Hello, People!  I've been thoroughly enjoying the country life this past week!  We've had lots of rain, and I finally got my garden planted.  The baby hoed it over after I planted it, so the seeds are probably all in the wrong places now, but I think I'll just wait for them to germinate and then put them where I want them.  Evenings here are magical this time of year.  The humidity holds scent so wonderfully and since the fences around here are covered in honeysuckle, as you mosey along the dirt roads you inhale the perfume of clover and grass and honeysuckle... think the perfume Bluegrass, only more subtle and less flowery!  We've been contemplating housing for our 25 laying hens, as the above houses 12 comfortably.  My husband got a big mower to maintain the grass around here... it's fun to see the "meadow" growing up in feathery grasses, red clover, and daisies, but pastures need to be mowed to keep the good grasses growing, if no animals are doing it for you!  I've been reconsidering goats, as there are portions of our land that are particularly suited to goats, but will need some good fencing first!

My window box on the back of the house is looking really good, I think!  It's supposed to attract hummingbirds, but no luck yet.  We have spotted lots of other birds, though.  We've seen bluebirds, cardinals, and orioles, for example.  Also, we've got a healthy population of fireflies!  Sometimes it looks like you're in the middle of a stadium and it's full of cameras flashing.  I've never see so many at one time in my life!  I know this land hasn't been farmed in at least 10 years, and before that it was a cattle farm, so I don't think pesticides have been used around here for a good long time!  

There are lots of walnut trees on the property, which promises lots of good eating come fall, if only we can get the shells cracked... ever tried to shell a black walnut?  It's super hard, and dyes your hands dark brown in the process!  I saw a special tool that looks like something that belongs in a machine shop in a catalog once, maybe I should try to get that?  I've got a hemp t-shirt finished to show you soon, it's almost finished, and the chicks should be moved to pasture soon, now that it's warmed up around here, so more pics of chickens, too, hopefully on grass, soon!  

A New Farmhouse?

So... I haven't posted in MONTHS! I know you're all busy and hardly noticed, but I missed blogging. I always wondered why people decided to take three months off in the summer instead of having year round school... and now that I have a little mini-farmlike lifestyle, I KNOW WHY! Summer is hard work. The freezer needs to be filled with veggies and fruits and chickens, and the pantry needs to be filled with jellies and jams and canned tomatoes. If we had a cow, we'd need to make cheese and get all that surplus milk dealt with. Not to mention the laundry. Yeah, it was a busy one!!!

It is fun, though, to open a jar of your own tomatoes, from your own garden when a recipe calls for 28oz canned tomatoes. It's fun to work with your kids around the kitchen table putting those tomatoes into jars, too. The knitting and sewing suffered over the summer, too, and now that cool weather has returned and I'm indoors more the urge to clothe people is compelling me to make stuff. So far I've made a shrug and bonnet for a friend's baby, a sweater vest for my baby, I finished the knee socks, started a pair of socks for hubby, cast on a stranded sweater vest, and have knit the back and left front of a cardigan for hubs. No sewing. Guess why....

We've been house shopping! We toured and compared, we walked lots and explored pastures, we debated gas vs wood fireplaces, and we finally signed a contract to buy a house. Of course, it's a short sale, and so many things could fall through before we close on the house. As a matter of fact, I'm trying to reconcile myself to it falling through now. I mean, if I don't get this house I'll know that God wants to remind me that Heaven is for the afterlife and not the here and now, because that house is perfect, OK, it's darn close to perfect.

It's yellow. My very favorite house color (I'm so ordinary). It has five bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, a family room, and a great room attached to a kitchen with granite counter tops and an island and a double oven with a gas range. It has beautiful distressed oak floors (exactly the kind that my husband daydreams about when we talk about our dream home) and gorgeous light fixtures that are the perfect mix of traditional and simple. It has a front porch with a tin roof, a fenced yard, a creek, a pasture, lots of trees, and a view. I wouldn't even need to paint... and I like the carpet, and the windows are big, and it's only 3 years old... Should I go on? I mean, I could, if you want me to. I could mention the great big storage room.

