Intoxication

There are few things that are intoxicating to me in the middle of winter; but the smell of rich, dark soil, the texture of this moist earth crumbling through my fingers made fertile for seeds by earth worms, the promise of hands that have been well worn by a day's honest work in the garden, nails clipped short and needing a good scrub in the sink, these things get me every time.

Sure, you could say that the above is just a romantic way of saying that I like the smell of dirt, the feel of worm poop and trading my dry, cracked winter hands for rough, calloused gardener's hands. But, if it weren't for the promise of spring, we'd all be going crazy this time of year, holed up in our warm homes while the ground stays frozen beyond our front doors and ice sprawls like a river down our walkways. The seed companies know this. They are happy to fill our mailboxes with bright, colorful catalogs, dotted with vibrant flowers and red tomatoes pregnant with juices, flavor and seeds. They aim to make us drool, to make us spend more money on what could be in our gardens (and tummies) in a few short months.

My new plans for the garden include introducing ollahs (oy-yahs) to some of my beds to see how well they work for me in my climate and to conserve water (and time). I plan to make my own ollahs following the techniques from closer to the dirt. I plan to build another strawberry fountain with everbearing strawberries to complement the three varieties we already have established (sparkle, early glow and sure crop) and to build at least two more raised beds for herbs, lettuces and an asparagus patch.

I'll be planting a hedge of balsam firs for privacy and a windbreak and expanding the raspberry and blackberry patches. We'll extend the highbush blueberries too. I've collected a few 5 gallon buckets to make various manure teas for my gardens indoors and out. I may even experiment with urine manure tea, which is supposed to be the best all-purpose manure tea for plants, according to research conducted by Woods End Laboratories in Mt. Vernon, Maine. So much to plan for!

Play dough dreams of spring

Even though I expect more snow and ice, it feels like we've made it through the worst of winter and that the promise of spring is close at hand. During the winter, we don't clean the chicken coop like we do throughout the rest of the year. Instead, I add a weekly layer of sweet clean hay, golden straw or pine shavings to build up the organic mass in the coop. Besides keeping the chickens warmer, it creates excellent compost come spring time and to my nose smells sweet, pungent, and earthy, not unpleasant. I actually look forward to this gardening smell on my daily visits to the chicken coop to check on the girls. Our matriarch, Scarlet, has the first few white feathers peeking through on top of her auburn head, a testament to all the hawks and dogs she's dodged. All the chickens are more grateful of receiving pats and food scraps in winter to keep their days more interesting.

In the house our worms are hard at work creating their own compost. In the spring as they start to multiply, I plan to scoop handfuls of red wigglers into the raised beds to help ensure the success of those crops. The soil they live in smells rich and loamy and Savannah can't help but open the lids and dig around inside.

We're growing our fourth batch of bulbs indoors; this time crocuses, spring's smallest but bravest and earliest bloomers. Seeing the delicate green buds everyday does wonders when there are snowbanks outside taller than I am. And to stave off the winter blues, we've been making play dough, something made pliable by the warmth of our hands and wanting to be stretched and molded into whatever we can imagine it to be.

Busy at play with a batch of homemade play dough. I use the oilcloth to spare my table from the rough housing.

 

Alligators and little girls.

Elephant-bat.

The play dough recipe that really works:

In a large bowl combine 1 1/2 cups water, and 3 Tb vegetable oil, (food coloring, if desired), (vanilla or other scented oil, if desired).

Add to it 1 1/2 cups flour, 3/4 cups salt, 3 Tb cream of tartar and stir until the lumps are gone.

Bake in a  9x9 or 9x13 glass pan at 350 degrees for 7 to 10 minutes.

Remove from dish, when cool enough and knead. Store in a plastic lidded container or bag to keep it fresh for many weeks.

Treadmill desk

There's a slow trend in offices across America, both corporate and home offices, towards increasing exercise during the work day. As a mother with a very stubborn eight pounds of baby fat to lose, naturally, I had to jump on this bandwagon. So, I built myself a treadmill desk.

It's very simple and fits around my treadmill, but didn't cost me the $500-$6,000 that some companies are charging for these. It is made from 2x3s for the legs, a pair of 2x2 cross supports, and some leftover 3/4" MDF for the desk top. I used my Kreg Jig to attached the legs and painted it black to help it blend in as much as possible with the existing treadmill.

Check out my new office view!

The idea is that you walk 1-2 miles per hour while working on your computer. It's exercise that you wouldn't get otherwise and adds up over time. I'm really looking forward to using my new work station. The other freelancers I know who use one say it has increased their productivity while decreasing their butt size.

