The Birth of a Homestead

Moms Meet and Kashi Layered Granola Bars

2011-11-07T14:32:00.000-05:00

I am a Moms Meet^SM Ambassador, which means I sometimes get samples of products to try and review with a local group of moms (any mom who is willing to run a group and fill out surveys can apply!). Last month, I received samples of Kashi® TLC® Peanutty Dark Chocolate Layered Granola Bars to try with the group.

Yum! Most of the moms in the group really liked the bars, although some found them a bit on the sweet side. They were a big hit with almost all the kids who attended the group meeting, too. Sadly, my daughter couldn't try them because of the peanuts - she's allergic. I would say the only knock on these is the peanut content. With so many kids allergic to peanuts, even sampling them at a group with children who have peanut allergies can be problematic, as some kids react to peanut in the air.

Check out Kashi® on Facebook.

Disclaimer: I received this product for free from the sponsor of the MomsMeet^SM program, May Media Group LLC, who received it directly from the manufacturer. As a Moms Meet^SM blogger, I agreed to use this product and post my opinion on my blog. My opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinions of May Media Group LLC or the manufacturer of the product.

Stripped down to essentials.

2011-09-25T07:48:00.001-05:00

This is what my son did with a few minutes of unsupervised time last week. Repeat this with several variations -- including this morning's, with school library books, an outdoor garbage can, a birdfeeder full of Nyjer seed, and his iPad -- and you have an idea of what our life is like right now.

It's not always garbage. That's a new thing. It used to be, he would just make a nest of our king-sized bedding and whatever laundry (clean or dirty) he could find in hampers or baskets. But he's moved on to garbage if laundry isn't available -- and preferably a mix, as you see here, of pillows, blankets, laundry and garbage.

I don't know what motivates this behavior. I just know that we now can't leave him unsupervised for even a minute. We have locked the doors to the bathroom (where bath toys and washcloths/towels get dumped - I need to find new storage solutions for these, but we have no closets in our house and as you can imagine, my time has been occupied doing other things) and the bedroom and the basement, where the clean laundry lives. We're trying to keep him engaged doing things with us. It isn't always easy, as he would rather be doing this.

These behaviors have morphed from the status quo of summer, when he would have crying, screaming, thrashing meltdowns almost every morning. I hear one starting now...perhaps he dumps and makes these piles to relieve whatever feelings lead to the meltdowns. It's all a mystery, as he is very limited verbally and can't really tell us what is going on in his head.

It's my husband's day to take care of him today. We decided on this because subconsciously on both our parts, I was ending up with the lion's share of keeping an eye on him. I'm exhausted, friends. Seriously exhausted.

My point in sharing all this with you is simple. Yes, exactly that: simplicity. Right now our lives are focused on stripping down to bare essentials. What do we really need to hold onto? What can we let go of? Having a massive task of caring for our son's suddenly very intense needs just thrown on our overfull plates has been a revelation. Wait a minute. We can't do it all. We've been doing far too much already: my husband's been working two jobs, I work full-time as a freelance journalist and do all Jake's medical care, appointments, school advocacy, and watching him while Matt works in the evenings, plus most of the housework. And I homeschool my daughter. My husband plays baseball and plays in a band. It's simply insane for us to continue trying to do all this.

So our last push before winter is to strip down. Get rid of stuff, allow ourselves the space to make a decision in the spring. We may need to move to find a school and community for Jake that fits his changing needs. And ours. We need support. Less isolation. More opportunities to do things with him without driving an hour first. The plan is to sell our tractor, our riding lawn mower with snowblower and tiller attachments, the motorcycles, my fabric -- everything we have but don't use. Live like we're moving in the spring. We'll see what happens...what life will bring.

Making time.

2011-09-03T07:45:00.000-05:00

For me, fall is all about retooling my life, recommitting to goals and projects, and beginning new routines. It's a great time to do a gentle cleanse and improve eating habits, to rekindle exercise and wellness goals, and to retool my schedule. I'm currently working on all of these, and wanted to share some thoughts about work and life balance and how to "fit everything in."

I think a great first step is to list everything you want to do - whether you feel you have time for it or not. Just take a piece of paper and write down everything that you want to fit into a day. For me, this looks something like: walk, journal, strength training, yoga, meditation, writing my novel, working on creative projects like personal essays and blogging, hiking, wildcrafting, tending the garden, fixing up the house, decluttering, eating well -- oh yeah, and my freelance writing work. It's a big list.

Next, edit your list. Sure, I'd like to hike every day, but I don't really need to put that on a daily schedule. Edit the list down to things that you really want in your everyday routine or rhythm. The other things get to stay, but they can be added in later or in other parts of your rhythm - like maybe every Saturday morning is a good time to go for a hike.

Then, I play around with the order of things. I actually really do take several days to try different routines. For example, today I decided to journal right after I put my son on the bus at 7:05am. My plan was to then go for a walk, but I ended up reading some tabs in my browser that I had been putting off, and now I'm blogging. Write down what you plan to try each day, but also record what you actually did -- because maybe there's a reason that journaling opened up blogging for me. Maybe the walk would be best at a different time of day. Just keep messing around with rhythm until you hit on something that works.

If you have young children at home, or homeschool, it can be more challenging to set a rhythm, since you're not entirely in control of how the day unfolds. I think it's important to think of the one, two or at most three things that are at the top of your priority list, and pick points during the day that you can use as anchors, when these things are most likely to be able to happen. For example, if walking a few miles a day is really important to your physical and emotional well-being, when is the most likely time that can happen consistently? Maybe when your husband returns from work, you have a deal where you say hello, give him a hug and kiss, and lace up your shoes and head out for your walk. Or it might work best for you to get up really early and sneak out of the house before everyone's awake. Lunchtime could be another anchor--maybe the kids do a quiet art project or other independent work while you journal for an hour after lunch.

You might be shutting down, thinking, "There's no way I can fit everything I want to do into my day!" You might be right; there's definitely a tendency for us to overschedule ourselves. But there's another question I'd ask, as I've asked it of myself: what are you doing all day, then? Is it what you really want to be doing? If you need to, keep a log of your activities all day. Just jot down what you're doing and the time frame. If you do this for a few days or a week, it can be really eye-opening. Suddenly those hours spent reading blogs or chatting on the phone with a friend or relative are put into sharp perspective. Is that what you really want to be doing, for that many hours? Compare your log to your list of daily goals. How much time did you spend on what's really important to you?

There is a way to make time. It takes intention. It takes commitment to yourself. It takes owning what's really important to you and feeling like you deserve to do what you really want to do. As parents, we're pulled in so many different directions. It's up to us to claim time for our own priorities. Yes, caring for our kids is of course at the top of that list. But the cliche is true: if you don't take care of yourself, you're not doing your kids any favors. Being present for your own needs and being true to what you want in your own life is a very powerful example for our kids to see. I don't want to raise self-effacing martyrs who put others' needs before their own. I want my kids to see that parenting means taking care of myself as well as I take care of them. (And I'm not talking about infants and young toddlers, for the most part -- although I think it's important to take time for yourself when your kids are under two or three, I also think that very young babies and toddlers need an incredible amount of care from us, and it is a challenge to maintain just our basic need for quiet, sleep and alone-ness during those early years.)

It's about balance. It's not just the kids, either -- with the Internet always beckoning, it is all too easy to fritter a day away doing a whole lot of nothing, without even realizing it. I challenge you to recommit to what you really want out of life. Sit down with a piece of paper and a pen and write it down. Then play with it, work with it, and make it happen.

The Story of (My) Stuff.

2011-08-31T06:36:00.000-05:00

If you don't get the reference, watch this. Then come back.

With the start of school (for my husband and son - my daughter is homeschooling this year) and the first crisp weather comes a desire to purge, organize, and simplify. I think it's probably a getting-ready-for-winter urge, a need to nest, a subconscious realization that we will be stuck inside for months at a time, unable to spend time outdoors nearly as much as we do now.

Earlier this summer, we did a clean sweep of the basement. We took everything out and spread it on tarps in the backyard (I keep wanting to type "lawn," but lawn does not describe the grassy-weedy area we mow around the house). It took the better part of a week, but we filled the van with stuff to donate and purged countless bags of garbage. Because of impending rain and my work schedule, we had to put some things back down in the basement unsorted, and stored a few other things in the shop. So there is still plenty of work to do.

But this clean sweep allowed us to demo some interior partitions in the basement and have enough space to put not one, not two, but three desks down there. I have a roughly ten by ten foot corner in the basement for my office now. Matt has a ten by ten space that serves as his beer brewing area and desk/office. And Katie is using our old kitchen table for her homeschooling desk. Yes, there will be photos, although we're not quite there yet in terms of moving in. I'm still organizing things in my office area, and my sewing table is still set up in it and covered in junk.

So this fall we'll make a major push to finish purging the basement and shop. To live in a way that maximizes the small amount of square footage we have. We plan to heat the basement this winter - we think with radiant tubes and a second concrete floor poured over it (which yes, will mean moving everything out yet again). We have a really nice space down here, once it isn't flooding regularly, is dehumidified and most importantly, clear of stuff.

All this purging and decluttering has gotten me thinking about stuff. How and why we acquire it, what motivates us to keep it once it no longer serves a purpose. Last night a little sewing basket of mine fell off a shelf in the basement and spilled its contents onto the floor and partly into my office garbage can. As I picked each item up, some went directly back into the garbage. Most of it I haven't touched in years, because I haven't had a space set up to sew. But I'd say well over ninety percent of what we pulled out of the basement, we haven't touched in years. And it's debatable whether I'll sew now that I have a space. If I don't, I'm going to either pack up or sell the machines and sewing stuff. For sure I'm going to pare down the fabric massively. I've been living with eight plastic tubs of fabric for going on ten years now. I've made two or three costumes in that time, that's it. So why do I hold onto the fabric?

I think a lot of it comes down to feeling like I'm "wasting money" if I donate something I paid for. And there's a layer of guilt for having acquired the crap in the first place (how that's assuaged by keeping it, I'm not sure - I think it's about not facing the reality that I did acquire it but didn't use it, and thinking that if I hold onto it and use it, then there's no reason to feel guilty). Then there's the scarcity mentality: maybe someday I will want this and I won't have the money or resources to buy it, so it will come in handy. Hoarding against future poverty.

Lately I've been thinking hard before buying more stuff. I'm not a spendthrift by any means, but I do tend to see, want, buy, especially in certain categories. Things that are for my writing work fall into this category. I had no problem dropping $60 on an antifatigue mat for my new standing workstation (newly reconfigured IKEA Jerker desk I already owned). I am standing on concrete all day, after all. And I just bought a new drafting-height chair for when I do need to sit down. And I'm not saying those were unjustified purchases at all. I think they fall into the "use every day" category and I don't regret them. But I also moved an entire shelf of books on writing down here, most of which I've not yet read. I get sucked in by any organizational tool that's new and shiny.

Then there are the things in my life that just appear. An ice cream maker, because my mom knows Jake needs high-calorie food and he was eating ice cream for a time (and she didn't use it). We've used it twice in four years. An electric cupcake maker (like a sandwich press for cupcakes, sort of) -- a gift for Katie from Matt's mom for Christmas. Has been used two or three times, then the novelty wore off, and now it collects dust in the kitchen cabinet. A bagel maker that Jake's teacher gave me because he was eating gluten-free and her sister used it for her daughter who has celiac. Three huge plastic appliances that I didn't buy, didn't ask for, and don't use -- but which were given with the ultimate thought, care, and good intentions behind them, so I have a hard time giving them away.

Picking up, looking at and considering each of the many thousands of items I own has brought simplicity into sharp focus. I look at everything with a ruthless eye. Do I need this? What desire am I trying to fill by purchasing this? Have I used this item in the last year? One thing I used to do when we had less disposable income was to make a list of Things I Want. Instead of one-clicking on something on Amazon like I tend to do all too often now, I'd let things sit on the list for weeks, months, even years. Often I could cross the item off without ever getting it. Other times, I'd find someone giving away the item, or find it used at a thrift store for a few bucks. And sometimes I'd break down and buy it. But mostly, the desire for the item passed. It was fleeting. It wasn't something I needed to act on.

I'm going to start that list again. I'm excited about keeping our space simple, uncluttered, and open to possibilities.

Augustness.

2011-08-06T09:34:00.000-05:00

August is such a strange month. Someone said the other day, "It's like the Sunday of summer," and in fact, with Lammas on August 1st, I feel that it is more the start of Autumn than the end of summer. When you wait till early July for it to really feel like summer, and late July for the garden to really start producing, that makes for a very short Summer here in the hinterlands of northern Vermont.

My garden is going nuts. The ground is finally warmed up! No tomatoes yet, but there are tons of green tomatoes just ready to ripen. A lot of things are late in getting going because of some issues I had with growing in raised beds for the first time (not enough water or nutrients for the early stages of growth). But we're eating lettuce, kale, chard, and herbs from the garden. I only got four 4x8 beds done, but that's okay. I also did a huge hill of Jack O'Lantern pumpkins, which are doing amazingly, and a row of Mammoth sunflowers interspersed with the rest of the pumpkins (they didn't fare so well between the sunflowers). The sunflower growth has been spectacularly uneven, which is interesting to me. I think there is more topsoil on the one side of the garden than the other due to the way the land slopes and trying to even that out.

I had to requeen both of my beehives. The first one just never took off and was staying very small. The queen was there and laying but there just never seemed to be more bees, and there were starting to be fewer of them. I had to smush her to install the new queen, which was harder than I thought to do. Now there are plenty of eggs, and I gave them a few frames of honey from the other hive, which is huge.

The huge hive was doing fantastic, but I must have injured the queen accidentally during my early July inspection, because when I checked it on July 24th, there was only capped larvae, no baby larvae or eggs. So I simply added the queen to the hive without trying to find the old one. I am now hoping that I checked the two frames of honey well enough for the queen that I didn't accidentally move her to the first hive. Ha! The worry never ends with beekeeping, it seems.

I'm sure things are fine, though. During inspection yesterday both hives had eggs. I will check again in a week. I am excited to watch the hives take off again and thrive.

Summer spinning by.

2011-07-07T16:15:00.000-05:00

I've been absent from this blog as summer has blossomed fully and the days beg for time outdoors, tending the animals and plants and insects as well as finding moments to kick back, read, soak in the sun and splash in the water.

And frankly, it's been hard for me to be here because life is in transition. I don't know where things are going, I just know that we have been talking about all kinds of possibilities for our lives in the future, spurred by the need for more space in this house, partly, as well as things too personal to get into here. Nothing bad or worrisome. It's all good, needed growth. But it's hard, messy, and exhausting. And I find it incredibly difficult to write about what's going on in my life while I'm in the midst of it. I'm having a bit of a blogging crisis, wondering where this very journal-y, stream-of-mind blog needs to go in the future, why I go long stretches of struggling to share my journey. I'm noticing how it's hard for me to spin positive about my attempts to homestead here, when things have taken a solitary turn on that front and I now question my dedication to this task, and wonder where it is on my list of "things I want" in my life.

I know so many people reading are dreaming of homesteading, hobby farming, having a piece of land and a few animals and a huge garden, making tangible, edible, beautiful things out of dirt, honey, straw, water and chicken scratch. I did for so long. It is so much what I wanted, and yet -- I'm here and feeling a bit lost with it all. I am still so very committed to nature; long walks tromping through wildflower fields, cross-country skis in the quiet snow-filled wilderness, running along muddy trails pockmarked with moose tracks -- this I still know speaks to me. And I certainly feel a deep, calm satisfaction when I water the chickens, scatter corn for them, collect eggs, or open the bees and pull frames, finding eggs and a queen and newly drawn combs, or snip baby lettuce and basil leaves from the garden. I cherish these moments, even the not-so-picturesque ones: shoveling dirt, screwing together raised beds, shoveling more dirt, moving fences, mucking out the coop every spring. But I don't know how central to my sense of self the farming/homesteading/whatever-you-call-it is. I think I could give it up and still be happy, still be whole, not feel like I was missing something. Especially if I had a smaller garden and let's say four hens for eggs. I could be okay with that, I think. Even without the hens. But I'm not sure. I'm not sure if I'd immediately pine for this life, this overly full, so very busy life where I somehow squish the self-sufficiency into working full-time and caring for my family, including one child who has some very significant needs. I want to write a novel. I want to have more time to dedicate to my career. I want more time to read. I want to spend less time worrying about how to make this house meet our space needs, how many things need fixing, how many things there are to do -- farming tasks being just one subset, but one that still adds many to-dos to the list that is already long.

I'm opening up to awareness about my own life and what I want in it. I thought, a while back, that I was clear that this farming life was what I wanted. And suddenly I'm not sure how critical it is. I am very much attached to this house, this land, this community. But I don't get to make all the choices about how it will go, so I may have to let go. I have no clue if that's the way it's going just yet -- it may very well not. We may stay right here and add on to the house and that will be that. Or it won't -- we could add on, then decide in a year or two or ten that moving is in fact the right thing to do. I have no idea. I'm in a space of being open to all possibilities, and to deeply evaluating what it is I want in life. At the same time my career is very full and ripe and wonderful and wanting to expand beyond where it is, so I'm evaluating what I want to write, for whom, in what format, and where I want that to go next, too. No wonder I'm so exhausted, and no wonder it's been hard to come here and share with the world about it.

It's a tender place, this opening, blossoming, changing space where I am right now. I'm much more comfortable staying in not-knowing than I was a year ago, when this major shift really began. I'm grateful to my partner because I might not be doing all this growing and learning and becoming aware if it weren't for his own journey doing the same thing. And here we go, through the height of summer, feeling our way to greater awareness and taking time to pause and notice the beauty around us.

June observations.

2011-06-17T18:04:00.000-05:00

Hiring out some tasks (like mowing/weedwhacking) can feel really liberating. Especially when a teenager who works for $8 an hour is the hiree. I've resisted this for a long time, but it's freed up endless amounts of time (six hours thus far, just to do the whole place once) for me to do other tasks.
Baby chicks have an endless drive to fly out of the coop and explore the big wide world, even when that world includes a labradoodle with a strong prey drive. Thus far: one injured chick with a broken wing (about to Google whether I should tape it up with athletic tape, or leave it be and dub him/her Crooked Wing to succeed our Crooked Beak).
Bees are mysterious creatures. When watching the hive entrance, I have no idea whether they're being robbed, just flying home, or taking orientation flights. When I open the hive, I can tell roughly if there are more or fewer bees and that they've been building comb or not, and that there are eggs or aren't (sometimes). If I see the queen, hooray! But otherwise I am completely clueless. One colony is struggling and I have no idea why. The other is thriving and I have no idea why.
Starting seeds because who knows when you'll get the raised beds done is an excellent idea. I have only three point five beds done out of eight planned, but I don't feel behind (yet). I have several beds started in seedling trays.
Planning a really, insanely full farming season is a great way to ensure that your freelance work will take off. It's just the perfect way to do it, really.
Sneaking off for an afternoon to hike along a thickly wooded trail, then swim in ice-cold pools and get a deep-tissue massage from a waterfall is always a good idea. It's even better when said labradoodle survives the experience without getting a chin full of porcupine quills.
June is always overfull, but as soon as the Solstice hits, you'll be wishing for it again. As the days begin to contract it feels like the long, slow slide toward darkness that it is. Savor the fullness and the languid, twilightly evenings that stretch on forever.

June Progress

2011-06-07T07:59:00.000-05:00

One bed is built, filled, and planted. Only seven more to go! I also just transplanted a twenty-foot row of sunflowers and Howden Jack O'Lantern pumpkins, alternating. Threw the remaining six pumpkins in a hill of turned-over sod. We'll see what happens. That's my theme for this year - throw it in and let it go.

Two coats of poly are on Katie's floor. Last coat to go on today. Then we finish the walls and railing.

Bees are due for an inspection - I last peeked a week ago. Still not sure how heavily Colony 1's queen is laying, but Colony 2 is doing well and filling frames of brood.

Once I get the rest of the beds built, I'll have a row at the front of the garden, too, where I'll transplant rhubarb and celeriac. My rhubarb is languishing in a very overgrown bed right now. I actually need to harvest some and also make sure it doesn't get mowed over today. Then the overgrown bed will become lawn again. (Although lawn is a euphemism for what is really a collection of wildflowers, weeds and grasses, some of which we mow.)

I gave up on keeping the layers fenced. Apparently four-foot-high electrified chicken netting cannot keep them in. Instead, I fenced the garden to keep them - and the deer - out. Makes more sense anyway. Now they just have to defend themselves from the dog. I think I'm about to decide they're on their own on that one, although I may try to put a line of his electric fence in a spot that allows them to take refuge in the coop.

The 75 meat birds and layers are now combined in one brooder area, with two heat lamps. It's half of our woodshed with chicken wire stapled up and cardboard boxes along the bottom to help keep them in. They just graduated to a large feeder and waterer, which gives me a break from the daily refilling of the small waterers. And the cardboard was in two circles around the two lamps to keep them from wandering too far from the heat source. But they were getting out, mixing with each other, and then having trouble getting back into the boxes, so it all came apart and their world was massively expanded. They seem a lot happier now.

We're also revisiting a potential addition (likely on a more modest scale than last year's plans), but right now we're in the gathering information phase for that. Exciting! I'll update here as we make progress.

On the work front, I can see the finish line. So, back to plodding away toward it - with a promise for juicier, more photo-heavy updates coming soon. I am hoping for a few days of that meditative, inward-looking time, so I am trying hard to finish up in the next couple of days. Tuesday is the last day of school and it's a half day!

Closing out May.

2011-05-31T18:45:00.000-05:00

I am finding that I desperately need some time to look inward, tap into my creativity, meditate, and slow down. Things have not really stopped going full-tilt this month. Truly, it started in early April, before we went to Florida for spring break.

Besides the projects around the homestead - eight 4x8 raised beds are mid-construction, Katie's loft extension still needs finishing, two hives of bees that take me half a day every week to inspect (or so it feels), and 75 baby chicks (50 meat and 25 layers) - I have been super busy with work. I thought I was going to end up with a huge lull after winding up my last two assignments (of five or more for the month!), but I have to do massive catchup on small farms writing and it looks like I might get a rather large assignment.

Somewhere in there, within the next couple of weeks, I need to carve out time for myself. There is all this pressure to get at least a few beds up, filled and planted immediately. Deadlines for assignments have already been bent and must now be adhered to strictly. But before the children finish school, which is rapidly approaching, I need a few days to dream, nap, read, rest and work through some creativity books. I want to think about where I'm going next with writing, and figure out how to bring balance to my daily work life.

I'll leave you with a photo of one of my pretty queen bees. The other isn't marked and I haven't been able to identify her yet. Maybe next week.

May mud madness.

2011-05-17T12:18:00.000-05:00

My girlie, Mud Season 2007

I cannot believe that over a month has gone by since I last posted. It's been a whirlwind. We went to Florida to visit the family, came back, barely got our feet under us with spring farm preparations and then turned around and went to a wedding in upstate New York. (Seriously, I got up at 5:30am, hived a nucleus colony of bees, working with bees for the first time ever, while Matt took photos, and then he put up electric net fencing to protect the hive against the bears while I packed up the kids and the car. We left at 9:30 am and got there around 4, not bad at all.)

And I'm swamped with writing work - glad to be swamped, but the particular assignments are wearing thin and I need to get them out of here and move on to fresh ideas and even (imagine it!) simplifying my work life a bit for the summer. I'd like to take some time to retool things, make room for new projects I want to begin, and redefine a bit where I want to go next with writing. Exciting stuff - lots more exciting for my ADD-ish brain than focusing on completing projects.

Part of that is taking more time for the homesteading adventures this summer, and finding a way to pursue them that doesn't involve Matt. He has mixed feelings about the whole thing, and I think in the past I've taken his positive thoughts, musings and plans and run with them because I get all excited when he gets excited about the homesteading stuff. But really, he always cycles back to not wanting to do it by this time of year. It's like spring fever grips him, and then by May he comes to his senses. It's just not something he enjoys in reality.

So, instead of assuming he'll be along for the ride, I'm planning to do projects on my own, which means making more time for them as well as scaling plans for the season back a bit. Although what follows doesn't really sound much like "scaling back." In the next couple of weekends, I'd like to build raised beds, fill them, and plant peas, kale and lettuces, carrots, and herbs. I have sunflowers, pickling cukes and pumpkins started, and will start more squash and some flowers today. I'll buy cherry tomato starts in a couple of weeks - I don't dare plant frost-tender things until at least Memorial Day weekend and often a week after that.

