Posted on 11/06/2021 7:20:23 PM PDT by dynachrome
She thought of the 40 acres Ed had bought two years ago outside Colorado Springs — “for retirement” — which had an unfinished house and … not much else. She booked a ticket out west anyway.
A year and a half later, it turns out life on the Colorado Prairie isn’t quite the vacation they anticipated. “It’s brutal!” said Kate.
The couple — along with their friend, musician Mary Ann Ivan, who has spent much of the pandemic with them — immediately got to work transforming the barren property into a home. Ed, 55, designed a garage and finally put down floors in the house.
Ed and Mary Ann planted trees (half of which died), dug out a pond (involving a backhoe almost tipping over and “their lives flashing before their eyes”) and built a vegetable garden while braving 60-miles-per-hour winds, dust storms, hail and more.
“We’re on version 14 of the garden hutch,” said Ivan, 56, adding that the harsh winds kept destroying their plants. “One day it was going to hail, so we got a clothesline and we were putting the clothesline through the grommets and trying to tie down the tarp so the plants wouldn’t be killed. … It looked like we were on a sailboat trying to get the sail down in the midst of a hurricane!”
Meanwhile, Kate, who has had steady remote work as a life coach, takes care of the brood’s two dogs, cats and seven chickens — down from 11.
“Chickens are surprisingly cuddly,” she said of her new pets. But prairie life has been hard for those creatures as well. “My favorite chicken, Squiggles, became a prairie snack for some kind of bird of prey.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
i wonder how many of these douchebags still vote hard leftist in their new states?
But she is a remote life coach. Whatever kumbaya job that is relative to living off the grid.
We love telling libtards how excruciatingly hot it is here in Texas, particularly in summer when school is out. For you Coloradans, try these angles: “It gets so cold here at night that things can be frozen here for days. Just like living in a freezer.” or “The altitude is such that you’ll get sunburn before you know it. You won’t be able to do any running or jogging until your lungs are acclimated and that takes years.”
Sat whatever it takes to keep these loons from moving out where you live. Your local government may just depend upon it.
Tell’em it’s so cold in your house you had to open the refrigerator to heat up the joint. See if they buy that one.
Who goes through 14 versions for a tool shed? Four walls and a door is too complicated for some.
The author is just as dumb writing about trees in the caption of tomatoes. All those folks need are pasta trees for a spaghetti dinner.
Spaghetti doesn’t grow on trees, it grows on bushes. Everybody knows that!
Yes, it is funny.
What with Al Gore’s Amazing Internet, one would think these folks would have everything figured out by now. After all, just about everything a person needs to know about home upkeep is on YouTube. I’m sure there’s even a video about how to use a Post Office box.
I’m starting to believe that 81 million people voted for SloJo.
Sounds like an episode of “Homestead Rescue”
#11 This buy says he makes 5 times more money from Youtube then from farming in Minnesota...
Millennial Farmer
https://www.youtube.com/c/MNMillennialFarmer/videos
I moved to Colorado in the 90’s. Many ways to fool out-of-staters especially those who want to live in the mountains. You have a well that takes forever to fill? Fill it up before you show the house to the new buyer. Also don’t mention the septic tank is ripe for replacement, they’ll need to buy an old 4WD with a plow to get out of the driveway in the winter, and they’ll need bear-proof trash cans. All part of the intangible joys of living an “authentic” Colorado lifestyle.
Wusses. They’d have never survived the dust bowl like my parents did
Patrick McManus wrote a humorous story about farming. In this story, McManus goes to his doctor hoping to get a prescription for sleeping pills for himself. The doctor refuses to prescribe pills (yeah, it is fiction) and instead advises McManus to try relaxing for sleep by imagining himself working on a nice little farm in the country. It seems to work at first but McManus has a problem: he actually lived on a real farm while growing up. Soon his imaginary farm goes from idyllic to realistic as he envisions storms, droughts, broken fences, wandering animals and crop failures. In the end he recommends imaginary farms only to those who have never actually lived on one.
I rented an old cottage on a farm in rural New Jersey years ago. It was great.
Of course every year it seemed more and more new homes were being built for people leaving the city to come live out in the country. And more and more complaints - usually about the smells coming from some of the farms, sometimes the roosters.
Definition of tenderfoot
1 : an inexperienced beginner : novice a political tenderfoot
2 : a newcomer in a comparatively rough or newly settled region especially : one not hardened to frontier or outdoor life
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