Category Archives: sweat

Coat, in situ

While emptying the pockets of my barn coat before its regular trip through the wash recently, I thought about what an odd anthropological study its contents would make.  Between all the lint and straw, dirt and crushed bits of eggshell (whoops), what does all this junk say about, well, its owner?

There won’t be any study funded, surely; no penniless grad student shall pick through its contents; and unless Etna were to magically appear nearby, blow its stack and bury me in ash on my way to the goatshed with pockets still full, no future somebody is bound to wonder either.

Its contents:  Tiny box of strike-anywhere matches.  Box cutter.  Pliers.  Right garden glove (left missing).  Various bits of wire, T50 staples, small measuring tape, safety glasses.  About 5 types of screws, a few rusted nails, a large permanent marker, a few pellets for the pellet gun.  The aforementioned dirt and junk.  A penny.  A snack-sized plastic bag.  A twist tie.

(Sheesh, but honestly, no independent study would be needed.  Imagine I allowed ads on this blog:  The sidebar would now be filled with targeted ads of Daisy guns, home supply stores, tool companies, and poultry supplies.  Yep, you are welcome.)

Now, I wash this coat with extreme regularity.  You would too, I would hope:  owning such a cover-up is fairly sensible thing to do if one is often called to pick up something muddy, poopy or bloody.  It is a knockoff of a Carhartt canvas coat, with a zipper, probably three times larger than it needs to be, cloth lined, and it sports a few holes.  And EVERY time I wash it, I find practically the same things burdening its pockets.

What an odd life this coat has.  It never leaves the property, unless it accompanies me on trips to the butcher (poultry often are muddy, poopy AND bloody, poor things).  But it is part of my uniform.  Interestingly, I never leave the property in the uniform, either.  So it’s a secret uniform, wherein I transform from mild-mannered white collar El to Super Farmer El.

Not that I don’t think I look fabulous in such dowdy he-man-wear; I do.  I find it helps to have a bit of an attitude, especially when one is prone to slip in chicken poo, fly dramatically through the air, and land firmly on one’s rear end.  May as well dress the part of a superhero.

A new garden day dawns over Greenhouse #3.

One of the (perhaps not terribly) surprising things that happens to new gardeners is learning how long it actually takes to accomplish something.  What appears straightforward (harvesting and then shelling fresh peas) is actually a sneaky time-thief that makes a person sigh with exasperation.  A half HOUR to shell two cups of peas?

It sure makes you think about the industrialization of our food system.  Frozen peas, either in baby form or those starchy large ones, are a bit of a modern miracle.  Who are all those people bent over those pea vines?  How DO they do that, if not by hand?  And how in the world do they shell them all?  If you think about the true labor involved if you were to pick and shell them by hand, no child’s plate would ever have uneaten peas.

Lincoln shell pea

But yes, that’s my back bent over the pea patches.  I grow the main 3 types:  shell, snow and sugar.  I would say shell were my favorite…by far, even if they take forever.

Lots of things take forever.  That greenhouse in the foreground of the top photo is a perfect example.  I often find my happiest days generally have me either eight feet up a ladder or on my knees in the dirt somewhere…and it’s a bonus day if I end the day having done both.  But even those days get tiring.  I was on the ladder one 90-degree day recently with the hammer drill setting the wire-lock channel to yet another greenhouse bow and it occurred to me:  is there an app for this?

An app for pea-picking might also be in order.

Five year old greenhouse globe artichokes actually produce flowers of a decent size

Interesting:  I hadn’t intended for two weeks to pass between postings.  Could it be a long weekend, a new greenhouse, the end of school or something else life-changing and/or burdensome that I can blame for the radio silence?  Eh, well, check off “all of the above.”  Ahem.

I am appreciating the garden just now.  Surely, if you home-grow, you work mainly from famine to feast on any one vegetable, and no matter how you try to time it, those famines/feasts between vegetables seem to work in concert with each other.  Everything must somehow ripen jointly.  (Must work on this, says the Machiavelli in me.  Where are my garden puppet strings.)

