Shii Koeii Community

Only a month late, we’re finally showing you all the cool stuff we did and saw in Colorado! We stayed at Shii Koeii intentional community in Gardner, CO, a tiny town of 300 people. Mark and Val are the resident stewards that run the farm, and are awesome radical people that taught us a lot. We met a lot of other cool people as well, including several interns whose time there overlapped with ours.

Mark and Val built this house a few years ago with the help of lots of friends. We lived in a room in part of the house modeled after the traditional Navajo hogan structure. It is made of strawbale (just like Alden and Maricarmen’s house in Alabama), and is coated with adobe. It is heated with passive solar, so it has huge windows along the southern wall and a three inch thick adobe floor. You can see the barn behind the house, also made of adobe.

This garden is immediately outside of their house. We harvested lots of green beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, basil, and peppers from this garden. They also grew lots of sunflowers in the garden, which we fed to the goats.

This garden was a short walk down from their house. Here we often harvested lettuce mix, squash, spinach, arugula, parsley, celery, beets, potatoes, dried beans and edible flowers to make the lettuce mix look puuuurty. You can see the larger of the two tipis in the background. Three of the interns we met stayed in this one.

We stayed in this tipi the first two nights of our visit. It was neat but we didn’t feel like putting all our clothes in boxes so mice wouldn’t eat them.

They have a gas stove and a sink in this adobe structure--the outdoor kitchen. This is where we cooked all of our meals and canned food for the winter.

This is a view from the back of the outdoor kitchen--they have a long black hose on the roof, so when you turn on the hot water from the sink, it gets heated by the sun as it goes through this hose. They also use greywater to water saplings growing behind the kitchen. When water goes down the drain in the sink, it goes through a hose, which we move to a different tree each morning.

They built this oven to bake bread and focaccias for market (Mark is an amazing baker). We also use it for pizza parties.

We had many fun times around this fire pit. They like to play a really fun game called “Life Stories,” where someone asks a question to the group, and everyone goes around answering it. Have you ever contacted the spiritual realm? What were you like in high school?

Mica getting clean! This shower was heated completely by the sun. We left black bags of water with hoses attached to them out in the sun, then when we wanted to shower we carried the bag to the shower, attached it to a carabiner, hoisted it up with a pulley and unscrewed the hose cap to let the water flow. The wall is made with waddle and daub, which we will explain later.

They are completely off-grid, and get a lot of their power from this wind turbine, especially on cloudy/stormy days. Apparently they require a lot of maintenance because their moving parts often need to be replaced.

Their main source of power comes from these solar panels, on top of the barn. Directly under the panels is the shed which houses all of the farm tools and the batteries and controls for their power system. To the right is the chicken coop and their run. To the left is the goat barn and milking parlor.

 The goats were taken out to pasture twice a day for a total of about six hours. We kept them on 50 ft ropes and would hang out in the woods, usually reading, while making sure they didn’t get tangled and that the mean (aka alpha) one, Willow, didn’t beat up on her sister, Maple, too much. This was called being “goatmouse” (all the chores had “mouse” at the end). We found out that goats are super aware of bears, and would not even cross the bridge to go to the pasture if they smelled one. We never saw one, but they were definitely around, since we found many pieces of bear scat (shit).

This is an awesome picture of Willow’s kid, Redwing, being a billy goat and climbing up this log. The goats have to continuously get pregnant to keep producing milk, so Willow and Maple’s sons were taken away to be eaten, while Redwing will grow up to produce milk for the farm as well.

Sometimes we took the goats out to the orchard when they didn’t want to cross the bridge (even though there were no trolls). When we did that, we got to hang out and stare at this gorgeous view for a while.

The orchard was full of plum trees like this one. It also had a couple of crabapple trees, and currants. We picked tons of these both to eat and to be preserved for the winter.

This is where all the action happens...Kevin milked the goats twice a day, and was the primary milker for the last week we were there. It was hard work! Turns out goats don’t like strangers touching them there, go figure. We brought them into a little room in the barn called the milk parlor (alpha goat first), put them on a stand and locked their neck in a hold, with a feeder in front of them full of grain, hay, and sunflowers. Apparently grain is like crack for goats and they don’t care what you do as long as you keep giving them grain...unless you don’t give them enough, then they get pissed. They would produce about two gallons a day between the two of them.