I have two beehives going. I just hived a package of bees sent in the mail from Texas. I completely screwed up putting in the queen, but am going to check on them tomorrow and see what I can do about it. Basically, Matt tried to help get the staple off and ripped the tab off the queen cage, dropping her. I took out the cork in the candy end, but then stapled the tab back on in a way that I'm afraid might make it hard for her to get out. And then hung her facing foundation and too high in the frames, because after the queen cage dropped and I had to stick my hand into the package of 15,000 bees to get her, I kind of lost all ability to follow directions. And the instructions in the 2 books were really vague and unclear! I actually can't wait to write up a really good, clear set of queen install instructions for the small farms site. Sigh.

I am trying to cultivate a graceful, forgiving attitude toward myself with all of this. My general overwhelm, my lack of blogging, my complete beekeeping install flub. My messy house, my undone writing assignments, my scattered nature. So, I try to let go of the thoughts when they become circular in nature - like when I tossed and turned last night wondering if the queen would be okay or if I'd lose the queen because of this whole mess. I am trying to have a bit more faith in the whole process and not take everything so literally. I like to follow directions when it comes to stuff like this, although I'm learning to let go a little.

The rest of May looks like this for me: building raised beds. By myself. Checking on the queen and ripping out the staples and attaching her to the frame with paperclips or a rubber band or something. Decanting and secondary fermenting two batches of kombucha and starting new ones (and sending a friend a scoby). Planting more seeds inside and setting up the garage shelves as a seed-starting place. Fixing and moving the A-frame chicken coop so the dog can have free range (we managed to fix his fence, and the chicken fence - both taking more time than imagined). Assembling a deep hive box for Hive 1, smoking them and adding it as well as a hive-top feeder.

It's that time of year! So I'm just going to breathe and take it one step at a time.

Mud season.

2011-04-11T14:43:00.000-05:00

I think it's finally mud season. I hope I'm not jinxing us; I am really ready to be done with snow until October or November or so. I went for a run yesterday, just a short one-miler, with plenty of walking interspersed. But the itch to run longer, every day, farther, is resurfacing.

We had a frustrating day yesterday trying to finish Katie's loft. The lumber yard shorted us three 16-foot pieces of flooring, which we didn't realize till we started cutting it all up for the floor. The good news is we only have those three pieces to cut, then we can nail it all down, sand it and poly it and it will be done! The bad news is we didn't have the three pieces yesterday when we had the time to work on it. But soon it will be done. After our vacation, we'll change her railing to a full wall, and make the open side a four-foot-long wall and then a six-foot wrought iron railing. Then the final step will be (hopefully) wiring an overhead light for the hallway downstairs, and finishing the ceiling by covering it with tongue and groove and trimming everything out. Whew! Just a "little" project.

Our snow cover, still a good foot or more in spots, is putting the brakes on any kind of raised bed construction until early May. I'm hoping to come back to grass for the last week in April. I haven't started any plants yet because we'll be away for a week, although our neighbor is taking care of our chickens and could definitely handle watering starts too. But I like to baby them. So, as usual, I will simply start a little late on the squash. I guess I will never learn that it might not finish if I don't start it early enough! Next year, next year...how is it that the season hasn't started and I'm already saying this?

When we return it is going to be insanely busy for May. Constructing a beehive, getting bees installed (still have to find a source for them, too - although there seem to be many places in the trader), making the raised beds, getting them filled, getting starts going, not necessarily in that order. And ordering meat birds and some new layer hens. Then the question: do we get a couple of pigs this year? Maybe so.

The gift of a clean house.

2011-04-04T07:07:00.000-05:00

The past few weeks, I have sunk into a feeling of chaos, of overwhelm, of feeling stressed and overworked and frazzled. It culminated with some hormonal shifts last week and I just felt awful. There are so many self-care things I wanted to do for myself, like meditate and practice yoga again, but I couldn't manage to begin any of them.

I took Friday off from work. I puttered around on the computer, laid in bed and read a book, and generally didn't allow myself to think of work. What a nurturing thing to do for myself. It set up the whole weekend in a wonderful way. Saturday we went to a farming and food conference, which was interesting and relaxing. Spent the rest of Saturday evening dreaming and talking and just resting. Sunday, I worked on the finances, catching up on entering transactions into our budget software, then Matt and I put tongue and groove on the wall separating Katie's loft extension from Jake's room.

As a small aside, once the wall was up, I started to feel like 6 feet wide by 10 feet deep, with a 45-degree angle of ceiling to the floor at the back, is really very tiny. I have this lingering frustration with this whole process; I wish we had done it post-and-beam style, although I can see that being able to hide wires for a ceiling light will be nice. I wish we had thought it through a little more, because I fear we will be pulling down the wall we just put up, next year, if we do the whole loft. And then I think it will be perfect and just fine and that having the ceiling match the rest of the lower ceilinged parts of the house will be much better than having one random rectangle of post and beam. Anyway, I can overthink things to death. It's close to done, and that's a good thing.

Putting up the tongue and groove went faster than I had hoped. The main issue was that we needed to cut around the outlet we installed, and we had to adjust the depth of the electrical box, so there was a bit of backtracking (taking out two pieces of tongue and groove) once we figured that out. It cozies up Jake's space and makes it feel more room-like, for him to have a wall instead of a railing. And I think the shallowness of Katie's new space can be mitigated in a couple of ways. We are probably going to create a 4-foot long triangle of wall where the eaves are, and use that 4 foot by 6 foot nook of low-ceilinged space to build a shelf. She will have storage for clothes there, in baskets. That will leave her with a 6x6 foot square of floor with an outlet. I'm thinking we will do a wrought iron railing across the open 6 feet that will be left, and hang a curtain she can pull across for privacy. This will leave her with light and air circulation in the room.

We may wait on the clothes storage, too - I think she wants to play with orientation of her bed, maybe use the 6x10 space as her bed area and the larger 9x10 space as the floor hangout spot. The nice thing is having options, as she put it. Either way I think four feet of wall, then six feet of railing, is how we'll close in the new loft on the living room edge.

After all that work, I decided to try to clean up Jake's space, which was covered in sawdust and littered in paper shreds, because that is what he does - he shreds paper endlessly. Or cardboard. (Another aside, I went to a composting workshop and the presenter mentioned how wonderful shredded cardboard is as carbon for compost. I am seriously going to try to channel Jake's cardboard-shredding into making compostables for us. He has a resistance to doing it into a container, but we'll see. I might be able to work on that.) I was tired, but just slogged through. Once his space was clean and all potential shreddables removed, I found the energy, somehow, to vacuum the rest of the house, which was also completely covered in shredded paper. "Like living in a hamster cage," is how my husband puts it.

Earlier in the day, I had wished that some fairy godmother would appear, whisk the children away to wonderful, engaging activities with competent caregivers, send us to some romantic B&B somewhere (warm? on the beach?), and completely clean and organize my house and life. I have been so exhausted, so thoroughly spent. But somehow, giving myself a day of rest and an easy half a weekend, I found the energy to be my own fairy godmother. And then Matt folded a bunch of his laundry, which was a huge help, and put it away.

So I woke up today to a relatively clean house (sure, I have to vacuum out the couches and under them, and under the rug in the living room, and the kitchen needs another reboot as always). It was a gift. It felt spectacular. And I notice how it has freed up energy for other things. I'm about to go meditate, and then will probably vacuum out the couches and under the rug, roll it up, and practice yoga. I made the bed this morning, and all day (until Jake comes home and rips the covers off and sits in them) I will enjoy looking in there at the orderly bedspread, stripes in line, cover smooth.

These are small things. And I'm sure there is some way I can figure out how to live peacefully in the chaos. But right now? Order helps. Order feels good. It gives me mental space, some bit of peace, and frees up energy.

Feeling like spring.

2011-03-17T06:29:00.000-05:00

The time change always throws me. I was enjoying the bright morning light at six am. It made me feel like getting out of bed. But now, the sunny afternoons feel like spring is coming. I look outside at five-thirty and I can hardly believe how bright it is.

The snow has taken on a grainy texture. Corn snow. Big grains of melted and refrozen snow with water between them. Soft, slippery, wet. It's good for riding and skiing if you catch it before it turns to slush, but after it's unfrozen from a hard, rattly texture.

And the temps have risen into the mid to upper 30s during the day. It feels balmy. The air has so much moisture in it. The birds sing all day long, flitting to and from the feeder looking more relaxed than they have in months. Yes, we still have the woodstove crackling all day long, and yes, we still have many feet of snow over the bare ground in most places. I'm so ready for it to melt, and my brain skips further ahead, past the mud and frozen ruts, to warm days spent lounging by the lake, or in fresh green grass, gazing at a bluebird sky trailing cotton-fluff clouds. But it's sugaring season, and we'll set taps this weekend and sip fresh, warm syrup. It's getting to be spring.

Adding space.

2011-03-15T16:34:00.000-05:00

On Sunday we made some new space in our tiny cabin. I'm so excited and so is Katie! We're far from done, but already she has a nice little place with her rug on it, where she can stretch out and read and check out the view from up high.

The next step will be to wall it in. We'll leave some triangles of space open at the top for light and air circulation. But the back edge, which was previously a railing and separates Jake's space from the new part of the loft, will become a wall, as will the railing to the right, Katie's current room. And we will put a wall on the front edge, of course. (Although Katie says, "I like it this way!" Well yeah, but, no.)

So here are a couple of before and after shots. Of course, while we did this, Jake flushed half the stuff in the bathroom down the toilet, but we actually did manage to uninstall the toilet and remove what got stuck - a bar of Kirk's Castile Soap that molded itself perfectly to the toilet innards. It was a long, dirty, exhausting job involving not one but two toilet uninstalls/reinstalls, and I have to credit Matt with most of the filthy work. Although I did clean up afterward so it wasn't all roses for me.

Before (we did remove trim already in this pic):

After (really, during - and we also have to finish the ceiling with tongue and groove, of course, but we might wire some lights before we close it up):

Total cost so far was $118.92, and we have a start on the 2x4s we'll need for framing. We'll need to buy more 2x4s as well as 6-inch pine tongue and groove for the walls, plus pine flooring to match what's up there. We'll recycle the 4-inch tongue and groove that currently covers the bottom half of the railing walls (like you can see on the right) to do the ceiling, since it seems that 4-inch T&G is special order around here.

Like I said, we might wire a light in the new ceiling, and possibly also in what is currently my office, behind the new loft. But this is a log cabin, so wiring is tough.

Tail end of winter.

2011-03-04T10:13:00.000-05:00

I apologize for the lack of updates this month. I just can't seem to find my groove. I wanted so badly to have my blueberries and strawberries, bees, laying chicks and meat birds, seeds and starts, all ordered and ready to go in February this year.

But we've been doing other kinds of work. Still working out how to get us all enough space in the house without taking out a bank loan. It's involved several different reimaginings, some of which I've shared here. We're on yet another iteration of the plan, this one involving moving my office up to the shop (framing out part of it), and adding just a small extension to the loft instead of completely flooring it in. That would give Katie quite a bit more space in her room for far less money, and we get to keep the cathedral ceiling in case we decide that closing it in doesn't make sense. Instead of spending the money on the large loft extension, we could use that money to pour a radiant slab in our basement - gaining far more useful space for the kids to romp around in, for Jake to have some sensory needs met, and helping to heat our main floor from underneath.

So right now we have some pretty firm plans to do those three things this spring/early summer. Office, small loft extension, radiant heat in basement. I think the plan is to leave it at that for this year and see how that feels. We'd like to do it all as soon as possible. We will probably also get quotes for several of our planned additions to the house, and just gather information about what they might cost, and whether they're feasible. (You know how it goes: the most wonderful plans can be popped in an instant by some carpentry barrier you had no clue about!)

And as far as the garden, it will come. There is still time to order everything. I'm going to work on that this month. Bees first, then chickens, then berry bushes, then seeds. I think we'll focus on raising chickens and bees this year, and not add any sheep just yet. I'd really like to devote time to a smaller, more intensive, more successful garden, too. I have a bed of strawberries, but want to add a bed of everbearing to try, and I really want to get some blueberry bushes. Another goal is to keep the orchard bushhogged and rehab the outhouse down there so it feels guest-ready. (It was left with a bunch of debris in it - old bits of wood, just random stuff.)

On the home front, there is a lot to accomplish. We definitely need to restain our house this spring. We want to rehab the deck and porch - some boards are rotting, and the railings need to be redone - and rebuild the stairs to the house, which are falling into the earth and off the porch. I have decided this will be the year, since we're not adding on, that I redo the flower beds and do them properly. I do think when we have grading done by the shop we will regrade a bit around the house. If I don't have a river running through the flower bed, I'm sure it will work out better. I probably need to build it up a bit, remove the stones that surround it now, and make it more of a raised bed. I'd also like to tear out the peonies that are in the "massive bed" as I call it, and plant that to wildflowers or something else that requires a lot less maintenance. I'll move the peonies to the front, smaller bed.

We need to build chicken tractors for the meat birds, fix the current movable layer coop (a piece broke in half in the windstorm we had a few months ago), and possibly move our woodshed somewhere a little less obtrusive. Cow shed (really for storage, no cows now) may get moved as well. All of this is somewhat dependent on where we decide to put the raised garden beds. I have been planning it all in my head, but will share drawings and photos as spring gets closer.

It's almost sugaring time. The sap should be running this weekend; we're supposed to get rain tomorrow. Right now it's hard to believe because it is so cold. But I'm really ready for some rain to melt a bit of the snow. I would like to get outside today to take some photos of it at its height. It's been an impressive winter as far as snowfall, even though we got a slow start and I began to wonder if NYC was really where I wanted to move, given my love of fresh powder.

As usual in the late winter/early spring fervor, I'm rededicating myself to blogging more regularly. But I mean it this time! This is going to be a big year for us in many ways, and I want to share it with my faithful readers. After five years on this land, I finally feel like I'm coming into my own, getting a sense of what I want to do with it, of what I enjoy, of what is "too much" and what is just enough. For a long time I've avoided posting here, feeling like a sham homesteader because I honestly don't think total self-sufficiency is something we'll ever achieve. This winter I've realized that's just my perfectionism talking, and that I can do as much or as little as feels comfortable and right. I've done a lot of introspecting about my overall life philosophy and what drives me to raise food and animals, and I don't know that I meet the classic back-to-the-lander definition of homesteader. But that's okay. I want to live closer to the land, and sync my life with nature's rhythms. But we also have two TVs and four computers and a whole lot of electric kitchen appliances. I no longer think these things cancel each other out. It's a modern homestead, and although its gestation has been long, painful, and circuitous, with steps forward and back and sideways, I feel like it's finally ready to be born.

Spring is in the air.

2011-02-15T08:25:00.000-05:00

Is it? I feel it. Even though it's 5*F and the wind is howling, I felt it yesterday when it was 38*F. (What wild temperature swings we've been having this winter!) I'm a seed flunkie; I haven't ordered mine yet! Our local co-op puts in a Fedco order in early February and every single year I miss it. I have a bunch of older seeds in the basement that I need to test germinate. And I still even need to make a list, although I know what I'm doing, pretty much. Sticking with salad greens, cabbage, some winter squash, carrots. Probably won't be able to resist cherry tomatoes (SunGolds) but think I'll try to resist doing bigger tomatoes. Oh and kale and chard of course. Onions were easy and delicious. Okay, there ya go, LOL. I was going to try to keep it mellow but I am so easy to sucker into a huge garden!

I think we're doing raised beds this year. So many rocks, and our drainage sucks. The real debate is where they go: over the old garden or closer to the house? Both have their reasons, and the addition-or-not question is related. Because the spot closer to the house is where we considered putting an outbuilding, if we do an outbuilding addition.

Here are our potential "more space" solutions from most expensive to least:

Our original plan of a 16x30 FirstDay, but modified so that it's two stories, with two bedrooms and a bath over a kitchen/dining, with a full basement or perhaps on a crawlspace. Floor in the loft for our master bedroom, and our current master BR becomes my office. Current kitchen becomes living room. We have to build it because we can't afford to pay someone to do it.
A smaller FirstDay (or perhaps other construction method), maybe 13x16, two stories, attached to the side of where our bedroom is now, on a slab or piers or crawlspace. We pay someone to do the labor, thus ensuring that we stay married through this process (my husband just really isn't up for the DIY aspect of it all, and I've come to accept that). Our bedroom/my current office gets the wall knocked down and becomes a living room. The current kitchen stays, gets IKEA cabinet-ed, and the current living room becomes the dining area. In the addition, the lower level (off living room) is my office, and the upstairs is the master bedroom and a bath. Loft gets floored in and becomes Katie's room, and Jake's room expands somewhat (but is still open to downstairs and you have to walk through his room to get to Katie's).
This one costs almost as much as the second option, we think. Put radiant heat in floor in basement and pour another slab. Pour a footing and add an egress door and big windows to far side of basement. Build a room and bathroom for Katie down there. Open area becomes Jake's sensory space. Upstairs, floor in the loft and make it our bedroom. Same as previous option, current bedroom/office becomes living room, current living becomes dining, kitchen stays and gets IKEAed. For my office, we build a small cabin near the chicken coop (becomes woodshed) that can serve as my office space, some space for Matt, a loft for Katie to get away to with friends on weekends etc, and guest space (sleeping loft and pull-out couch).

So you see, before I can figure out where my garden beds should go, I need to decide whether we're building this outbuilding! And truly, yet another option is to go with the attached, smaller addition (which is how we're leaning) and then build a funky little cabin with cash in a couple of years.

Can you lend us a hand?

2011-02-04T09:14:00.000-05:00

Please help our efforts to get our son Jake an iPad! Jake is 10 years old, minimally verbal and significantly affected by both autism and cystic fibrosis.

His iPod Touch has opened up new worlds for him. BUT - the augmentative communication software is too hard for him to use on it due to fine motor issues! We are looking to get an iPad to help him communicate with us better. Due to high costs for his ongoing care, we can't afford this expense out of pocket, and insurance/school won't cover it.

We are doing an iPad Challenge with The Puzzling Piece. Some more info:

http://thepuzzlingpiece.com/ipad.html

If you order one of the necklaces or key chains listed at this link, some of the proceeds to go help autism - you can pick the organization you want the money to go to. If we get 60 orders, Jake will get an iPad for communication.

http://thepuzzlingpiece.com/products.html

That's a direct link to the product page. ONLY the $20 necklace or keychain count for the iPad challenge for J, but of course you can order whatever you want!

Please note that when you order you MUST put Lauren Ware in the notes section in Paypal (you have to click to add this toward the end of the order process) when you order or it will not get credited to us.

If you want to send a check, you can do that too - email me for details, I can send you my addy and you would make the check out to The Puzzling Piece or to me, then I would ship the item(s) to you.

If you're in Canada: Paypal me $25 for one necklace or keychain and I'll order for you, then ship to you once it gets to me. If you want more than one, email me - I'll only charge you actual shipping (it's steep through The Puzzling Piece to Canada).

I've added another way to help - in case the $20 is too steep. I'm making these keyfobs myself!

The keyfobs go around your wrist and are a great way to show your support for autism - and keep track of your keys! You can even write contact information on the inside of the loop for safe return of lost keys!

One keyfob is $10 plus $2 shipping = $12. Email me to order! I take Paypal. Thank you so much for your support!

Thank you!!!

Egg-a-licious.

2011-01-21T11:14:00.000-05:00

Past the solstice, I've put a light bulb in the coop - finally. It took a long time for me to get the light properly set up in the new winter coop setup, for various reasons - but ultimately because it simply wasn't that high on the priority list, and a little nagging something said, "Let the hens rest a while."

A few zip ties later, the light is up in a way that it won't keep getting knocked down by the hens. And they're laying eggs again. I forgot how much I had missed fresh eggs! What the laying break gave me was a renewed appreciation for how wonderful they are. I admit last summer we got lazy, and the eggs would age and get warm and flatten before we got them in the fridge or ate them. Now, we're getting 4-8 eggs a day, and I eat 3 every morning for breakfast - often just laid. Even compared to the eggs from the local farm that I paid $4.29 a dozen for at the local general store, ours are better, if I do say so myself! The yolks are huge, and round and three-dimensional, and a dark shade of orange that seems to hold the promise of summer within it. The whites are thick and hold together around the yolk. Whipping three with a fork leads to incredible aerated fluffiness. And when I fry them over-easy in grassfed ghee, the yolks taste so rich and fatty, it seems downright sensuous.

Eggs. How I've missed you.

A request.

2011-01-12T11:06:00.000-05:00

I just found out about this challenge - if we can get 60 orders for $20 autism keychains or necklaces, with the proceeds to benefit the autism charity of your choice, The Puzzling Piece will send Jake an iPad!

You must put "Lauren Ware" in the Notes section when you order - click "Add instructions for seller" and a text box will pop up. Can't hurt to add "iPad Challenge" in there too! Otherwise the order won't "count" for Jake's iPad. You also have to order either the necklace or keychain that are $20 each; no other items "count" toward the challenge.

Thanks for participating if you choose to do so. Make sure to put my name in the notes when you order or it won't count!

Order Your Keychain or Necklace for Jake's iPad Here

The challenge is open to anyone affected by autism, so pass it on to someone else who might want to try for an iPad, too.

The Puzzling Piece iPad Challenge

Happy New Year!

Posting break.

2010-12-21T17:11:00.000-05:00

Depths of winter. The light will return! I am taking a bit of a break as I'm home with the kids and husband and wanting to pull back from work until after the New Year. That feels wonderful! See you then.

The Non-Addition Plan.

2010-12-06T10:55:00.001-05:00

This weekend, I did clean Jake's loft, pulling out four large tubs and one medium tub full of tiny wooden, metal and plastic toys that were littering the floor. I did a rough sort by type, and left him a shallow underbed box full of wooden train pieces, a shoebox-sized plastic tub of matchbox cars, and some larger toys on his toy shelf. I vacuumed well. I still need to fold and put away several loads of laundry that currently reside on his bed. But the room has been mess-proofed. Ahhhhhhh.

That's the toy side - roughly 10x12 feet but as you can see, very little of it is high enough to stand up. I bashed my knee hard on the corner of his bed, because that side of his room is just so smushed that there is about a foot of space between his bed and the wall to get into that area. Once I get his clothes put away and bed made, I'll take a photo of the bed/desk/beanbag chair side.

But now...the bigger news is that we figured out a plan that makes a lot of sense if we decide not to do the addition at all. And it involves us constructing the loft over Christmas break. I do still have a fantasy that perhaps Matt will come to his senses and we'll hire the carpenters to do it, but if not, I think we can manage on our own. What this means is that I am not going to stress over the current loft layout as far as Jake's furniture, because soon he will have a good bit bigger room. It will be a welcome change to the current squishiness of the bed and desk.

How to describe succinctly what we plan to do with the space? I think by telling it in pieces, chronologically, and following with floor plans:

We construct the loft across the rest of the house, so we now have a full second floor (albeit with the very steep eaves).
We build a wall and door to separate the upstairs loft into two rooms - one for Katie (for now) and one for Jake (you walk through it to get to Katie's room but it is otherwise a decent size and normal shape except for eaves).
We build low closets into the eaves for storage, install lighting with switches for both rooms, and more electrical boxes (there are not enough!) which can be put in the new closets' walls.
We test over the winter for radon in the basement. Anticipating this will be okay as radon on the main floor was tested and was very low. Assuming it comes back fine:
In the spring, we clean the basement completely, have a slab poured on top of the current one with radiant tubing in it, and build a new bedroom and bath for Katie in the driest side of the basement. We do as much finish work as we can afford. We do a closed radiant system with a separate, inexpensive hot water heater that just does the floor, and keep our current setup for hot water (adding a bath, but we have a 50-gallon propane heater and should be fine).
The remainder of the open space in the basement gets interlocking rubber mats and is Jake's sensory space. We also put an old couch here, maybe get a projector and sheet, and put the Wii down there and a DVD player for watching movies (or just let them stream Netflix through the Wii).
We can now move our bedroom into the upstairs loft room where Katie was, and Jake stays put. Our previous master bedroom can become my office with door that shuts! For now, anyway. Oh, and in the spring we'll need to cut holes in the gable wall of the loft and add a window or windows - big enough for egress in case of fire.

At this point we have many of our needs met, and it's only nine months from now. We have an office for me with a door that shuts; a room for Katie that meets her desires; a second bathroom that is very accessible to Katie's bedroom since she is the bathroom hog, LOL; bigger room for Jake and sensory space for Jake. That's ninety percent of our needs right there, and we haven't added on a bit.