I really have appreciated the farmhouse here, and the farm itself is glorious, but we are a bit shoehorned in.... not that the bedrooms aren't adequate, they are, but there's just one living area and we do EVERYTHING in there. It's a foyer, and a schoolroom, and an office, and a playroom, and a living room, all at once. So it gets messy, and really downright dirty rather quickly. Living in a house built in the 20's is rather romantic.... but the windows are really old and one can feel the wind in the winter, and the floor isn't insulated, and the furnace burns heating oil, which is stinkin' expensive. The stinkbugs and ladybugs just wiggle right into the house through the windows in the fall and try to hibernate in the bedrooms by the hundreds. Not to mention the constant battle with paint chips and lead in the pipes that would make any mom rather worried. So we're ready to go. In the spring.

What have we learned here on the farm? We learned that we can grow a whole lot of our own food. We learned that we love chickens and the eggs that pastured hens lay. We learned that we are NOT city people. We love the country life, and we love the outdoors, and we love to be able to LIVE in our house and not just sleep in it. We learned that we love Jersey milk from Josephine, the cow who provides it...and we like knowing our milkmaid's names too. We learned that it's waaaaaaay harder work than we thought it would be, but it's fun, too. We learned that my husband wants to be able to go on vacation, so we'll probably never have our own cow! Oh, also... that largish yellow labs sometimes like to steal eggs from chicken coops and can squeeze themselves through remarkably small chicken doors to do so. AAAAAAAaaaaaaand that I hate raccoons and love MaryJane Butters.

Easter Eggs for Breakfast

Look! Aren't these the most beautiful, fascinating, and delicious eggs you've ever beheld? OK, I know, they're just eggs, and those of you with chickens are perhaps underwhelmed, but to me, they're beautiful. Now, all of our nine laying hens are officially laying! The blue/green eggs belong to the Americaunas, this I know, and I think the pinky buff ones are from the Buff Orphingtons (all of which I call Maryanne), but the darker, speckled ones? They're from our ginger colored hens with the white collars. I call them all Ginger, but I don't know what kind of chickens they are. Our rooster is, as of yet, unidentified, too, but we call him Professor. There's one more cockrell in the flock. Technically I should not name him, as he's for dinner, but in my imagination, I call him Gilligan. The Americaunas are named Daisy, Lily, and Marigold, in case you were wondering. I love the beauty of their eggs, but they're timid and not as willing to be petted as the Gingers. I'm so glad we have chickens, and I love to watch them do their work of pest removal, mulching, and fertilization. Those seven to nine eggs a day are just enough to keep us in eggs without going to the market, so I expect to have to add some in the future (though perhaps it'll be geese instead, or even ducks?), but for now, they're perfect! Do any of you know of chickens that lay tinted eggs that are also speckled? Or even white eggs that are speckled?

A Winter's Walk

Well, I'm finding that this farm is just as wonderfully beautiful in winter as in summer and fall. I'm smitten with this place. It so often reminds me of the farm I lived on in Upstate New York when a girl. I hope my children experience that kinship with nature as I did growing up. I always felt as if I could almost feel things growing, like I could sit on a big, old rock and almost hear it telling me the story of the land, of glaciers and floods, of plows and boys in overalls planting trees, of seedlings and flax crops. I think I've lost some of my imagination, but I can see it alive in my children. They roam the farm and name all the little places they like. There is a group of rocks arranged in a large circle that they call "The Cathedral", a little bit of clear ground overhung by an arch of branches from trees that just happened to grow in two rows that they call "Trinity Church." Grand Grove, the Treehouse, and Muddy Bottom are all places that my children have named and inhabited as their own. They don't have the waterfall and mill and apple orchard and ancient graveyard of my youth, but they have magical places of their own, and sometimes they let me in.

Yesterday we took a hike since deer season is over. We sort of were looking for nuts, as we've been studying the wild foods that Native Americans ate before Europeans came here, but of course the squirrels have hidden them all away in their larders. Instead we found a turtle shell right next to a hole in the ground. A freshly dug, neat little hole into some animals winter home. Maybe a fox or badger? We've been reading Wind in the Willows so the children imagined all sorts of wonderful little furniture and comforts in there, but realized that the turtle probably met an unfortunate end in it's dealings with the inhabitant.

