Farmer's reward

Once our garden is in full swing, we feel pretty stinking rich all the time. And why is that you wonder? Because every day is like eating at a fresh gourmet restaurant. A typical trip to the garden will yield all this, and more.

Everything I could hold: a half pound of green beans, two zucchini, four eggplant, two cucumbers and two peppers.

This year I smartened up about my herbs and overwintered some of them so they had a huge head start in the spring. Most of my overwintered herbs are the size of small hedges, so I hope to keep that up this year. I love being able to pluck some oregano, thyme or basil for whatever I'm cooking in the kitchen. The eggplant and cucumbers are ripening at a pace of 3-4 a day and we eat the cukes as fresh snacks they are so sweet.

Our tomatoes are only just beginning to ripen. These are an heirloom variety, Beam's yellow. They look like light bulbs and have a very sweet, mild flavor that makes them a good addition to everything from eggs to salsa. The pumpkin-shaped Brandywines are green on the vine, as are the Roma and cherry tomatoes. The carrot tops are tall and lush and since I didn't have the heart to properly thin them, I have been plucking baby carrots 2 to 4 inches deep from the rows each week to thin them out now (except now I get to eat them instead of just discarding the seedlings). We've come up with some great in season recipes this year that I'll share this week.

Farmer's breakfast

First it was strawberries and lettuces, now it's sugar snap peas, cucumbers, and the first eggplant and baby broccoli crowns.

"Sugar snap peas for breakfast?" you ask. Sure! And cucumbers too, although we juice them with a few apples and carrots for a refreshing healthy breakfast juice.

And of course, a bunch of eggs we collected yesterday.

With sauteed chives, garlic and baby broccoli. Mmmm. This is the richness of the gardener's breakfast. Of course, it also matters what we didn't eat.

Do you see the two little cracks on each of the eggs? We can't wait to meet our newest feathered family members. To me independence is all about having having secure, safe and sustainable food and energy (here's looking at almost 14 megawatt-hours of solar energy generated). Happy Independence Day!

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.

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.

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.

Piano table

My daughter has been taking music classes this year from The Music Studio in Albany. This program is definitely one of the jewels of our area and we are lucky to have discovered it so early. Savannah loves her classes and practicing on her keyboard at home. Up until now, this has been her keyboard at home...

Yes, I know, it's on the floor of her bedroom so she has to sit down and sort of bend over to practice. And when her little brother decides to attend one of her "concerts" he ends up crawling all over it and inevitably pushes the button to play "Livin' la Vida Loca" at high volume.

A week ago I decided to design my own piano table for her. I built it on Mother's Day and finished it today. It's 24" high and 36" wide and 15" deep to accommodate the keyboard and the space in her room beneath her window. The legs and aprons are 1" x 3" but beneath the aprons are 2" x 2" supports. The top is made from two 1" x 8" pine boards.

Here it is, ready to move into its new home this afternoon! I think she already has enough pink going on in her room, so I painted it with two coats of white paint and two of a satin enamel. The white paint is Sherwin-Williams' Harmony, a no-VOC paint that's great for environmentally minded people and for painting indoors since there are no fumes.

And the after photograph! I'm so relieved my measurements and design plan worked out. There's just one little thing...I forgot to build her a piano bench! But, I bet you can guess what I'll be building next.

Gardening with chickens

The view from my kitchen window is of a terraced rock wall partially shaded by pines and with a crab apple tree and forsythia at one end and the chicken coop on the other. Sounds lovely, right? Except that time has taken its toll on the wall so that little of it appears beneath the piles of pine needles. I vowed to reclaim the space this spring after who knows how many years of neglect.

Savannah is my little helper. I suppose William is too since I garden with him in the backpack and he has to cooperate so I can work. The chickens also help! They are eternally curious about the goings on of their human family so whenever we garden outside, they keep us company. As I rake away the pine needles, Scarlet and Penny stayed within a few steps of the rake so they could eat up any tasty morsels uncovered by the rake. Savannah feeds then grubs whenever one is unearthed. As the girls eat grubs now, it means fewer insect problems in the coming months.