But, there's more. We do still want to have a larger kitchen as well as a table that we can all gather around for dinner parties. It's our main form of entertainment and socializing up here on the mountain, and it's important to us. Plus, our kitchen is pretty beat up, tiny and the cabinets are literally falling apart.

So the goal would be to save up more money and spend the summer of 2012 doing the following:

Build an office cabin for me. Ideally, it would be large enough to be a one-person living space (say for Jake in the future) and would have space for yoga practice, a pull-out couch and sleeping loft to sleep guests (thinking of our parents/my brothers here), and would have lovely windows looking onto the view. Something really rustic and pretty, built on posts and piers. Ideally. I mean, if money is in the way, we can go smaller, or we can appropriate the garage for my office (I did see that it has a really nice view of the mountains but the windows are small and high, it leaks terribly at the floor, and would definitely need some serious work to become a decent space.)
Now that there is no need for the back bedroom (that was master and then office), we tear it out and open up the space into a living room. With the couches moved, we can put a dining room table where our current living room is - right across from the kitchen.
Then we move the woodstove to a more logical place, right in the center of the main floor. This is important because as it is, the pipe comes up into the middle of where our bed will need to be in the loft, but we figured out how to work around it if we move it. And it is in the way of the kitchen and flow out the new door we want to put in for a view and more light.
We redo the kitchen with IKEA cabinetry (fairly inexpensive but really nice), tile the floor and put hardwood in the new living room. We chainsaw a six-foot hole into the side of the cabin behind the dining room table and add French doors to the porch with a view of the mountains and more light.
(This may happen earlier) We build new steps that enter the porch on the short side and are covered. We enclose part of the porch as a mudroom.

Here are the floor plans which I hope help make it a bit clearer. I don't know why Blogger cuts off the right-hand edge of the plans, but after all this yammering I don't have time to figure it out right now. Just click on the plan and it takes you to the Flickr page with the full image as well as some explanation of what you're looking at. Enjoy!

Wintry thoughts.

2010-11-29T10:00:00.000-05:00

We have a few inches of snow on the ground here, and the weather is in that freezing/thawing place where it will turn to rain, then sleet, then snow, then back to rain again. The woodstove is always crackling away, but there are still nights when we can let it go out overnight and rekindle it in the early morning.

The basement is now completely dry save for a few damp spots along the crack in the floor and in the previously very wettest spots, where the floor meets the wall. And I mean damp - if we put the dehumidifier over them, they dry out. Seems like it might now be able to be sealed with hydraulic cement.

I have been working hard down there and will photo it later this week. I have the gym mat, a zero-gravity lounge chair, the easel, the electric keyboard and the mini trampoline all set up down there. Next up is moving the futon couch from the garage into the space, but I need to do a bit more work before I'm ready for that. And some creative arranging. I also have the rowing machine set up down there and would like to leave it set up - Jake plays with it, actually rows on it, plus I find it much more convenient to have it set up than broken down and stored vertically. (Matt and I disagree on this point; at least philosophically, he feels that the few minutes to set it up to row are not a big deal. I agree philosophically, but in reality it's an obstacle, plus it usually ends up being a cleaning job to make the space for it again.)

I am now coveting something called "The Black Mat," which is a super-thick rubber yoga mat made to use on concrete. The gym mat feels too thick and my current yoga mats, even layered on top of each other, too thin. But at $90 it seems very pricey. Many say it lasts forever, but so did the mat I have now; I got it probably fifteen years ago. Anyway, I'm excited to have a space to practice yoga without rolling up the carpet, and to row when it's too yucky to run outdoors - although getting outside has its own magic not to be discounted.

And the stuff. Oy, the stuff. So much stuff to sift and sort through, purge, organize. I just finished all our bags, backpacks, sheets, curtains, off-season clothes, and outgrown clothes (four huge boxes now sit in the van to go to consignment). I'm about halfway through the sheaves of paperwork from Jake's school years and life in general. I have several tubs best called Small Toys and Pieces and Parts to Toys, plus a few cardboard record boxes full of kids' artwork from the early naughts. And just endless junk on these two large shelves that needs to either get purged or properly stored. The paperwork, the shelves, and cleaning Jake's loft upstairs (I still have to remove about 70 percent of the toys that are up there, and go through some stuff that is Katie's) are on the agenda for this week in the evenings when I'm not working. This weekend, I hope to get to the basement pantry - old herbs, most of which need chucking, actual pantry items, stored kitchen items like the wok, dehydrator, and salmon poaching pan from Matt's mom, and books. Books books books and more books. We need to decide what to keep and what to do with the rest of it. I have already donated about twelve book boxes to the library - nice stuff, too, we're talking kids' picture books and hardcovers and so on. I want to keep a reference library but I also want to pass things on and have space. I may sell some used on Amazon and then just donate what doesn't sell or what isn't worth money.

If I can get all that done, the following weekend will be fabric. I need to take it all out of its bins, wash it and refold it, chuck what smells like mildew, sell a bunch of it, and sew up the rest into Christmas presents. It is so exciting to finally be able to get into this space and get it organized. All because it doesn't have a river running through it now.

Dry basement!

2010-11-15T08:02:00.000-05:00

Okay, crossing my fingers here, big-time. And I promise photos are coming, although I'm now wishing I'd taken them throughout the process so I could do a tutorial.

We have a full sump-pump installation. Or, 95% of the way there - we have to install a GFCI outlet for it, the extension cord is a temporary solution.

The basement is drying out! Here is where the finger-crossing comes in. When we had just our temporary pump-in-a-bucket setup, all the other trickles and damp spots dried out, so I'm hoping that with the large sump pump liner and huge pump down deep in the hole, it will be even better. We are getting quite a rainstorm later this week, so we will get to see the effects of our efforts then.

And I should say, mostly of Matt's efforts. I had to sit a lot of this one out, but was brought in for consulting at various points in the project. He did all the digging, though. And we had to install the liner twice, no, three times, total, so he shoveled out the hole three times. Why, you ask? Well, it came without holes in it, and we assumed by looking at the pump installation manual that we were to drill large holes in the top of the liner. But, then we would have had four large waterfalls into the basin, and the force of water underneath it pushed the entire liner up out of its hole. Unless Matt was standing in it, but that's no way to run a sump pump and stay alive. So, we pulled it all out, Matt shoveled out 500 pounds of gravel, and we did some googling, and saw that the basement fixer folks we almost paid an insane amount of money to do what we just did, had a bunch of small holes in the liner, like a sieve. Made more sense to us, so we did that and covered up the large holes - which we figured were there for a pipe from the drain tile that would constantly feed a stream of water into the liner. Not our setup.

Finally, with the liner snug in the hole, we piled marble chips and then gravel all around it. No more physics pushing it up and out. Pesky physics! Always getting in the way. So now, the hole fills with water from the surrounding area underneath our slab. The pump's float valve floats upward, triggers the pump to start, and in about thirty seconds the pump has emptied the water to a level where the float valve triggers the pump to go off again. Not sure what to do about the short cycles, but we'll just replace the pump as needed. And we got the super heavy-duty industrial pump, just like the basement contractors use.

Very exciting. Now we have a (hopefully) dry basement and a heat source down there (our vent-free propane heater - complete with life-saving CO detector!). Winter is looking a whole lot different. Next weekend and over Thanksgiving break, my goal is to get all the crap purged from the basement and get it set up as a playroom/sensory room for the winter. And, oh yeah, a sewing room for me. I'm going to sell off a ton of fabric and use up the rest of it. I am sort of ridiculously excited about all of this!

And the ultimate goal? We're rethinking getting into a significant amount more debt for the addition. Wondering if between constructing the loft ourselves (look for posts with pics around Christmas break, as I think that is going to be our task!) and finishing the basement (if it dries out, we may pour a radiant slab over the current slab and truly finish the space), we can get 75% of the way to our needs. Still required? A second bathroom for the teen girl, an office with a door that shuts for me, and more kitchen space. But we have some ideas about how to do that for a lot less than our previous addition plan.

Getting ready for winter.

2010-11-07T19:11:00.000-05:00

We've been really busy getting the homestead buttoned down for the upcoming winter. Tonight: sleet, rain and snow mixed are coming our way. Yay! Seriously, after tonight it's looking good for the week. Low 50s and sunny right into the weekend.

I've been tackling the basement, trying to get it cleaned, purged and organized. It's coming along slowly but surely. Today, Matt took over down there, borrowed a hammer drill, and chiseled out a hole in the floor. This week, in between teaching at night and full-time during the day, he'll head to the hardware store and buy a sump pump and sump pump liner and cover, and install it in the hole to help dry out the basement. We're optimistic, but it remains to be seen whether it will dry the entire basement. We may need a second one for a different area that gets wet as well. Banking on the "lens effect" - that the pump will lower the water table enough that the other areas will dry out as well.

We have a vent-free propane heater (and carbon monoxide detector!) down there for heat when we need it, but if it dries out we will consider pouring a radiantly-heated slab over the original slab and finishing it. We are considering a plan B (or are we to plan BB by now?) if we don't get approval for the addition loan in the spring. And just toying with how frugally we can achieve our space goals. We could finish the basement, put an office, sensory space and den down there, floor in the loft so the kids' rooms would be up there, and add a master bedroom and second bath. Then our current bedroom and my office space could become the living room and the living room would be converted to the dining room, allowing us to expand the kitchen. We have all winter to play around and think of ideas, but we're leaning toward having the loft floored in fully as soon as possible. This way, Katie will be a lot more comfortable this winter - and so will Jake. He has actually been playing in his room more and using the computer he inherited from Katie now that she has her Macbook. In fact, he's up there playing Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo right now! With the loft floored in, we could hang our new Sky Chair up there for him, and he'd have a bit more room to spread out with his toys.

I did some serious decluttering up there today, but there's still so much more to do. I moved his train table to storage and moved his beanbag chair and TV/bookshelf to a space next to his computer and near his bed, freeing up the area in front of his toy shelves for some floor space to play. He can play trains on the floor; he never really used the table anyway. Now I just have to put back all the board games he dumped out and declutter the massive amounts of "tiny pieces" that are up there. We have a good bit of room in our storage shed, and I have a feeling whatever I decide not to actually throw out, will end up in there. I'm planning to keep only cars, trains, and board games. Oh, and his cash register - he loves it.

So, we've been very domestic lately. I love having the house cleaned, purged and organized for winter, as our time outdoors dwindles with the shortening days. It feels cozy and welcoming with everything clean and spare. We're getting there.

Falling further...

2010-10-18T14:00:00.000-05:00

Fall is flying by! I can hardly believe it. I love this time of year - post-peak, with navy blue mountains and bright yellow leaves remaining on a few trees. Stark, dropping into darkness, the woodstove crackling and wool socks a wardrobe staple.

We've been tackling fall projects one by one, and sometimes two by two. Dog fence: check. (Although he doesn't yet understand that there is a world outside the original fence boundary, sigh.) Chicken coop: check. (But they need more straw bales because they are cold and miserable.) Wood stacked on porch: in progress. And we still need to buy a cord or two of seasoned wood to get us through the second half of winter. Pool away: almost check. It's getting there - rain has hampered this process.

A month and a half into the school year and I'm only just getting into a routine with writing again. There has been a lot going on, and I'm trying to be gentle with myself. Katie seems to have developed a peanut allergy (allergist appointment is scheduled for tomorrow); I've had quite a few goals for Jake and Burke that have come to fruition or are well on the way; I've not felt well - and am trying to nail down the reason(s) for this and think I'm close to finding them and addressing them. Don't get me wrong, I've been working - just not at the efficiency level I would like to be or feel I need to be. But I can feel the wheels of routine churning in a more rhythmic fashion by the day, and I'm grateful for that. I love my work; I love routine; I love predictability. I'm learning more about myself daily.

Pics of fall projects coming soon, promise! Meanwhile, check out what's been going on with Jake and Burke.

28th of September.

2010-10-04T16:28:00.002-05:00

peak2010-3, originally uploaded by bodhimama.

Peak has come and gone, but it's still lovely out. I caught this light on the back mountain while we were pressing cider. More to come when I have a moment to catch up. Life is swirling past in the crisp falling leaves.

Autumn arrives.

2010-09-24T08:06:00.000-05:00

Suddenly, the trees are turning. Things went from luscious shades of green to golds, reds, oranges, yellows and rusts - seemingly overnight. The Harvest Moon was full and heavy on Wednesday night, coinciding with the Autumn Equinox. I love this time of year. Just love it. It's my absolute favorite.

Every other year our apple trees produce a ton of fruit. This year is an "on" year. Tonight, Matt's friend and coworker is coming by with a pickup truck and a cider press, and we'll gather apples and make cider. I am going to the corn maze field trip first, so I suspect I may need a nap somewhere in between - but instead it will be Afternoons With Jake as I watch him in his orange sweatshirt, which blends in too well with the foliage. K has a soccer game, so Matt will go with her to that and then come home in the late afternoon, I'm guessing somewhere between 5:30 and 7 pm depending on what time her game starts (schedule says one thing, she says another!).

Apple picking will be a blast; I can't wait. Saturday brings our new Weekly Financial Discussion where we enter receipts into a Google spreadsheet we created last week and plan next week's spending and menu plan. I had a grand plan to make a six-week menu with recipes and shopping lists, but honestly, taking it week by week is working pretty well right now. If we can just plan what we're going to eat ahead of time and do the bulk of the shopping weekly, that's all that really matters. The dip-in-every-day-and-buy-something-to-cook-for-dinner was costing a ton, however European it is. We still had to restock a few things - I think we still had three trips to the smaller stores this week. But we bought the bulk of what we needed at the supermarket on Sunday, so it saved us money. Our planned meals lasted longer than planned, so we're ahead of the game that way. Beef stew lasted us three nights, and we ate steak last night, which wasn't on the plan. Tonight we'll roast a chicken and tomorrow I'll make stock with the carcass plus some necks and feet from the freezer. I like the routine of that and making stock on Saturday (even though I'm home during the week) appeals to me, so I think we might make that a ritual for Friday/Saturday.

As you can tell, right now it's all about establishing routines, fine-tuning our home life. Not much is happening on the animal-keeping front. Getting ready for winter is also high on the priority list and tomorrow will be a busy day for that. We need to tear down the chicken coop and clean it out, putting the chicken droppings on the garden plot. I would love to build a raised bed. We need to finish cleaning up the waterers and kennels from the meat birds, then store for winter. Oh and our pool! It needs to get put away. It's sitting outside with a few inches of water still in it and has been for two weeks. Blech!

So all of that, plus deciding what to do about the dog fence (whether we're extending Burke's boundary, how many splices we need, how much wire, and so on) so that I can order those supplies, plus getting the loft construction on the schedule. I really can't wait for the loft to happen and hope we can get it done within a week or two. Then I can focus on setting up Jake's space and Katie can focus on what she wants her space to look like. I think she'll need a new bed frame - the IKEA Hemnes daybed that she has, is already falling apart (the drawers have never worked right, and we're on our second replacement for them!) and we'll have to take it apart to get it out of her room (the door is small). Once that happens I can tell you I will not want to put it back together.

Getting ready for winter.

2010-09-12T08:28:00.000-05:00

I made two quarts of elderberry tincture in 100-proof vodka the other day, and cooked up the rest of the harvested berries in water, then strained them and mixed the resulting juice with local honey for some elderberry syrup. I may freeze some of the syrup in flu-packs - enough to defrost per cold/flu that runs through the house. There are more elderberries ready, which I will either freeze or dehydrate - I haven't quite decided! I might try dehydrating them because I haven't done it before.

Yesterday we drained the pool, Matt mowed, and I dragged out my yarn and patterns and started assessing what I will knit for winter. It was gorgeous, but I'm fighting a recurrence of shingles, so I had to work a little, then rest. Knitting and reading Plot and Structure (about writing novels) fit the bill for the rest periods. Today I think we're heading to Matt's baseball game, because otherwise it's me home with the kids dealing with a cranky Jake. Being out and about tends to keep him happier even though he is fighting a cold. I'll bring the knitting.

We've had a lot of issues with Jake wandering, which I'll update on the Autist blog very soon. So we also spent some time printing, laminating and hanging STOP signs around the border of our couple of acres of mowed "yard" - to help him not head down the hill to the brook. But it's made the decision about the dog fence easier. We'll keep it around the couple of mowed acres as it is now, put up boundary flags to help both Burke and Jake respect the boundary, and try to teach Burke to alert (bark) should Jake go past the boundary. He used to do exactly this, but we discouraged it because Jake was okay going down to the bottom of the hill and not further than that early in the summer.

Still so much to do -- we really need to downsize the chicken flock and get their coop reclaimed for wood, and get the wood cut, split and stacked. But right now, the chaos in my house has reached a fever pitch, so I am going to check out now.

Back to school.

2010-08-31T07:43:00.000-05:00

Matt and the kids started back to school yesterday. I've made a list of the things I had been putting off because of the addition, and am going to tackle some of them without worrying about the fact that we'll be tearing it all out and changing it in the spring. I just cleaned out half our pantry/food storage, and will do the other half (a different shelf) soon. Matt and I cleaned out our "bookshelf," which is really additional kitchen storage, and reorganized everything. We got rid of the "junk container" (no drawer for junk to be had!). That felt really good. Also reorganized the storage shelves in the living room.

Today my goal, after taking care of some work, is to completely revamp my office. I have this very smelly and snagged rug under my feet that annoys me daily. Tomorrow I will go to the big city for some shopping and will buy myself a chair pad to replace this, as well as hopefully (if I can afford it) a new chair. I'm going to shift my desk and move the bookshelf that's tucked in the corner here, hopefully allowing myself more access to shelving. And all the stacks of papers need going through, shredding and sorting.

Katie got a Macbook for her birthday/graduation gift (lucky girl!) and with it I got a $50 Canon multifunction printer (lucky me!). There was a good rebate program going on. I had a cheap multifunction Brother, but it had a very anemic document feeder. This one has a document feeder that rocks, and it prints much better pictures and is much snazzier at scanning. My goal is to deep file the archival paperwork in the basement, and to start scanning and shredding bills so that I can keep a more paperless office. I hate having musty file cabinets everywhere, and my file cabinet is getting overly full anyway. I have a huge pile of paperwork to sort through in the basement, still, which is also on the fall projects list.

So without further adieu, I'll share my fall projects list. Oh wait, one more update: we got a price on the loft, and it seems to be a good one. Just sitting with it for a bit to make sure we really want to lose the cathedral ceiling - going through the what-ifs. (What if we can't afford to put an addition on, is the big one!) And we got a price on the slab in the basement, which was more expensive than it would be to do it when we do the addition anyway. So we think we're gonna wait on the slab/radiant in the basement, dig out and install a sump pump to see how dry that gets it, and carefully use the vent-free heater down there (with sensitive CO detector right above it!) to heat things up for some sensory fun as needed. And put the money that we would have put toward that, toward debt instead to improve our credit score for the loan.

Fall projects:

Clean and reorganize office
Reorganize kids' toys upstairs
Reorganize/declutter "bookshelf" when you first come in the door (sort of a hats/mittens/catchall area)
Buy wire and extend Burke's electric fence area
Build a raised bed or two with cold frame capability, plant lettuces, kale, chard and cabbage
Rip down chicken coop, restore to woodshed status (improving "curb appeal")
Stack wood in woodshed
Set (much prettier) A frame chicken coop on hay bales, attach to half of woodshed - which will become a covered "winter chicken area" (open air, but no snow on ground) - this is hard to explain but it will basically look much better this way
Cull chicken flock from 17 to around 7
Finish cleaning out and reorganizing basement
Finish cleaning out shop and get it set up/heated for winter

There's more, I'm sure. Matt's in the middle of installing a radio/CD player in my van, replacing the nonfunctioning one. I will take the van for a tranny fluid change and possibly have a tranny cooler installed while I'm at it. The Subaru needs snow tires. I want to clean out under the porch so that it looks a little better for the spring appraisal, oh and button up the crap that's up against the side of the garage (ie, get rid of it). There is soooooo much to do!

A fresh design.

2010-08-23T07:58:00.000-05:00

It's amazing, what a little time, space and outside perspective can do to a floorplan. We started chugging along on the loft and radiant heat in our current basement. We have a carpenter who should get back to us any day with an estimate for flooring in the loft, using 6x6 beams and making it post-and-beam style, because otherwise our ceiling will only be seven feet high like it is in the office and bedroom. We will likely hire him to do it, but it depends on cost - we may see if Matt can do part of it, or work alongside the carpenter.

We also have a concrete guy coming this afternoon to take a look at the basement. But, we're leaning toward waiting on pouring the slab down there, and just installing one or two sump pumps ourselves this fall to help keep things dry. We're concerned that without doing the exterior drainage and waterproofing, the basement will just continue to be wet, and the radiant and new slab will get ruined. And then there's the new plan.

Yes, the new plan. A friend and I were talking about the addition, and I was bemoaning the need for a second set of stairs, and expressing concern over having the kids' bedrooms in the daylight basement - one feature that has remained constant through all our designs. And then there is the reality of the appraisal: we got a copy of it from the bank, and apparently they don't count the basement level, no matter how far above ground or how finished, the same as the main level of the house. So they appraised what will be a 4-bedroom, 2-bath, 2000 sf house as a 2-bedroom, 1-bath, 1466 sf house with a "50% finished basement" (figuring our current basement would remain unfinished, which it wouldn't so I don't even understand that). Well, no wonder it came in low!

I haven't talked to the loan person at the bank yet (there were some other errors on the appraisal, and I'm hopeful that at the least, the bank will eat the appraisal fee), but my memory is telling me that in fact, she has mentioned that they "count the daylight basement differently" - I just was completely unaware how much we'd be penalized for it. So I think this is something nonnegotiable, at least with this bank.

But my friend came up with an idea - a great idea. We started talking about whether we'd go to a two-story design, and she slid the addition along the house, placing it where my office area is now. This would allow us to use the existing stairs to access the kids' bedrooms, which would be in the second story of the addition with a bath. The current, floored-in loft would become our bedroom - so we'd be closer to the kids, but not right on top of them. You'd come upstairs to a landing area, do a 180-degree turn, and face the hallway to the new addition with our room on the left. It's hard to explain but I'll upload a drawing soon. I need to find out from David if there is something I am clueless about that means we can't do this, and I'm waiting for my new all-in-one printer/scanner/fax in hopes that it will be less crochety than my current one.

In any case, what that would allow us to do is to make the 16x30 main floor *all* kitchen and dining room, and our current kitchen and living room would become all living room and den - with the addition of some windows and/or a french door that maximizes the view there. The spaces would be connected somewhat, as the kitchen would open onto my office area, which would become the mudroom, with the living room beyond. We'd end up with more functional living room space, instead of a small "living room" tacked onto the end of the kitchen and dining, and a separate, disconnected "media room/den" upstairs.

I love the new design. It feels right. We'll probably still put a full basement under, with large egress windows on the downhill side, and finish it for a playroom/sensory room/"man cave." We may not need to do the radiant slab in our current basement at all - which would save a lot of time (emptying the entire thing) and expense. And we could wait and see how the drainage work improves the current basement before deciding whether to pour the new slab and heat it. It makes sense on many, many levels. And the second story maximizes the view. What we give up? Cathedral ceilings. An easy compromise in my view, especially with post and beam style ceilings.

Plan B time.

2010-08-14T08:42:00.000-05:00

We found out on Tuesday that we didn't qualify for the PMI. They don't like more than 10-acre parcels, mostly, and a couple of other reasons that are too private to share. But basically, PMI companies are insanely picky and hard to please these days. Pooh on them. So much for us stimulating the local economy!

So it's Plan B time. We'll break ground on the FirstDay in the spring, hopefully. In the meantime we'll put ourselves in a stronger financial and time position for that, should we have to finance more of the project up front. And we'll floor in the loft and pour a slab in the basement over radiant tubing, as well as partially finish the basement - we'll see how far we get, but my idea is to at the very least plaster the walls and possibly move all the utility stuff (washer, dryer, well pump etc.) to a more compact area that can be walled off from the rest of the basement. If we can swing it, we'll put down inexpensive laminate for flooring.

We'll plan where the future bathroom will go and have the plumber come and rough in the fixtures before the slab is poured, as well.

What will be nice: Katie will gain more floor space; Jake will gain a sensory area in the basement; we can have a "satellite" office area down there for me; our basement will be clean and organized; we can store things that really shouldn't be in the basement like photos and off-season clothing, in the new loft area eaves; we'll have some of the project done before spring! We can hit the ground running then; I'll apply for the loan super early and we'll already have everything in hand, including final plans with the new extra bedroom, and we'll have an existing loft and semi-finished, heated basement to add square footage.

