Spring Equinox

The Spring (Vernal) Equinox arrived this morning at 5:02 Mountain time. I actually slept through it but an hour and a half later I was ready to celebrate the change of seasons, the point at which the earth is in balance. 

Rather than signaling the start of spring, in the Rockies the vernal equinox starts the battle between the seasons where we have a short hint of warmth and green only to be tugged back to cold and snow. True to form the weather forecast for the coming days includes snow and highs in the low 30s. We are hoping for snow, lots of snow.

After the terrible wind storm of November 2011, we built a simple altar to honor those bits of nature who were lost and those who survived. We placed the altar on the remains of a grandmother cottonwood tree who was so badly damaged in the wind storm that she had to be removed. At her widest point she was 40" across. 

I add to the altar when I find something unique or special like a pine cone from a Ponderosa pine who makes the largest cones I have ever seen or a rock from the base of a tree that was hit by lightning. The native peoples believe those rocks have powerful energies. 

Today I meditated for a while then visited the altar to give thanks. Thanks for another long, dark season behind us; thanks for another season of life ahead of us. 

From Fleur Creek Farm

Elk Wallow

The warm weather of the past days has melted much of the snow in the meadow revealing an elk wallow. During the fall rut (breeding season), the bull elk create a mud hole where they urinate then thrash around in the pungent, wet earth. Trees and shrubs are often torn from the ground by their massive antlers. 

 

 The bull elk use this process in an attempt to increase their presence and dominance for it is the most dominate male who will have the greatest success during the breeding season. 

Even now, nearly five months later, the earthy, musty smell still lingers. In a matter of months when the meadows green up and the aspen trees breakout in leaf, the elk calves will begin arriving fulfilling the cycle. 

From Fleur Creek Farm

 

What's in a name?

Folks have asked us how we came up with the name of our place – Fleur Creek Farm.  Try as you might, you won’t find Fleur Creek on any map of the area, no matter how detailed.  For those of you who took French in high school and still remember any of it, “fleur” is the French word for flower.  That’s your first clue.

It didn’t take long after seeing this place for the first time to discover some of the wonderful native plants that exist here. Armed with field guides each investigation would turn up another special discovery, some we had seen elsewhere and some we had never seen before. Our first surprise was the identification of the wood lily – a blazing red flower standing nearly a foot above all the surrounding green. The following year we found the beautiful yellow lady slipper, a delicate orchid. Both the “lilies” and the “ladies” along with numerous other rare or endangered plants are located in the spruce bog areas of the wetlands.

 

The “lilies” and the “ladies” bog found on the eastern edge of the wetlands is fed by numerous springs and seeps that flow into a main spring fed creek we’ve named Fleur Creek. The headwaters of Fleur Creek were nothing more than a bog itself before a previous owner tried to turn it into a pond. Long story shortened – surface water rights in Colorado are strictly regulated and the pond had to be breached. While there is only a small pool left there, the pond construction served a new purpose – to concentrate all the waters that originally created the headwaters bog and channel them into a small creek. And so was born Fleur Creek which continues through the lower bog area of the “lilies and the ladies”, gathering up other spring and seep fed creeks finally leaving the place at the north end as a pretty nice little creek.  

It seemed only natural to name this special little creek which winds its way through an amazing collection of native flowers as Fleur Creek and the place where it is found as Fleur Creek Farm.

And now you know the rest of the story. Future blog postings will feature the incredible diversity of this special place including photos of the "lilies and the ladies".

From Fleur Creek Farm

Bounty from the Land

The weekend’s weather report predicted three days of snow (on and off). When this happens, we get in the cooking mood, or should I say that Don gets in the cooking mode and I try to help out. First was baking the week’s four loaves of whole wheat bread using organic flour from Mountain Mama, just over the Sangres from our place. 

Homemade pizza is high on our list of favorites and Don makes his own pizza dough. Since Friday nights are often pizza nights, Don made up six doughs which are then frozen for later use. The dough also uses Mountain Mama’s organic whole wheat flour. Our pizzas are topped with all kinds of stuff from the greenhouse (arugula),  and the freezer (red peppers), and a few goodies from the pantry (olives, artichokes, and anchovies) and the pizza is usually cooked on the woodstove in the winter or the barbeque grill in the summer.

Nothing takes the chill out of a cold night better than a big pot of green chile stew and homemade tortillas. The key to the best stew are the green chiles and we have scoured northern New Mexico and southern Colorado for the perfect chiles. Over the years we have tried chiles from roadside stands in Raton, NM, and Antonito, CO, parking lots in Santa Fe, NM and Salida, CO but the best come from Peppers Plus. You can find them in Pueblo, CO on the north side of Hwy 50, a couple of miles east of I-25. While Hatch, NM may lay claim to the best chiles (and they are not bad), we think the chiles grown east of Pueblo are the best because of the flavor and meaty pepper walls. And no one but Peppers Plus roasts the peppers correctly using water to steam the skins. We always make a point of traveling to Pueblo in late August or early September to buy two bushels of roasted chile peppers which we freeze in quart bags. 

