Life Transplanet

Schnoodle with some of the various tropical plants in our house -coffee tree is furthest left

We have had a small coffee plant for the last few years.  In the summer we put it in the humid greenhouse and it grows well.  Then in the winter we bring it inside, where it lives..but doesn’t exactly thrive.   Just this year it started to bloom.

Cassie played the role of the honey bee and pollinated some of the blossoms by hand.  We hadn’t thought much of it until just the other day when we saw….Coffee beans!

Colorado Coffee Beans

We will continue to let them grow and I doubt we’d have enough even for a single cup of coffee, but it’s still fun and having tropical plants around us invokes thoughts of Puerto Rico.  Of course the coffee plants in PR are a hundred times more fragrant and bigger!  Perhaps if we have enough beans/seeds we will try to grow another tree or two here in CO.  When we get to PR we might plant a whole acre of them!

This is a coffee bush in Puerto Rico (makes our Colorado coffee beans look silly)

The late-May early June harvests here in Greeley mainly consist of garlic, strawberries and lettuce, which is fine with me. We’ve been eating salads and putting the lettuce leaves on sandwiches, using the garlic scapes in all sorts of foods and eating strawberries from the vine.  We planted the seeds that have to have warm soil like watermelon, cucumbers, peppers and cantaloupe so we will look forward to their harvest as well. So far everything has been growing great using organic techniques. Here’s a few shots from the yard.

Garlic Scape

This garlic is huge! As thick as my thumb

Lettuce in our garden -mostly volunteers from last year

Strawberries straight from the garden

The girlies in the yard

We’ve seen a fox out back in the land behind our house and are a little bit worried for our chickens since they roam freely. So far the fox hasn’t seen them and I hope it stays that way. We also have eagles and hawks all around. I know why some people build chicken runs with chain link covers!

I heard this song and thought of Puerto Rico. It really feels like Puerto Rico to me. I love the summer-like weather we’ve been having. Gardening, listening to music, wearing warm-weather clothes and flip-flops, drinking sun tea with fresh mint from the garden, eating salads that are 10 minutes old. 

For about 4 months a year in Colorado it feels tropical here too, and I love it. My swing is tropical, too!

Our Seed starter setup

It is the start of the gardening season here in Colorado.  All the local stores start to stock seeds, compost, potting soil, pots, shovels, gloves and all the related items a person might need to grow some food or do some landscaping.  Cassie was lucky enough to score some free seeds at a local gardening workshop.  More seeds than we could possibly use.

We are going to plant a variety of peppers, tomatoes, melons, lettuce, strawberries and some flowers.

I got an early start last weekend but maybe I wore myself down to much.  I was sick the previous week and recently I’ve  had a fever of 102 for the last few days.    It really sucked, mainly kind of a chest cold.  It put me down for the count  and all I could do was sleep and try to keep warm.  Luckily today I am feeling better and I decided to resume light garden work and it was a beautiful day.

We’ve decided to move the chicken from the greenhouse (which was a temporary location) into a home built chicken coup that I am making so she wont eat all the seedlings.   More on the coop in coming days.

When I was expanding our vegetable garden I moved some rocks and landscaping fabric.  I found a whole lot of bindweed.  This stuff lives under any condition imaginable.  Its been under wraps for over 3 years and was just continuing to grow.   Why can’t food to grow this easily?

Bindweed

Noodles?  No…Bindweed!

We bought some compost a week ago to amend the soil in our vegetable garden.  It was $1 a bag which I didn’t think was too bad.  But it is cow poop, so I dont think they could charge too much.  Their marketing spin on it was “Steer Manure”.   Makes it sound better.

Chicken bug buffet

It is also time to cleanout the greenhouse where the chickens have been fertilizing all winter long.  We use an old cat feeder for the chicken food and Cassie’s mom Charlotte was kind enough to give us a chicken water dish.  She actually just happened upon it beside a trash can  one day while she was watching the chickens for us when we were in Puerto Rico! That is just plain lucky.

Chickens old house

Due to the chicken needing to be restricted from growing plants we also have to build a section of fence.  We were finding parts today and some of them wouldn’t fit in the Honda so they went ON the Honda.

Strapped to the roof

Britton and I went on the Tour De Farms events from the Rocky Mountain Sustainablilty group on Saturday. It was pretty fun. We loaded up the bikes in the Honda Civic and met at the Farmer’s Market in Fort Collins. There we had a discussion about local food economies and the benefits of eating organic. Then we looked around the Farmer’s Market and ate some Grand Junction peaches.

At the Farmer’s Market

From there we headed off on bike as a group to a couple of urban backyard gardens and discussed the importance of this.

In an Urban Garden

Then we rode a little more and saw a couple of commercial operations including an organic nursery and greenhouse operation that is part of a larger farm out in Wellington and a Community Supported Agriculture farm that has over 125 members.

Rows of Food with a Mountain backdrop

It was pretty cool to see over 50 people in a row on bikes going from farm to farm in a 5 mile radius in Fort Collins.

Biking to and fro

The last event at Happy Heart Farm was probably the best. We talked about the importance of transportation in the equation (biking) to reduce our carbon footprint and even had a bike courier deliver lunch from a local co-op. It was definitely a pretty hippie and awesome day. The speaker even talked about moving from a “locavore” society to a “bike-a-vore” society. Which made me think, who eats their bicycle anyway?

Even the sandwich choices were either vegetarian or vegan -that’s pretty rare. I would have liked to have seen a few animals as part of the discussion on farming -especially for the kids to play with, and maybe a little more diversity in the people who turned out for the event, but overall, it was a great way to spend a morning. And we ended up at New Belgium’s again which made Britton all the happier…

Hanging out at Happy Heart Farm under the old tree arch

When we came home, we hung out with Matt and Jamie at our house for a little while and then slept out in our backyard in a tent to complete the hippie day.

Britton by the tent

The whole day overall was yet another training for Puerto Rico. I believe there are very few organic farms or CSAs there. It would be wonderful to create a farm-stay program where people could stay at the place, work and eat. It gave us renewed vigor and strength that this is going to be one of the coolest things in our lives. We probably would do it here in Colorado except, well, we have a winter season that goes from about the middle of October until the middle of April. I am ready to live like this -well maybe not the whole tent thing – year-round.