With ten days left till Matt starts school, we have a long list of tasks to do, still. Clean the basement, call a carpenter to help with the loft, call all the subs and tell them the project is on hold, line up the slab pour, get the radiant tubing and mesh and sump pumps, pay the septic designer and excavator for the work they've done, talk to the plumber about roughing in the plumbing before the slab pour, and more.

But, one big disappointment for us was that we put travel plans on hold for this summer because of the addition, and now we're talking about being tied here for all of next summer actually building the addition. So we're considering spending some of next week taking a camping trip, perhaps up to Maine (because we don't have enhanced driver's licenses so can't even go to Canada! and it takes two weeks to get them). We'll see. We're going to talk and plan later today.

It's been a week of shifting expectations and facing a major downshift in terms of our plans for the next few months. Overall, I think it's a good thing. We were starting to feel almost panicky about spending every weekend from now till Christmas break working on getting the shell up, with Matt teaching full-time plus two nights a week at the community college. And financially there were a few contingencies that were leaving us feeling pushed to the limit there, too. We get some time to take care of all of that and we still get to do some of the project now and gain more livable space in here for winter.

Plans in hand.

2010-08-07T16:40:00.000-05:00

We got the final plans from FirstDay in the mail today. Exciting! We are having to relocate the bathroom, because there is a post smack in the middle of where we had it. Oops! But it will work out to push it into the corner - bye-bye pantry, but we may not need it with as large a pantry as we'll have upstairs. And if we do, we'll relocate it into the corner where the stairs are now.

Bonus, we'll gain a window in the bathroom -- it is already there. We'll lose a little more basement space, but it's totally workable. Still have to figure out where we will put the radiant manifold, pumps, and hot water heater.

Now the bad news: the bank made a mistake and thought the appraisal was higher than it was. It came in low enough that we have to get approved for a small amount of PMI - now, if the house appraises higher at the end of construction, it will be fine, but we have to get approved up front. So we're waiting on that. We have our own plans to avoid PMI - we submitted the plan without the fourth bedroom or square footage of a fully-floored loft - and we think we'll be in fine shape at the end of the construction process (and hopefully the housing market will improve?).

I've been feeling really anxious and down about this turn of events, and waiting till Tuesday has been stressful. But today Matt came up with a great Plan B. If we don't get approved for the bank loan, we'll flip our plans: this summer and fall, we'll floor in the loft, giving Katie far more square footage in her room. Jake's room will stay teeny, because he really doesn't use it much. We'll pour the slab over radiant tubing in the current basement and have a cleaned-out, heated basement! (We'll also pre-plumb the future bathroom.) Jake's sensory stuff can go down there, so he can have a space for this winter. We can probably even lay laminate flooring down there.

Then, in the spring, we'll hit the ground running with the FirstDay addition and building the master bedroom, bigger bath, and mud room benches. We're also going to flip the window and door so that the door walks right into the mud room (it's a window now) and make our current front door a window. The door would then be closer to the steps - kind of nice in the winter!

Here's a scan of the prettier addition plans. Yes, the living room space is pretty small. It's just a little sitting area. For media, the loft - with bean bags spread on the floor and a comfy throw rug - will be the place to be.

Trust.

2010-08-03T10:02:00.001-05:00

So, the appraisal is back - and it's lower than we had hoped. But all is not lost. We now have to get approved for PMI - private mortgage insurance. Because at least it came back that with our (inflated) budget for the addition, we are at 90% of projected value. And as she put it, there is an appraisal at the end of the process, so if the housing market improves at all between now and next spring, it could come back fine then, and we won't have to pay PMI.

But, we have cut our budget down, we just didn't submit that to the bank because we wanted to try for a little cushion. Our bare-bones budget comes in around $5,000 over what we need it to come in at, given our current appraisal, if we don't want to have to pay PMI. At the worst, figure we have to borrow the extra $5,000 and then pay it down as quickly as possible so the PMI goes away.

It's motivation to stay under budget, is how I am looking at it. Oh, and one big factor: we didn't put in any modifications to our current house because we didn't want to have to get that done to close the loan. So he put what will be a fourth bedroom in as a dining room. If we can get that done before we close, I'm sure it will help the value enough to cover our budget as written now.

So, I think we'll probably try to shave off $2,000 and make the septic system as small as we legally can - a 3-bedroom versus a 5-bedroom. That's the remaining decision. That, and whether we can truly get the bathroom in the current basement or if that is going to cost us a lot of extra money.

To my post title: a lot of this is about trust. Trusting that this will work out, that we will be able to get the mortgage at closing at a reasonable rate. It's also about thrift: we're rocketed into debt payoff mode to raise our credit score, we're selling off everything we can to ensure we can do that, and we're really motivated to keep the costs as low as possible without sacrificing quality.

Bye-bye, soapstone counter fantasy. You were probably best left as a fantasy. I think it's cheap IKEA butcherblock, sealed with Waterlox so we can do an undermount sink (a Ticor from overstock.com, inexpensive but quality). Bye-bye, cork flooring and four-zone radiant heat. Hello, two simple closed radiant systems for the slabs, and more chopping wood. Maybe we'll do cork later, or maybe we'll find a way to afford it anyway. We'll see. It's all about compromise!

Things are moving quickly.

2010-07-30T22:13:00.000-05:00

We're still holding our breath and hoping that the appraisal comes in where we need it to; we had the appraiser here yesterday.

We have finalized plans. I have uploaded scans of the not-quite-final plans, and David is working on the final ones as of today (I hope). I'll walk you through them. First we have the main floor of the addition. We actually have tweaked the kitchen design slightly since drawing this, and have decided to beef up the radiant heat and put it in the first floor as well as the basement slab. I am wondering if we should just leave out the woodstove and make the kitchen more of an L shape and a bit shorter. It's something to think about - fairly quickly, I think, because we'll order cabinets early on in the process. We also decided, after reading about island cooktops and issues with venting - especially given that it's also our dining and living room and has a cathedral ceiling - to put a 36-inch range along the outer wall nearish the door, and make the island one huge prep space (maybe with a small prep sink in it). Lots of reasons for that, including that more time is really spent prepping than cooking, as far as interacting with guests. So here is that plan:

That's a pantry along the back, and you can see where it connects to our current house. Here's the current house, which right now has a cathedral ceiling over half the space and a loft over half. We will completely floor in the loft, then close in a master bedroom. Additional plans not drawn here are to pull the bathroom wall out to the level of the master bedroom, making that cramped bathroom bigger, and change the location of the door to my office to accommodate that. It will mean slightly smaller mud benches, but we're okay with that.

I hope you can get a sense of how it will all connect. I'm really excited about the master bedroom, as right now ours is that small space in the upper left corner - what will become my office.

Downstairs, we did some tweaking, too. We'll end up pouring a slab with radiant in the entire basement of the old house. So we decided to give the kids bigger rooms, and put the bathroom to the right of the stairs, like so:

Don't worry, they will have windows! I just forgot to draw them in my hurry to see what size it made sense to make the rooms. The rectangles in between the rooms are closets. The amorphous shapes on the far wall of the current basement are our well pump, hot water heater, washer, and dryer. There's also a slop sink and a freezer along that wall. In the corner is my pantry. I'm willing to slim it down or give it up if needed for the kids to have bigger bedrooms. We originally had the bath in the addition space. But this seems to make better use of the space we have. The big open area of the basement will be sensory space for Jake, and maybe the treadmill and rower will go down there.

The loft will become a media area, on the tunnel-y side that won't have windows - we'll put beanbags and pillows on the floor and hang the TV on the far wall, because the walls slope down so far that will make the best use of the space. And then the other half of it may house the treadmill (that we don't own yet) and the rower, and will definitely contain a desk and office area for Matt.

I'm really excited, but I am still waiting to hear about that appraisal. Should be Monday or Tuesday. Then, title search on Wednesday, during the four hours the town hall is open. And then, we close - and can get started! Which reminds me, we need to pick our excavator and concrete subs. Waiting for bids from a few of them.

Decisions, decisions.

2010-07-21T18:15:00.001-05:00

It's time to finalize the design of the addition and it's hard to commit to final choices! We need to decide whether we want to do 16x30 or whether 20x30 makes more sense for our needs, and is worth the money and extra construction time and complications. We need to decide exactly where the bathroom will be on the kids' daylight basement level. And, we need to one hundred percent decide where we are putting the addition in relation to the house. Our big question about that today revolved around the staircase in the middle of our current living room, and where the master bedroom will be (current kitchen? upstairs loft? or where it is now?) and where a "media room" will be, as we want to take the TV out of the living room. But most importantly, the question was, if we put the staircase in the current basement, don't we have to insulate and heat that basement?

The answer: yes, at least partly. We've decided that in the next couple of weeks, before the foundation is poured, we'll clean out the current basement (which is cluttered with all kinds of stuff, storage since we don't have closets). And we'll add the cost of pouring a new slab over the current one in the basement, laying radiant tubing into it before the pour. So, we'll gain a heated basement underneath the current house - a dry one, too, as we'll add two sump pumps in the wettest parts of the basement, and our excavation and grading sub will grade the house and add perimeter drains around it. We'll bury foam insulation around the exterior of the house, under the porch, to help insulate it against the cold much the way the snow should (but can't because of the porch overhang).

To avoid all these decisions, I've been obsessing over the kitchen design - drooling over soapstone countertops and perhaps a sink (probably out of our budget, but fun to dream!) and fussing over the cabinets. Our kit comes with the kitchen cabinets, "a reasonable amount," says David (I think ours are a reasonable amount) so I asked for details on their construction and brand - Armstrong, oak, 3/4" with thinner door insets, frame style. I looked them up on the Armstrong website and am happy. Hey, for basically "free," I can't be too much of a complainer! More money for soapstone, right? I was worried about all the fussy interior fittings I want, because David was cheeky about such things and suggested they'd cost quite a bit to add on. But I have a friend who sells cabinets and does kitchen design, so I'm hoping I can just order the fittings later through her company (they sell Armstrong). They do have everything I want - mainly pull-out garbage and recycling, drawer organizers, and maybe some pull-out shelves.

And I want to paint the cabinets, because we have so much wood in the house already that I think I would welcome painted cabinets as a contrast. Since the kitchen will be open to the living room, it's kind of a big commitment. And since there's so much warm wood, color isn't as straightforward as it seems. Anything too ashen will look out of place, with too much contrast. Right now my top three colors are dark green/teal, burgundy or maroon, and cream. Like these:

(I think this is my favorite, today, anyway.)

(possibly more red and less purple-y)

more red like this - actual First Day kitchen!

Our style will be simple Shaker though, and I'm not sure if what makes these work is the tobacco glazing and the door details. I like a cleaner, more modern look.

Right now I'm loving the first pic. I think we won't have uppers, just stainless shelving, because we'll have room for uppers only on each end of the long wall of cabinets. In the middle I'd like to have two big windows over the sink, then we'll have a hood over the range. So to the right of the hood and to the left of the windows and sink are the only two upper spots. I think open shelving will give us storage without cluttering the wall up with cabinets - especially since it's a cathedral ceiling and open to the dining and living room areas.

Then along the wall that attaches to our current house, we'll have our fridge and a pantry, tucked into the space between the start of the FirstDay bent and the current house. Hard to explain, hard for me even to visualize. It will be two feet deep, so the fridge will stick out a bit. But I think it will work. Perhaps we'll build out the cabinet a bit so that it houses the fridge within it. I'm not sure if we can, due to a door we need to put in there to access the porch.

So many little and big decisions! We're sitting with more ideas today, and I hope that tomorrow we'll have the time and energy to nail things down and get David working on final plans. Certainly by Friday, I'd like to be able to call him with our final decisions. But it's scary! The color of my kitchen cabinets is the least of it, but the most fun for me to think about.

Chugging along.

2010-07-16T07:36:00.000-05:00

We met with David again yesterday. He came up here to see the site. And, he came up with an idea to put the addition in a different place than we had planned. It makes sense, and it helps the addition relate to the current house more gracefully while still taking advantage of the eastern and southern light and views. We're chewing on it for a few days. The nice bit of info I received is that he has kits ready to ship pretty much immediately, since we put down our deposit and are doing something really simple, and since they just purchased a large amount of kit materials to fill their orders.

He also redesigned things so we can do a still-smaller addition. We are now looking at adding a single 16 by 30 story on the daylight basement. I think this makes a ton of sense, and will make construction simpler and easier as well as saving us a chunk of money. I love how he thinks, and that he cares about not putting us in too much house. We should be able to heat the whole thing with our current woodstove, perhaps supplemented a bit with a coil going to a radiator in the "old" house and a couple of small electric space heaters. Of course, we'll have radiant in the slab in the kids' space, and we may put radiant in the slab in the current basement as well at some point.

One major design change, besides moving the addition to a different part of the house, was putting the stairs in the current house. This allowed a ton of possibilities to open up - a mud room/area when you come in, keeping our main front porch, keeping our deck (although it needs rehabbing) and side porch while not seeing the deck from the addition. And still being able to get the new part shelled in and the kids' space finished, kitchen in after that, then close on our new mortgage and work on redoing the current house next summer.

My biggest fear with the new design is that if we run out of steam and don't get to redo the current house, I will not have an office with a door that shuts. But, I know I just need to be patient - that may be another year away, and I may have to continue to work here, my work space open to the "media room" that we will create out of where our kitchen is now. There will be enough other spaces that if someone wants to watch TV while I'm working, they can go somewhere else. That's my thought process right now, anyway.

We received our good faith estimate in the mail yesterday. It's signed and the check is paperclipped to it; I'm on my way to the bank in a few minutes to drop it off. I contacted the title search attorney, who actually was our closing attorney when we purchased the house. The title search should be quick, easy and cheap - we just need to get the appraisal done first so we're sure we can move ahead. Our foundation/site work/septic contractor is putting us on his list for the first or second week in August, and he is coming by this afternoon to look at David's new sketches and give us a revised estimate for everything. We will be able to make the septic leachfield smaller since we're not adding as many bedrooms as in our original plan, which is another nice feature of being able to make things smaller.

I love how the addition (and budget!) keeps shrinking and shrinking, while our space keeps making more and more design sense. It's exciting!

The ball is rolling.

2010-07-12T20:51:00.000-05:00

We finally handed in the loan app today. Well, the half of it that wasn't complete - the estimates (we are already done with the financial side of things). Now, we wait. And we sign the Good Faith Estimates the second they arrive, and we dig up the name of the title search attorney from when we purchased this home so that we can hopefully hurry that end of things along.

On Thursday David from FirstDay will come up here to see the site and help us finalize a design. We're contacting additional contractors and gathering estimates for plumbing, concrete, excavation, septic and electric. Oh, and roofing. And tile...although I may end up doing the tile myself as I did in our current bathroom. And kitchen cabinets - we're not sure if we'll use the FirstDay ones or not.

I'm feeling particularly exhausted tonight. It's all taking a toll - juggling work, the chaos of kids and Matt home for summer, the pressure of trying to get the addition up before winter when we won't even be starting until August. I just want to crawl into bed and sleep and not have anything to do for a while.

The weather has been fantastic. I want to enjoy it, but there is this little voice asking, "Will it rain all of September and October? Will it start snowing in November?"

I'm trying to have faith, to see the positive, to leap and trust that it will all work out. Our plan is solid: we need a shell up before winter. We can do a lot of the work in the cold, inside the heated space, once it's shelled. And we can finish things up in the breaks in the weather during sugaring season, and side the house and renovate the current house next summer. It will all work out.

Plan C.

2010-07-01T20:57:00.000-05:00

We spent almost 6 hours with David of FirstDay Cottages today and although I'm too exhausted to write much tonight, we're both really excited about the way the addition is shaping up. David helped us think through some issues and had some great ideas about how to utilize our current space more efficiently to make the addition both smaller in some ways, and more grand in scope in others. The gist of it is that the kitchen/dining/living area will be a 20x30 foot addition directly attached to this house, with a cathedral ceiling and windows that maximize natural light and our view. And I just sat down to tally up the cost, and I'm about $20k under our budget. That's too cool. Leaves us plenty to hire some students to help pound nails.

Master bedroom, my office, a den/study, and guest space will be the functions of the current house, with exact layout still to be determined - and David's suggestion was to put the addition on this summer, finish it through the fall/winter, and then work on renovating the current house next summer, after we've had some time to think about the best layout. Makes sense to us, and breaks up the project into manageable chunks. And as far as the bank's concerned, it will be done before we even touch this house, so it makes closing on the loan within our timeframe more feasible.

The kids' bedrooms and a bath will still be on the daylight basement level, under the addition. With 20x30 feet they should have plenty of space.

We're very optimistic and excited. And exhausted. Did I mention that? There's lots of legwork to get moving as soon as possible. We're definitely starting this a bit late in the season, because of the completely nonlinear path we had to take to get here. But, we're here. Somewhere. Putting things into motion, and taking a leap. Together.

Full circle?

2010-06-30T21:15:00.000-05:00

We're going to meet with David of FirstDay Cottage tomorrow. We are considering adding on their smallest cottage, a 16x30 or 16x33'4" Original, plus a 16x6' breezeway, as our addition.

Yes, this year. Yes, building it ourselves. It's okay, tell us we're nuts. We can take it. We've heard it before.

As Matt put it, we are at Plan C.

Plan A: Add a log kit from the same manufacturer as our house. Failed: Because we came in $50-60K over budget. Still $20K over budget if we build it ourselves.

Plan B: Hire an architect to design a stick-built addition. Failed: Because once we saw their construction costs per square foot, we did the math ourselves, and realized what size our addition would be. Too small for what we want to put in it.

Plan C: Buy a FirstDay kit and attach it to the house ourselves. Advantage: In our budget, with complete radiant heat system. And, they'll design it for us, including telling us how to attach it to the log house (we hope!).

So, wish us luck. We're hopeful. After this, it's Plan D, and I don't know if that's building a crazy cordwood addition, or just building me a cabin in the woods to work in, or selling and moving to Belize. Because I know we can't do this one more year with my work going the way it's going.

Although, I admit to being scared about getting it all dried-in before winter, and wishing we'd figured this out before now, so we could have had the foundation poured in early June and hit the ground running when school got out. But realistically? We probably would have slacked anyway. We had my folks visiting last week, the first week of vacation. I was slammed with work this week. Next week M has a graduate class that will take him away for 5 full days. So if we can get the loan moving asap, and get them assembling the kit post-haste, we might be okay. Oh, and yes, we'll be building it ourselves, but we'll enlist a bit of help from builder-friends (paid help). The idea will be to do interior work over the winter. When? I have no idea.

And I think I might want to write a book about it all. Certainly I'll get blogging here more often as well.

Relief.

2010-06-16T11:10:00.000-05:00

We had an architect come out today, and relief describes how I feel about the result of our hour-long meeting with him. I am also really, really excited about getting to design the addition with a fresh eye.

We get to fill out what we want - bedrooms for kids, bathroom, office for me, possibly office for Matt, larger kitchen and larger living room - and they will present us with a variety (I think he said "seven") different scenarios and designs.

Wow. Imagine that. Just getting to pick out what we want to go with, a design that already incorporates our wants and needs.

He's optimistic that they can come in within our budget, which is so exciting. And like I said, I just felt a huge weight lifted off my shoulders. Someone else will do the work. Someone who went to school for it. Yes, we are DIYers, but we'll come in and do some finish work - it's silly to think we can design an addition without knowing anything about architecture, planning and design. Still, we did pretty well with the initial idea - he agrees that the addition should be where we have it. We just will need to make it a bit smaller and figure out how to use the space more creatively.

I can't wait to see the plans.

On a more homestead-y note (although what's more homestead-y than building your home?), we now have 50 meat chicks - Freedom Rangers. They're really cute. We have a broody Buff Orpington in there with them and she is so happy to be a mommy!

I'm tired and insanely busy with work. Tired verging on exhausted. Hoping to take some time off next week.

Growing pains.

2010-06-08T06:56:00.000-05:00

We just returned from a four-day weekend in Boston and Martha's Vineyard. It was fantastic - a relaxing and rejuvenating blend of romantic couple-time and reconnecting-with-friends time. I didn't want it to end. My parents watched our children, very generous of them considering it included flying up from Florida to do so.

I'm having some really big doubts about our addition. Mainly the part where we increase our mortgage by a sum too large to even share here. The oil spill makes me want to recommit to full-on homesteading like the folks we bought our tractor from: raising as much of our own food as we can, spending as little as possible in the market. I'm afraid we're really not those people, though - although I don't really know what I mean when I say that. I guess if I unpack it, I'm afraid first of all that Matt doesn't want to go there. I know he doesn't want to, he doesn't like caring for animals and running the tractor and all the just plain old daily grind, hard work part of it all. And then there's part of me that agrees. I'd rather spend my time writing, trade it for dollars, and use those dollars to pay someone else to grow my food.

But isn't that what we moved here for? Or is that what I moved here for? Was Matt ever fully on board? No. If I had the homesteading hubby extraordinaire, would I be willing to homestead? Yes. I'd love it and I'd jump right into it. I'm making peace with the fact that he isn't that person, but it requires a readjustment of my priorities.

Now, it's not that I'm not willing to borrow any money for the addition. I think realistically, if we waited until we had saved up enough, Katie would be off to college, and I think she deserves a decent-sized room, and I know I need a home office. But I'm contemplating whether we should reconsider how much of the labor we're willing to do ourselves. If we use structural insulated panels for the basement level, we can install them ourselves and just hire someone to pour the concrete into the forms. We could consider hiring someone simply to attach the kit to the current house and do most of the building of the kit ourselves (although, the one guy who is very quick at putting these up is charging a relatively small fee - I could write two feature articles and pay him, and that's tempting). Or who knows what other options we could consider. I'm just scared of what our mortgage will be once we do this, and I don't know how reasonable it is to increase our debt that much. It makes our lives less flexible.

So that's where I am. Growing pains. I want to step back, assess the three- and five-year plans, consider the ten- and twenty-year plans, with Matt. But it's the last week of school and life is insanely busy as usual, only a little more so than usual. At this point people are booking up for the season for building and I don't know if we can do it at all. I can't get Cheap Builder Guy to call me back. I'm frustrated with the whole endeavor.

Update from the Land of Snow.

2010-04-29T07:23:00.000-05:00

We woke up to this and a snow day yesterday:

It's half-melted already. Due to an impending deadline for me, our plan to play hooky today and go snowboarding at Jay Peak was thwarted. A shame, really.

I'm absolutely snowed under with work, gathering construction estimates and finishing financial paperwork for the addition (which will go right about where that deck is, partly!), and trying to maintain some semblance of order in the house. Not actual order, just something that might pass for cleanliness.

Right now I feel like I can't keep up with those responsibilities, never mind adding tending little baby plants or doing anything else requiring effort.

I'll be back soon - next week is looking brighter. For now, my head goes down, till I finish this piece.

Oh no! It's spring!

2010-04-08T07:45:00.000-05:00

I want turkeys x10. I want Freedom Ranger meat birds x50 but the current A-frame chicken tractor is too small. I have to start seeds - I buy tomato starts, but it's time to start some squash and pumpkins and I need to build a raised bed and plant greens - now! I have to call foundation people, builders, a structural engineer, and I don't even know who else. I still haven't finished or filed the taxes. If my ankle ever recovers, I'll be spending at least 6 hours a week training for a half-marathon.

AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

Deep breath. There. That's better.

I need to strike a balance here, between my writing work, the homesteading venture, the addition, and a bit of downtime and relaxation. This time of year always threatens that balance. I get excited, I overdo, and then I drown in work and frustration and overwhelm.

Balance. Moderation. These are my mantras right now.

Moving right along.

2010-04-05T21:38:00.000-05:00

Can a homesteading blog turn into a home renovation blog? Why not. It's all about home, right?

I finally mustered up the time and wherewithal to have a sit-down with someone at the bank about what we qualify for, building-loan wise, and how the process works. I found out that we are likely to qualify for the amount we need to build the addition onto our cabin! Exciting!

Now it's time to gather estimates from people. Hard work. Finding the right people is the hard part. I learned today that a rough estimate is okay. As usual, my perfectionism was getting in the way of getting started.

Time to get started!

Sugaring.

2010-03-21T19:19:00.001-05:00

There's the maple syrup we made yesterday.

Oh, I'm not going to apologize. Life has been incredibly busy. I haven't started seeds, nor built a raised bed. I have been very involved with a few writing projects and I have been working on getting the initial ball rolling on the addition (and need to get it rolling more quickly, this coming week).

