Diana’s Think Space

I just realized I never showed you Sofía’s new jacket. How could that happen?…

…Oh. Because I finished it at 3am the night before leaving for vacation, and then proceeded to forget all about blogging. Right. Well, better late than never!

The outside is a supersoft wool that I felted up a bit in the washing machine before cutting. That had the advantages of not only making it thicker, but ensuring that I wouldn’t have to hand-wash it or dry-clean it in the future. The torso and hood are interfaced with wool batting and the sleeves and skirt have a double thickness of cotton flannel. This coat will keep my baby warm, baby.

And… did you notice? The lining is an Eric Carle print. From The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Remember that book?

I ordered the fabric online, again from fabric.com. I’ve had good luck with them. But have you any idea how much guts it takes to order that kind of color combination without being able to see it or touch it? I’ll tell you, I was this close to wimping out. I’m glad I persevered. (Why yes, I do make these for sale. -wink-)

I just made dinner for the first time with one of my homemade cheeses – my first Colby, actually. It was just mac-n-cheese, but it was amazingly delicious! Of course, how could it not be, with 8 ounces of cheese and a whole stick of butter?

Wow, that was some doozy of a storm! For those of you who might not know, we had some big ole-record-breaking snowfall around these parts last night. About 28 inches, and 10 more forecast for tonight, with 40-mile-an-hour winds. Drifts topping our chain link fence, burying our grill and patio tables with ridiculously over-puffed muffin-hats of snow, coating and draping and breaking trees all around us.

Which is of course why the power was out all morning: down the road a bit some very tall evergreens had keeled over right across the street one after another, snapping power lines as they fell. Our neighbors (who sleep on the street side of their house) told us they were woken up by snapping and arcing electricity that looked like a lightening strike.  Our street was impassible for most of the day.

The quiet and solitude all along our street was mesmerizing; the snow-draped trees and silent forest were beautiful. Snow continued to drift much of the morning, and our busy two-lane street had just enough of a rut cut out for a single utility vehicle to pass.

I was excited; we were woken up at 7am by the sound of our sump-pump back-up battery’s alarm emitting an extremely loud, piercing whine to let us know that the power was down and that the battery was also having trouble. I think the alarm itself was broken too, because no matter how long, frequently, or forcefully we toggled the “alarm reset” button (the ONLY button on the thing at all), the alarm would come right back on two seconds later. We ended up swaddling it in cooler boxes wrapped in old floor rugs, and that kept it quiet enough for us to sit upstairs and try to ignore it. After all, the ground was frozen so nothing was going to flood.

Josh was not very happy, but I was having a great time. I’d get to see if after reading all those homesteading and prairie life books, I could actually keep my family comfortable without electricity! Sofía woke up because of the battery alarm too and I explained to her that we were having an adventure and that we were going to live like people did in the old days. I sent Josh out to excavate a path to the firewood that I had so carefully stacked up back in October. I lit our “real” fireplace for the very first time using sawdust and beeswax polishing-cloths and kindling that I had saved up for that very purpose, and soon we had a roaring oak fire going.

After inviting the neighbors over – they had 5 young kids and no fireplace – I started breakfast over the fire.

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Well, I did it anyway. I cleared a 10′x30′ path for the trucks to gain access to the mini-farm from the North road. Blowing snow, 3″ of snow on the ground, soaked-through jeans, a single handsaw, and an hour and a half’s work. No headache anymore at least (thank God for excedrin).

Most of the brush was just little saplings, but I did get at least 10 good trees big enough for fence rails (about 8-10″ circumference). I even made myself pause to lop off their branches before tossing them on the “rails” pile. I didn’t do that for any of the previously cleared future-fence-rails, and I’ve been despairing now of ever getting them out of the wildly knotted loom of tangles their branches have become.

The chipping brush pile is getting taller and taller – and now there are 4 of them. I hope to have enough mulch to last me a couple years.

Now the only thing left to do is move one last big clump of downed brush/trees to the chipping pile, then go in there with orange tape and individually mark trees that I want left in 8′ lengths rather than 18″ fireplace lengths. I plan to make as many raised beds as possible with all the slender, straight trees I already have, before going out and buying landscape timbers. The beds made of whole logs will be rough, and maybe ugly, and probably the sides will leak compost because they won’t be flush to each other when stacked, but they are free and I do so hate waste.