 Mica learned how to make goat cheese! It was a fairly simple process. You just heat up milk to 86 degrees, add chevre starter and put it in a jar for 12 hours. Then you strain it through a cheesecloth (as pictured) for another 12 hours. Then add a little salt and herbs if you want and presto! Goat cheese! Dairymouse was Mica’s favorite chore.

Chickenmouse was the easiest chore. Except that you had to deal with humanure, which we’ll get to later. The main task was checking under the chickens every half hour to see if there were any eggs. Surprisingly enough, they didn’t like this and would peck at our hands. It was okay if you were wearing gloves though. We had to check every half hour because if you didn’t they might eat their own eggs! In the afternoon, after they had laid most of their eggs, the chickens were able to roam around the land anywhere they wanted. Truly free range. We had around 25 hens and 3 roosters.

As you can see, Rocky was the biggest asshole on the farm. You constantly had to be on the lookout. If you weren’t careful he would fly up (as much as chickens can fly) and attack you. Mica sustained a nasty cut and bruise from such an encounter. Demon chicken! Luckily he could usually be scared away with some shouting and a stick.

This is the compost toilet. Once you do your business, you scoop sawdust out of the trashcan on the right, cover it up, and put the lid back on. Surprisingly, it doesn’t smell too bad at all.

 Once four of the six buckets are full, chickenmouse would take them to the humanure pile, dump them on, and put ½ as much water in as poop added (using the water to clean the buckets before pouring it into the pile). Then we covered it up with 10 inches of hay, to keep it at the right temperature to decompose properly. Once a pile is full, a wooden plank gets put on top, and it sits there for three years. By that time, it’s become more like dirt than poop, and is used on the orchard.

This is Lyca or wait... Puffball! no... Hunter! This kitty had many names. While we couldn’t all agree on what to call her we can all agree that she’s adorable. While she’s definitely cute, she was brought into the farm for a practical purpose--to catch mice and chase away gophers that would steal the crops.

Mica’s least favorite chore was Watermouse. It involved using this mostly solar powered pump to drip water the garden as well as overhead watering lots of it. It doesn’t sound complicated but each plant needed its own specific amount of water and it was really hard to get it just right. It involved constantly using a trowel to dig six inches into the soil to check the moistness level.

We spent some time adding on to the wall around the garden that’s slowly being built. It’s made of waddle and daub--the waddle was there before we got there; it’s a bunch of sticks weaved through one another to create a frame. We learned how to mix daub, which is 9 parts sand, 4 parts clay, and 3 parts…that’s right you guessed it, horse manure. We then threw in a couple leaves of hay, and enough water to make it the right consistency. Then we mashed it all together with our bare feet, put it in buckets, wet the sticks with a sponge and slabbed it on a handful at a time.

One of the most useful skills we learned is how to maul wood, which is apparently different than chopping wood. A maul is like an ax but it has a weight behind the blade, so you can chop pieces off of a large chunk of wood using relatively little force, meaning anyone with decent aim can do it pretty easily and quickly.

Kevin worked with one of the other interns, Alicia, to lay down these flagstones and fill the space with sand to create a patio in front of the east bedroom door.

We did lots of preserving food the last few days here. On the left is salsa, and on the right is pickled squash. Canning basically involves preparing something (a brine for pickling, salsa, mashed plums, etc.) and putting it in a sterilized jar with a new lid that was put in boiling water, then submerge the whole jar in boiling water for a while until it vacuum seals. We also blanched lots of things (boiled them for a minute, then put them in ice water) before putting them in the freezer to be stored for winter. We made yummy pesto to be frozen, too.

The greatest enemy of this farm was a gopher that stole almost all of the potatoes and has been trying to eat lots of other crops. There are holes like this all around the garden. Apparently, gophers won’t use holes that have been exposed, so whoever was on “gopher patrol” would find their tunnels and expose them. We also dug a very deep trench around the side of the garden, outside the fence, to expose the tunnels he was using to get into the garden.

We picked lots of calendula flowers and seeds. The flowers would be set out to dry on the windowsill, and eventually be used in Val’s homemade cosmetics, because calendula flowers are good for the skin. Val makes lip balm, sunscreen, face cream, and other beauty products.

One weekend Kevin got to go to the farmer’s market with Mark. They sell at two markets per week. Unfortunately Kevin didn’t take any pictures there, so the sign sitting in the kitchen will have to do.

Mark’s mother sells her pies at the market, so we got to eat lots of these delicious homemade pies. Really the best pies ever, and she was a really fun woman to hang out with at the market, too.