But this weekend, we scrounged a handful of buckets and a half-dozen taps from a friend and Matt and I tapped a few of our many sugar maples. We put two up last night and four more today, including improvising buckets with food-grade pails. This afternoon we poured them all into a larger bucket and boiled the sap down over a turkey fryer burner out on the deck. It's kind of cool; we can check on it through the glass in the kitchen door. We finished it off on the stovetop and ended up with six ounces of incredibly complex and delicious grade A fancy maple syrup.

Very cool. Truly the best syrup I've ever tasted. Is that just because I made it?

We ordered a book on building our own evaporator and arch and for next season, we will go for it full force. We have 50-100 potential taps on our land.

Spring fever hits.

2010-02-18T09:18:00.001-05:00

This is how the season is shaping up:

March: Tap a few trees next month and boil down some syrup.

Start a tray of salad greens in the basement under lights, see how it goes.

April: 4-6 raised beds, +2 cold frames, build and fill. Plus start squash, pumpkin and cukes below. Start annual medicinal and ornamental flowers.

May: Till last year's garden, plant buckwheat as cover crop.
Rehabilitate front flower bed, fill with compost.

end of May:

Plant:

kale (2 or 3 kinds)
swiss chard (2 kinds)
mixed baby greens - 2 kinds. i do a baby lettuce and a mustard/lettuce mix.
romaine, possibly speckled or another kind of lettuce
onions
garlic in fall
pumpkin
summer squash
spaghetti squash
butternut squash
cukes, pickling and sliced
cabbage
buy tomato starts and plant (I just don't have much success from seed, not enough light)
plant medicinal and ornamental annuals in front flower bed

Weed other flower bed. Possibly till and cover crop the side bed, depending on whether we're adding on to the house this year or not.

March/April: Slaughter at least 12 of the 24 remaining chickens. Look at how many eggs we get, possibly split an order of chicks with someone to fill in so we have enough eggs.

get chicks in April: Raise 50 free-range meat birds, not the Frankenbirds but a heritage, slow-growing breed. Use our A-frame and electric net fencing to move them to fresh pasture every week or more (may need more fencing, I just don't want to move the whole thing too often). This should take four months, so we'll aim to start in April so they finish while Matt is still home to help slaughter/process.

September/October: It should be a big apple harvest year. Would like to get down there and prune next week. But certainly, this fall we'll pick what we have and use our friend's cider press to make both fresh and hard cider. More applesauce too.

We have 1/2 of a (very) small pig and are going in on 1/2 Highland beef so we should be set there. Possibly looking to buy a lamb this spring.

Oh - and how could I forget? Rip off the side of our cabin and add on. Ha! That's why the list above is "downsized" from last year.

Goodbye, sweet Dana Dog.

2010-01-19T10:49:00.001-05:00

We had to put our 15-year-old lab mix down last night. She had a nasosinal tumor that was likely cancerous and in the past couple of weeks she had been going downhill. Yesterday she was clearly in pain and having a rough time. We knew it was time.

We feel so lucky to have a farm vet who was able to come to the house. We all held her and told her we loved her, and she passed quickly and peacefully.

I got Dana when I turned 21 - she was an eight-week-old rescue from a high-kill shelter in Tennessee. She's been with us for her whole life. She was there when our kids were born at home; she has traveled with us from New York to Maryland to Washington to New Mexico to Washington again, to Alaska then Florida and finally Vermont.

Rest well, sweet dear Dana. Our hearts are with you on your journey. There will never be another dog as great as you.

Waffles for breakfast.

2010-01-10T16:17:00.006-05:00

The kids have been loving the waffles we make in the Vitamix and waffle stick maker ($10 at the grocery store about six years ago). It's really easy to whip up a batch of them, and any extras get frozen in "full waffle" form and are easily and quickly defrosted and cooked in the toaster.

We did a massive stockup at Costco and the resulting incredible amount of food led me to declutter the pantry today and get it all nice and set up. It's been really haphazard down there and there were many nonfood things mixed in with the food. And the shelves were gross and needed to be vacuumed off. I put shelf liner on as much as I could, but plan to buy a couple more rolls and do the rest. The shelves are very sturdy, but rough-hewn and unfinished.

There are even more shelves to the left that still need organizing, and my plan is to move the appliance storage, jars and extra plates and such to that side, and gain more room for home-canned foods - that category is currently at an all-time low. But this was a really good start. We don't have a lot of storage in the kitchen at all; just two small upper cabinets, one hard-to-access and tiny lower one, and a two-foot-deep wire shelf unit that is just to the left of the stove. In fact all of that is due for a major declutter and reorganize too, and I need to put shelf liner on the bottom of the food storage cabinets. That will have to be another day's project!

Shiny new year.

2010-01-04T07:51:00.002-05:00

Seriously? I last posted at the end of November? I am so sorry, faithful readers. December was simply a whirlwind. Wasn't it the same for you?

I have been reading over at my dear friend Val's blog, and find myself so incredibly inspired by her craftiness, creativity and the beauty of her blog - and of her life. I have grand plans now to start my own craft notebooks this week. What a great idea! And I think it's time to dust off the household notebook and freshen it up a bit.

It also seems like a good time to look at goals for the year, not surprisingly. For me, 2010 on the homestead looks like a lot of simplifying and streamlining. Not very much expansion. I really want to focus on finishing my novel, perhaps starting another (already have the idea for it in my head), finishing and submitting the essays that have been percolating in various drafts, and securing more meaningful, creative writing work for the bulk of my income. Those work goals and a massive garden and adding a few cows? Not gonna happen.

We're also kicking around the idea of traveling this summer. It would be the perfect time, as Katie has expressed that she is skipping the two-week circus camp she usually attends, this year. Although she wants to skip camp for a mellow summer at home, so maybe the idea of packing us all into the van and driving around the country won't appeal as much to her. We'll see. She's an adventurous one - it must be the sell-everything-and-put-her-in-a-backpack vibe she picked up during her first year of life, when we took our 1968 Volkswagen Bus to Alaska.

Back to homesteading goals. The big one for this year: put an addition on the house. We are quite desperate for more space. There is just no way to get around the fact that my eleven-year-old has a 5 by 8 foot room - only half of which you can stand in. It's like a prison cell. We can put Murphy beds everywhere, roll the table into the wall, use every Apartment Therapy trick in the book - but the reality is, we are 4 people and 2 dogs in a 720-square-foot house. It sounds like fodder for a reality TV show, doesn't it? Let's add in the fact that one of the people has autism and jumps around almost constantly. Yes, visitors here only last two to three days. Guests are always welcome! But at your own risk. And don't think you're going to stay up late and read unless you have a book light, because if one light is on, the entire house is awake with you.

We did make progress on carving out what space we do have - namely, cleaning out our basement. We now have a mini trampoline, gym mat and some of the kids' bulkier toys down there (things like the electric keyboard and whiteboard easel, not small pieces that can get spread on the floor). My goal is to get it completely organized and dry down there this year, and if we don't get approved for a construction loan, we'll definitely pursue finishing that space.

But the addition remains the big focus for 2010. I forgot about that when thinking about travel. We're planning to do a lot of the addition work ourselves, as much as is feasible and reasonable. I will post about it here, so the homesteading blog will turn into a bit of a construction/renovation blog. For starters, Northeastern Log is the company that made our current cabin kit, and we're working with them to finalize the plans for the addition, which will be made of the same logs. They're very accommodating and helpful, and once we actually get the plans one hundred percent set, their draftsmen will draw them up for us. There is some kind of sale/discount they're having for ordering in the depths of winter, but I'm sure we'll miss it - I think the end of January is the first deadline, and the discounts get lower as time goes on. It all seems hard to cram into an already-full life, but it's a big priority.

I can't just not grow veggies, but am looking at doing 4-6 raised beds this year and leaving it at that. The chickens number twenty-four right now, but I would like to whittle that down to 12 or so of our best layers, and put the rest in the stewpot. I'd like to tap our maple trees and make some syrup next month, and prune the apple orchard. We have an every-other-year harvest with the apples, and this year will be it - so I plan to press cider with use of a friend's press, as well as make tons of applesauce. I want to try my hand at hard cider, too, and have a very authentic recipe from someone who grew up in Stannard in the 1930s to go by. He gave us a bottle of his, and it was delicious.

So, there you go. My homesteading-related goals for 2010: make syrup, prune apple trees, grow only a few veggies, trim down the chicken flock, finish decluttering the basement, make cider and build an addition onto our house.

And with the first big snow

2009-11-27T15:59:00.003-05:00

comes all the fall projects left undone, the shop and cellar still needing attention, things needing to be stained, tile to cut and install and a million other things that will wait till spring (and some that we'll still be able to achieve).

I bought my snowboard this morning, breaking ten years of buying only perhaps a small bit of food on Black Friday. It wasn't a Black Friday Deal or anything, though. It was a last-year-closeout that was steeply discounted, and it was the board I wanted, and it was my birthday present. All in all, it was very much worth buying something on Buy Nothing Day just this once.

With the big snow and the snowboard comes looking at the upcoming cold freeze, how to stay active, alert, and connected through it. The snowboard is a tool for that, although it is only a tool. I also invested in a snowboard carry/hydration backpack so I can snowshoe up trails and board down, in the backcountry, this year. I am really excited about that; it may partially replace running for the depths of winter. But I will also happily hop onto the lifts at Burke and ride up to the top of the mountain so I can ride down, too.

I'm not a purist in any area of my life - something I've sometimes lamented. Other times I think there's a benefit to seeing the advantages and drawbacks of every single position on every single issue. I just sometimes wish I could blindly follow an extreme position. It would be so comforting.

Goodbye Crookers.

2009-11-23T13:33:00.002-05:00

We lost Crookers, our special-needs, crooked-beaked chicken, today. To Burke, the labradoodle service-dog-in-training. The chickens have been in their winter coop with an electric fence around them (but I hadn't plugged in the charger). Somehow part of the fence came down, the coop door got blown shut, and Crooked Beak, who was the really the conduit from chicken world to human world, got out. She had this uncanny ability to come find us whenever they were low on food or water, or if something like this happened.

Well, Burke caught her, and was running around with her in his mouth, and just killed her with rough play. Katie was cleaning the windows and saw him with a chicken in his mouth. She was horrified to find it was Crooked Beak.

We gave her a proper burial; she was the one chicken who was a "pet" in the truest sense of the word, and she hardly had any meat on her anyway. In fact it was something of a miracle that she had survived this long. She was a special chicken. She would even run alongside Dana, our other (non-chicken-killing) dog, when we played fetch.

Goodbye, Crookers. We'll miss you!

Provisioning.

2009-11-18T08:16:00.002-05:00

I have a dirty little secret: I joined Costco in late August, and I have shopped there twice.

Okay, if you're done gasping and shaking your head at how I, a wannabe homesteader, could possibly justify this, read on.

First, I used to live in Washington state, and very happily joined Costco there after learning about their business practices. They're actually a fairly cool company as big companies go. They provide their employees with good benefits, and they source out quality for the Kirkland Signature brand. I read up, and read up, and read up - they seem actually darn good in this respect.

Second, we live about 45 minutes from a true supermarket. There is one in the nearby town 20 minutes away, but it doesn't count to me because you can't trust buying meat or produce there, and they can't even keep the freezers working properly so the ice cream is always freezer-burned. And, the prices are just about as high as the smaller, local stores - we have several of those.

Typically our grocery shopping is Matt picking something up on the way home from work - which turns into 15 somethings that we need. Juice, half and half, chicken, and snack foods for the kids are a lot of what we buy. Weekly we purchase produce and some bulk foods at the coop, especially this time of year - I've had the garden pulled since early August when late blight hit the tomatoes and potatoes hard, and I had planted the rest early so the carrots, onions and everything else was ready.

I don't buy produce at Costco, generally speaking. I tried some apples, but they were not a good price, and they were from Chile (to their credit, this time they had local apples). I do have a kid with autism who eats several foods in large quantities and doesn't deviate from this, so I purchased two family packs of chicken that should last him a week or two. (You can see why raising all the chicken we could eat in a year would mean we'd have four hundred broilers out there - at least.)

I send all his food in to school with him, so every week or two his paraeducator sends a note home: Need juice, oatmeal, more popcorn, more apples. And I pack a reusable grocery bag with it and put it on the bus.

So this trip, for food for him, I bought 8 gallons of apple juice, the chicken, and a few boxes of bulk snack foods. My daughter also had a budget for snacks for school and purchased a couple of boxes. The snacky stuff is what I feel most guilty about. I would like to get her off of Cheez Its and Rice Krispie Treats, and get him off the Goldfish crackers and Smartfood popcorn. But in reality? I don't think it's so bad to have a small bag or two of those each day. Not horrible. And, we have this huge gorgeous pantry downstairs, so the snacks live down there, and just go to school. When we buy, say, a large box of Cheez Its at the grocery store, they're gone in a day. This way, everything seems to last longer.

But the real benefit of Costco, to me, comes with the money savings on the dry goods. Paper towels (I know, not very homesteader-y of me, but the pack I bought will likely last for a year of cleaning up dog puke and other really gross things, and I admit I like to do windows and mirrors with them), toilet paper, garbage bags, dishwasher detergent, dish soap, laundry detergent, and Oxy-Clean have all been purchased, roughly half the last trip and half this trip.

I'm saving - a ton. I don't know exactly how much; I did write down all the prices, then promptly lost the index card, so I have to reconstruct from the receipt. But it's at least 30%, and possibly more like 50% for some things. Oh, dog food. I couldn't sing the praises of Costco without discussing dog food.

First, let me say: I've read about the raw diet for dogs. I agree with it in every way. But, I have a fifteen-year-old mutt who has been on kibble her whole life, and I can't feed my puppy raw and feed her kibble. So there's that. There is also the fact that I have a kid with multiple medical and developmental issues, and the fact that I am trying to train this dog to be a service dog. Add to that the fact that I have a full-time job, and that we are trying to raise as much of our food as possible. And, see above re: supermarket proximity and cost of things locally. Right now, buying a bag of kibble and opening it to fill a bowl of food is what works for me in the dog-feeding realm. I'm okay with that.

I researched the heck out of the Kirkland Signature Puppy Food and hey - it's pretty good. It's darn close to the premium brands; it's made in the US with no China-sourced ingredients, and guess what else. It is $12.59 for a 20-lb bag. So instead of forking over $50 for a 30-lb bag, I would pay $18.85 for the same amount of the Kirkland food. Wow.

I'm sorry, but I don't make enough money to ignore savings like that. It sounds like a good deal. The ingredients are sound. The dogs do very well on it and don't have any issues with their coats; they are shiny and healthy and their eyes are clear.

So Katie and I stroll into Costco (it's a joke, you don't really stroll when you're pushing a cart the size of Luxembourg) and load that cart down with toilet paper, dog food, paper towels, shampoo and conditioner (Avalon Organics, a great deal too), chicken, juice, several boxes of snack foods, olive oil, a 25-lb bag of King Arthur flour, olives, pickles, boxes of chicken broth (Pacific Foods organic), and a few other things, and all around me people are pushing half-empty carts with a bunch of junk in them. I try not to lollygag, but wow. People don't shop at Costco like we do. For us, it's an all-day event, we last went two months ago, we may window shop in the electronics department but we don't buy (unless it was a crazy deal and planned in advance), we have a budget, we have a list. We stick to the budget and the list - okay, okay. I lie. We went down the toy aisle and we found Wii Fit Plus and I told Katie she could get it. It was something we'd planned to get, and it was $17 and change. But other than that? Nothing not on the list. Stick to the budget. Eschew the prepared frozen foods, the prepared canned foods, the premade everything. Stick with the basics, and especially the dry goods.

My pantry is full. It feels good. I don't have to worry about running out (a 20-mile round trip) for toilet paper at $1 a roll for a long time. We won't run out of apple juice for a while, and I paid about half what I usually pay. I want to keep as much money as I can in the local economy, but I think I have it all justified. The money I'm saving by purchasing some of our groceries and dry goods at Costco, I am spending on local produce and meat instead. It simplifies my life and gives me more time, and in the winter it is really nice to have things stocked up on the shelves downstairs, alongside the jars of applesauce and elderberry jelly.

Provisioning. It does speak to the pioneer girl in me, even though the sizes of some of the boxes of food are obscene.

Short days.

2009-11-11T07:24:00.002-05:00

We're heading into the depths of November and December, where the short days really get me down. And we're still not quite done with stacking wood or with the myriad of projects we wanted to accomplish outdoors before it gets really cold. We're having a wonderful week as far as weather: 40s for the highs, sunny, not windy. But I'm buried under writing work and unable to get to the outdoor stuff. I still need to order stain for the house! And only half the railings are stained with the leftover we had.

The chickens are all set up for winter, and we closed off the A-frame coop so that they would stop sleeping and pooping in the nest boxes and use the new nest boxes instead. They need more roosting space, but for now this works - and maybe if we reopen it they won't start sleeping in the old boxes again? One can hope. I don't know why the boxes are so much more appealing than the roosts for sleeping. Sigh. Chickens aren't reasonable creatures.

Although I'm blogging more about Burke's development over at Portrait of the Autist, he is a smart, smart boy and he is doing really well. I just need to work more on commands with him, and I have really been slacking in this department - especially stay. He's really good with sit and down, but he doesn't like to lay down. It's just so fun having a puppy around again though. Matt doesn't want to admit it, but he's really enjoying him. Dana's exactly the same - salty about it on the surface, but really happy to have a pal, I think. I kind of wish we'd gotten one when she was younger, because she is so solitary and so unconnected to us humans that it's nice for her to have a doggie buddy. But, she's still kicking and he seems to be bringing back her youth a bit if anything.

I wrote about Lakeview's Farm to School Program over at Civil Eats. It was a fun piece to write, and I hope that it brings to light the joys and challenges of implementing a farm-to-school lunch program.

I'm writing a novel for Nanowrimo, but like the previous 3 years, am thinking about it more than actually writing it, just because November always seems to be crazy that way. I think they do it again in March, which might be a better fit for me. Then again, what month isn't crazy for me? I managed to run daily in September and much of October, but I haven't been able to fit in running since I had the swine flu in mid-October. This is making me depressed. Yet, today I am on deadline for several projects and have no choice but to strap arse to computer chair and type all day and evening. Every day there's something: yesterday it was Jake's clinic visit, the day before the dentist for me and Katie, Sunday I was sick.

I think I might sound whiny, so I'll stop here. Really, life is very, very good. Promise.

Climbing back up.

2009-10-27T06:47:00.002-05:00

I am doing a lot better than I was when I last posted. I think perhaps I have to learn to accept that life is like this: it will overwhelm you and get unruly at times, and there is little to nothing you can do about it but ride the wave and try not to stress. I'm still in need of some "anti-stress" measures - I keep fantasizing about a hot bath with the Epsom salts I bought last week - but I'm overall doing a lot better and feeling more on top of things.

Some of that has to do with working right through the weekend to get caught up on some work, definitely. But time just does this funny thing where it keeps passing, regardless of how much or little you accomplish. I still have this list of about ten things I want to get to, writing-wise, and it will still be there and I will slowly chunk away at it. I have a list of about a hundred things to do on the homestead before the snow flies, but again - I'm making slow but significant progress, and that's all I can really ask of myself, right?

Sunday we finished cleaning out the coop and getting it ready for the chickens for winter. Originally the idea had been to tear it back down to a pole barn and fill it with wood this fall, building a new, snazzy, well-designed coop for the hens - staining it to match the house, no more rotting chipboard walls. But the reality is that the time and money to do that just wasn't happening. So we moved their movable coop up the hill and plopped it at the little exit door to the main coop. Once it gets really chilly I'll staple clear plastic sheeting in a hoop shape around both doors, so they'll have quite the winter digs with extra roosting space and nest boxes.

We also tore down the divider that separated the two parts of the big coop, when we had the baby chicks and needed to keep them separate from the mature layers. That gave them quite a bit more room as well. We set the waterer and heater up on blocks, in a nice level spot (the coop is earthen floored and on a slope), and planned ways to route the cords so that they don't fly into them and unplug the waterer heater like they did last year. We tacked up the motion sensor light so you can have illumination when going out to the coop at night - and as an extra deterrent for predators.

Finally, yesterday I moved the electric net fencing up the hill and installed it around the coop to make a nice-sized pasture area for them. It encloses both doors of the coop and two sides of it, so it provides an extra measure of predator protection. I still have to plug in the charger and get that part set up, but for now they are at least confined within the coop and pasture, which eliminates the other issue we were having: our service puppy in training, Burke, was chasing the girls relentlessly. I looked outside yesterday to see him with a Barred Rock's wing in his mouth, looking guilty. The girl was perfectly relaxed, though, and his mouth was soft. It was kind of funny, in that he was clearly playing and not killing or hurting. He just doesn't understand why these playful, colorful, running toys are off-limits. He is doing very well stopping in his tracks if he's chasing them and we tell him "no." He just can't seem to resist tearing off after them again once they start moving at a good clip.

So, the fencing will be good for them too. In the middle of the move we had left it open, because the spot where they were had gotten pretty well trashed, and I hate not letting them have fresh grass and pasture to graze. But I had been worrying more and more about them getting eaten - so far just one has gotten munched by some predator. We found a pile of feathers a few weeks ago, but it wasn't simply someone molting - something ate her.

Healing.

2009-10-23T12:40:00.002-05:00

Sorry I've been MIA. We have had the dreaded flu, apparently, and are just recovering. It was fine - my daughter got hit the hardest, and first. My husband, son and I all handled it fairly well, although I think Jake is still fighting it. Now, I'm firmly in the aftermath - a house that needs serious attention, work that very desperately needs catching up, and me home alone with the kids while Matt works these past two days. (The kids have off from school, but he doesn't. It would be a challenging week any week, but coming on the heels of being laid up for a few days, it's really tough on my work schedule.)

I'm actually seriously struggling today to maintain calm and sanity. I think I just screwed up on that front, but I'm putting myself in time-out. I have to adjust my expectations of what work I can get done, maybe see about having Matt take off on Tuesday to take Jacob to CF clinic, or maybe completely cancel his appointment and reschedule for next month. I vacuumed the house - it was gross - but that is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much to do to prepare for the appraisal for the addition, it is completely overwhelming. I'm trying not to even think about it. I'm still very stressed and worried about Jake actually getting this flu, since he never got fully sick. And I think I'm still a bit tired and under the weather.

Here I go again, using this space more as a journal than a blog about what we're doing with the homestead. Just needed to put it somewhere today. Hopefully I'll be back on track very soon, and hopefully I can just relax a bit and stop being such a stressball.

Waiting for the snow to fall, and cover us all...

2009-10-13T06:44:00.003-05:00

And it did. This morning.

It will rain later, but it is lovely. The puppy was incredibly excited and ran around all crazed and wet-mouthed, jumping in it. Now he's sacked out on the couch.

I was planning to work at the coffeeshop today, but the snow just makes me feel like cuddling up inside. I might head out to the (much closer) library in a bit. Just because I need to get out sometimes.

On the homesteading front, we are complete slackers. Kate is doing really well caring for the chickens herself - I'm amazed they're all still alive, but I haven't had to think much about them in the past few weeks. I'm sure I need to recharge the battery, and we really really need to move them to a new spot, and clean out their winter coop and get them moved back into it.

And, I will plant garlic. Will, will, will. I am promising this to myself. So, I need to get on that fairly soon. I haven't ordered it yet, even. It might be too late to order.

Using my Power of Less, September was running. Goal met. I ran the Harpoon Octoberfest Road Race, 3.6 miles, on Sunday. In 39:54. So my 5K time was 34:55, and I'm very happy with that. Very happy. I am planning to run a much smaller local race, the Kingdom Challenge, on Halloween - another 5K. Then the Barton Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving. And, I'm planning to train for a half-marathon in late May - the Derby Dandelion Run. Another local race. Should be a lot of fun!

I'd like to run a full marathon by next fall. That's my goal. It seems reasonable. Although right now I am still fairly sore from Sunday.

So October's goal: train the puppy. I'm blogging about Jake and I will move the service puppy posts over there. Summary of his progress so far: he's smart, maybe too smart. I need to step up the training, and work on stays and loose leash walking (he seems to think pulling with all his might is the way to go on a walk). I bought a head collar, but it's too big. I hope to order a harness for him once I get it put in Jake's budget, with Service Dog In Training patches to put on it. I will exchange the head collar. But mostly it is about me putting in the 20-30 minutes a day on training him.