Here’s a glance at our future mini-farm. Remember back when I posted these satellite pics?

Well, the measurements and area calculations are ALL WRONG, so pay no attention to those. But the lines and the shape of the future farm is roughly correct. Except smaller – I don’t know where I got those area calculations, but once I’d actually measured it (instead of relying on replicating Google’s scale tool), it came to 40′ across the top, 113′ down the East side, and I think 126′ across the bottom… about 5,000 sf total. (If my embarrassing failure of a mess of math skills hasn’t let me down yet again.)

If you were wondering why in previous posts I was complaining about slaving in there for a whole week in order to clear it out for the contractors just to be able to come visualize and give me estimates, this is why:

You should really click to enlarge it; the little pic doesn’t do it justice. The whole woods is barely passable in the dead of winter. During summer, you can’t see 5 feet ahead of you. It’s a jungle out there. I slaved for a week with a little handsaw and a pair of hand loppers, and here’s where I am now:

Lookin’ good.

That picture is facing South-East: to take it I’m standing on the North-West boundary corner, where the main entrance will be (the whole thing will be surrounded by 8′ deer fence, so it’s good to remember to plan for entrances). Here’s a picture looking vaguely South/South-West:

I’m standing in the middle of the future orchard, next to the future apiary and the future chicken coop. That rise to the right is actually backfill from when they dug the pool (ugh, the pool) and will probably end up being my vineyard because of the superior drainage. I’ll end up planting the steeper slopes with lavender for the bees.

I still have to clear a path for the trucks to enter from the North – it’s too wet on the South side. After all this effort, though, the last thing I want to do right now is slog out in 5 inches of snow in 30* weather with a headache. It’s gotta be done before Tuesday, but… maybe I can just rest on my laurels for a couple days more.

Besides, seeing as we’re due for 3′ of snow starting this afternoon (it’s funny to see people stocking up on Superbowl foods all in a panic because they’re afraid they’ll get snowed in before the big game. The grocery store was *empty* of junk foods and so crowded that I had to finegal to just get Sofía and I a shopping cart. Josh says the liquor store was so packed he could hardly move – luckily he doesn’t drink Bud or Miller, so his snobby-beer selection was still ample.) So the workers probably won’t actually come this Tuesday anyway. Well, the longer they delay, the longer I can put off having to shell out for landscape timbers!

Today was a good day to go spend a morning at Whole Foods. I had wanted to go tomorrow with a good friend of mine, but because of wicked snows in the forecast for tomorrow, decided there’s no time like the present. Also I was inexplicably grumpy and there’s nothing like gorgeous displays of fancy foods to lighten my spirits. Sofía loved it, and as a treat for being the sweetest baby ever the whole time, she got to devour her first hippie-style Fig Newton. And then she pestered me for more all the way home.

I was ostensibly going in the first place to taste-test their blue cheeses and decide if I wanted to make my own. Here’s what I came home with:

(Oh yes, three different blues. Well, one is a Roquefort. They were so good. So good. I could not resist.)

A lot more than I’d bargained for, but get this: everything I got is dual-purpose. Not only will they be eaten, but also saved for my garden later this year. Roast butternut squash is yummy, but just scoop out the seeds and I’ve saved myself a $3 packet of seeds. Bake the rest of those yams and put just one in the window to sprout, and it’ll eventually be good for a whole lotta meals. Same for the lemons and clementines.

I was thrilled to find scoop-your-own beans in the bulk foods. For about 25 cents each I bought enough soybeans, kidney beans, cannellini, and black beans to keep a family of 4 in beans for a year. These beans aren’t any different from the ones you buy in the seed packets, with the exception that they’re more boring (and cheaper). These are just your run-of-the-mill beans: not for me the named and beloved “Cherokee Trail of Tears” or “Lazy Housewife” or “Calypso” or “Walking Woman.” Too bad. These were nearly free, and saved me $12.

There were sunchokes for sale (underground tubers), which will keep nicely in the fridge till Spring and ought to do beautifully in our soil; and of course I bought some russet potatoes to sprout as well. They may not sprout in time – if they were grown in a drastically different climate than ours they won’t sprout till their internal clock goes off, be it August or May or whatever – but I think they will since I tried hard to verify that they were grown Stateside, so hopefully the climate won’t be too different.