I had to pry out of the earth many of the large stones that had toppled over years ago and find a new spot for them along the wall. Each time I lifted another stone Scarlet would run over and eat up any worms, ants, pill bugs, etc that she spotted. The chickens till the soil with their feet. They have powerful legs and claws and scratch the earth much better than I could aerate it with a garden fork or cultivator. Our soil is a very thick clay so I really appreciate the help!

As we work the soil and the girls eat their fill of all natural protein, the boys keep guard. Coburn keeps guard on top of the rock wall while Lucky keeps an eye out from below.

We love our girls (even if two of them turned out to be boys). Three days into my terraced wall project, I've restacked two levels of the wall and removed nine wheelbarrows of pine needles for composting elsewhere. Some of the bulbs I planted area already much happier and the crocuses have pushed through.

Tick bytes

Through necessity, we've had to learn a lot about ticks and Lyme disease since moving to upstate New York. Like many New Englanders and Pennsylvanians, we live in an area that the CDC considers to be high risk for Lyme disease. High risk means that a tick bite here is more likely to infect you with Lyme disease than a tick bite elsewhere, mainly because so many of the ticks are infected with the disease-causing organism, Borrelia burgdorferi. There is still much scientific debate about a variety of aspects concerning Lyme disease, so I feel it is important to be more conservative when dealing with bites. After our daughter's first tick bite, with an attachment time of just less than 24 hours, she became Lyme positive in the middle of winter even though she received prophylactic antibiotics. (She received a second course after her blood titer was positive.) Also while Lyme disease is the most prevalent tick-borne illness in the US, there are others to be aware of, including babesiosis and ehrlichiosis, transmitted the same way.

Here are some of the things we have learned and implemented to help our family.

Preventing a tick bite is the most important thing you can do. Here are the prevention techniques we've found useful:

1. Keep deer off of the parts of your land that you use regularly. No matter how sweet and docile these creatures are and how useful their manure may be to your lawn, they are among the primary carriers of Deer ticks (aka Black-legged ticks). In every study where deer populations were decreased, the incidence of Lyme disease significantly decreased as well.

2. Deer can be deterred naturally through deer-proof landscaping. No matter where you live, there will be a garden or landscaping center in your gardening zone that carries or is knowledgeable about deer-resistant plants. The goal is to keep deer away from your house and front yard so replace any plants that deer usually eat with those they find less appetizing. Bird feeders and salting your driveway in winter can also attract deer.

3. Maintain a clear lawn area without long or tall grasses, piles of leaves, or suckers growing around the base of trees (mulch, mulch, mulch your trees!). This will both deter deer and leave less "habitat" for ticks to wait in while hoping for their next blood meal to brush against them.

4. If you have other rodents around your house, barn or garage, get rid of them too. Rodents can be carriers of ticks and keeping their populations down is just as important as keeping the deer away from your house. In many areas, the white-footed deer mouse is the primary carrier so do what you have to do to remove mice from your garage, shed and barn, and around your home.

5. If you have a cat or dog that goes inside and outside, the cat or dog can carry ticks in that can bite you. Do regular tick inspections on your animals and have a kit nearby to remove any ticks found on them. We are partial to the tick twister for removal from animals and humans alike. We keep a tick jar (a small glass canning jar) filled 1/4 with rubbing alcohol to place ticks in. It helps us to identify the ticks we find on our clothes, or embedded in our skin so we know when to call the doctor or be concerned.

6. When you're outside playing, hiking, doing yard work, or cutting trees, wear long sleeves and socks pulled up to your calf. Then remove your clothing for washing when entering the house. We keep a laundry basket hidden near the front door for this purpose.

7. If you live in or will be travelling to an area that is considered moderate to high risk for Lyme disease (or any other vector-borne disease including those carried by black flies, mosquitoes, chiggers, etc) try the line of clothing by Buzz-Off Insect Shield. We have been very pleased with the results of their long-sleeved shirts, hats, bandanas, and socks for keeping insects away for 70 washings. The clothing is treated with permethrin, a manmade chemical that mimics a chemical found in the chrysanthemum plant. You can order it through many outdoor clothing companies including LL Bean, REI and directly from the manufacturer. Even the very sensitive skins and noses in my house aren't bothered by this clothing and it prevents all sorts of bug bites while making me feel safe-r when sending my daughter out to play. But don't take my word for it, read other customer feedback.

