Moved to Colorado!!!!

So for those of you wondering why we haven't posted in a while....Here it is. We moved to Colorado. Some bad things happened that were out of our control and I will say that fences are a good thing to have sometimes, and we had to leave Tennessee. We loved it there and hated to leave after all of the hard work we put into the place but Oh Well... Life sucks sometimes.

Anyway so we moved to South Central Colorado and it is a beautiful place. The mountains are unreal. I wake up and look out the window and forget where we are sometimes. Our view from our property looks like a postcard. We still have some issues with our place but we will tackle them one at a time like always. We have to go to get water when we need it and we have to fix the road on the property but it will work itself out soon hopefully. I am going to post some pics of our view from the trailer, the creek we get water from and Mount Blanca which is just north of us when we head to town.

Incubator Disaster

Ok, So bad news day. What else is new around here lately. The dogs somehow pulled the plug for the incubator out of the socket the other night and the temperature dropped down to 60 degrees and just about killed every egg. :(.......   Not happy at all. We have 2 guinea eggs which are hatching right now and a possible duck or goose egg that should hatch soon and 1 turkey egg left out of 8. Hopefully these will hatch. Wish us luck

New Baby Chick!!!!!

So we got a crappy incubator and we collected eggs from the chickens and the turkey and we bought some Muscovy ducks eggs from a man down the road to hatch, today was day 21 of the eggs being in the incubator and we woke up to a baby chick this morning. Yay!!! It is so dam cute. It has definitely been a challenge with this being the first time we have ever incubated eggs and being off grid. This thing sucks up some power and of course the weather hasn't seemed to cooperate with us at all, but I am sure that as soon as they all hatch the weather will be beautiful because we won't need the extra power. Anyway, we started off with 50 eggs now we are down to 30 after candling them a couple of times to see if anything was growing inside the egg. I definitely had to google how to do that, lol. Now the chickens are starting to hatch and we have 3 guinea eggs that should start to hatch soon too. The Turkeys and Ducks should take about another week and then we will see how many hatch altogether. Wish me luck.

Essay Winner

So for some reason the poll we put up so people could vote apparently didn't work. We know of a couple of votes that went through but for some reason on the second day they were gone and then no one else voted. So we declared it a 3 way tie. They were are really good and the kids worked hard on them and I couldn't pick just one. So thank you for stopping by to read them and I hope you all enjoyed them.

The kids contest

Ok everyone, all of the kids essays are up and we would really appreciate it if you all would take a minute to vote for one or all of them. We put up a poll on the right hand side of the page to make it easy for everyone to vote. It would also be great if you maybe put up a few words of encouragement for them whether you know them or not. They worked really hard on these and they are all very excited that you are taking the time to read their essays. Oh just so you know, it is an anonymous vote so they can't see who is voting for who.

Thanks Everyone.

Jordan's Essay

     Hello, My name is Jordan and I will be telling you about my life. I am 12 years old, I live in Tennessee, and I am the daughter of Jon and Marcy Colombini (or as you know them, the blog owner). My family and I moved up to the mountains of TN. just in case something happened in the city. I was excited when I heard the news that we were moving, but I was very sad when I realized I had to leave my friends. :'(. I thought it was hard to get used to the life up here cramped until' we built the house. When the parents said "We are going to be living off the grid" I thought I was going to die without internet and electricity. Once we got here and got settled it wasn't so bad. 

     

     Okay, less about me more about different stuff.

     

     We have a bunch of animals, and I love them all! Some of them don't have uses being up here but we still love them. Some of our farm animals we have so far are: 1 Male goat, which we all hate. A whole bunch of chicks and chickens. 4 Dogs, which protect us very well. We also have 3 Turkeys, 2 Toms and 1 Hen. We are incubating some turkeys, ducks, chickens, and guineas. 

     

     Up here on the mountain we have a few places for sight seeing. There's  "The Falls", as we call it, It has "little water falls", as I say. The water is very cold all year round. The water has sulfur in it, so if you have a wound and you go in the water it will heal the wound. Another place is the river down the road, it is cold like The Falls, but it is very pretty. It is also hidden. The next one I am going to tell you about is our spring. It is on our property, so many people haven't seen it. We are building a house by the spring. Whenever we go down to the spring we are always doing something to make the house process faster like cleaning the area.

     We have only a few neighbors, but their all nice. There are 2 girls my age that go to the same school as me, but i hang out with only 1 of them.

 

     That's enough about my life. Have any questions? Just leave a comment if you do! Don't forget to vote which essay if your favorite! Don't forget to tell your friends!

                                                Bye-Bye! :)

Lala's Essay

            Hello, my name is Laura, I am 10 years young, I'm in fourth grade, and I am the daughter of Jon and Marcy Colombini. I am going to be telling about my off grid life. I live off grid and it is very fun and hard work. Although i miss spending almost all day on the laptop, I love living up here. That is why I'm writing this, but another reason is that it is a contest between me, my brother and sister, and i am going to win the contest because I am the prettiest, smartest and most awesome kid in my family.

 

            I live in a big camper with a big room built onto it. I can't wait until we move down the hill and take baths in the spring (in our bathing suits of course). We don't have city water so we have a spring we get water from. At the spring we have a hydraulic ram pump which  moves the water uphill through a hose to the water  tanks and it uses no power. We also don't have electricity from the electric company so we have solar panels, batteries, and a generator.