I almost bought raw peanuts and popcorn too (I mean to get one of those antique hand grinders and make my own corn flour). And what about rice for the boggy patches? Hm. I abstained.

Even the three blue cheeses will get enjoyed, saved, and reused again and again as their cultures live on in my own household cheeses. They’re kind of like sourdough that way.

It brings a whole new light to grocery-store shopping: think of all the different kinds of heritage tomatoes they’ll have in summer! The varieties of melons! The squash in the fall! I’m already excited to stock up for Spring 2011.

So let’s see – if I’d bought these all at the online seed and plant stores I frequent I’d have paid:

$10+$10 shipping for the yams
$10+$10 shipping for the potatoes
$25 for the clementine tree (assuming it grows)
$25 for the meyer lemon tree
$3 each for the beans and butternut seeds
$10 for the sunchokes
$6 each for the blue cheese cultures, plus $8 shipping

Totals about $130. That doesn’t even include the shipping for the seeds and citrus trees, which is probably substantial. Versus the $30 spent today… Whoo-ee. I think I made a killing.

I am so excited. And nervous. I feel like I’m once again waiting for my due date to roll around. And in some respects my anticipation is due to birth: well, re-birth, renewal, new beginnings…  it’s all about Spring this time.

I had thought that after moving into this house I’d have to wait at least a year to be able to plant anything. I kept resolutely telling myself that was fine – that I needed to get a feel for the lay of the land anyway, and that one year without a veggie patch wouldn’t kill me. (I couldn’t just start a tiny one in the corner of a yard, you see, because after tracking the sunlight with videos and cameras we realized that there is not one place on our property that gets direct sun for more than an hour and a half a day.) The previous owners sure loved their trees. No, there was no way to get a veggie patch without first chopping down some trees. Well, all that extra land was what we bought this house for, after all. It’d just take a little extra time and effort.

It’s just that there were all sorts of reasons why we couldn’t do it this year. We didn’t have the money; I’m scared of chainsaws; our county goes crazy with the permits; we couldn’t possibly pay someone to pull all those stumps, and besides then we’d need more permits and architecturally engineered plans to show to drainage and sediment committees; we didn’t want to irritate the neighbors the first year.

Nonetheless, after several weepy incidents, contractor bids that came in at about 25% of what I had imagined it would cost, and a realization of just how addicted I am to this self-sufficiency thing, we’re going ahead with it anyway. That’s right – come Tuesday (or two-weeks-from-now-Tuesday, if this weekend’s predicted 3 feet of snow haven’t melted yet) – I will be the proud owner of 9/10 of an acre of woods, plus a treeless stumpy patch of about 4,500 square feet. Enough for a vegetable patch that – with luck and a lot more dedication than a parent with a toddler can possibly deliver – should feed two people all year. Not enough for livestock (except my bees and possibly some chickens), not enough to grow wheat for our flour (I’ve calculated that we’d need about 1/8 acre, 5400 feet, to grow all our wheat). And the goats will have to come later. (Oh yes, Josh, come they will.)

The price of the bids was helped by the fact that the drainage is so poor in there that I must build raised beds anyway… so why pull the stumps when I could just cut them flush to the ground and build beds right on top of them? The stumps will decompose (if I help them along) within two years anyway.

Plans are underway. Multiple fruit trees, vines, and bushes (the bare minimum for the first year, I told myself, consoling myself that every year I can get more, as if 4 wouldn’t be enough for most people) will be delivered in a couple months. I’ve used dozens of pages of grid paper to plan every foot of my garden down to the square inch. I have spent many evenings studiously researching average veggie consumption habits to determine how much of what to plant.

But now that the time is at hand and contracts are signed, I’m getting that what-if-I’m-terribly-wrong feeling. I’m suffering a crisis of conscience about beginning my garden only halfway as North as it could be: what if later I want to expand it all the way North (about 50 more feet) to the street, but then the orchard is already in the way and will shade all the other plants I try to grow back there? What if the drainage turns out to be more of an issue, or I can’t plant the orchard right because there are stumps in the way, and how do I make allowances now for where to put the chicken coop, shed, and apiary in the future, and ….  what if, what if, what if. I want to get it exactly right the first try.

The uncertainty, the anxiety, the irrepressible excitement of really beginning, really finally beginning the mini farm I’ve dreamed about for so many years… it really is like approaching a due date.