Search for "treadmill desk" and you'll find a wealth of information on the topic and the studies that have been conducted so far. To build your own, just keep in mind that it should clear your treadmill on all sides, rather than rest on the treadmill to avoid any vibration from the machine. Hope you build one this year too!

Popcorn for breakfast

William likes loud things. Our air popper is loud, ergo William likes it. It helps that he's crazy about popcorn and gets to throw nutritional yeast on by the fistful. But I was still surprised when he insisted on having it for breakfast. I offered him banana bread, which he loves and would more aptly be called banana cake. I offered him toast, with butter, and jam. I offered him cereal like big sister. With blueberries on top. Blueberries plain. No, it had to be popcorn. For breakfast.

 So, we popped a big bowl together and he was so happy that he ate it by the fistful.

You didn't believe me about eating it by the fistful until you saw it for yourself, right? At least he also ate a big bowl of grapes with his big bowl of popcorn and washed it down with milk.

"Hey, what can I say? I'm quite the guy!"

Worm houses

Last night I read about a farming family and one of the many things they do to promote soil health is vermicomposting. I've considered getting worms many times before but kept putting it off until my littlest rascal is older. Today though, something clicked and I ordered my worms and we constructed our worm houses. As is often the case, it turned out to be a family affair.

Savannah learned how to use an electric drill with the impressive 1/2" drill bit. We drilled holes on the bottoms of two 12 gallon containers for aeration and drainage of any excess water. Excess water will be caught in a second container below, that is intact.

Ever wonder what happens to all those manuscripts I write and work on? If they are lucky enough to get printed, they end up shredded and in the spring get added to my compost pile. Kind of neat that my work feeds my garden too.

The paper will act as bedding for the red wigglers, a tiny but voracious worm, that will occupy their new digs when they arrive on Tuesday. The paper is kept moist for them and a bit of organic soil and food scraps are added daily.

My help gets a little exuberant with the worm bedding! At least there's an indoor gardening project we can do in the dead of winter that's fun.

I think William is pretty proud of his indoor farming project!

Here's one of the double set of bins (we made two sets of worm houses); the whole bin sits on the bottom, the bin with the 1/2" holes drilled into the bottom sits on top of it. There are also holes at the top for air circulation right beneath the lid. Eventually, we will place a third bin with holes drilled in it over this one for two weeks when it's time to use the worm castings. The worms crawl up through the holes in the bottom of the floor to the new food available in the top bin. Our worm houses were constructed with information from this website and our 2,000 red wiggler worms were ordered on sale here, a Pennsylvania company.

We made two sets of wiggler homes, and plan to house about a thousand in each. The first vericomposter is affectionately named the "Vermestate" and the second is the "Wormcome Inn". We're not the only ones who named their worm houses, right? Bring on the castings! I can't wait to use them in the garden.

Blue elephant's debut

Savannah entered the Powder Puff Derby this year, an activity I had intended to be a daddy-daughter event, but since Daddy is in Chile and couldn't be in two places at once, it was more of a mother-daughter event. And then when I needed help with some wood working tools to countersink her weight on the bottom of the car, and Savannah used craft supplies to decorate it given to her by another neighbor, and William inspired the design, and another neighbor helped me entertain William during the race, it turned out to be more of a neighborhood-family event.

Last year's photo with her pink race car and third place trophy.

Anyway, Savannah's goal was to apply what she learned last year to try to beat her finish of bronze or third place in her age class. Because she's been sick, she designed her car just two days ago and finished it last night. She calls her car Blue Elephant. Honestly, I don't know where she comes up with these things.

Savannah still looks pallid and puffy since she's recovering from a viral illness.

Hopefully you can see the actual blue elephant on her car. It's from, I think, an old Alexander Henry fabric in my stash that she mod podged on over the watercolor markers that her art teacher gave her.

At the race, Savannah sets her car in the starting block in the assigned lane. They are good about rotating lanes and averaging the times so it's more fair.

Here's Savannah's car in the first lane. On the side the lettering says "Blue Elephant".

Guess who won first place in her class this year and got to progress to the overall finals? That's right, Miss Savannah and her Blue Elephant. In the finals round she came in seventh and had an axle problem that we hope to improve on for next year's derby. I wonder what design she'll come up with next year.

Our happy little Daisy with Blue Elephant and her first place trophy in front of the race track. Racing day is so much fun!

Discoveries

One of the best things to me about homeschooling is that when my child has a new interest, we can explore it fully. Savannah's latest obsession is building and learning about circuitry, so we've been doing it for three days.