          We built a wonderfully awesome  chicken coop the other day. We also have lots of eggs in our incubator in our house. Some of the awesome eggs are Muscovy Ducks, chickens, turkeys, and guineas. I also love taking care of all the different animals that we have. That is why i love living here on this awesome mountain.

Austin's Essay

Hello galaxy,

  My name is Austin, son of Jon and Marcy Colombini. I am 14 years of age and male gender. And that is all of the info I am telling you peoples.

  The reason I am writing this out essay about "Living Off The Grid" is for a few different reasons. One is because my parents are making me and too I wanted to tell of how my experience  living here is, and  finally I just wanted to write this.

  One of the many reasons I like living here is all the construction we do. I like learning about all the different styles of building, different types of wood and sizes of wood. We have been building chicken houses, rooster houses, etc...
Also after getting a building done I feel good and tired.

  Another thing I like about living here are the animals. It's neat to learn about all of different breeds and creatures. There are cute ones and ugly ones, one of my favorite types of animals are the turkeys.

  For me this a pretty exciting thing "Living Off The Grid", 'cause before moving here I was just a kid who didn't care about anything besides games. I really never cared for animals, people, and nature. But moving here has made my life so much better, happier and "funner".

  I have fun hanging out with my 2 main best friends Jay and Boyce. We go on expeditions, have  air-soft wars without protective gear and we play arrow roulette. We are boys so what can you expect from us.

And these are a few of the many reasons I love living here.

The Kids Essay Contest

I am letting the kids type their own essays so it might take a little while. After they are all 3 up I would appreciate it if you all would take a moment and tell us which one you think is the best. We loved all of them and couldn't choose which one we liked so it is up to you all.

Thank you and happy reading.

Bunnies!!!!!

We got 3 of the cutest liitle bunnies yesterday. Our neighbor trades out animals with us and so we got to go pick out these little ones yesterday so we can start our rabbit colony. The rabbits will be a source of food one day so we figured we would go ahead and get started. The kids are in love with them, how can you not be though. They are almost 8 weeks old now I think and we don't know yet if they are male or female.

Fun, Fun!!!
Help us with names for them.....
There is a white one with tan ears and a solid white one with no name.
We named the black and white one Anonymous. He has an awesome mustache.

The Contest

So we are having a contest with the kids. We asked them to each write an essay telling about their "off grid life". The girls were so excited about writing about their life here. We will be posting the essays on the blog Saturday morning so you all can pick which one you think is the best. We just wanted to know how they really felt about living here and the daily routines. They seem so happy most of the time but we can tell that they miss TV for hours on end while playing on the computer. The ease of just running to the store when they want something. All the creature comforts so many people just take for granted.  Does anyone have any suggestions on a different topic they can have a essay contest about? Make sure you check out the blog Saturday so you can comment on the kids essays.

Washing Machine

OMG! I forgot to tell you all about our new "Off the Grid" washing machine. It uses nothing but kid power, lol. Thank goodness we finally have water or this would really suck. It works great until you get tired. Ok so here it goes,  

#1  put soap and water in bucket, add clothes and use plunger to push into water. Do this for about 4 min. Watch how dirty the water becomes. 

#2 Take a heavy duty mop bucket and use the mop squeeze part as a wringer. wring out clothes then put in 2nd bucket for rinse cycle.

#3 Use a clean bucket filled with water and a little fabric softener and rinse clothes, Wring out clothes with mop bucket the best you can.

#4 Hang clothes out to dry. 

Sounds easy doesn't it. It is tiring though

Earth Day!!!!

So today is Earth Day, one of my favorite days to act like a hippie. I hope all of you get outside and enjoy the fresh air and some trees and flowers. I am going for a walk down to my spring today to enjoy the outside. We are thinking of building a cabin down there so we can be closer to work on our house. Yay!
Happy Earth Day Everyone!!!

Building away

So we have almost finished the bird and rabbit compound. We have been working on it a bit everyday. We have all of the baby chickens and turkeys moved out there now. We still have to put a roof on the chicken house and build rabbit hutches but they should be done this week. So here are new pics of the turkey/ chicken house and the door Jon made for it is awesome. We still haven't figured out what color to paint it, What color do you think we should paint the outside?

Bird and Rabbit Compound

So this week we have started working on what we call our bird/rabbit compound. It is huge but we have all of these new animals, Turkeys, baby chickens and we will be getting some new bunnies from our wonderful neighbors soon. So this is the Turkey house we have gotten almost done so far except for the nesting boxes. We set the post today for the fencing around the pen and the the post for the start of the chicken side of the compound. So if you have any advice please offer.....Any suggestions on what color/ colors to paint?

The Cave

So here are some pics of one of the old mining caves on our property. This cave is so cool and is back by where we are building our house. The spring we use for our water runs along the side of the hill by the cave and when we first moved here we were told that a Cave Lioness lived in this cave with her cub. We don't know if she still stays in the cave very often but I believe that the path up to the cave entrance is being traveled again. Isn't that cool? Maybe I will get to see our cave lion one of these days. Tell me what you think about these caves.

Spring is here

Well spring is in bloom here and it is so cool watching all the crazy plant life that we are not use to blooming, as well as our allergies because we aren't used to the different plants and trees yet. I wanted to share some of the photos I took today down by our spring. The ferns are crazy looking when they are starting to grow and the Irises are everywhere.

I had to share this photo of our female Presa Canario puppy, she is 13 months old now and she is always into mischief. She is such a mess. She put herself in time out after she got yelled at the other afternoon and I had to take a pic and share it after that she went and laid on the couch and snuggled with our morkie Tommy Chong. Isn't she cute