We have the best friends and neighbors! When people hear what we’re working on, or stop by and say, “What are you doing with that field?” and they find out we need something they have, they just say “Come get this, we don’t need it.”  Or “Whenever we have some, we’ll drop it off.” It’s so great!  It’s also been happening with people we’ve hired to do some type of work around the place.  For instance: Sue had a plumber come out to fix and old faucet that was just continually running out by the dinky house, he saw that she was working on some rock walls and he gave her some pointers and offered to give her some materials that he wasn’t going to be using… she stopped by to pick them up and got some more info, the materials that he had, and a huge box of iris that they were cleaning out! Never say no to “free”!  This photo is of some windows that our contractor friend, Brent, dropped by a few weeks ago… they came out of house that he was doing some remodeling on… now one will be a part of the new chicken coop, and the other will be part of the green house.  The doors for the goat shed and the pump house were dropped off too!  Remember all that stuff going into the ditch for our Hugelkultur area?  Much of that was donated by our neighbor, Tom, who has a landscaping business.  He’s also dropping off cuttings for our berm project in the upper field.  The people who put in the new flooring in the house had a truckload of pallets for us, we used them to make the compost bins!
I struck up a conversation with a gentleman I was sitting next to at “Messiah” rehearsal and found out that he has a small horse ranch.  I asked, “What are you doing with the poop?”  He did look at me a little funny, but when I explained that we’re trying to work with it for a type of compost planting, he was more than happy to let us come and get it.  So, now Sue is going every few days and picking up a truckload at a time to complete the penultimate layer for the Hugelkultur project.  All you need to do is tell people what you’ve got going on, more than likely they’ll be able to help or tell you of someone who might be able to help!  It’s just amazing! Yesterday a lady stopped by the property with her two sons and asked if we were going to sell… of course we said no, but when she asked what we were planning to do, and Sue started to explain, she said that she had a friend who owned a ranch called “The Can Do Ranch” and they would be happy to offload some horse hooey.  You never know where you might find someone to offer something that you need!  That’s right neighborly of ’em!

Today’s weather… was absolutely beautiful!  It was in the low 30’s around 6:30 this morning, but when the sun got up over the eastern mountains, it warmed up to a wonderful day.  Tomorrow, it should be clear and up into the mid 60’s.  Saturday morning we woke up to snow on the mountains above us. We had rain, but it didn’t even frost at our place.  Just had the pretty white dusting around 5000′.  This photo is a little small, but you can kind of just see it there on the mountain tops.  It’s really been beautiful!