Mama's Day Out

Coming to you live from Panera Bread in Warrenton... I needed a vacation, bad... so my husband, wonderful, beautiful, generous man that he is offered to give me a whole day to do whatever I wanted now that the youngest is old enough to leave alone for a while. So, this morning, I took a walk on the farm, which I'm always wanting to do, but never actually doing. I took a few pictures, which I thought you'd perhaps enjoy.

Pretty, huh?!

The Clothesline

“Many women do noble things, but you surpass them all.”
Many of you will know what I mean when I say I want to be a Proverbs 31 woman. I want to have a clean house, organized closets, and a cheerful demeanor at all times. I want to make homemade bread, cheese, and dinner from my homegrown food all the time. I want to have a giant garden that meets all our vegetable needs, and even our fruit needs. I want to take good care of our resources that I've been given: be it money, time, or raw materials. I want to be a good correspondent, a good friend, mother, sister, wife, and citizen. There's more, of course, but this list makes me want to implode, so I assume you're not feeling too comfortable, either.
Baby steps, as Flylady would say. I often go back to that. I think about what small changes I could make that could have a big impact on all the things I care about. I've made pretty major changes in my homemaking that started with little steps and little money. It started about six years ago when I switched to cloth diapers. My third baby had very sensitive skin and I decided to try them to see if it helped her, and it did, with a bonus of fewer “blow-outs”. So, I bought a bunch of Chinese prefolds, some Bummi Whisper Pants and some diaper pins and went to it. I actually found a pleasant sense of rightness when I washed those diapers, folded them, and stacked them in her changing table. I wasn't filling landfills with disgusting chemicals and I pretty much recouped my investment after I used the diapers five times (that was accomplished in less than a month). Then I thought about all the extra detergent and water and electricity I was using to wash them. Buzzkill. I decided to invest about $20 on clothesline, pins, an apron to hold them, and started hanging laundry out to dry. Well, to my surprise, that was really fun! My breezy, grassy, apple blossomy backyard was a much more fun place to be than my basement laundry area! I trooped out, basket on my hip, apron around my waist, and children underfoot, cheerful and happy. The baby enjoyed the laundry waving over her head and the leaves against the sky and the outdoor air, the toddlers liked to get a chance to ask mom to push them on the swing, and I was happy just to get out of the house a minute! I pinned and sang and breathed in the clean fresh scent of those diapers and decided that this was downright fun!
My time outdoors benefited other aspects of my life, too. I discovered that running outside for a little bit gave me a chance to say hi to the neighbors, invite them to play or to have tea (did I mention my desire to be more hospitable?). My garden was receiving more attention because I'd pop over to check on it as I piled the baby into the empty basket to take inside (weight bearing exercise, anyone?). I started to spread out a quilt to read to the children while I was out there. We all were cheerful, outside, and I was motivated to do laundry, of all things! Then we moved and started paying our own utility bills. You may not believe me, but hanging laundry on a line also enabled me to exchange the money I paid on dryer electricity for money to be spent on air conditioning electricity. (Yes, yes, I know, they're not responsible, either!) My clothesline led me to change to vegetable based detergents instead of petroleum based ones, which I have decided is patriotism as it reduces our country's dependence on oil. It inspired me to buy a whole lot of tea towels and inexpensive wash cloths and to buy flannel and do a little sewing to replace bibs, paper towels, baby wipes, napkins, sponges and many other disposable things! I also decided to purchase a front load washer instead of a top loader when we had to get a new washer so I could use less water, electricity, and detergents doing all that laundry. Finally, it gave me an opportunity, that I perhaps otherwise would have missed: to see Cedar Waxwings passing apple blossoms one to another in the spring.
So, my laundry load was increased by all this cloth, but remember how I enjoy the process of washing and drying and folding it all when my surroundings are the glories of creation! Remember that folding squares and rectangles is one of a toddler's first jobs in our house, that when a family can work together joyfully, it fosters bonding and companionship and mutual respect more than any family movie night will, and that a homemaker who finds joy in her work can change the whole atmosphere of home. The little steps I made led to a large behavioral change that makes me feel as though my large family is being more responsible in it's use of resources, and I feel that I'm truly being a good steward of what I've been given in the laundry genre...
You might want to know if I think I've got that aspect of my life settled, but now I'm trying to take all this a step further and make rags then rugs out of my worn out napkins, diapers, and tea towels... then, after all that has been used to it's fullest, I'll put those worn out rugs into the compost heap and let them feed us! Top that, disposable society! Also, I'm hoping to put more of us in wool in the winter as it repels stains and requires less washing (though you cover it with things like bibs and aprons which do require washing) and helps keep us warmer so we don't use so much energy heating the house in the winter. Oh, and you can compost wool, too! I think this beats a disposable lifestyle hands down, and it's good for the soul, as any hard work that produces good results is.

