We got our estimate!

This was our collection basket yesterday -- our first beet, still more peas, and our first meal-sized batch of bush beans! The tomatoes are pretty close to being picked too. :)




I [Mick] clipped the maple tree by the flagpole a little bit, it looks a lot better this way. We think you can see the flag from 41 as you're driving into McGraw, which is kind of exciting.



Also, we got an estimate back from Coventry about our cabin design. This is before the discount...it's 1550 dollars less than the Northwood stock plan. The discount should be awful close, if not the same as the stock kit discount (4,150 dollars).


Hey, this might work out after all!

Potting and Putting Up

It was a cool Sunday afternoon, and Mick has been busy all day planting and repotting -- herbs, holly that we found half-price at Country Max, and lemon balm and mint that he dug up at his folks' this weekend. We decided to go with a short window box to overwinter some of our herbs in this year...the strawberry pot was too tall and a funny shape to fit in under the lights last winter.


As well as the lemon balm that Mick dug up at his parents, he found one hiding in a seedling flat that we had started tomatoes in! It had volunteered along with a pigweed, the pigweed went in the compost, the balm went into a larger pot.


We had also found some stevia at country max for a dollar apiece. They say they root easily provided the day is long enough, so we're giving it a go. We're drying the leaves we stripped off to make the cuttings, and stevia is no scam, they are intensely, intensely sweet!


He has also been busy in the kitchen, putting up. I didn't think there would be a cool enough day for him to want to can for a couple more months yet, but yesterday has worked out to be lovely. He made a batch of applesauce, with some apples we bought on discount at Wade's and a large bag of Empires, which were lunch leftovers that he rescued from the trash at drill.


The apple cores and peels that did not become part of the applesauce, he boiled down to make apple jelly. It looks beautiful! The peels now taste like water, so all of their flavor definitely went into the jelly. What color!


In between canning the applesauce and apple peel jelly, he processed several jars of tomato sauce, which he made by combining tomato puree we bought with a great coupon and vegetables that his folks had dehydrated last summer and gave to us. Those two cans of tomato puree started at a volume of 3.2-ish pints, we added dried patty pan squash, zucchini, peppers, eggplant, water, and herbs until we wound up with eight pints! We are excited to have more tomato sauce in the house without having to wait for our tomatoes to come in this summer. (We really like pizza.)


Our rose of sharon is beginning to bloom now.


After knocking a beetle from it, Mick got a picture of a flower close up.

Vegetables and Rainbows

The garden is really beginning to pop! We came back after a couple days away, and tomatoes are turning red, corn is beginning to tassel, and squash and cucumbers are flowering. We have a four-inch zucchini, lots of bush beans, and many small runner beans.


Even the cabbage, much-loved by the slugs, is finally beginning to look like an actual cabbage!


The comfrey has really taken off too. We are planning to plant it underneath and among fruit trees and shrubs. It will keep weeds down and bring nutrients up. We will cut it down several times a season, since the leaves provide a nutritious green manure. Our comfrey plants had a slow start in their nursery but soon exploded.


We also have many visitors to our garden. Last week we arrived and saw six turkeys walking through the orchard! Hopefully they will stick around until they're in season. In the meantime, we have collected lots of feathers.


And last week when Mick was moving mulch around, I discovered a very large toad that had traveled by Kubota from the wood pile to a garden plot. We built him a house.


Walking through the woods, I thought I spotted some litter. But it turned out to be Indian pipes.


The hill is a beautiful place to watch the weather. We were able to watch the clouds rolling in last week.


And then the rains came.


As we were driving back to the trailer I spotted a double rainbow, and we chased it up Ridge Road (which runs to the south of McGraw parallel to 41). From here, the rainbow ends just about at our flagpole.


There were some lovely views of our neighborhood too.



We are thankful for so much beauty and life!

The wood pile goeth

So today was a major milestone for us...I finally got rid of the rotting pile of logs! I moved about half of it to make room the flagpole about a month ago, and today it's completely gone!