But the other wonderment that has occurred to me as a gardener is that almost every vegetable can be eaten at any point of its growth.  Why wait for the proper harvest?  My gluttonous binges on perfectly-ripe vegetables are tempered by the not-insignificant fact that I am Impatient.  (Yes, capital-I.)  So when I first see the (first of the garden to ripen) English (or shell) peas, I am eager to pull off a few to eat as mange-touts, or snow peas.  Why not.  My labor, my benefit.

And so it is that these young peas are joined with the everbearing asparagus (maybe a month left to go for my daily raids), some fresh favas (greenhouse-grown, pulled from the spots of the first “done” October-planted lettuces), the newest spring onions, and the current representative of the garlic crop (the scapes).  Everything is really flipping seasonal here.  Why not a pilaf, with some (effing) garden mint and thyme and a pinch of pantry cardamom and cinnamon, thank you Nigel Slater for the inspiration (a pilaf of asparagus, fava beans and mint from his inimitable Tender).

I think often of capturing these meals.  But they are a dime a dozen here, frankly; why brag.  My point in all of it is to get it to be de rigeur for YOU.  (Tell me:  is it working?)

PDF download:  CCFF BOOKLET (schedule, films shown, etc.)

This is a shout-out to you locals and near-locals.  The Second Annual Coastline Children’s Film Festival is due to begin on 3 Feb in seven locations in Southwest Michigan (90 minutes from Chicago, 45 from Grand Rapids, 30 from South Bend and Kalamazoo).

The mission of the Coastline Children’s Film Festival is to bring high quality independent films and animation for children and young adults to Berrien County and to present them – on the big screen – as shared theatrical experiences for the whole family and community. Recognizing that film and animation are still among the most accessible and innovative media for the communication of stories and ideas, both historical and contemporary, the CCFF also sees the provision of educational opportunities as central to its mission.  Alongside the screening of animated and live action films, features, shorts and documentaries, our festival participants will have the opportunity to learn about the history of the medium, as well as the craft of filmmaking through hands-on workshops and filmmaker presentations.

And:  all the films are FREE!  Over 50 films (full-length, short, and in-between…animated, documentaries, films) for children aged 2-18…in seven different venues in Berrien County, Michigan:  Benton Harbor:  ARS Gallery and at the Citadel Dance & Music Center;  St. Joseph:  Krasl Art Center and at the Box Factory for the Arts;  Bridgman: Bridgman Public Library;  Three Oaks:  Acorn Theatre; and New Buffalo:  New Buffalo Performing Arts Center.

Two of the films are quite well aligned with what I try to do here on this blog:

• What’s on Your Plate?
• Pressure Cooker

There are workshops, too, for older children:  they’ll learn the structure of a story, storyboarding, visual story telling, film vocabulary, writing, directing, cinematography, & editing. They will also learn the vocabulary of each film, as well as different roles in the art of filmmaking, e.g., cast, crew, & director’s roles, etc.

This is all very exciting for us, and for children in general.  I will admit to an aversion to most modern movies aimed at kids:  every single one seems to have the same plot (bunch of mismatched characters on a mission from point A to B) and the same annoying hypertalkative sidekicks.  This film series is a bit of a pushback against the standard fare; perhaps it’s more highbrow, but then again shouldn’t we expect more for our kids?  I know I do.  So come join us if you can.

NOT our soap:  our camera is lost somewhere amongst the kitchen clutter.  Image from here.

Normally my kitchen and my garden are my queendoms:  places where I reign supreme, and often quite solo, in my tasks.  This holiday season however I have company in the kitchen, and it’s welcome, it’s crowded and sometimes it’s a bit loud with our quarrels…as queen, you see, I am not very used to challenges to my authority.