Traditional Green Chile Stew (modified from  Artisan Farming )

2 pounds of cubed beef that grazed on our pasture last summer (you can also use pork)
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 large onion, chopped (I use my dried onions from last summer’s garden)
2 cloves garlic, minced ( also from last summer’s garden)
2 cups of stock or water

1 ½ cups of cooked, diced tomatoes (from last year’s garden, roasted on the grill and then frozen)
2 cups of roasted, peeled, chopped green chiles
4 medium red potatoes, diced (from the farms on the other side of the Sangres)
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon dried oregano (from my herbal garden)

Brown the meat in the oil. Add the onion and garlic. Add the water/stock, chiles, potatoes, salt and oregano. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for 2 to 3 hours. Serve with warm flour tortillas.

We are pleased when we can create a meal out of many of the agricultural products we grow on our place but we know the reality – no one can be food self-sufficient here. The short growing season, high altitude, cool summer nights and low rainfall restrict what will successfully grow. A greenhouse or hoop house can help but in the end we are glad that a grocery store is only 15 miles away. 

From Fleur Creek Farm

Stock Show Weather

Every January I am reminded of Denver’s famous National Western Stock Show. Since I was a little girl of 9 growing up in Denver, my father and I would attend the stock show to see the rodeo and all the livestock exhibits. When I was sixteen, I showed my first horse at the Stock Show, unsuccessfully I might add. The National Western Stock Show had already been an important part of Denver’s history when I started attending.

From the online history of the National Western: “The year was 1906. Theodore Roosevelt was in the White House, there were 45 states in the Union, Colorado was getting ready to celebrate its thirtieth birthday and sirloin was ten cents a pound. On the outskirts of Denver, a growing town with a population of 200,000, stockmen from around the West gathered to show their animals, buy and sell breeding stock and encourage a meatpacking center to rival those in Kansas City and Chicago. From this beginning, the National Western Stock Show, Rodeo and Horse Show was born. The grand champion steer that first year was a Shorthorn that tipped the scales at 1,150 pounds and befitting its status, fetched an eye-popping 33 cents a pound.”

Initially the stock show grounds were pretty primitive. 

As the show grew so did the facilities. In 1989 the National Western’s executive committee chaired a successful drive to convince Denver voters to approve $30 million in bonds to expand Stock Show exhibit space and build the Events Center. With 240,000 square feet, seating for over 5,000, and 354 stalls for equine guests, the state-of-the-art Events Center opened in 1995 and vaulted the National Western to the forefront of the nation’s horse show arenas.

During the 80s and 90s Don and I were working full-time and also attempting to produce a high quality Appaloosa horse. We had purchased our first stallion in 1983 (C.B. who passed away in 2011) and made plans to show him at the stock show. 

Showing in January is no easy feat. Horses like to start putting on winter hair in October and to prevent that and keep them in show condition, we had to keep heavy blankets on him and installed artificial lighting In the barn that mimicked summer hours. It also took hours every day to keep him in good physical shape and all of this had to happen as the weather got colder and the days shorter.

Our hard work and the fact that C.B. was an incredible horse paid off – he won the Appaloosa Aged Stallion class and in the process, beat the stallion who just two months before was crowned the World Champion Aged Stallion at the biggest Appaloosa show in the world in Oklahoma City. 

One part of stock show that most people try to forget is the weather but it has become infamous. For some reason the two weeks of stock show are often the worst weather of the year and that was certainly the case the year we showed C.B. 

In 1984 when we showed him the horse barn facilities and the indoor show arena were not attached. It required a 100 foot walk with your perfectly groomed (and nearly hairless) horse. We showed around lunchtime and the temperature was 22 degrees BELOW zero. We covered C.B. with a heavy wool blanket, trotted him the 100 feet to the arena and slipped him up under the overhead heater at the entrance to the arena. Our timing was perfect – the last class of younger stallions was just coming out, Don handed C.B.’s lead to our professional handler, I grabbed a hold of the back of the wool blanket, and in they went with the blanket sliding off the back of C.B. as he moved forward.

This year is upholding the reputation of stock show weather. The cold started yesterday and we are not expected to get above 19 degrees until next Wednesday with lows 10 degrees BELOW zero or worse. I sure am glad that these days all we have to do is throw another log on the fire and relax on the couch with a good book.

Now if we could just get more snow!

From FleurCreek Farm