Look! A photo of large rocks! Very impressive.
Fitting squarely in the category of Important Life Lessons: if you buy a piece of mostly empty agricultural property that hasn’t exactly been used as a farm, there may be a reason why. In our case, that reason is rocks. Many, many rocks. So many rocks. Big rocks and little rocks and medium rocks. Some tiny pebbles. Some the size of a small car.
More rocks.
Spring is finally here…with the exception of a small blizzard that blew in Friday evening, of course. The weather right now is capricious – gorgeous one minute, hurricane-like the next. But we haven’t yet spent spring on our farm, so we’re ready for all of it. Here’s what we’re up to these days!
Why the long face?
Despite this photo, our pastures are greening up rather nicely, so we have a new resident at Quiet Farm. Temporary Pony belongs to our neighbor, and since we have grazing land available and no animals to graze it, Temporary Pony lives at Quiet Farm until she goes to her new home later this spring. She is a lovely, spirited horse who likes to sprint along the fence line, and she also runs straight at you full-bore when you’re out in the field – heartwarming and yet terrifying at the same time. It’s a pleasure to have an actual animal here; it makes our farm feel much more legitimate!
For a site called Finding Quiet Farm, we don’t actually write that much about finding Quiet Farm. This isn’t because we’re not looking, but because we haven’t found much worth sharing. Farmland in the U.S. is bulldozed and paved over for housing developments and shopping malls at a staggering rate of forty acres per hour, and the land that is available tends to be just a touch out of our price range. We spent a month in Oregon this fall, volunteering on farms and looking for our own place, but ultimately decided that Oregon wasn’t our home. We drove back to Denver through Colorado’s Western Slope, and decided to give that part of the state – previously ignored – a closer look in the new year.
The first week of 2018 saw us westbound from Denver crossing the high mountain passes, which was easy instead of treacherous because winter in Colorado was canceled this year. We visited Grand Junction, Delta, Montrose, Olathe, Hotchkiss and Paonia, areas famous for peaches and sweet corn and cherries and the center of Colorado’s nascent wine industry, too.
Our trusty road trip car. (Just kidding.)
Over the course of three long, intense days, we saw maybe a dozen properties. Most, of course, were discarded immediately: rickety house in need of extensive, costly renovation, sketchy neighbors, too much infrastructure devoted to horses, odd adobe construction, property too close to busy roads. But there were two in particular that caught our attention: one forty-acre parcel just outside of Grand Junction, a reasonably major population center, and one in a tiny apple-growing area just up the Grand Mesa, the largest flat-topped mountain in the world.
Apple trees with protective winter coverings ready for use…if winter ever appears.
Finding Quiet Farm 