And to be clear: I know he won't be trained by end of October. My goal is to establish a daily habit of training the puppy.

November's goal: Write 50,000 words of a novel. Yes, I am going to do Nanowrimo. Again. I just need to get a shitty novel out there and be done with it. So, I will be working on some preparation (character sketches, reading, research) for that this month. And picking which of my handful of ideas I will actually bring to fruition next month.

Exciting stuff. December's goal may just be maintenance of running, puppy-training, and novel-writing habits while getting through the holidays. That sounds like enough. And on the homestead front? Because isn't this blog all about our homesteading efforts? Well, sometimes personal growth is the place we need to go. I guess I'll leave it at that. I have complete faith that I'll want to recommit myself in the spring, plant a smaller garden but still try to raise a bunch of food, and maybe even get a few sheep or a beef cow. For now, we need to just keep maintaining the chickens, plant some garlic, and maybe build another raised bed for some fall/winter greens (with hoop cover). We'll eat our delicious stores of applesauce, elderberry jelly, and buy local greens for now. Oh, and I probably need to put the strawberries to bed for the season before they die. Thursday night is forecast to be 16 degrees!

Fall cleaning and decluttering.

2009-10-05T06:53:00.002-05:00

Sadly, I think I waited a wee bit too long for the elderberries - the birds have claimed them all, it seems, although there are a few unripe clusters that I may be able to snag. But I went down cellar (I'm picking up some Vermontisms) and found three quart jars of elderberry juice that I canned last year, and I'm sure there are both berries and juice in the freezer as well. (Note to self: next year just pick and dehydrate the berries, don't worry about when you can get to making the tincture or syrup!)

The lack of elderberries freed me up to do some decluttering this weekend. Autumn always prods me into clean and declutter mode, trying to make our tiny house more efficient for the upcoming winter while I can still work comfortably in the basement and easily air out rooms. Yesterday I dusted all the cobwebs, inside and out, repaired the front porch railing and began staining it (I needed to stop because it rained, and because I wanted to be sure the six-year-old stain was still going to dry properly and look like the rest of the house). Then I began to tackle our master bedroom.

We're considering swapping rooms with Jake, giving him this room, since it is a generous 9x11, all with normal-height ceilings! Right now Jake lives in the loft, with Katie, which has steeply sloping eaves - not your typical knee walls, just straight from the roofline, forty-five degrees down to the floor. That makes it impossible to stand anywhere but the center four feet or so, and really curtails our living space. (We have 710 sf where you can stand in our house - then a few more of eaves, and of course I'm not counting the basement or shop.) If we swapped rooms, we'd have space for our bed where Jake's bed, train table and some toys are now, and we'd revamp his toy shelves to store our clothes. One bugaboo is hanging space - I think we could manage something sort of weird-looking where we hang the clothes in the middle of the wall by the window, but I'm not sure it would look at all decent.

Speaking of which, right now our clothes hang in plain sight in our bedroom - this house was meant as a vacation cabin and is completely, utterly closetless. It keeps us neat, theoretically.

So I just went through and vacuumed under the bed, sorted through all the clothes and made a pile to give away and a pile of summer stuff to store, decluttered the top of the dresser (though you can see I could stand to get rid of more), and set up our new hamper underneath the hanging clothes (Jake picked all the wicker off the ten-year-old hamper that was near the door). I also cleared the piles of books that built up on the floor by my bed and overall just went through everything, although there was no major restructuring of the space itself. You can see that there isn't really much you can do with a king-sized bed in this space besides have it where it is!

Jake uses this room to bounce on the bed and roll himself in the covers and watch TV. It's the only room in our house with a door besides the bathroom, so although it's a master bedroom, it is also used by anyone who's sick and needs a little privacy or quiet and a comfy bed, or just when someone wants some privacy. So it gets used - a lot. We've considered swapping out the bed with a Murphy, but we store our clothes in those maple drawers you see underneath the bed, and we can't quite figure what type of temporary use the floor space would have if we folded up the bed. (Toys get strewn quickly, and the idea of having to pick up toys and clutter before going to sleep just makes me feel exhausted.) The bed makes a great TV-watching space, book-reading space, and all-around cuddle space. If we change it to Jake's room, his twin would go along the wall where the head of our bed is now, with his clothes stored underneath as they are now. That would give him quite a bit of room for his toys (probably organized onto a shelf unit along one wall) as well as a couple of bean bag chairs - they are desperately needed as they're a sensory regulating item for him, and we can't figure out where else in the house one could possibly fit.

Okay, I think I've blathered on enough. The room! Beware: it looks much bigger in the photos!

View from the doorway. In the left-hand back corner is the door to the basement.

View from the basement door corner. The shelves above the hanging clothes hold some storage of things like the negatives from the photos of Jake's birth, and a few other things that probably could find a better home if we had more climate- and moisture-controlled storage elsewhere. The one kitty-corner basket is our first-aid kit. Tucked underneath the clothes in the corner is a laundry hamper (we'll probably need to get another one, so we each have our own) and my Seagull guitar. The thread rack holds most of my jewelry and earrings. The teak dresser holds - surprise! - clothes. I need to get a different curtain for our window, as the floral batik doesn't match the stripey bedspread at all!

Puppy kryptonite.

2009-09-29T19:23:00.002-05:00

Yesterday was a very tough day with Burke. He was incredibly bitey and mouthy and aggressive, and every way I tried to distract or correct him resulted in him getting more riled up and mouthing me more. This, despite walking him first thing in the morning, trying to play fetch (but he would jump and lunge at my legs and bite them so I had to crate him for time-out) and doing everything that every book I read said to do.

We have been using mostly positive reinforcement and clicker training methods. I have tried positive redirection to an appropriate chewy toy. I have tried yelping in a high-pitched voice to show him he's hurting me. I have even - briefly - tried an alpha roll, but it was clear within five seconds that this was an ineffective and cruel choice.

Today I finally picked up a book written by the dog trainer who has kept our elderly dog, Dana, several times while we've been out of town, April Frost. I read through everything - she mostly suggests positive redirection for mouthiness. But, we've been there and it's just getting more and more out of control. So today on her suggestion for other behaviors, I made a shake can - put a few pennies in an empty can and taped the mouth shut. Well, it's magic. I barely shake it and he's out of the room - which shows me I have to be sparing with this, as I want him to remain a secure and emotionally grounded pup. But, having my arms and legs bruised from his bites is not okay either, and nothing else has made a dent in this behavior. As she puts it in her book, it's much preferable to eliminate the behavior quickly with "surprise" than to have most of our interactions be negative - he mouths me and lunges at me, I say no, I crate him, repeat until I'm angry and frustrated and he knows it and mouths more.

I know we have to get him playing with some younger dogs as soon as possible, so that's on my list for this week and next. He only has Dana, who is more tolerant of him, but won't really play with him. And he's had a bit of exposure to a couple of other dogs. But I can sense that what he is really seeking is play, engagement, interaction on a puppy level. Sometimes fetch or "I'll hold the toy while you mouth it" isn't enough for him (we don't encourage tug and he is not at all into it anyway, nothing like Dana was).

Speaking of Dana, she is doing so much better! She is walking again. She is even going up and down the steps most of the time. This week we'll get our icebreaker padded mats on the steps to give her some more traction. But she's really come back. I'm not sure what went on - seizure? stroke? Her right side seems a bit contracted and off. But she's holding her own, very interested in food and treats, and once she gets down the steps she is playful and running through the fields and woods with Burke at her heels. I'm very happy to have her for as long as she's comfortable and active. She seems to be renewed and full of vigor again. My old girl! I love her so.

I've started a blog about Jake. He's doing amazingly well. The homesteading has turned into dog training, huh? Such is life. The leaves are in full color; it's a beautiful autumn.

Happy Mabon!

2009-09-23T08:52:00.004-05:00

With the passing of the Fall Equinox (Mabon), we're having a spell of warmer, more humid weather. After weeks of crisp mornings and brisk, frosty nights, I could almost be fooled into thinking it was August again - but then I feel the gentler, paler rays of the sun, witness the bright palette of reds, golds and greens on the trees, and watch evening slip ever more quickly into dark. It is definitely autumn.

Burke is settling into his last few weeks of true early puppyhood (he'll be four months old on October 5). I've been reading The Golden Bridge by Patty Dobbs Gross and feeling alternately better and worse about how his training is going so far. But mostly better. He's a very good boy, but temperament-wise he is more mouthy and bossy than some of the quiet, calm dogs she selects for service work. But, she emphasizes matching the temperament to the family and child - and I do think he's a good fit for our mouthy, bossy family! Jake is loud and he moves a lot, quickly, runs and jumps all over our tiny cabin, and Burke is nonplussed. When he has a meltdown, Burke is right there, not afraid of the screams and crying, but looking at him as if to say, "What can I do to help?" (I wish I knew the answer, sweet pup. I ask it of myself every time Jake has a meltdown. But I feel sure you will figure it out in time.)

Personally, at the moment, I'm wrestling a few demons. I've felt very emotional for the past month or so - back to school time always does this to me. Add in a virus or two and a Lyme flare and the recipe produces high emotion, struggles, and yet - growth. I've been trying hard to get a handle on my schedule and manage my time better, and simply trying to do less has been a very successful strategy that's helped me feel more sane. But I still struggle with the house being messier, the late-summer and winter-preparation tasks falling behind, and in general feeling like I'm drowning under a to-do list (whether I put the things on the list or not, they just seem to pile up). I'm trying to chip away at things, putting in an hour a day on the outside tasks, figuring that consistency will pay off just like it has with my running.

Running has been a success, when I'm not plagued by knee or hip pain. It's so meditative and wonderful for me. My body just needs to catch up with my heart and I'll be thrilled. And, I need to acknowledge that establishing this habit has been a major accomplishment this month. Today is Day 22, and studies say you need 21 days to establish a new habit. So, there. I'm a runner now. I will run my first 5K on October 11th in Windsor, Vermont - the Harpoon Brewery's Octoberfest. It should be lots of fun. My husband will run with me!

One big thing I've been struggling with is my need for approval from others. A few things have happened that have brought to the surface how much I need external validation, even when I think I don't. I guess part of it is that so many people in my life have always looked up to and admired me - to the point that I feel embarrassed about it - that when it's clear that a person disapproves of my actions, decisions or how I conduct my life, I react by feeling blindsided, angry and hurt. And I respond by trying to get that person to change his or her mind, desperately defending myself and arguing my points. I want them to see what a great person I am, how much I have managed to do with a huge burden on my shoulders, how I'm funny, smart, and ultimately - lovable. How even though I can be bossy and seem cranky at times, it's a thin veneer over an all-encompassing, unconditional love for those close to me - a love that can be very strong and powerful as well as gentle and nurturing.

I want to say, Yes, we have some serious challenges and things can be rough sometimes, but there are also some great things in our lives. My kid is healthy despite the genetics stacked against him, thanks in large part to my own efforts. He's thriving developmentally thanks to my determination to find him a good school program, to make it work in the face of an overburdened, broken education system. My marriage is intact and healthy despite the statistics that say that as parents of a special-needs child, we only have a 20% chance of staying married. We've been together seventeen years, almost half my life. What it might look like from the outside may be very different than how we both feel about it. It's strong, it's good, and our division of labor works for us (even though growing up in our generation, we feel like we are constantly creating and recreating our roles from scratch). And most of all, I love, admire and respect my husband deeply.

I end up engaged in a battle, trying to show someone that I'm worth thinking highly of, that my ideas should be entertained seriously and that my decisions are good ones that I've thought through. Then, weary from the fight and feeling badly about myself, there comes a moment when I step back and ask myself: why am I engaged in this? What need am I trying to fulfill? Why can't I walk away, and realize that not everybody has to like me or approve of my decisions or actions?

You can only control your own actions, reactions, emotions and decisions. You can't control those of other people. You can't change someone's mind, make them miserable, or make them happy. You can't make them approve of you, love you, or admire you. In fact, when you really think about it, the other person's emotions and opinions likely have very little to do with you, even when it seems they are all about you.

This is a lesson I seem to learn over and over in my life. Slowly, I think it's sinking in.

Falling into Fall.

2009-09-18T06:33:00.003-05:00

We've had gorgeous September weather - all the high-pressure ridges we missed this summer have made their appearances one right after another, giving us long stretches of crisp, sunny days with temps in the low 70s, and cool nights. Now the highs have receded to the 50s and 60s, the leaves are very much starting to turn, and fall is definitely in the air.

The lovely weather has made taking up running easy. It's the perfect weather for it - no rain, not too hot, not too cold. For the past three weeks that has been my focus - making a solid habit of running nearly daily. I had been running last spring, but a hamstring injury sidelined me for months. It's nothing like a treadmill, running on these hilly, gravelly dirt roads, and it can be hard for someone who's just starting, like me. But reading Born to Run and thereby discovering a new technique for running (a mid or forefoot strike instead of a heel strike, similar to Pose and Chi running) has helped me immensely.

Puppy training has been going along well for the most part. I feel like a bit of a slacker. He's 14 weeks old now, and still needs refinement on staying in both sit and down. He's got a great, enthusiastic recall - it's awesome! But he's been very bitey with us (just likes to mouth our hands, and run after and jump at our calves and pant legs when we're walking sometimes) and we're working hard to curb that. He knows sit, down, shake, and the "Doggie Zen" game from Clicking With Your Dog - basically learning self-control and not nibbling at my hand when it has a treat in it; when he relaxes and stops trying, he then gets the treat and I say "take it."

The other crappy behavior is begging. He's just so bad about it! He will sit and look all angelic for a couple of minutes while you're preparing a meal or snack or whatever, but then if he doesn't get something (he never does!) he will start full-on barking. He goes in his crate, but it's not a behavior that is going away. I am trying to examine if there is some way it is reinforced, but can't quite work out how he's so sure he's going to get something this way. I may have to preemptively crate him while I make food or give Jake enzymes or whatever.

But, you know how it is with puppies. He's doing really well overall. He's very tuned into Jake, and will follow him around when he is outside. Both of them enjoy a game where Jake snuggles in a thick comforter and Burke bites gently through the comforter - super deep pressure! Now, perhaps this isn't something I should allow if we're trying to get him to stop biting in other situations, but I've let it go on a little bit because it's definitely a bonding thing for Jake. The other amazing thing is that when Jake's had freakouts, Burke has not been fazed at all. He looks concerned, gets calm, and goes over to him (especially if I tell him to). He will lie right next to Jake. I'm still working on getting Jake to see that the puppy is there and how Burke can help calm him, but a few licks from Burke the other day had Jake going from crying and upset to smiling and calm in a few seconds - so I think this might actually work out quite well. This is much more of a big thing than the behavior stuff - that we can work out. Having a dog whose presence actually works to calm my kid, that's the key.

I remain a bit worried about my older dog. Of course, when we decided to get the puppy she was doing great. But a few weeks ago she had a grand mal seizure. Now, she has had mild seizures off and on since she was 5 years old, often triggered by thunderstorms or fronts moving through. But never a grand mal. It was terrifying. She seemed to be weak, especially her back legs, afterward, and the vet confirmed there are some definite neurological issues with her back legs. The trigger for the grand mal was likely low blood sugar, as we had been keeping the food up and feeding them 3 times a day because of the puppy (she had always been on free feed because her weight has always been low). That day we had the kids' birthday party and I missed the evening feeding. They're on free feed again and the vet says the puppy is doing fine with it, so we'll keep it that way. They're both eating puppy food - again, my vet okays this (Dana is skinny, but has put on some good weight since this!).

This morning Dana seemed off again - "rangey," I call it, sort of stumbling around outside and moving too fast, almost on autopilot. She seemed more senile/out of it and acted weird. Her front legs seemed weak and her back legs weaker than usual. We crated the pup to give her space and now have her in the bedroom, on her bed, with my daughter who's home sick from school. I gave her an L-theanine, an anti-anxiety amino acid supplement that has always helped stave off the seizures. Because - wouldn't you know it, there's a front moving through.

I have phenobarbitol on hand and the vet has instructed me on how many to give should she have a seizure. I hope we don't get to that point, but I'm armed and ready. I don't think her fifteen-year-old body can withstand another grand mal. I'm really not ready for her to go, not at all. I never will be. But I need to call the vet today and find out how to get in touch with him should we need him over the weekend. He will come to the house for euthanasia if needed, which is a great comfort to me. She's terrified of the vet and I can't imagine that being her last experience, so to know that she can pass in the comfort and peace of her own home is huge.

On a happy note, school is going great for both kids, especially Jake. The new program is awesome and he's making huge strides. I remain optimistic that our bitey, beggy puppy can turn into a well-behaved service dog. I have really put the homesteading - and even the basic fall chores! - on hold while I've gotten into my running routine and focused on the pup. I'm looking forward to winter (did I just say that?) so that I'll have even more time for his training. (Not to mention snowboarding!)

Life is always full, isn't it? This has been quite the long blog post. But it's been a while and I wanted to update.

More on doing less.

2009-09-03T06:13:00.002-05:00

I felt so scattered when finishing up my post yesterday, I'm still not sure if I made any sense.

I think that I have gotten so used to multitasking and to having too much to do at any given moment, that I forgot what it feels like to do just enough, to have free time, to have minutes or hours when I didn't have a major project or a handful of small urgent tasks that I was putting off.

I realize that I have to focus my efforts and pick one or two major goals for the next six months to a year. I can't massively expand the garden, expand my writing business, train a dog, add a new species of animal to the farm, and get the house decluttered and organized. I have to focus. Right now I've decided to focus on developing my writing career further, and training our puppy (to possibly become a public-access service dog - I'm not set on that, but reading, exploring the possibility, and seeing how his relationship with Jake develops). Okay, I have three goals; the third is to take some preliminary steps toward building an addition onto our house. Those three things are plenty. Decluttering is likely still going to happen, but the farming end of things is taking a backseat until next spring - save for planting garlic and making elderberry wine and building a raised bed and planting fall greens. See? I still struggle with keeping it simple.

The thing is, I love homecanned food in winter, I love planting things, I love being outdoors. I'm not so good with the weed maintenance and my soil leaves a lot to be desired. (Someone, show up with a truck full of cow manure and I will feed you and massage you and worship you!) I tried to expand the garden to around 3000 sf this year and it was an unqualified disaster (though then I read the newsletter put out by my local seed purveyors and see they are only just getting field tomatoes! so I wasn't terribly far behind, if only the late blight had held off). I decided when I pulled everything out that I should go with building raised beds for next year, and learning how to grow things well when you have decent soil and half a chance against the invasive weeds. My garden also needs major drainage and leveling before things will grow well.

So, instead of fighting with the land, I'll build raised beds and plant a much more reasonable garden next year, and to supplement it probably either invest in a CSA or just commit to going by my favorite local farm every few days. I am such a do-it-yourselfer that this makes me swallow hard and blink my eyes, but it will be fine. I'll have more time to think about doing other probably unwise things like getting a Highland calf or a few sheep to graze the hillside.

True confessions time.

2009-09-02T10:35:00.005-05:00

It has been a horrible summer for the garden. In fact, the garden has been laid to rest as of a couple of weeks ago (right before we had a birthday party for the kids). I feel so good with those plants pulled out of the ground and the weeds smothering under 6mil black plastic.

I have cucumbers in my produce drawer that are rotting. Most of the rest, we ate, but the Salad Bowl Lettuce that I planted in early July was just plain tough and bitter, so it went to the chickens. I keep having visions of buying a box of cukes at Riverside and making pickles, or going blueberry picking with Katie this weekend (that one, I really want to do). But the truth is, it's been an insanely busy summer for me, and I've had to prioritize my life and cut back on gardening and food preservation.

Part of it I chose knowing fully I was adding chaos to our life: the puppy. Although in truth he's easy enough already, and I decided on that only after I knew the garden was a complete wash this year. But a lot of the summer I've felt swept away on a sea of responsibilities, a rising tide ranging from raindrop-sized tasks to projects crashing over me like massive waves. And as I sit here trying to continue to compose this while Matt gives Katie a lesson in rhetoric about fifteen feet away from me, I realize that the undertow has been the presence of my wonderful family, whom I love more than anything on earth, but whose chaos and noise don't favor writing peacefully.

So it was time to get radical. By learning how to question, "Is this true?" in much of my life, and the impetus of a little book on zen and managing work and life, I've been able to strip away a lot of what was bogging me down. I realized I had to put something at the very top of the hierarchy, and stop trying to juggle work, family, garden, canning, and the extra pressures on my life from various things outside my control. Over the past few weeks, I've cleared away some major hurdles to working productively on writing when I *do* have the time and space, and made the rest of life run a little more smoothly. I've found the energy to catch up on things and really make a dent in one area of my life - instead of running around putting out fires in five major areas and feeling like I never get anywhere.

It's been very freeing. I feel really good when I look out at the sea of black plastic, the emptiness that was the garden that was full of blight and weeds and stunted plants this year. I feel good when I think, "I should go blueberry picking; I need to freeze blueberries," and then I think to myself, "No, I shouldn't, and I don't need to do that." Ahhhhhhhhh.....

Turning a new leaf with the garden.

2009-08-10T08:34:00.000-05:00

I'm pretty darn sure my tomatoes aren't worth saving. There's one "bunch" (are they a "hand" of tomatoes like berries?) per plant, some Sun Golds are ripening, but they're about knee-high and starting to die off from either late blight or Septoria leaf spot or something else due to the wet weather we're having. In case it's blight, I think I'm pulling them, and wrapping the green tomatoes in newspaper to ripen.

The greens area of my garden is pretty much done - cut and come again works for 70 days or so and then they bolt and the kale gets tough. The onions are starting to topple, the carrots can get pulled and stored, and the herbs are in the corner of the plot, and can stay or get harvested (oh where is my Excalibur?).

The plan is, I will hook up the 48" rear tiller to the lawn tractor and till everything - except the potatoes, I am still not sure if I will weed and mulch them and see if they recover, or just mow them down and let them sit in the ground for a while before harvest (which was suggested for leaf blight).

Then I'll plant buckwheat as a cover crop. In late fall, I'll mow that and dump tons of cow manure on top of the garden, then plant winter rye (if I'll have time, I need to look at how to to time it all, but I think I still have time to make it happen).

In spring, winter rye will be dead and mulching the ground, and I'll till it all in and plant and everything will be beautiful and lush and growing great. Right? It won't rain for 2 months at a time?

Meanwhile, no, I'm not done gardening for the season. I plan to build another raised bed (strawberries are in a lonely 4x8 of cedar logs right now) or two, and start a fall crop of greens - kale, chard and lettuce. Possibly even might try a fall crop of cukes. Oh, and definitely garlic is going in this fall.

Oh I have some spaghetti squash to harvest out there too. But the pie pumpkins and cukes did nothing, and my zucchini is rotting before it even starts forming. I'll harvest the blossoms for salad and give up on the rest.

So the plan w/the raised beds is to do fall and spring greens crops in one, covering with hoops and plastic. Then another (at least) for tomatoes, one for cukes, one for pumpkins, one for herbs. That's 5 beds to build and fill by spring, ideally. I'll plant onions, potatoes and garlic in the ground - probably nothing else, maybe a summer crop of greens/lettuces.

All because of my weed issue. I might try black plastic next year, but I also think the raised beds help warm the soil, and I really really need that where I am. My neighbors who did raised beds are doing awesome this season. They're about the only ones who are.

Ahhhhh....it feels so good to say it!

Happy Burkie update...crossing fingers.

2009-08-08T05:45:00.002-05:00

We've put Burke on a cooked hamburger and brown rice diet - he did get chicken and rice for lunch yesterday, then we moved to the beef - and very quickly his tummy troubles have subsided. He's pooping much less frequently; we've only seen one since noon yesterday! And it was formed and looking fairly normal.

I'm hoping that whatever is going on, we can reset things with a few days of this diet, and that it's nothing more than his gut getting out of balance from the stress of deworming and going home a little early.

I was awoken at 6 am sharp by a playful and hungry puppy! So much for sleeping in this weekend. He is very good at hanging out on the lamby and chewing his toys though, after a little walk. My plan is to work our routine so I'm up early with him at 5 or 6 and we go on a long walk. But he didn't seem interested today, and my coffee was calling.

This weekend's plans: try to recover the garden. I actually ate a Sun Gold cherry tomato yesterday! I still can't decide if they're worth trying to weed around and recover. Probably, although it was 44 degrees last night. We've skipped straight from spring to fall this year, it seems.

Puppyland.

