On the Homestead

I bought this book with some of my birthday money: The Weekend Homesteader.  It is a series of projects to work through to develop your own sustainable homestead, and the most helpful part for me is that the projects are organized by month of the year. 

As I read through the book, I started to organize a To Do list for our place organized by month.  Some months just have less in them (December, January, and February) so seeing that I put some of the indoor projects we have been putting off into those months. 

October's Tasks:

• Harvest from the garden and clean out the garden beds
• Move the raised beds up closer to the house
• Slaughter and freeze the meat birds we raised
• Set up a hoop house over one raised bed
• Plant garlic
• Plant flower bulbs
• Build the pig pen
• plant winter greens in the hoop house (spinach, kale, hardy lettuce varieties)
• harvest and preserve apple crop

Another step toward getting better organized to be homesteaders was a conversation I had with my husband about our weekly schedules.  I work every day except Saturday (sometimes I have to work Saturday too, but not every Saturday) and Monday, and my husband works a normal Monday-Friday, so this means that the only day the whole family is together is Saturday.  If we are going to have a homestead, we need to do all that work on Saturday - so no scheduling other stuff or expecting to sleep in or have a lazy day.

If we get up on Saturday and the whole family gets to work, we can accomplish a lot.  We're calling Saturday "Farming Day" and making that our highest priority on that day, and it's actually nice to have the family out working together and getting lots of fresh air.

And that's what is going on here on the Homestead!

Let's Organize Our Chores

You know that saying that "A man works from sun to sun but a woman's work is never done"?  Well, really the work of keeping a house IS never done, and so as long as that is primarily a woman's responsibility, then it's true that a woman could just work around the clock.  The trick with so much of this domestic labor is that you do it, but in the meantime it is being undone all around you.  The dust just settles back again on to all the horizontal surfaces.  The animals continue to shed hair and fur that covers all your furniture and rugs.  Dirt finds its way onto all your floors.  Dishes - don't get me started on dishes.

And so, if I don't want to just spend all my time as a whirling dervish with cleaning tools attached to my arms, I need some way to say when Enough is Enough.

There is an old system that many housewives used to use, with different tasks on each day of the week. What appeals to me about that idea is that if the day is set aside for baking, and you've done all your baking, but you notice that there are some shirts that could be ironed and that the floor is a bit dirty, you leave those things for another day.  You are done with today's work, and tomorrow's work can just wait while you go put your feet up and read a novel.

Would this mean my house isn't as clean?  Maybe.  But it will still be Clean Enough.

And then there is another, newer, idea for managing this housework problem, namely the other people in the house should be helping!

Last week I sat down with those two ideas and wrote out the chart pictured above.  It gives a main focus to each of six days of the week:

Monday is Baking Day
Tuesday is Ironing Day
Wednesday is Mending Day
Thursday is Shopping Day
Friday is Cleaning Day
Saturday is Gardening Day

And then it also gives my kids chores as well.  Last week I was thinking that they would rotate through all the chores, but that system proved too complicated and it gave them chores they weren't quite ready for.

So this week I've simplified their chores:  they will each make dinner one night a week, help with laundry one day a week, clean their bedrooms on one day, and wash the dinner dishes on two nights each.  They also take care of our outdoor animals on all weekdays.

I have to help with the dinner cooking still, but this way they are learning. If this works, I'll gradually add in some more chores for them.

And then my work will only be Sun to Sun, as well.  Enough has got to be Enough.

Got Eggs?

So ..... I was out of town for a little more than a month.

And this happened:



Wow, I have more than a gross of eggs in my fridge!  They ran out of egg cartons and started filling tubs, and I don't know how old some of these eggs are.

Fortunately, we are taking on a "Make It All From Scratch" change to our diet.  And, also fortunately, my son is very enthusiastic about baking right now.  He made (GF) corn bread all by himself yesterday, and it was pretty good.

Early Spring Gardening Notes

I am about to set off on a very long road-trip adventure with my kids, so I am sad to know that I will miss some of the best time in the garden.  But at least the tulips bloomed for me before I leave.




I don't know about other gardeners, but I have been accumulating a lot of partially used seed envelopes over the years.  This year I am not buying any new seed until I plant all the seed I already have ... some of it may have lost its potency, but it's worth a try anyway.  During the winter I inventoried and sorted, and now I can pull out these wads of seeds - this is all bush bean seed pictured above.




I've got my onion starts in. (What- doesn't everybody bury their white wine in the garden so it doesn't fall over in between sips?  It's a great way to garden on a puttering Sunday afternoon.)