We make all kinds of goodies this time of year.  This year, we’re experimenting with goat’s milk soapmaking.  I used one cooked/heated recipe with beef tallow that I found in the back of my favorite goat-y book (Goats Produce Too), and Tom made an uncooked one with cocoa butter and olive oil.  Soapmaking, despite its outcome, is a sloppy endeavor.  Tom made wood box frames for the molds: you unscrew them once the soap has hardened.  Oh, and one thing we hadn’t considered?  Soap needs to cure for about a month before use!  whoops.

My daughter and I have been making gifts for the CSA and for her teachers.  Our weekend task was chevre truffles and spiced chevre balls (okay, the latter needs a better name; basically they’re my regular herbed chevre rolled in a powdered spice/salt mix, bite-sized, entirely too edible).  We also made more cajeta (goat’s milk caramel) and we canned it so it doesn’t need to be eaten right away.

In point of fact, I find that it helps if not all gifts need to be eaten right away:  like the canned cajeta, the truffles and (cough) balls are frozen.  So is the chicken liver pate and the goose rillettes; hiding under their layer of clarified butter and gently frozen solid, these jars’ contents won’t expand  and break upon freezing.  It also helps a tired queen stage her production throughout this busy season.

I like sharing my kitchen for this gift-making.  But does it mean I need to clean up twice the mess?  Uh, yes it does.  Happy crafting, all.

Anything hiding in the new greenhouse?

In one of his books, Eliot Coleman (my winter gardening guru, often mentioned here) talks about looking for “the hidden farm” on his own organic farm.  His land is in Maine, and they grow intensively (great soil plus close-spaced plantings and quick cycling of crops).  How can he possibly squeeze more production out of the land he already has?  Is there another farm hiding there somewhere?

How about the old still messy one?  Tomatoes (back left wall) in mid-November count I think…

One of his thoughts for “the hidden farm” is to set low hoops on outdoor (normally dormant) garden beds, sowing them with cold-loving quick lettuces and the like outside the bookends of first and last frost, like right now.  The advantage of low hoops are fairly obvious.  With cheap and easily moved materials, he is able to eke out more crops on land that was otherwise dormant.  Another thought is turning one of his cold (unheated) greenhouses into a cool greenhouse:  minimal heating (to 35 degrees at night) means he can get three crops in the time that a cold one gives him two.

Even if we’re not bent on feeding the masses or making pots of money, it behooves us all to consider “the hidden farm” within our own gardens.  Granted, Coleman mostly speaks to professional growers, though his Four Season Harvest remains the exception for “I should try that too” accessibility.  You might not on your own need to cycle three crops in one garden bed.  But what about two?

Listen:  I come at succession planting mostly out of thrift.   I am thrifty with my time, and thrifty with my seeds, and very generous with beneficial, free(ish) things like compost, mulch, rain water and volunteer plants.  It only makes sense that I yank out a plant that’s on the slowing side of production:  more stuff needs to grow, right now!  And (there’s always an “and” when I enumerate my garden tactics) more plants in a tighter space means less weeding and mulching for the time-pressed gardener.

That big thing in the back is cardoon.  It and its close relative the artichoke love the greenhouses.

So I often look for my own hidden farm, and this year I’ve begun to capture some path space between the greenhouse beds.   Shoot, things want to grow there anyway, why not make it official by closing off the last two feet or so of the path?  Oh yeah:  the one problem is that half of both greenhouses are prone to flooding, west to east, and blocking off the water’s flow isn’t my best lightbulb-y idea.  But the north halves of both greenhouses are mostly game.

And here we are on the bed opposite.  See what I mean about standing water?

Another hidden-farm idea I have put into practice is not a terribly radical one.  It just has to do with my compost pile location.  Granted, my “pile” occupies a space 10’wide and 15′ long and 4-5′ high…it’s kinda big in other words.  But I have been moving its location annually, and sowing nutrient pigs like winter squash and corn in its former location.  Those ground-based beds have the best soil on our land, I tells ya.

I also appreciate a vertical farm and grow lots of things on trellises, even if they’d rather flop all over my precious horizontal real estate (I’m looking at you, butternut squash and sweet potatoes).  My trellises range from simple teepees out of twigs to structures made out of recycled irrigation piping to repurposed cattle fencing.  I am also a huge fan of this netting: weave it over the top rail that of a 2×2 wood frame and you’re golden.