For dinner today we had herbed roast chicken and a salad of mixed greens, spicy candied pecans, diced apple, cranberries, and parmesan with a honey-mustard viniagrette. Both my people were moaning “mmm” while they ate…

…and then Sofía looked up from her tray, where she was shoveling in food as fast as she could, paused to smile at me and said “Delicious! Delicious!” for the first time.

I don’t know how she learned that word, but she sure knows how to make Mommy happy.

Yesterday I had Sofía lying on the changing table as I counted out wipes out loud: “One… Two… Three…” And Sofía, miracle girl that she is, spontaneously chimed in and continued, all by herself, “fowa, fiy, sick, seven…” all the way up to eleven!

There’s a distinction between counting and reciting, but I still think it’s an amazing feat for an 18-month-old. She doesn’t always get it all right – she has a tendency to skip 8 – but she’s done it multiple times and when we do it together, she often even gets ahead of me like “Come on, Mom, I’m smarter than that baby rhythm!”

I wish we knew where our video camera is.

‘Til now we haven’t placed much emphasis on numbers at all – our attention has been on reciting the alphabet. During Christmas break we did notice that she could recognize the numbers 2, 6, and 8; and she will sometimes say “one-two-flee,” but she wouldn’t say “four” or anything else. So this accomplishment came as a complete surprise.

Up to eleven!

(When I tried to get her to say “twelve,” she said “sixteen!” We’re working on it.)

Well, I’ve been away for a whole month now… pretty far from my ancient goal of blogging about every other day. I’ve been super busy since vacation – like always, ya know, but at a really accelerated pace.

For one, Josh and I have decided it’s more important to our family cohesiveness (read: my lack of general grump) that we focus on getting my garden plot cleared this year instead of getting the carpet replaced. Of course I’m sad because I really, REALLY wanted our family room carpet gone, not just because it looks like elephant vomit and is about 50 years old, but because it’s a health hazard for a family with allergies to dust and mites. Did I ever tell you that the two times I’ve napped in there, I’ve gotten blisters on my eyeballs? Blisters. On my. Eyeballs.

Now that I’m on my maintenance allergy shots I’m ok in that room, but it grosses me out that I’m still breathing that stuff. And you wouldn’t believe what the Roomba – that I run twice a day – still drags up. (Did I tell you I’m eloping with my Roomba?)

Anyway, so I’m working on the future mini-farm complete with all the necessary hours spent looking through seed catalogues (gardener’s porn), compiling lists of fruit trees at various websites, calculating linear footage of fencing of various qualities, and obsessing over scaled down draft models that I sketch in down to the square inch. I’ve been outside clearing the land of brush and saplings for a couple hours every day this week. Busy? I’ve also been making crazy cheese, rearranging furniture, AND running after Sofía with kleenex all day because her nose has been leaking for nearly two weeks now. (Her first consciously communicative sentence was, after she was whimpering in the backseat and I asked her what was wrong, “Booger! Come out.”)

I’ve done a few craft projects too, and that was really what I started to write this post about before I meandered all over the place. I had been looking forward to the annual Ruth’s Chris party all year long, and as I wrote before I was determined to wear a new dress this time. Luckily my MIL has a Bernina machine too, so I spent all vacation crafting a muslin and starting the dress, and then a week and a half back home tucking and fitting and embroidering and hemming and slashing and gathering and beading and… on and on and on. I was still attaching the sash at 3:30 for a party that started at 5. Half an hour away. What an exercise in frustration that was. I think it ended up looking pretty good though. Others seemed to think so too. I wish you could see all the super sparkly Swarovski crystals and silver beads and gold thread encrusted all over the sash. Did I mention it was cut from a crazy upscale designer wedding dress?

And oh, did I mention the best thing about this dress? It was (nearly) free. No kidding: the skirt and various linings were from my stash, while the bodice and sash and petticoat (wheee! Petticoat!) were from a friend’s stash of random leftover bits of bridal fabrics that I had recently inherited. I already had the shoes, -ahem-structuring garments-ahem-, thread, needles… everything but the sparkly accoutrements (> $50) and pattern (vintage, from 1954!)

I also came out looking pretty good for something done while craning over my shoulder into a medicine cabinet – NEVER MIND THE FRIZZES, I got them later and did NOT go looking like a destitute debutante.