Moving one of our chicken yards around the yard onto fresh grass results in bare spots that we are then covering with new raised beds.  I'm going to have a border of raised beds all around my back yard in a couple years (and then have to think of a new method for moving the chickens around, or just plop them down on top of a bed to give it some fertilizer directly - we'll see!)




I've got carrots, turnips, pole beans, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, and potatoes planted in the new beds, and after I harvested the over-wintered kale I planted bush beans in that older bed.  The marigolds are because they seem to discourage the cats using the beds as litter boxes.




My garlic was planted in November, and it's looking pretty good.




Peas and Radishes are making an appearance!



And the bleeding hearts are in bloom.



Hopefully some of that seed I put in will make it, and I'll be back at the gardening in mid-May.  I'll miss it while I'm gone! (My husband and then some house-sitters will be caring for the place, and I've left them with watering instructions if there is no rain, but otherwise it's all just waiting for me.)

Things I Learned in March

I'm a few days late with this, but here is my look back at the last month to see what I learned from it.

1.  I stopped ordering from Amazon this month, after deciding I could no longer support their employment practices, and I learned that I could do without it except for hard-to-find used books, which is going back to the original Amazon business model.  All the other odds and ends I had gotten into the habit of ordering through them can be found in local shops, ordered from different online businesses, or we can simply do without them.

2. This lenten season my husband and I gave up alcohol for Lent, and learned just how much alcohol is part of the normal social life. I had expected to find it difficult to not enjoy a glass of wine or a cocktail in the evening with my husband, but I had not thought about the times when drinking is part of social interactions with others. Whether it is beer at soccer games, wine at a professional gathering, or drinks with a nice dinner at a restaurant, we just hadn't noticed how much alcohol moves the social scene.  I have a whole new sympathy for those struggling with alcoholism or who simply do not drink, when it seems to be so saturated in our culture.

3.  Reading the book Six Degrees has been horrifying and galvanizing, and I've been reminded yet again that I need to dedicate myself to a low-carbon lifestyle and advocating for a collective shift to a low-carbon society.

4.  My mother and I studied the Psalms this month in our Mother-Daughter Bible Study, and learned that we were both disappointed by the psalms and disturbed by how much "my enemy" language they contain.  I still struggle to pull the religion of universal love out of the religion of tribal loyalties and judgment.




5.  I learned that the kale I planted in August was able to overwinter and is perfectly lovely to eat in March.  I also relearned just how much I love my land and my garden and life here once we are past the winter.  The sun really does come back and spring returns and I can happily live here without ever leaving the gates of my own property.




6.  I had heard it was possible, but this month I verified that I can sprout leeks from the cut off bottoms of other leeks.  I kept the bottoms from some grocery store leeks, started them in my kitchen window, and then planted them in the kitchen garden after they were a few inches tall.  Now how well they fare will be the April learning. :)

Dreaming of March during the February Blahs

I get the "November Blahs", and I get the "February Blahs" too.  These two months are the worst for me, and I frequently feel pretty depressed.  But soon - soon! Dear God, please make it soon! - I will be out in the garden with the sun shining on my head.

In the meantime, I'm getting a few things organized as I prepare for that day.

I'm Back!

I've been off in the land of Charlie Brown (St. Paul) attending a conference for work (I blogged about the conference over on my other blog).  It was a great week, with lots of professional networking, inspiring ideas and presentations, and time by myself in a hotel and eating out a lot.  As much as I love being a mom and a cook and a radical homemaker/small scale homesteader (while also working full time), it's still a nice break to go stay somewhere and have others clean up after me and feed me.

But what did I do with my kids for this week?  Well, this is one of those times that it's really good to have some other homeschooling mom friends.  We paid a friend to watch the kids during the days that my husband worked, and I left them for the week with frozen meals and activity bags packed and with a lot of worries and lists and all the laundry done and instructions for when kids needed to be where ...

And my husband ignored a lot of it and did things his own way and some of my prep was useful and they didn't get any schoolwork done and took an impromptu weekend trip away with my in-laws to the beach in Oregon ... and they were just fine without me.

Don't get me wrong - they were still very happy when I got home and I still feel needed.  My daughter said "thank goodness you're home because I need laundry washed!" and my son said "please make a salad for dinner because Daddy didn't feed me any vegetables all week!", but they also said they had fun and they obviously had some good bonding time with their dad, without me there to be the automatic first responder.