Anyway, the off season for many of us gardeners soon approacheth!  Time to start noodling around, trying to find a hidden farm or two of your own.  You’ll have lots of hours before the shovels come out again.

Does global warming count as a hidden farm?  This is by far the latest I have harvested tomatoes.  The bread just came out of the hot oven, now the toms and the cauliflower will join the pot of beans in the medium oven.  It is odd doing all this work in a t-shirt this late in the season.  I could even still hear the tree frogs.

Half bushel (with chickens):  good year for apples here, 7 bushels out of one tree alone

The one redeeming thing about the end of the growing season is that it is the end.  If your harvests were banner or bupkis, Next Year remains perfect–and perfectly successful–due mainly to your experiences with this current one.

So, onward, planning.

Should I remind you again that now’s the best time to make garden beds?  (I am such a nag, I know…that, and I am prone to ignoring my own advice.)  The winter’s freeze/thaw action will sweeten that soil, erasing some of the damage that making the beds does to soil structure.   (Tip:  feeding those soil creatures with lots of compost then tucking them in under a thick bed of mulch will make the new soil quite a hospitable place to the microorganisms, worms and insects that help make soil fertile.  Feed them to feed yourself.)  You can also save yourself some shoveling by doing a lasagna bed:  atop a patch of lawn, put down cardboard or newspaper, rake on some leaves, grass clippings; throw down some compost and maybe a touch of soil to hold the whole thing down…next spring you can plant in it.

One of a dozen new trees in the side 40

Also, now’s the time when many garden supply stores are trying to unload unsold products, like fruit trees.  One of the biggest obstacles to the success of young fruit trees and fruiting bushes is inattentive watering during their first year:  when getting established, the trees require weekly waterings…something a forgetful gardener might miss if she’s planted her trees in the spring (trust me here).  Planting them in the fall is actually easier.  Trees quickly become dormant, and fall/winter/spring precipitation will eliminate most of the need to water.

We’ve recently had a prolonged Indian Summer with its deep blue, perfectly clear skies and wonderful exuberant colors on the remaining leaves.  The leaves literally rain down:  all windows being wide open, we hear them pinging the house’s metal roofs ticktocktick.  We wait for them all to fall, perhaps not quite so patiently, before we do the last lawn mowing.  This one is the best for the compost pile:  so many mulched-up leaves, so much long grass, so few weed seeds.    It’s a great garden mulch too…and even those new trees could use a touch of the stuff.

I like the pace of the garden in the fall; I like fall clean-up.  There’s something satisfying about knowing I don’t need to weed for the next few months ahead…that, and my spring garden still looks perfect….

What can I blame it on, the weather?  food ennui?  or perhaps the lack of a deadline?  I am talking about my sincere disinterest in canning this harvest year 2011.  Maybe it’s the CSA (sure, I can blame them, those blameless people who pay me to consume my food) but I haven’t felt the normal pressure I feel at this time of year to can. freeze. dry. and pickle.everything in sight.

Striped Romas, ready

That’ll change this weekend, though:  it’s Peach Season.  Oh, and the tomatoes are here too.  Oh, and the corn.  OH!  Pressure!!  Better get moving! Here’s wishing you all bountiful harvests.

Incidentally:  I am trying a new method of tomato staking this year.  In each of the 3×6′ greenhouse beds I usually grow 6 plants and have hated doing 2 individual stakes for each one (that’s 76 plants, or 152 stakes, if you’re counting) so this year I tried Shepherd Ogden’s method of hanging them, vertically.  Basically, you tie twine around the base of the plant and hold the plant upright, twisting the twine around the stem to some jerry-rigged overhead support.  My overhead supports are tilted (4′ at low end, 7′ at high) because, well, the greenhouse roof is curved.  Upside:  I only drive 2 stakes for 3 plants!  It’s working very well so far:  no real work for the gardener once they’re up.