8.  Learn to recognize a female and nymph deer tick. Humans are accidental hosts for ticks. They attach to us when they sense our heat and carbon dioxide as we brush by them. A blood meal helps them survive but they require the white-tailed deer to complete their lifecycle.

9. Inspect your body once a day. Remember to check your neck, under arms, groin, behind the knees and ankles and in between your toes. Also check your neck and in and around your ears. I check my children's hair but to check my own, I use a fine-tooth comb. Remember that you don't have to find a tick to get Lyme disease. Ticks will attach for varying amounts of time, feed, and then drop off, possibly without being seen.

10. For tick removal, follow the instructions from a reputable agency. Any method of removal that requires rubbing, agitating, heating or applying a substance to the tick may cause more saliva from the tick to enter your body, which is not good if the tick carries a disease-causing organism. We stick to the tick twister mentioned above or use forceps, fine tweezers. Here are three sources (of many) in agreement for the proper tick-removal process, CDC, Lyme Disease Foundation, and my personal favorite, the U.S. Army's Center for Health Promotion and Preventative Medicine (this one is a nice one-page PDF that you can tape inside a cabinet for easy reference). Swab the area with alcohol after tick removal to kill any possible bacteria on the skin.

11. If you're the farming or homesteading type, consider free-ranging chickens or guinea hens for tick control on your land. Our girls happily patrol the brush along the edge of our mowed land snapping up any insect morsel their keen eyes come across. We went from finding lots of ticks on our skin and clothing to none after letting our chickens free range during a year when local agencies studying the tick population found large increases in the tick population.

Life in the country (and suburbs) is filled with the joys and beauty that nature has to offer. Let's hope for many outdoor adventures that are free of tick bites.

Solar energy

I love our photovoltaic system! We don't have to lift a finger and everyday it generates clean energy that it feeds back to the grid. We just hit the 2 megawatt mark, which is very exciting considering it has been active for only four months and missed the sunny spring and summer months. Having produced 2 megawatt-hours of energy is the equivalent of planting 15 mature trees and not driving 1,609 miles in a standard car.

Without the summer and spring we are just breaking even with our system so I'm hoping that a full year of PV will put us slightly ahead.

Farm Fresh

Look what we started collecting this week...

...our own farm fresh large brown eggs. What to have for breakfast is an easy decision.

Solar laundry

Our photovoltaic system has been up and running for just over two weeks now. It's working very well and it's fun to read amount of energy in kilowatts we've generated each day, usually about 36 kW. The system also tells us (for fun!) how many pounds of carbon dioxide we've saved.

Now that we check the amount of energy we're producing every day, we think more about the energy we are spending everyday. So, finally, Kevin installed the clothesline he purchased many months ago. Really, its installation was a joint venture with everyone pitching in something - digging holes, mixing cement, stringing the line, etc.

My helper

According to DOE EIA statistics, 5.8% of a household's electric use goes towards dryer use. I'm not sure what percentage of our electric bill goes towards that since we have an energy efficient dryer and a washing machine that gets rid of more water during the spin cycle than non-front loaders. Anyway, hanging laundry is fun and it's one more chore that gets us outside.

One cute baby sock blows in the wind like a Tibetan prayer flag.

This interesting website (Project Laundry List) claims that if every American line dried their clothing, it would be enough to close several power plants. Imagine that! We are looking forward to the energy savings so our solar system will make a bigger impact.

Nature's Bounty

We've been enjoying our first real yields from the garden. Must be the sunshine! When I finally got out to pick zucchini for the first time, they were nearly the size of baby William. We've been grating them into baked goods and fritters with grated onion and potato, sauteing them and slicing them into lasagnas and ratatouilles, etc. The zucchini are Black Beauty heirlooms.