2009-08-07T10:36:00.002-05:00

I've been insanely busy with the new puppy, working on early training, ordering service dog training books (looking into it, not sure we're doing it yet) and tracking down the cause of his chronic diarrhea. I'm extremely frustrated about it. We had his stool tested and it was negative for all parasites. He was on worming medicine for the first five days we had him. I've done canned pumpkin, probiotics, and homeopathics (though I might give homeopathy another whirl now that he's had it a while and I can see some more particular patterns to it). So far he did best on California Natural Lamb and Rice canned food. As soon as we add dry, more diarrhea.

The plan right now is to do simply cooked ground beef, fat strained, with brown rice. Nothing else whatsoever. We'll feed this for a couple of days and then see where it takes us. I have 2 cases of canned puppy food on order, one with fish and one that's a mix of sources, both high-quality. We'll see if we end up being able to feed them at all! Otherwise Dana will be getting a gourmet feast for a while. I already have three different bags of dry puppy food - California Natural in both chicken and lamb, and Innova. All three caused issues.

My worst fear? That he has pancreatic insufficiency - the canine version of what's wrong with Jake's digestive system due to the cystic fibrosis. Why is this fear stuck in my head? Burke's puppyhood is bringing back memories of infancy with Jake: frequent loose poops, straining, pale, stinky, shiny stools. From what I have read, it isn't that common in labs or poodles (it's mostly German Shepherds and Rough Collies), and it usually doesn't show up until later in puppyhood. But I've been down the "this is rare, therefore unlikely" road too many times for that to reassure me.

If he does have it? If I have a puppy purchased from a responsible, solid breeder that turned out to be special needs, a puppy that is supposed to be a service dog for my special-needs son? And if they have one of the very same kinds of special needs? If I'm opening enzymes not only for my son but for the puppy every time he eats? I might need to crawl into bed for a week to process that one.

Not to dwell on the negative. Apart from the poop, Burke has been a joy. He gets crazy and wild and bitey, but he's learning to respect us when we tell him no. He runs away with his ears back and retreats to a "safe" place like the Dog Bed Zone we made at the end of the couch in the living room (enough space, theoretically, for both Dana and Burke to have separate sleeping areas, but he prefers to take her dog bed and she prefers to go onto the couch). Then he's all ears-forward and tail-wagging again, so we know he's not too chastened. Housebreaking is getting better; we've had a few accidents on the deck, but he can't quite get down the stairs yet so that's acceptable. A few pee accidents inside, but they're getting fewer in number. And we do let him have unsupervised awake time in the house, although I'm trying to keep that under wraps so that his potty learning can be more "errorless."

It's been a good focus for me, since the garden is pretty much a literal wash this year. The rain's finally stopped, but the weeds have taken over, and it's going to require a massive effort to recover the squash and cukes, and the tomatoes I'm not sure even are recoverable. We'll have potatoes, onions, and herbs, and we've had tons of greens, peas, lettuce, and beets, so it's not all horrible. But I'm contemplating just ripping out the tomatoes and squash and cukes, tilling, and planting buckwheat to choke out a few weeds. I'm also seriously contemplating raised beds for next year.

Right now the puppy is sleeping in the boot tray, with his snout stuffed into one of my boots. It's too adorable.

I'll be here, blogging, more frequently for the rest of summer and into winter. I have resolved not to let myself get so crazed with chores and gardening again. Between implementing some efficiencies into my work system, and just simplifying what I expect of myself, I feel much more centered and grounded than I did a month ago. Puppy poop notwithstanding!

Where has July gone?

2009-07-23T08:10:00.002-05:00

I wish I could say I have a well-tended, productive garden to show for it, but I don't. I have potatoes that need hilling, some tomatoes that need weaving (that are starting to produce green tomatoes, finally!) and a whole lotta sugar snap peas and lettuce, kale and chard. Oh and carrots, for sure! And onions! Okay it might not be so bad...

But what I do have, is a new puppy! He is a first-generation Labradoodle, black British field lab mother and apricot standard poodle father. From a farmer/breeder couple who mostly breeds hunting dogs (labs and English setters) but who also breed these Labradoodles cause they make awesome family dogs.

Our fifteen-year-old lab mix, Dana, is taking the new addition a little hard, because he keeps wanting to play with her, and she wants nothing to do with him.

This photo kind of sucks, but I will get some better ones up very soon! Promise! I also am going to try to post more regularly. I have just been so overwhelmed with everything lately.

Hairy vetch.

2009-07-01T19:11:00.002-05:00

I think it might be my new curse word...only it's supposed to be a great cover crop to sow underneath tomatoes, and I'm going to buy five pounds of the seed and try it. It adds nitrogen, and the soil needs that for sure, and apparently increases yield and taste of tomatoes. Will it choke out galinsoga? I hope so.

What I'm growing this year.

2009-06-22T14:04:00.002-05:00

Forgive me while I purge my brain onto the page.

onions (yellow sets from Willey's - cheap and so far so good)

darki triple curled parsley
italian flat leaf parsley
common sage
sweet basil
genovese basil
santo cilantro
german thyme
herbs i'm forgetting

high mowing mesclun mix
hms gourmet lettuce mix
jericho romaine
salad bowl (not yet planted)

cascadia peas

french breakfast radishes

fordhook giant chard
ruby red chard

white russian kale

scarlet nantes carrots

yukon gold potatoes
russet potatoes

jacob's cattle beans
rattlesnake pole beans
provider bush beans

baby pam pumpkins
howden pumpkins for jack o'lanterns
spaghetti squash
butternut squash
dark green zucchini

green finger cucumbers
national pickling cucumbers
marketmore 76 cucumbers

roma tomatoes
jet star tomatoes
new girl tomatoes
sun gold tomatoes

(total of 32 tomato plants)

detroit dark red beets
arugula

I believe that is it. Note, no corn this year.

First harvest.

2009-06-19T14:49:00.003-05:00

It's just getting to be time to harvest spring onions, thin the arugula, radishes and carrots, and start carefully cutting some of the bigger baby mesclun and salad greens. So we've been enjoying plates of goodness like this one. Right now I'm eating one that includes surprisingly aromatic Scarlet Nantes carrot thinnings and the first properly-sized French Breakfast radish. And no dressing - who needs it when you have mustard greens?

Garden expansion.

2009-06-12T07:07:00.003-05:00

This year we have tripled the size of our veggie garden. To the left of that photo is about a 20x60 plot, which is roughly what we planted last year. The area you see is about 40x60 feet.

We used a cultivator attachment on the Ford tractor to rip the sod off and break up compaction in the soil without actually tilling. My neighbor called the attachment "spring harrows." It's sort of like a lightweight chisel plow. Five curved metal teeth with replaceable blades on the ends. Anyway, it works wonders in our boulder-y soil, as the rocks don't break it - it just springs around them gently. Then we dug out (most of) the boulders with the front-end loader on the tractor. That was fun. (Always is!) We had to bulldoze one down the hill a bit as it was too big to even fit in the bucket!

So with most rocks out (trust me, I planted around plenty of granite!) we attached the PTO tiller to our new-to-us Simplicity lawn tractor and tilled everything. The soil looked pretty good to start with, and with money at a premium we haven't added much in the way of amendments. This fall we'll be sure to secure truckloads of cow manure and till it all in, but for this year I just did some extra amending to the rows themselves, and will add a bunch of composted cow manure and some peat moss to the very far side of the plot in the photo. That area was the most ledgey and clay-ey.

Yesterday I planted potatoes and more of the delicious Jacob's cattle beans we grew last year. I have a pot of those very beans, grown nearby on Butterworks Farm, simmering in the oven. We make them with Mexican spices, sweat them with onions, garlic, spices and salt on the stove, then add water, bring to boil, and bake for 5-6 hours in the oven. Tender, delicious beans that make a great base for Mexican dishes is what we end up with!

And this afternoon I'll grind the 2 cups or so of flint corn we managed to grow last year, and make cornbread to go with the beans for supper. Whee!

June skies on Stannard Mountain.

2009-06-07T12:27:00.003-05:00

I just love June. I think it might be my favorite month of the year. The long days (waking up at 5 am to bright skies is just amazing!), the languid nights, the warmth and sun and the promise of the entire summer laid out before us.

A finished project.

2009-05-30T14:37:00.002-05:00

I did finally finish an article with some photos of our snazzy new movable chicken coop, complete with roosts and nest boxes:

Build a Movable Chicken Coop

I'm particularly excited about it because I really mastered some basic carpentry skills through this project. I got the hang of getting screws into wood, how to measure, cut and build basic shapes, how to fasten wood together properly. It was a lot of fun, and Matt and I did really well working together on it.

Expanding the garden.

2009-05-28T15:12:00.002-05:00

Springtime busyness.

2009-05-28T07:04:00.002-05:00

I wish I had more to share - photos, more energetic updates. I'm still slogging right along trying to work full-time and put in the garden. We're expanding it from 20x50 or so, to triple that size, adding two more 20x50 spots that were completely sod before.

I wrote this little poem below, the other day and it sums up where I am. I really, really hope to be here more and to have this blog be a place where I can share my personal triumphs through the season. We have a big season coming up, because besides the expansion of the garden, we are seriously considering getting a Highland coo and baby due in spring.

Things I Am Doing Right Now

Planting Tons of Food.
Picking Grass and Rocks Out of Soil.
Amending Soil with Peat Moss.
Learning How to Grow One Hundred Strawberries in the Square
Foot Gardening Method.
Following a Cognitive Therapy Plan for Weight Loss.
Starting an Exercise Program.
Decluttering a House and Garage Full of Stuff.
Eating Healthy Food.
Working Full-Time.
Caring for My Son Who Has Significant Special Needs.
Nurturing my Tweenage Daughter As She Grows an Inch a Month in Height.
Going on Field Trips.
Wanting to Write a Novel.

I haven't forgotten you!

2009-04-28T10:23:00.002-05:00

As the weather warms (it's actually mid-80s and sunny here today) and the spring season gets underway, I'll be posting to this blog again. Winter is so inward-focused, so tamped down and contracting. It feels glorious that life is expanding again. I'm going through a lot of internal changes, feeling out some new rhythms to my life and work, and resolving to be more present and work more purposefully each day.

The maple near our house has buds. The peepers are back, emerging from under frozen snow and mud once again. My dog is running after deer and turkeys and then sleeping on her side in the grass, soaking the warm sun into her black coat. It's been too dry of a spring for Mud Monster play, but the kids are wandering, creating, building with twigs and sticks and scrap wood and tarps, playing in the rushing brook.

Life is good.

Where I've been.

2009-02-04T17:37:00.002-05:00

Let's see...I've been snowboarding every weekend, for starters. And living in this:

And I've been putting together a little site:

About.com Small Farms

I'm the new Guide over there! Come over and check it out. I'll be adding lots of new content over the coming weeks and months.

I'll still be blogging here; I just need to find my groove again.

Whatever blows your feathers back.

2008-12-23T09:44:00.003-05:00

Went to check on the hens today - it was 13 below last night. One poor girl had a huge wad of poop stuck to her hen parts with ice. Just frozen solid - a lovely poopsicle. So I had to take her in to the house, plop her in the bathtub, stick her backside in a bucket of warm water, and proceed to deice her. It took quite a bit of work, and I ended up having to cut some feathers off. It was just so frozen and cold.

Then, remembering what those who show chickens do, I blew her feathers dry. She wasn't sure about it at first, but then she seemed to like it...I think she might have thought she was finally gettin' some. She kept giving me this look...

That's her, sitting pretty for her blow-dry.

Another hen seems not to be doing too well. She had some weird-looking, foamy discharge from her eyes, was all huddled up with her eyes closed just sitting on the coop floor.

The coop floor/litter is frozen solid - I need to get them some more shavings or straw. They are not too happy right now.

We got about 18" of snow in the past few days, so things are a bit overwhelming at the moment. I'll check in again soon.

Local yumminess.

2008-11-15T10:03:00.002-05:00

For a completely locavore dessert - add only vanilla, salt, baking soda. Maple syrup from local taps, King Arthur flour (Norwich, Vermont), local milk/cream, eggs from our hens. Recipes are adapted from Ben & Jerry's Homemade Ice Cream and Dessert Book.

Maple Blond Brownies

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter at room temp
1 cup maple syrup, grade B preferred
1 large egg
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda

Preheat oven to 350F. Butter and lightly flour a 13x9 inch baking pan. Beat butter and maple syrup in large mixing bowl. Add egg, vanilla, flour salt, and baking soda and mix until well blended.

Spread the batter in the prepared pan. Bake 25-30 minutes. Let cool in the pan completely before cutting.

Maple French Vanilla Ice Cream

2 large eggs
1 cup maple syrup
2 cups heavy cream
1 cup milk
2 tsp vanilla extract

Whisk eggs in a mixing bowl until light and fluffy, 1-2 minutes. Whisk in the maple syrup a little at a time, then continue whisking until completely blended. Pour in cream, milk, and vanilla and whisk to blend.

Transfer to ice cream maker and freeze following manufacturer's instructions. Makes 1 quart.

To Serve:

Cut brownies into squares. Serve a Maple Blond Brownie, then top with a scoop of Maple French Vanilla Ice Cream. Drizzle with your favorite grade of maple syrup (we like Grade A Dark Amber).

Know your wood.

2008-11-03T13:43:00.003-05:00

Thought I'd share this helpful info on how much wood is in a cord, how much is in a pickup truck (hint: it's less than you might think) and other tidbits.

We are finishing stacking our six cords this weekend, weather permitting. We should be set through next winter, which will allow us to do some cutting and gleaning of downed wood next spring and summer and have time for it to season a bit.

The stove is going all the time now, although set low. I love its toasty, dry heat and the kettle of water gently steaming on top.

Rogue chickens return.

2008-10-31T06:28:00.002-05:00

My supposedly hawk-eaten chickens apparently just went rogue, wandering the land and roosting in trees despite the snow and stormy weather. I went to get the kids at the bus yesterday and there was the lovely, tufted-ear caramel Ameracauna that I'd figured was dead. Whoa! Where did she come from? Soon I found the others, their feathers a bit bent in spots, looking a little ragged and exhausted, inside the run, trying to find a way back into the coop. (I could just see them saying to themselves, "Wasn't that little door open before? Hello, flockmates! Let us in! Snow's cold on chicken toes!")

I am pretty sure all of them are back now, but as I told a friend yesterday, it's kind of hard to count nearly forty chickens while they're all moving around the coop. We were out yesterday when it was roosting-up time; we weren't back until it was pitch-black outside and even with a flashlight, it's hard to count them all in the dark. So tonight before we go trick-or-treating will be Chicken Accounting Time.

I'm glad to have all those new layers back. I think it was just one of the older girls, so the small Rhode Island Red might still be missing.

Reality bites.

2008-10-29T17:40:00.009-05:00

Our apple reality this year: an energetic harvest followed by severe lack of time for dealing with the apples. I did well until I brought them inside so they wouldn't get sawdust on them during the construction work. They began to soften, especially the ones with apple scab. They have been staring at me from the entryway while I work. Finally yesterday I dumped the boxes into the sink so I would be forced to deal with them. Slowly, with bits of borrowed time, I have been working them through a sequence of washing them, cutting off the scabby parts, tossing the really shrively ones, cooking them soft, pushing them through the food mill, and refrigerating the applesauce. I am finally to the point where the sink is clear of apples (the food mill is soaking in it, needing to be cleaned from last night's round before I use it again tonight) and there is just this one batch resting in the dish drainer. There is one batch softened in the stockpot. So, two rounds through the mill, into the Bathtub (the 13-quart green Le Creuset oven), seasoned, and then into the canner - and I still have to dig out the jars and sterilize them. I think we're close to 13 quarts of sauce when all done with this batch.

The hungry time.

2008-10-29T06:17:00.003-05:00

Things are hungry out there now - specifically the Cooper's Hawk. We are down nine - yes, nine - chickens. Seven from the new flock! I'm quite upset. Four were Ameracaunas and three were Partridge Rocks. Then Miss Friendly's Twin, a Speckled Sussex from the old flock, and the smallest Rhode Island Red, who was nameless but who survived some sort of paralyzing disease as a young pullet.

Now we have 32 hens. It is a more manageable number, but I would have preferred to select the nonlayers out of the old flock and put them on the table rather than feed a Cooper's hawk.

I did hear a commotion outside the other day. I thought it was one of the new ones laying an egg or something. But I finally did go outside and found they were all huddled up in the coop. They looked like fewer then, but I figured some were hiding under the porch.

It has to be a hawk because a) we've seen them, and seen them kill chickens before; b) there are no holes into the coop and c) it looks like daytime predation - they have been cooped up at night.

Now they're cooped up in the day too, until I can get their huge run covered with hawk netting. I am not going through more losses. It really does suck to feed a flock of twenty-two birds expensive organic grain, care for them, get them to this point where they're about to lay, then have seven of them wiped out.

I am now revisiting whether a Cooper's hawk got our cat last year around this time; the link above says that anything smaller than a raccoon best beware during their hunting season (which is now).

On top of discovering the hen losses last night, we woke to 2-3 inches of snow and more falling. The alarm went off late - how does an alarm clock randomly set the hour ahead? - so I was scrambling for parkas, snow pants, gloves, boots for K (she went off wearing mine! and they fit!) as well as the usual, including packing insane amounts of food for J to eat. It's wicked out there, with a cruel and blustery wind. I'm happy to be warm and toasty inside by the fire.

First snow of the season.

2008-10-22T08:29:00.002-05:00

It's still snowing hard, but this was at 8 am this morning.

As much as I'm not ready (we have tons of work to do - cleaning the chicken coop, stacking wood, cleaning out the garage, 1000-hour service on the tractor, and more I'm blocking out), I still get a little thrill when the snow starts.

Photo Of The Day

2008-10-17T13:12:00.003-05:00

The three boldest of our new Barred Rock pullets. On the top step of the porch, because it is comfy to roost there until the humans come. Then it gets scary. They've just seen me and are a little alert, but too snuggled to get up right away.

Autumn Meditation.

2008-10-17T10:46:00.004-05:00

Autumn is when New England puts on its briefest and most glorious cloak. It's not only the trees, though I can hardly downplay the rich russets, flaming reds, and vibrant yellows that already surround me up here on the mountain at 1800 feet. It's also the crisp in the air, and the smell -- a smell that changes quickly, but right now it's subtle, just a gentle pulling back from vigorous green summer growth, a settling, a drying, a hollowing. If that can smell like anything - which somehow it does. It is the very beginning of the deeper smell that develops as autumn progresses - leaves decaying, vegetables rotting, plants putting all their energy into their roots for winter, dried grasses rustling, then releasing and becoming part of the earth once again. Decay, death, and yet with it, somehow through the leaves' last attempt at beauty before they die, the promise of spring, of cycle, of endless renewal. We will come back, and we will be tiny buds and crocuses and fresh shoots bursting through snow. We leave you with this, what we trees see as the most poignant and stellar display of life and beauty that we know - we leave you with this, as we retreat into our stark, bare winter selves, as we ready to dress ourselves with snow and ice, to be the brown skeletons dancing above the white winter earth.

What's in your fridge?

2008-10-15T09:26:00.002-05:00

I was inspired by this New York Times feature that looks inside the fridges of five foodies. We just got a new Energy Star refrigerator so mine is actually clean and organized enough to photograph...here it is, I'll narrate the contents below in text. (And that big bottle of Asian hot sauce with the green top? We used to get that in Washington. I haven't found it here. I miss it!)

On the door we have a shelf of meds and some bread yeast, a huge bin of butter (I usually get Cabot but at one point they were out of it so I got Land O'Lakes), too many salad dressings, and more varied condiments. I have doubles of some because my parents rented a cottage on the lake this summer and bought what they needed, and we inherited the leftovers.

Inside, the essentials on top: beer, milk (glass bottle w/the yellow top), cream, yogurt and maple syrup. One of the chickens we raised, defrosting to roast tonight in the big silver bowl. Our eggs in the plastic container we saved from the old fridge, carton of extras to sell below. On the left of the second shelf are storebought tortillas, and the deli drawer is full of cheddar cheese, ham, and hard parmesan for pasta. Various leftovers, some beef defrosting for shepherd's pie, and in the blue baking dish, some chicken marinating. And in the produce drawers, the last of the zucchinis from our garden, some carrots from the store and a bag of our carrots, a head of storebought lettuce, and a bag of grapes.

On top you see the many empty egg cartons we use to pack our eggs. Usually our fridge will have 6-10 dozen cartons of eggs in it, but the girls are molting right now.

I loved the one where they have the shelf of home-canned goods. I need to get some photos of ours.

Apple picking.

2008-10-01T06:52:00.003-05:00

The apple tree in the chicken yard.

We took the car and a trunk full of empty boxes down to the part of our land that is full of apple trees to pick yesterday. It's going to rain straight through to the weekend, except for when it snows Friday night, so this was great timing.

We have about twenty apple trees, and yesterday's picking was a discovery of the different varieties and tastes we have on each tree. It confirmed what I suspected; the land was an orchard there at some point. Every tree is different, although there are doubles of a few varieties. One tree, of course the one that produced the largest apples, has apple scab pretty badly, but the rest were surprisingly free of any disease.

We are still trying to figure out varieties, and the apples are small - downright miniature on some trees - but we now know that it's well worth getting out there in February/March and pruning at least 10 or 12 of the best trees.

What we know we have so far:
*a tart green apple much like a Granny Smith
*a light pink/yellow apple that tastes just like pears!
*a super juicy and delicious pinkish-red round apple
*tiny dark red sweet-tart apples
*some sort of fairly basic/common reddish round apple (we have several of these, and the one that's got scab is this)
*a few crabapple trees of varying degrees of bitterness
*one that looks sort of like a honeycrisp and sort of like the pear-apples, but is very densely fleshed and a bit on the not-so-tasty side

Then of course we have the one small tree that the previous owners planted, that yields huge round apples for baking. The flesh on these did not stand up to baking very well though; it's dry but almost "foamy" - just not very dense. Not sure what is up with that.

I have no idea how many bushels we picked, as we used boxes, but it's a good amount. We need to take a ladder down there next and get the higher fruit. I'm going to make applesauce and cider with most of it. We have a friend who's an artisanal cheese maker who has a cider press, and are hoping to bring some apples to his farm to press cider.

It was great fun, and Katie, who has never liked raw apples, declared that she now loves them.

Winds of change.

2008-09-15T06:21:00.004-05:00

The remnants of Ike are blowing by: gusty, humid winds ripping through the cabin and trees, through the corn and flowers. I'm ready for the crisp autumn day that is following this front.

I pureed fifteen pounds of Glacier tomatoes into sauce yesterday, then cooked it down with bay, oregano, garlic, onion, salt and a touch of crushed red pepper. Fifteen pounds - two huge colanders full and then some - cooked down into two quarts of sauce to freeze, plus about two cups for lunch for me today. I have never made sauce from fresh tomatoes, and I was a little skeptical when I had the fresh puree ready to go. It seemed so full of water, and so sweet. The sweetness meant I didn't have to add any sugar at all to the sauce. And the water just meant it reduced a lot. In the end, it was the most beautiful and delicious sauce I've ever made, and I know I'll be growing paste tomatoes next year.

Yep, there's my vice behind the food mill - no, not the prescription bottle! The wasteful K-cups. It looks like I'm running a coffeeshop, but we really just like to have a lot of variety out - teas, decaf (oh, I feel old every time I make a cup), dark roasts for me and light ones for Matt.

There's so much work still to do before the snow flies. Stacking six cords of wood, putting away the pool, putting up food, decluttering and organizing inside so we can live in here more comfortably through the long winter. More tomatoes, the pickling cukes, and elderberries beg to be processed and preserved. Basil needs replanting, and I'd love to seed some flats of herbs and get in another round of kale and chard before winter. I'm glad that the corn and beans will preserve themselves quite nicely and dry on the plants. That makes life easier.

We ease back into the rhythm of the work/school week: up early, a flurry of activity as we shower, dress, eat breakfast, pack bags. I load everyone on the bus, the dog accompanying me to see them off. Then - a quiet house, a cup of coffee, and my work. I work with blinders on to the elderberries, the cukes, the dishes in the sink and the laundry piles, save for a break here and there to stretch my legs where I throw a load of laundry in the washer and sigh at the dishes. Then it's bus time, and as the kids come inside and wind down I attack the dishes, pore over recipes for pickles, pick up clothes and toys, and make supper. Today's afternoon task is organizing their loft. Pickles took a back seat to putting together K's bed and computer desk and having our carpenter friend take a look at building a wall and door for her "corner" of the loft. It's going to be lovely, I think, and while not spacious, it will be simple and space maximized. So today, we will make that happen together, culling excess toys and streamlining clothes, organizing what's left so it can be used and put away easily. Winter preparation: make space upstairs that is functional for both of them.