Absence may not make the heart grow fonder, but it really does give you some perspective and more appreciation for things often taken for granted.  Taking time away from my family does them no harm, and gets increasingly easier as they get older.

So don't be afraid to take some time away from your kids.  Your partner can handle it.  Really, they can.  We may want to be needed, but we should also let others go without us every now and then.  It gives them a chance to unfurl their wings and discover what they are capable of, and it gives everyone a chance to see you as more than a reliable caretaker.

In my Kitchen this week

As we continue to eat seasonally, this week has been busy with making dehydrated apple chips from the apples I harvested (we don't really know all the varieties we have).  I was gifted a very nice dehydrator for Christmas last year, but this is really the first crop I've had enough to dry some of it.



I have about 6 of these that I grew this year, and then I was also handed a bag of already peeled and chopped sugar pumpkin that was left-over from a church dinner.  So, it's time to bake with pumpkin!



My kids requested pumpkin muffins with cream cheese filling, and so I made a double batch this weekend, and then froze half of the muffins for later.  I had enough left-over pumpkin puree to end up freezing some of it too, so there is plenty more pumpkin in our dietary near future.

Going with the seasons and mostly cooking what needs using up right now. :)

In My Kitchen Right Now

Homemade yogurt from milk we got from our next door neighbor's goats.  Sadly, it turns out I am the only one in the family who likes the taste of it, so I'm eating homemade yogurt with granola and homemade strawberry syrup for breakfast every day for a while, I guess.




Pears I harvested from a tree that was completely hidden by the blackberry bramble in the back field.  I worked hard to cut back blackberries, harvest the pears, and now I'm not sure what to do with them.  The kids don't like the taste of them as a raw snack .... Thinking we might make pear cider or maybe I'll make a pear crisp.

A walk around my home and garden

Fall is definitely here, but we are still enjoying the outdoors.  My husband has been finishing up projects that have been on "the list" for a long time, such as the pergola here.  I'm ready for our northwest rain to start up again, but these crisp fall days are lovely while they last.

Making Use of the Blackberries

I may have missed the main blackberry harvest this year, but I still got a few.



We are trying to make wine.  It's something new, so we'll see how it goes!



And jam, of course.

Things found in our garden this week

Our silkies are such good parents, and they've managed to hatch out 5 more chicks.  They are adorable, and the chickens and rooster are being really good and protective parents.




I missed the main blackberry harvest time this year, but there are still a lot out there.  I've been working to gather enough to try my hand at making blackberry wine.




We're harvesting and eating a few cabbages from the garden, as well.

The Pickling

Another year's pickles!  I made 25 jars, so we can eat about two jars a month. :)

My Garlic Harvest

I have a ridiculous level of gardening insecurity.  Since we bought this place, I've been largely unsuccessful at growing edibles, which was kind of the whole point of buying the place at all.  A fantasy of being a hobby farmer/suburban homesteader is one thing, but the harsh reality is something else entirely.  Not enough time, not enough built-in infrastructure, don't own the expensive tools that would make it easier, don't know the soil here, don't know the drainage here, making mistakes, etc.  Sure, I'm learning, but geez - I wish it just was more impressive.

But, look, something worked out OK this year: garlic!




The end result of our work back in November.



I didn't have time to make pretty braids.  But I've got plenty of garlic hanging in my kitchen.

A Walk Around My Home Today

In my kitchen right now, it's cherry pitting time.  My cherry tree has been pretty productive this year.  Keeping up with picking and pitting doesn't leave me any time to cook them, so I'm just freezing them for now.




The right tools really do help.




For frugal reasons, I resisted the urge to buy any hanging baskets this year, and instead took the old ones and replanted them with nasturtium seeds (left over from last year, no less).  It's finally actually looking nice.




There's just something I like about red geraniums in my window boxes.  This box may not last the season out, however - time for some TLC to that wood!




The south side of the house was planted with some nice roses, and that is where we put my hot tub when we moved in.  They are lovely to look at from the tub!







The turkeys are getting big.




The pea plants are past their prime for the year, so I wish I had taken a photo of this a couple weeks ago, but this was our funniest garden set up this year: an old tub we found out in the back field, an old bicycle wheel also from the back field, then my husband was given some old metal fencing and took it apart and rebuilt it into a trellis.  Reuse!




My experiments with straw bale gardening are seeing some small success, after a truly awful start (slugs, death, blech).




 I might actually get tomatoes this year, if the warm weather holds up.

 

And it shows signs of being another good year for our apple harvest.