This is the pile this morning...

And this afternoon!

Actually, an awful lot of wood has been moved recently...I've been clearing out an area for us to hopefully put a home someday (soon?).

Where, you might ask, did all the tree tops and rotten logs go? Well, that question deserves to be answered with a picture:


It's a berm we've put between the raspberries and grapes, made up of layers of brush and rotten logs. Eventually we'll dig a small swale on the uphill side of the berm and just shovel the dirt onto the wood pile. It's something called hugelkultur, apparently it's existed in eastern Europe for millenia. The idea is that you bury wood, and then plant stuff on top. The wood as it decays attracts composting organisms and holds moisture for extended periods of time. A lot of people worry about the carbon rich wood consuming nitrogen in the soil as it begins to compost, but as far as I've read, no one has had any problems and nobody knows why this is the case! We hope to eventually plant many things on our hugelkultur berm, but we either need a lot of soil to cover the berm with or lots of time to let it compost on its own.

While Sarah and I were working, Roscoe was chewing on a golf ball. When we were done for the day, Sarah went to play with him. He is so bad at catching!

Random update, sadly devoid of pictures...we're trying to figure out how to build a home before Mick leaves for Afghanistan again. We've been thinking a smaller place, a cabin with a basement. The kind of place that would be tight for holidays, but just right for everyday living. So Mick has started cutting trees and clearing ground, and we've begun soliciting estimates for the site work and foundation. Also, hopefully within a few days the company we want to buy a home kit from will give us a quote for the price of the floor plans we've sent them. The idea is that we can build the shell and dry the structure in before winter, and work on the interior during winter. We think if we sell the place we're in now sometime next year we can pay for it all before Mick has his next deployment, and all the money we make during that year will be all savings.

The place would be a small one, and sure, there are lots of things that would be nice to have that our current home plan does not offer, but we think that everybody tends to make do with what they have one way or another, and we humans expand to fill out living space, like goldfish. In Afghanistan, Mick saw families in the double digits living in structures of mud, cardboard, and fabric that couldn't have been more than 150 square feet, and many didn't even have roofs. We suppose that life this side of death is never ideal, and memories and joy are forever, but houses crumble and burn. To quote Brandi Carlile

"Life is too short to waste all your time

Running too quickly to the finish line...

There's no guarantees or promise of wealth

And you're only allowed so much time on the shelf...

Time isn't money it's only a lie

Because everything lost can be found but your time..."

In other words, we would rather live with a small home forever than have the mortgage of Damocles hang over us for 30 years.

Don't forget to eat your vegetables!

A couple of days ago we were finally able to harvest some broccoli! We started a few plants in the earth box way back in the spring and they were looking great. Unfortunately for them, I transplanted them to their permanent home on a morning that turned out to be a very hot day, which turned out to be a very bad idea. They wilted pretty dramatically, and I wasn't sure they were going to pull through at all. In spite of me however, they have been coming along, and we were finally able to pick some this week. We picked them in the early morning, which seemed to fit fresh raspberries more than fresh broccoli, so I put the vegetables in a bowl in the fridge and then pulled them out for dinner tonight -- very responsible of me (so I thought) to include vegetables in the meal along with our delicious burgers. So Mick ate a stalk and handed me the other large stalk, which I began to munch. I was just about to take another bite when to my horror the broccoli, all on its own, without any help from me, began to wriggle! I jerked the broccoli away from my mouth in surprise, and a green worm dropped out of it onto my plate. YUCK! I must admit that I let out a bit of a scream. It was a pretty narrow escape from eating a live worm. Mick examined the broccoli more closely and this is what he came up with...


Yes, all of those out of that stalk of broccoli, which only a few minutes before had been on its way to my mouth. Our guests left gifts for us in the bowl as well:


Certainly not the best advertisement for home-grown food :-/ or for vegetables in general. It might be awhile before Mick eats anything that's not meat, especially since he's now wondering whether there were worms in his broccoli. May all your vegetables be animal-free!