with the medical and educational markets we pretty much settled into that. We were as busy and as profitable as we wanted to be supplying an industry that is beneficial to human medicine and to science.
We conducted a lot of feed trials after we got the Bullfrogs to eat pellets. It took time and effort to work out the nutritional requirements for the adults as well as the larvae. The ingredients in the diets aren't so expensive as to make the pellets cost much more than some of the other feeds that the mill produces.
It is inefficient and expensive to raise an animal to feed to another animal that you are marketing.
We raised maggots year-round for five years to feed to the Bullfrogs while we tried dozens of ways to get them to eat pellets. By the time my brilliant wife came up with a method to get the Bullfrogs to eat pellets we were producing up to fifty Kgs of housefly (Mosca domestica) larvae a week in a separate larvarium.  After assembling her set-up and then seeing the Bullfrogs swallowing the pellets, I was astounded and started to hyperventilate and had sit on an upturned bucket while I calmed down. NO MORE MAGGOT FARMING!!! I rushed home to tell her about her success, there was a news story on the car radio about O.J. Simpson and a slow-speed chase on the freeway in LA.
I'll check out the link.

We had a Mormon Cricket (They're actually grasshoppers) population boom in the desert and mountains of our area this year. I didn't hear of any problems with them in agricultural areas.
On a side by side trip in the mountains on July 3rd we came upon bands of them crossing the trail in several places. They covered the ground for several hundred feet at each crossing. They pile up on the vehicle tracks to eat the ones that have been run over; thus getting run over themselves. It was a gooey mess when the third side by side brought up the rear. This picture is from July 2022.  

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.