Harvest.

2008-09-03T07:15:00.002-05:00

There is something very satisfying about walking in from the garden with fifteen pounds of potatoes, warmed by a couple of hours of sun, in a paper bag. It feels like I went shopping outside! Maybe because it isn't an everyday event, like grabbing bowls of tomatoes off the vines, it feels more poignant. Maybe it's the hard work of turning over the bed with a pitchfork, unearthing the starchy goodness of big russets and the tender promise of tiny new potatoes, that gives me such satisfaction.

So far I have dug up 22 lb of potatoes. I know it isn't a ton, but I've never grown potatoes before, and it feels almost miraculous. Of course, the bed is a mess - now I know why people plant orderly rows of potatoes. And the weeds got to them in July, and yields are not what they could have been due to the heavy rains. Some of the potatoes are rotting already. But mostly, there's at least one or two big bakers per plant, and plenty of smaller ones. I think I waited a little too long: one day I looked out at a bed of weeds and said, "Oh yeah! The potatoes!" and found that the plants had already died back. It's been one of those years.

But a month ago, I was ready to give up gardening altogether. Now I have a crock of pickles in brine, scented with my own dill heads, fermenting in the basement. I have a dozen pumpkins waiting to be roasted and scooped and cooked into pumpkin breads and muffins and frozen for delicious sunny winter muffins. I have so many tomatoes that I'm scrambling to figure out how to can sauce, something I have never done before. The beans are recovering from being eaten by deer - I'm not sure the Jacob's cattle beans ever will recover, but the black turtles are doing well now. We even have a few ears of corn growing out there, despite the corn's struggle this year.

Elderberries are also bountiful, and I hope to make wine with them soon. The chickens got most of the low ones, good for them, and the jays will get the high ones, but the ones in the middle - those are for me. The bushes need trimming - I don't know, do I do that in the fall or spring? More to find out. Flying blind with gardening is always interesting and keeps me on my toes.

Quiet here during harvest time...

2008-08-30T08:43:00.003-05:00

I keep telling myself I have to take photos, especially of the garden now - I missed it in its prime, not sure when that was. Actually, it was probably the last photos I posted here, as soon after, things yellowed and stagnated due to the incredibly rain-soaked ground.

I have learned a lot about growing food this year, and my soil. It needs work, my soil. It needs manure, and more tilling. My corn is not happy.

The harvest has started coming in earnest, and I plan to add some photos of our bounty soon. Right now we have:

*tons of baby pam pie pumpkins
*pickling cukes
*insane amounts of sun gold tomatoes
*plenty of glacier tomatoes
*jalapenos
*potatoes
*carrots
*what's left of the kale and chard
*cilantro going to seed
*onions
*zucchini!!!!

I think that's it. Oh, plenty of herbs on my deck - I need to reseed parsley, cilantro, and thyme at the very least. Still waiting are the big carving pumpkins for Halloween, spaghetti squash, butternut squash, and Jacob's cattle and black turtle beans. The Jacob's cattle beans got pretty well munched by deer last week, so now the garden is surrounded by the electric netting left over from the meat chickens.

My list of tasks for the next week:

*cook and freeze pumpkin
*put up pickling cukes (salt brined with our own dill heads but storebought garlic)
*finish harvesting potatoes, cure and store
*finish harvesting, cure and store onions
*harvest some carrots
*read up on elderberry wine - our elderberries are starting to come in!
*pick and eat gobs of tomatoes

If I have time, I will reseed kale, chard, cilantro, parsley, thyme, dill, and maybe more...

Busy in the fullness of summer.

2008-08-13T08:18:00.003-05:00

Honestly, it's been a rough week for us here on the homestead. Another week of neverending rain, processing chickens in the cold and wet, watching the garden yellow and decay when it should be bursting forth with produce.

Learning to accept the whims of Nature is part of this whole enterprise, but it can be tough. I was humbled when I realized that my sodden, dying veggies are the least of the problems in these parts: no one has been able to hay, and many animals will go to slaughter early this fall in order to save hay through the winter. Hay will be pricey, I'm sure. It may be a good thing that we stopped short of getting a couple of Highland cattle this spring.

So, all the chickens are in the fridge or freezer. We finished processing last Thursday and the last batch is aging in the fridge and will be frozen today. I have photos - detailed, graphic photos - of the entire process from start to finish, and my goal is to write about it here, soon. Let's just say that although for the first round we were fueled by adrenaline, it was tough to get up the energy for rounds two, three and four. Matt did the bulk of the work, just by necessity as I had a lot of work on my plate. The kids did watch and help a bit, and Matt and I wished we were able to make it more of a whole-family task - maybe next year.

We have been enjoying the fresh herbs from the containers on the deck, and I'm trying to grow a second basil crop without letting them languish so long that they're rootbound (I have to attend to that today - ack! afraid they went too long again, I started transplanting and got interrupted). The pickling cukes are coming in, and the dill is flowering, so we should have some nice real dill pickles to put up within the week. Sun Gold tomatoes are going strong with about a quart a day of harvest. My Glacier tomatoes, that I almost ripped out, are finally, slowly, ripening. And the zucchini (planted from seed, late) is coming in. The pie pumpkins are slowly ripening and a few are nearly ready.

Harvest seems painfully long in coming this year, but again I know I'm not alone in my despair. And the weather is looking good through the end of the week - I dare not look further than that. Just to have sun and "only" afternoon thunderstorms is sounding good.

Rain, rain go away...

2008-08-04T07:26:00.003-05:00

It has been an incredibly rainy few weeks. The garden is now officially suffering from too much rain. Things are yellowing and stunted and just not very happy at all. It's too expansive to cover and anyway, too windy for some sort of cover to hold and anyway, the ground uphill is so sodden that I doubt it would make much of a difference. So, it is what it is - a lesson in letting go, in ceding control, in Nature and her incredible power.

That said, the bush beans are doing great, and the pumpkins are holding their own, and the tomatoes are sort of holding out for better weather when they might start growing again. My lettuce has bolted and we didn't make a dent in the patch, so I feel guilt for not using it all - which is silly. It's a learning process, and I devoted way too much space to lettuce. Which doesn't preserve well. It's a lesson to learn, something to correct for next year. I think 3 rows of 10 feet each for lettuces would be perfect. I have 8 10' rows - 80 freaking feet worth of lettuce. Too much! The beautiful romaine you see below - bolted. And standing in 6" of water. We did eat it 2x a day since it was remotely ready to eat, so we didn't waste it - our tummies can only hold so much. I want to get it out of there and get some fresh stuff replanted, and plant some more carrots (which 20' is not enough) before the season is too late. At this rate I will still have to mulch the carrots with hay this fall to protect them from frost. But that is doable. But first, it has to stop raining.

On to the photos. These should link to the large size on Flickr, which is here, just in case you're interested in more: Lauren's Flickr

Catching up.

2008-07-25T08:11:00.002-05:00

The height of summer has left me breathless. Galinsoga started taking over the garden during our week away, partly because I didn't know what I was dealing with. The garden is still weedy, but not with galinsoga. I had to prioritize getting it out and leaving the lamb's quarters and other miscellaneous weeds that are less dangerous. It was flowering and seeding everywhere, especially loving it under the squashes. Every time I'd walk outside, I'd weed another armful. At last count, I was at eight wheelbarrows full of weeds!

I had hope that I could weed the entire veggie garden for pictures. No such luck. It's been incredibly rainy, not just drizzles but huge thundering storms with high winds. Today, I have to go out and right the tomato cages that got blown sideways yesterday, and stake the peas to a step-in post because they're hanging all over the beans. We finally have sugar snap peas! It's a little late, but the cool summers here came through. I was worried about powdery mildew, because I got a lovely variety that isn't immune to it, but I think planting late worked in my favor there. They're just gorgeous, and delicious, and I know Katie will enjoy them when she returns from Florida - I think sugar snap peas are her favorite veggie ever.

So, I have some photos from about a week ago. Of course everything is bigger now; the corn especially has taken off. My Glacier tomatoes have either curly top virus or a phosphorus deficiency/lockup, I'm not sure which. They're twisted and stunted, with green fruits that aren't growing and ripening. I'm debating whether to rip them out and plant carrots and cabbages there, or let them go and see what happens. I'm leaning toward ripping them out, but there's that pesky time factor. Just stretched a bit thin this year.

Everything else is doing wonderfully. We've had some thinnings of the Scarlet Nantes carrots and they are very flavorful and yummy. I harvested two absolutely huge heads of romaine - they won't fit in the salad spinner or in a gallon ziploc bag; I think the leaves are 18-20" long! They looked so "average" in the garden, but I now have about a dozen heads of romaine that are more than ready to go. Time to call the neighbors and friends to come get some. I guess I could have harvested them a bit earlier, as some are rotting inside from all the rain - they're in the part of the garden that flooded. Anyway, live and learn - no one needs 18" long romaine leaves! They are great for wraps, and I have some taco beef cooked up and frozen in individual servings, so I guess I'll be having taco lettuce wraps for a few days. I have also put some of the outer leaves with some defects like small brown spots and holes, in my green smoothies. I can put about 4 cups' worth of romaine in one smoothie with a cup or so of frozen strawberries and a banana and a bit of apple juice and water. It's my favorite breakfast; last night I even ate one for dinner as nothing else appealed.

On to the photos! Sorry for the shadows; it's either bright and sunny or raining hard here, no in between. The Salad Bowl lettuce, which I just keep thinning and which just keeps growing, and also needs more eating:

Peas:

Overview of garden on July 14 (please pardon the weeds) - I need to do another soon, the growth in the past 10 days has been amazing! especially the squash and corn:

I think that's it for now...I did just find some more so I'll upload them, and I promise to be better about updating! It's just been a crazy few weeks. Also - more photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/laurenware - including baby chicks, who are growing into cute little pullets!

On our plates: forget about fencing the baby pullets, we just let them out to roam since they're too small to do damage to the garden (and too small to wander that far, yet, anyway, though they're happy in my flower beds). The meat birds are really ready and the processing equipment just arrived. We hope to slaughter the 2 or 3 biggest roosters tomorrow morning! It may take another day or two as we have to set up the abbatoir area and make sure our stockpot is big enough for scalding and that our propane camp stove can get the water hot enough. If not, it's off to the store for a turkey fryer. I'm excited about tasting some of that delicious chicken. One tip for fellow home processors: you have to leave the meat in the fridge a few days before putting it in the freezer. It must age or else it becomes tough and inedible. Glad I learned that before slaughter time.

A mini-vacation...

2008-07-12T05:49:00.002-05:00

I apologize for the lack of posting! We have been preparing for, and are now winding up, a little local vacation with extended family. They rented a place on the lake, and we have joined them here most days and nights. Despite promises of wireless Internet at the lakehouse, it's been spotty at best, and when it's worked, it's been via a short Ethernet tether to the "box" where the service comes in. (We're rural enough that most traditional forms of internet are not available - the lakehouse uses a wireless-based ISP and at home we access via satellite.)

What's been interesting, is being a 10-minute drive from the many dozens of chickens currently living on our land, and the garden which is growing by leaps and bounds. (I promise to share many more photos, very soon. Suffice to say my Sun Golds are completely outgrowing their little cages, the lettuces are lush enough to feed half the town, and we are going to have a year's supply of canned pumpkin for sure.

Each morning Matt or I, or both of us, go over to the house to feed and water everyone and check on the garden. I usually have to stop myself from weeding, although I managed to get in a good bit of it this week. We also collect the eggs, and I think I may have left two days' worth out on the metal feed can outside the coop yesterday. Oops! Hopefully that kept Mr. Raccoon happy enough that he didn't decide to squeeze through the chicken door (we have been leaving the door to their pasture open at night, saving a trip back) and eat a few girls. I've been worried about that, but two nights, so far, they've been okay. Tonight we'll probably sleep at the house again and be able to shut them in.

The meat birds are looking quite close to ready. Certainly by end of July, most of them will be ready for harvest. It depends on what finishing size we want...broilers or roasters.

The baby layers are adorable and very skittish. They run in circles and cheep whenever we try to pick them up. Right now they are completely inside the coop, but we hope once this vacation is over, to fence off part of the pasture for them and build access to it from their coop. The big laying hens are their own very happy selves, but I kind of miss having them underfoot (not their poop, though!). They've adjusted to being in a fenced pasture, finally, and they certainly have more than enough space to roam in it. The garden is happy not getting decimated by chickens.

I'm finding a real passion and connection with gardening. I'm learning an incredible amount this year, on the fly, and I just love every aspect of it. It seems to engage both intellect and hands, and that's something I crave intensely.

I brought a stack of books and magazines to read this week, and my knitting, but I haven't done as much reading or knitting as I thought I would. We've eaten well and richly; Matt roasted the Highland cattle prime rib roast yesterday and prepared a delicious feast. As Katie exclaimed, it was almost all local food: the prime rib, grassfed organic from a teacher at Matt's school; the local organic potatoes; mixed greens salad from our garden; a huge, freshly baked loaf of rustic country bread from our local farm, Patchwork Farm and Bakery; and for dessert, local organic strawberries from the farm where we got our CSA last year, topped with Cabot whipped cream and underneath, locally baked biscuits for the shortcake. Even Cabot butter on the potatoes. (Which, while not organic, I do try to buy instead of other brands when I don't buy the local Amish butter that I adore.) The food was incredible, especially the prime rib. My family couldn't believe the amount of flavor the meat had, seasoned with salt and pepper and slow-roasted on a charcoal grill stoked with apple wood (ah yes, taken from a dead tree in our orchard).

The lake has been spectacular, and we've enjoyed kayaking and canoeing around it all week. We were blessed with nice hot weather for the first half of the week, so we swam a lot as well. It's a gorgeous, ever-changing, quiet and carefully developed lake, and I feel very blessed to live so near it.

Sustainability.

2008-07-02T18:35:00.003-05:00

In my earlier post about my sort-of-fly-by-night and still-developing gardening philosophy, there is one thing that is such an underpinning that, well, I forgot to articulate it. Sustainability. Permaculture. This is why the heirloom varieties, the compost, even why I toss the weeds into the mulch to compost right in between the rows rather than moving them to the compost pile, then back. Why I want to learn to save seed. Why we're figuring out which breed makes sense for a breeding flock of birds with cockerels used for meat, rather than our current system of replacement pullets and separate meat birds raised in a batch. It's not just self-sufficiency, but sustainability of that system - they're tied together inextricably.

Suburban expectations and farm/homestead realities.

2008-07-02T08:38:00.004-05:00

With my family coming for a visit on Saturday, of course I want my place to look lovely and put together. And somehow this has raised for me, a deeper expectation that surfaces every time I'm outside weeding to make things look better for a photo, or using the weed whacker around the front beds and tsk-tsking myself mentally about the grass growing up behind the lupines and peonies.

That expectation: that everything "should" look trim and tidy, like any suburban house. I'm an endless garden snoop, both online and driveby, and online especially, in other, more suburban settings, a garden usually looks so pretty: stout, straight, boughten fenceposts and hardware cloth, a fancy gate, even a pretty flower bed surrounding the vegetable garden. Houses have vast expanses of trimmed lawns, fences don't have any weeds or grass growing through them, and everything is perfectly edged. I even saw a photo of a greenhouse yesterday that has nicer kitchen cabinets than I have - in my kitchen!

Maybe if I'd grown up on a farm, I wouldn't get this twinge of - let's admit it - jealousy whenever I see those manicured, neat houses and gardens. Right now, things are not particularly pretty here. We've cleaned up the piles of lumber we had stacked against the house, gathered up all the pallets that originally held stacks of wood, then fence posts as we dismantled the (suburban in assumption as well) fence that was around an acre of land and our house. We've mowed, but right now our 1990-vintage Husqvarna ride-on mower, bought for $250 a couple years ago, has a broken part and we're waiting for the replacement in the mail. So perhaps some of my anxiety stems from the long grasses and the funky pattern Katie mowed into the grass when she was learning how to mow, right before it broke. Still. We've decided, ticks be damned, we like the wildflowers on the hill down to the brook and mowing paths through them with the tractor is just fine.

We're not about to march our recovering-from-suburbia selves down to the Home Despot and plunk down a chunk of change for a zero-turn mower or anything. But there's a small part of myself that thinks that maybe a finely-mowed and -trimmed homestead, a well-weeded victory garden plot, would validate our life choices to my parents and brothers, and truly, if I look deep enough, to myself.

This same expectation invades the inside of my house, which is currently overflowing with laundry baskets of clean clothes from which we pluck our outfits each morning. Right now the focus is on functional. Leave the vacuum out and near the kitchen because it's gonna get filthy from the shoes we often forget to take off when coming inside this time of year, the cornmeal flung around when Matt makes pizza, the strawberry tops that somehow didn't make it into the compost bucket. Get the dishes done; we don't have enough to stack them in the sink for too long, plus there's that hygiene issue. The table is full of bags of dried herbs for Lyme tea, a basket of eggs that need washing, and a pretty pink peony in our flower vase. Clear it onto the woodstove for supper (we're not using the stove this time of year, I'm happy to say!). Don't worry about the kids' loft because it's upstairs and I can't see it most of the time. It's that time of year. In winter we do lots of fixing up, organizing and preening of our little cabin, because it's all we have. Right now it's just a place to eat and lay our heads (and for me, to work).

I'm struggling to drop these expectations, though. And family visits - especially family who have not seen my place in a while - bring them to the forefront. It's been good for me to examine them. I'm still going to make things look nice, but I do have a very limited amount of time and energy to devote to the process, and I'm starting to accept that it might not look quite as pulled-together as I'd like. And - that is okay.

Things we're eating from the garden.

2008-07-01T18:02:00.003-05:00

lemon balm tea
flat leaf and curly parsley
basil
thyme
rosemary
chives
radish thinnings
swiss chard
baby romaine
mesclun
carrot thinnings (in soup with radish thinnings)
kale
baby salad bowl lettuce
rhubarb (still!)

And from the local organic farm, strawberries we picked today. They are incredibly sweet and delicious.

Gardening philosophy.

2008-06-28T19:13:00.003-05:00

Yesterday, while weeding, it hit me that I do have a philosophy underpinning my choices in growing plants, even though I think I'm just bumbling along without a plan. It's something I actually did think about, but because I didn't plan it all out ahead of time before I set foot on the soil, it sort of slowly dawned on me in a way that I'm now able to articulate.

First, I realize that we have an incredibly short growing season here, so I've focused as much as possible on plants that do well here. Heirlooms that have been grown here for hundreds of years, like Roy's Calais Flint Corn. Plants that are well-adapted to short seasons like Glacier Tomatoes. And wherever possible, I have picked an heirloom breed. I purchased every single seed from a local organic seed company this year, and will work on starting to save seeds this year (hoping that by next season I've got it down enough that I can save most everything).

I am using our own composted chicken manure, local compost from a company that recycles the school's food waste among others, and basically no fertilizer of any kind. I say "basically" because I do have some old boxes of organic fertilizer that I'm using up, but I didn't purchase anything. I want the garden to be as sustainable as possible without adding anything but our own compost.

We've also really prioritized function over beauty this year. My carefully saved Cosmos flower seeds from last year are still unplanted, and my front bed looks bare. I am finally going to be able to turn my attention to working on the flower beds in the next week or two, but for the most part they just haven't been the top priority. Or even the bottom priority. Pretty is nice, and it makes me feel good and have pride of place, but I have just had to choose where to focus energy, and I've focused on plants we can eat, herbs for seasoning and medicine.

I have focused on things that store well - carrots and potatoes - and things we can can or freeze for later. The goal is that eventually we'll grow enough produce to supply almost 100% of our vegetable needs through the year. I know we won't make that goal this year, but we've made large strides toward it. I've planted things we actually eat versus things that are fun to grow (okay I did plant a bunch of big Howden Jack O'Lantern pumpkins!).

As far as soil preparation methods, I till lightly and amend heavily. I love to mulch around plants because I hate weeding. I used as much companion planting as I could manage logistically, including a Three Sisters garden for corn, beans, and squash. I prioritized flint corn for cornmeal over sweet corn this year, and focused on the types of beans we eat - black beans and Jacob's cattle (which are a good sub for pinto as well as chickpeas in a hummus-like dip).

Of course, thrift is a big component of my gardening philosophy. You won't see fancy copper signs proclaiming each variety. Instead, we recycled popsicle sticks and I wrote on them with a Sharpie. I saw a neat and free sign at the local organic farming college (yep we have one of those!). It was just a square of scrap wood painted white and nailed to a short stake, with the variety written on in Sharpie. I can do that, when I get big enough to forget which variety is in which row. My labels just got me through from planting seeds to sprouting so I wouldn't forget what was planted already. Now, I don't really need the signs; I can tell the Salad Bowl from the Romaine.

I already know that a greenhouse is going to be an important component of our garden as well as cold frames. I don't have them yet. But basically, anything I can do to extend the season here is going to help. I can't wait to see how long I can grow chard and lettuces this fall. I hope we can get a cheap DIY greenhouse going as the weather cools down in September.

I guess that's as articulate as I can get about it for now. Short-season stuff, focus on what grows well here (no rows and rows of peppers and tomatoes! - although we love tomatoes so they do take up some prime real estate this year), local organic seed and starts (I did buy some starts this year), heirloom/old-timey/traditionally local varieties, compost and our own animals' wastes as soil amendment, grow for eating not for show, companion plant, function over aesthetics, cheap/recycled/DIY, mulch lots, weed as little as I can manage, seedsave wherever possible.

Speaking of function, Matt suggests ripping out the White Russian Kale that no one but me will eat, and planting more carrots. Hmph.

Now can we coast for a bit?

2008-06-26T11:26:00.003-05:00

In the past few days, we cleaned the house, I got a bit of work and writing done, and we're down to just two small outside projects on the immediate horizon. Those are: to plumb an outside spigot for the hoses and to finish the back wall of the new layers' coop and fence off part of the big chicken pasture for them. Okay, that's really three projects, but the layers' coop/pasture is related. Matt's out right now getting supplies for those projects and registering his new, 100mpg dual-sport motorcycle. This is his new commuter for school this fall! (Once he gets his permit, that is.)

I hope the weeds don't get too big while I work inside. Can it be that I want crappy weather so I'm not tempted to work outside? Yesterday was great: I planted the beans and squash (spaghetti, butternut, zucchini, and Green Finger cukes) in the Three Sisters garden to accompany the already-growing Roy's Calais Flint Corn, then jumped in the pool for a bit. I love floating around on a raft just looking at the mountain views. We did decide we'll probably move the pool downhill a bit beside our deck, next year. Where the pool is now, will all be garden next year.

The new, doubled-in-size coop:

The left half is what we constructed for the new layers and the right half is for the big girls, as we've been calling them.

The baby layers:

Potatoes:

Lettuce, chard, kale and peas - doing great thanks to cool, rainy weather:

The dirt in the back is where the Sunflower House was just planted, and to the right are two long rows of beans - half Black Turtle and half Jacob's Cattle.

Happy Solstice!

2008-06-22T09:13:00.002-05:00

I'm a little late on this post, and still have to upload photos, so look for a post in the next day or two.

But, it's busy time, still. I'm trying to till and de-rock a 6x20 ft strip to add to the garden, because I have way too much squash and beans that I haven't even gotten in the ground yet! It will be more than I can add around the corn in the Three Sisters garden. And I have to plant the Sunflower House. I hope it will still look great before it frosts. We're also busy trying to get the meat birds set on their 40x40 ft electric netting enclosure and building them a house of some sort. They're crowded in their tub with about 2 sq ft per bird, and yesterday we lost one to piling/crushing and one to unknown causes. It's also starting to stink in the garage and M would like to get the tractor in there to do the 1000-hour maintenance on it, get the bush hog hooked up (currently it's behind the kiddie pool with the broilers in it) and bush hog - it's getting very overgrown in the old orchard, and basically everywhere on the open 10 acres or so!

Sometimes it feels like one of those puzzles where you slide the pieces around, and to get to one particular piece, you have to move about 5 others. Right now that is our life. We have to do X, but first we have to do U, V, and W - oh and oops before we do U there's R, S, and T to do. It's all good though - we're harvesting some lettuces and mesclun, local strawberries are coming in (we hope to do a U-pick next week), and we've gotten in a large garden. We should have a lot of food this summer and fall!

That's all for the moment, but I promise to be back in the next day or two with tons more pics.