The cucumbers are also delicious! We pick them and take a bite right out of them. They are Early Fortune heirlooms. In between salads, I've been slicing some up and placing them in a container in the fridge overnight with some vinegar and sugar for a little treat in the heat.


The squash, pumpkins and two varieties of melons are all doing well. So are the sweet peas but we eat them all right out of the garden so they never even make it up to the house.



Our blueberries have been slow and steady but we are enjoying them now for breakfasts on the weekends or for a quick "whenever" snack. Yum!

Entryway makeover

When we first moved in, none of our existing entryway furniture worked well in this house with its odd contemporary angles. We temporarily used a cheap bookcase to hold our mittens for the winter but the unfinished entryway bothered me because it gives the first impression of a home. So I came up with a "plan." I like to sketch out my plans on dotted graph paper to be sure the furniture and pieces I like will fit together and to help me think about and decide what will and won't work before I buy or build anything. Here was my entryway idea:


The plan...


and the current result.

I think it turned out very well. I painted the wall in Divine White (Sherwin Williams) then added a matching set to the mix - a bookcase to hold our hats, mail and other indoor/outdoor items and a cabinet to hold my gardening and craft books, photo albums, and stationery. The bench is great for taking our Wellies, sneakers or snow boots off and I like the way the red in my grandmother's rug is picked up in the accent pieces. The bench is not part of a set but the nice thing about black furniture is that there's not much variation in "black" so you can mix and match and pick up vintage items. I may change the fabric bins eventually but these are the ones we used before so they are doing the job for now.


My "catch-all" bowl to hide the little odds and ends that inevitably accumulate when you have children and a full life. Looks great with the rug and adds a small Asian touch to it all. I love Asian art. I found this item on my favorite handmade and vintage web store, etsy.


Three-quarters of the chalkboard came from the dump - a wooden window pane. The back is a thin sheet of plywood with two layers of the chalk paint. I love this color - Colonial red from RustOleum's American Accents. Makes me want to paint the front door the same color! I might add some hooks along the left side of the chalkboard for our keys.

Chicken coop

Our chicken coop is finally complete, okay, almost complete, and it looks great beside the board and batten garage. From the kitchen I can walk onto the porch and right to the girls' coop, which is convenient for me. It's situated beneath a deciduous tree on the south side to give them shade all summer and more sunlight in the winter. We will dig holes for the run posts this week and probably cement them in place.


So far the girls seem pretty happy with their coop although they like to roost on the step to the nest boxes instead of on the actual roost. I'm going to use some of the branches we had to take down recently to make a lower roost for them since I think that's what they're trying to tell me... They roost in our rhododendron all the time but they prefer the lower branches.


Here are the twins roosting in the rhododendron with sister Lacey.


And little Goldilocks roosting under the protection of sister Sylvia.


Here are the girls in their usual pattern: The twins, the pair of Rhode Island Reds (RIRs) that are always side by side. I can only tell them apart by their eye color - one has slightly green eyes, the other hazel. Curious Katie is the other RIR. She greets us when we come home, comes running when she sees us walking up the driveway from a walk, invites herself in the house if we leave the front door open for too long. Katie is just the kind of chicken you want to come home to. Her curiosity sometimes gets the better of her though and when her sisters are no longer in sight, after she has wandered off chasing some speck of interest, she cries in distress until she is reunited with them again. Sometimes Savannah will pick her up and pat her and carry her over to her sisters, which Katie loves. Lacey is the Silver Laced Wyandotte with more white on her wings and although we didn't raise her, she is more trusting than her sister Sylvia. Sylvia often protects little Goldilocks, the Buff Orrpington, but they are both nervous nellies and won't let us near them. Goldilocks is the baby of our pullets and often tags behind, following her sisters. She never strikes out on her own. Each has her own personality.



Savannah holds the door open to welcome the chickens in for the first time. Behind her you can see the two levels of nest boxes on the north wall.


The brave chickens encourage the two timid ones (Sylvia and Goldilocks) to walk the plank (that Kevin built last night) for the first time. Did you know that chickens could be, well, chicken?