Update:  The meat chicks are a bit more than a week old, so they spend their day outdoors in the mini tractor (an old chick coop I rigged for my first chickens five years ago now:  they lived in it until we built the Taj Mahal).  Nights are spent in two big plastic storage tubs with 60-watt incandescent bulbs in the brooder lamps:  no need for real heat overnight, and hopefully in a week no light at all.  And I still have them on bath towels in those overnight tubs until I can trust them not to eat their wood-shaving bedding (another week hence).

Here you see Tom’s Friday deposit to the compost pile:  I was at my office on Friday so I couldn’t spread all this grass.  The bed in front of it is 3’x8′, if you’re curious about scale.

Most days, I consider myself more of a Mulcher than a Gardener.  I should give you a little background, though, to explain this.

Mother’s Day, 2005:  my second mother’s day, frankly.  And what did I ask for?

What do all new farm-owning new-ish mothers ask for?  A gas-powered, rear-tine tiller*, of course.  Silly question!  So I spent that day busting up the sod.  Then I built raised beds and filled them up with the resident clay soil.

It took me no time at all here as a small-g gardener that this clay here is baaaddd, but also surprisingly fertile.  Fertile, and that fertility does not discriminate:  those weeds were so happy that I had made lovely compost-filled raised beds for them.  (Did you ever truly wonder how I came up with the name of this blog?)  If I wanted ANY time to enjoy my new gardens and my toddler, I needed to figure out how to get ahead of those weeds.

And my answer was quite literally under my feet.  Grass!  Sears (and its Craftsman products in particular) sure came to our rescue those first two years as country dwellers.  To help me battle the weeds, we bought mulching blades and a badass rear bagger for Tom’s lawn tractor.  We could now capture and use all those grass clippings.  Well, not *all* those grass clippings, as 4 acres of grass clippings is, uh, quite a lot.  Half the acreage is wooded and seeded quite readily with poison ivy, so…I gladly ask for and receive about two acres’ worth of mulched grass (and fall leaves) from the non-poison ivy portion of lawn every time Tom mows.  It’s a bountiful resource.

First, though, the worry.  As a new mom, my worry was likewise indiscriminate.  I worried that our soil would become too waterlogged if I had mulch on it 24/7, but that worry was silly because the raised beds drain quite well.  I worried too about weed seeds:  cutting those dandelion heads and then spreading them on the gardens, what, was I crazy?  No crazier than letting them simply be wind-blown onto it…weeds just ARE, if you ask me.  I likewise worried about the bugs it would harbor, but 99% of them are more beneficial than harmful.  If I lived in someplace damp and forested where slugs or snails were a problem, I might reconsider my love of mulch…but I don’t.

I am so glad I don’t have a grass allergy.  Spreading those bags around is a dusty, pollen-filled business.  But spread I do.  Excepting the seeding beds (where I direct seed, let the babies grow big, then move them around) every bed has at least 3″ of clippings on them all year long.  Nature abhors a vacuum, of course, so any open patch of soil is sure to sprout a weed or six.  It’s best to keep it all covered up.

Mulch isn’t just great at suppressing weed growth.  Our clay soil turns rock-hard if exposed.  Keeping a blanket of mulch on it helps its friability…and helps the worms and millions of other soil dwellers use the soil all the way to the surface.  I really don’t water the garden at all once the seedlings have taken off.  Planting into that soil is likewise a dream:  I part the mulch, dig, and plant.

The green, green grass directly out of the bags is easily spread if it’s not allowed to mat up, so I try to spread it as soon as it’s cut.  Its bright color is handy:  because it turns brown after a week, I can readily tell where new mulch needs to be applied.  If I can’t spread it immediately, this isn’t a problem.  It mats up but those mats are quite usable, jigsaw-puzzle wise.  It becomes a stinking slimy mess though if it’s wet…and so if allowed to sit, it needs to rest, often for weeks, before it’s usable as mulch.  But all excess bags get thrown on the compost pile to help speed it along.