As you can probably tell from the photo, it makes her very happy. Deliriously happy! Perhaps because it ties into her goal of learning how to build robots that wash the dishes and clean up after people so she can build them and make loads of money (her dream, not my dream for her).

So far she's built alarms, fans, lights and learned how light switches work. She's learned that metals that conduct electricity such as paperclips can be used to complete a circuit and that electricity can only pass in one direction through an LED. She's also learned the difference between building in parallel versus in a series. (By the way, I should mention here that I have also learned much of this as we go along.)

And that water also conducts electricity and can be used to complete a circuit. (Don't worry it was a safe setup.)

"Mom, just tell me, what happens when I put the wires in the water."

"If I told you, you wouldn't remember, but if you do the experiment yourself, you will never forget."

Perhaps we have a budding scientist on our hands!

 With her eager assistant, William. William "helps" by clapping when her circuits work out as planned and to show her appreciation, Savannah often replaces the slide switch for the button switch so William can turn it off and on.

Savannah has fun building a flying saucer (a fan blade that launches into the air).

William made a few discoveries of his own. He found out that it may be easier to try on someone else's boots, if they have bigger feet, but that wearing one boot forward and one backward, doesn't make for easy walking.

He also discovered that while it may seem like a good idea to climb into the newspaper and kindling box, it may not be as easy to get out as it was to get in.

I guess some people just have to learn things the hard way.

Bathroom library

I saw a cartoon that reminds me very much of my house. In the comic, a woman is giving her friend a tour of the house and as she stops in front of the bathroom she gestures towards it politely and says, "And this is my husband's library."

A pile of magazines starts to grow faster than the house plant in the first floor bathroom.

That's how my DH treats our bathrooms and I have to admit, I can understand it. When you have young children, there's pretty much only one room in the entire house where you can truly get some peace and that's the library, aka, bathroom. But, of the three bathrooms in this house, two of them are small and there's no room for a regular magazine rack. This means that I have to pick up piles of Solar Today and Popular Mechanics to clean the bathrooms or shuffle them aside to get to the things that really belong in a bathroom. So I came up with a solution I can live with.

The solution.

I know, you're probably thinking, what's that. It's my solution so the bathroom reader and the bathroom cleaner can coexist peacefully together in the same space. I'll let it speak for itself.

Ta-da! The most elegant solutions are usually the most simple. I transformed some scrap wood into a magazine wall rack. By painting it the same color as the wall (called Sugar cookie by Behr), I hoped to make it blend in as much as possible. I didn't want to clutter an already small bathroom.

What do you think? The rack holds up to five magazines close to the wall so no one will bump into it. Me likey. In case you want to build your own for the bathroom librarian in your life, I'll include the dimensions below. I built this one as a Christmas gift to my husband but couldn't wait a few more days to install it.


Slim magazine rack cut list:

(2) 1x3 8 1/2"
(3) 1x3 9"
(1) 1x2 9"

Note: You could also increase its depth by using 1x4s instead of 1x3s or change the style in front by swapping out the 1x3 for another 9" 1x2. If you look at the second picture, you'll see that between the horizontal strips of wood on the front, there's a 9" piece on the back to screw the rack onto the wall.

Another farmhouse bed

While they were doing this, 

 I was building this.

Of course, William thought it was for him...

But, it wasn't quite his size.

I painted it white during his nap time and, under the direction of my daughter's aesthetic, sewed some pillows and a quilt for its future occupant. Can you believe this beautiful doll bed was made with 100% scraps and I didn't have to buy a single thing to make it? I love Ana's plans.

Want to see more? You can here.

Recitals

This month Savannah had her first piano recital with her new teacher. She played Beethoven's Ode to Joy, the simplified version to which her piano teacher accompanied her, and Candy Shop.  She is such a patient girl, never afraid of performing in front of an audience and waiting quietly when it's someone else's turn.

Savannah waits her turn to play her recital pieces.

For her recital I made her a new dress, an early Christmas present from Mommy. It's a long jumper-style dress in purple corduroy, very rich and warm with tights.

Yay! Savannah plays the first three lines of Ode to Joy solo without a hitch.

After the performance there was just enough time for a few poses in front of the poinsettias.

And of course, even William got to have his own little recital at home. It may not have been musical in nature, but he was the center of attention after stealing his Dearest's glasses, which is better than stealing her beer...

Happy William before his ear infection. The next day he grumped around for a day before we realized he had another ear infection. Now that he's been treated, he's his rascally happy self again. Whew!