Anything that grows can be mulch, of course:  wood chips, straw, leaves, pine needles.  Cardboard, newspaper.  I wanted a renewable, constant, homegrown source free of industrial chemicals, so compost and mower clippings work well for me.   Mulching takes so much less time than weeding.

So, if you want to water less, weed less, have happier plants and build a more fertile environment for your soil’s biome, find yourself some mulch.  It works with clay, it works with sand, it works with all soils in between.

(*And incidentally I am very anti-tilling as a general practice.  For large new gardens and the impatient gardener, though, they’re great.  I only till now if I need to make a lot of new beds…which isn’t that often.)

One should always try to avoid injury, too.  Should I blame the 1.5 pre-prandial glasses of wine for me slicing part of my finger off, or general farm tiredness?  Either way, it’s a drag weeding in a latex glove, and even harder milking 2 goats with one hand!

Sometimes life’s a bit too busy and running around with a camera is just one thing too many.  On occasion, though, it’s a good documentary tool for what happens, even in its minutia.  I’ve gotta try to remember that.

It’s also hard to take pictures if your goats make you laugh so much.  Here’s Cricket demonstrating her permanent milk mustache.  Does she look pregnant to you (due date 5/25)?

It’s hard to slow down sometimes.

With so much to accomplish, the very act of sitting down seems mutinous.  Yet I am sitting down in between tasks to type this, and to force myself to pause and reflect.

Pausing, indeed.  I am still reminded of time passing: the metronomic wet drips from both bags of cheese curds hanging above the sink are hard to ignore.  Surprising, really, how equally timed those drips are; the bags aren’t the same size.  And I’m listening to the crackling of the loaves of bread behind me.  Just out of the oven, their crunchy crusts are reducing to size.  The pot of stewing squash (the last of the pink banana) emits a burble here and there.  And through the open window, I hear the buzz and angry twitter of two hummingbirds fighting for the feeder.  Even when you put two feeders out (as we do) they still bicker.

It’s spring.  I am muscle-weary yet still anxious to move.  Better get up and get going!  Much to do yet.

Bell says get busy already, and is that camera edible?

After two years of saying “I think I have enough of a garden”  I have changed my mind.  Seven new raised beds and a new (chicken- and deer-proof) fence are in my future for this weekend.

Crazily, I am also planning a new greenhouse (for this fall).  Whee!

Seattleites! Washingtonians!  All you all up there!  If you’ve got some time on Thursday March 3rd, go attend my husband’s opening at the Gail Gibson Gallery from 6-8pm.  He’ll be there, glad-handing; I will be milking a goat and shoveling snow, alas, back home.

Here’s a link to the gallery, and you can see more of his work there.  It’s his newest gallery, and they’d love your support!

Bantams for some reason really like being on the coop roof.  This is a hen.

Hey:  I am quite sure a lot of you all read this blog through a reader, but…I wanted to point out that the hosted blog has had a few changes made to it.  Come on over to the site and take a look.

I feel compelled to mop things up at this time of the year.  (Either that, or I’m motivated by chaos, at least temporarily:  that kitchen renovation that I mentioned is hobbling along…and it’s still needed as a kitchen.)  So.  Above, I have redone the pages (those little tab things at the top of the blog) and have done a little more ‘splainin’ about things that make this little homestead a bit unique, like Loven and the goats and the greenhouses.

There’s a tab, too, about 2011 and what it portends, farm-wise…it’s not a list of goals, just a list of the other bits of craziness that we’ve signed on to for this year.

And lastly:  I often get asked if I teach classes.  I have, but I don’t do it often enough to make it worth anyone’s while.  Fortunately I know a really wonderful woman who is a natural teacher, and whose enthusiasm and openness is a great thing to experience.  Her name is Shawna and I will have a running list of her farm’s offerings in my sidebar this year.  If you live in the area, sign up!

Different day, different bird:  Michael Jackson, daddy to the hen above, mid-crow in the morning.

Of all the years, this was not the best one to start a CSA to sell my surplus vegetables.

It wasn’t a bad year, weather-wise.  In point of fact, this year was fairly normal…being just a touch hotter and drier than what I have come to expect.  So I can’t blame the weather for my lack of planning.  Indeed, this lack of planning?  It is 100% on me.  I have been a GARDEN SLACKER.

You see, normally I am a succession-planting fool.  “No Earth Unplanted, Ever” is the m.o. that I have worked under for years.  Likewise, I rapidly pull and replant areas where harvests wind down (lettuce out, bush beans in; beans out, broccoli in is the pattern for a typical bed).  But this year, because of my goat-y and oven-based distractions, the garden has suffered an amazing lack of attention by yours truly.

One of two.  Last year, I think I had 4 wheelbarrows’ worth.

That’s not to say it hasn’t been productive.  Nope.  Exhibit A:  This year’s winter squash harvest.

I did not plant one seed of this.  These are all volunteers from the compost.  And yes:  I was lucky:  the Queensland Blue squash at the bottom left seems to have not been crossed with anything else; same too with a couple of kabochas buried in the ‘barrow.  The monster pink banana squash though?  They’re a bit…bigger than normal, so obviously there was some cucurbita hanky-panky going on.  Not seen?  Pumpkins, and zucchini, even more butternuts and more than a few mutts that did cross.

It’s not to say that harvesting has been, exactly, easy this year.  Witness my poor hori-hori, whose handle was a victim of our tough clay soil while unearthing the sweet potatoes.   Crack!

I do scratch my head and wonder what the point was to my spring plantings.  I believe I had a notion that I should grow as many starch crops as possible, because, frankly, you plant potatoes in March and harvest them in October with nary a care in the months between.  So I hope my CSA folks like potatoes and sweet potatoes as well as winter squash…there’ll be plenty to eat.  There’s also a lot of leeks out there.  I think I misread a label and planted out, instead of a flat of onion seedlings, one of leeks:  I must need glasses.  The seedlings aren’t THAT similar had I been paying attention.

Well.  It will all work out in the end methinks, but if I am going to have paying customers, I probably should get more serious about this venture.  Eeeks.  This means I need to…plan.

So, for the summer, I thought I would lighten my load by posting once a week.  You know what?  I *like* only posting once a week!  I am going to continue the trend.  It just seems sensible, what with all I have bitten off.

School is back in session for us, and with it a shift in the flow of the day.  It’s fun and good:  we’re all earlier to bed, earlier to rise.  Okay, maybe “fun” is the wrong word as we all seem a bit more harried, but that could simply be us adjusting our schedules.  And with a new year comes homework (!) and more nightly music lessons and projects of interest.  One project:  Learning to spin.  And knit what we spin.  Oh boy.

Me doing the usual bite-lip-in-concentration thing

Another new-ish thing for the late summer/fall is that I have begun an informal CSA.  I only have five subscribers but goodness, I didn’t plant my summer garden thinking I was to harvest enough for six households…in other words, it’s a stretch!  Fortunately, it IS informal, and the mix of goods is broad (yogurt/kefir/cheese, eggs, veg, fruit, bread, and canned goods, as well as fresh ferments like krauts and kimchi as I make them.  And leftovers.  My subscribers aren’t picky, and actually appreciate a quart of bean soup.).  We all just figured on a weekly dollar amount and I will scare up enough victuals to hit that number.  So far, it’s been working.  The summer CSA will focus more on veg and the fall/winter more on salad…and oven bread and beans and the like.

Next year is projected to be a Year of Meat.  We will be raising meat chickens for the CSA members.  I am also going to get into meat rabbits, and Tom wants to do bees (which are not meat but, you know, honey is wonderful).  We are also toying with the idea of a fiber animal or two (either one angora goat or two sheep…we don’t want to do angora rabbits as the brushing sessions seem too time-intensive).  It’s all part of a piece, really, about learning, sharing, and doing.  For us, doing is being, and when we’re growing and learning new things, we’re happy.

Everything is an evolution, whether one is adding to one’s workload or reducing it.  Right?