A Zoo, Sort Of

I'm a bit mad at myself today. I'm back from Chicago (had a LOVELY time!), but just not in the groove. Too relaxed, perhaps? I've had these really great photo opportunities recently, and I just wasn't fast enough to get good pictures! We have some sort of bird's nest outside our back door, pasted up in a corner under our eaves. At first you could see Mama Bird building her nest on top of another, older one. Not too much later you could hear little peeps coming from it, as long as you didn't step out the door. They were very obedient little birds and were completely silent when they saw danger. A little later you could look at them peeking over the edge of the nest, waiting to be fed, quietly watching us go about our business. Yesterday, they were gone, and there was a black rat snake on the ground four feet long to entertain us instead. The four baby birds were in our front yard, lined up on a tree branch, getting their flying lessons, and just in time, for those black snakes are really good climbers. I know, I looked it up online! My daughter saw the snake, and we all ran out to look at it, while I was yelling at them to, “Go back inside till I figure out what kind of snake it is!” I Googled Black Snake and found a picture that looked just like the one we saw: a shiny black snake, all kinked up, perfectly still. My kids wanted to kill it. I decided not... we've found plenty of evidence of rodents and I decided a little bit of natural predation was a good thing. Later that day, we heard five gunshots come from the neighbor's hen house. I was disturbed at the gunshots. After all, any kind of killing disturbs a woman like me. The three neighbor men had found two black snakes munching their eggs, and, well, when it comes to food, a man must protect his interests above the serpent's, naturally. One day I believe the lion will lie down with the lamb, but not yet!

A Garden

Sooooo, here is a glimpse of me in all my glory and my beloved as we look over our garden. It looks little, huh? Well, we plan to have a garden that is approximately 4 times as big as we've ever attempted before and so, technically, it's ambitious! I love the concept of square foot gardening. I enjoy the sustainability of it, I think that if everyone would just start a little one we'd all be healthier and we could use the petroleum we save by not transporting food to lower gas prices! If we all saved compost for our square foot gardens we'd not have such overflowing landfills and dumps. I can't believe how matronly I look... normally I'd not wear that shirt, but I had to borrow something of Hubby's because I couldn't find any of my own clothes!

Warning!!! The following picture is NOT doing this "By Hand".

Our landlord saw my Hubby toiling away with the tiller and decided he needed some help... and boy did he help! He brought the industrial equipment to ease my husband's labor and we got a good look at what was under the grass. Beautiful loamy clay. It looked fertile and wondrously good for veggies! I think he was a little jealous, because he said HIS garden was full of rocks. Sorry... We had fun watching the progress he made, but I have to say, watching my Hubby sweat while doing manual labor is fun, too. I wanted to do the garden slightly differently. I'm afraid that all that green grass in the dirt will burn my seedlings. I hope I'm wrong and we get lots of yummy veggies out of those little plots of dirt!

Measuring

We went to the farmhouse today to measure rooms and windows and most especially the laundry room. I really would like to find a way to put my big front load washers in there. The landlord is awesome. He was trying to help us figure out how to cut a bigger hole in the cabinet space for the machines in case they don't quite fit... even with all that figuring I forgot to measure the door opening!!!! Maybe we'll go back tomorrow. Aaaaaanyway, we planned for the raised beds for the garden, and talked about the chicken house. I want something pretty and portable and safe for the chickens. Hubby wouldn't mind it being those things, but he wants it cheap! I finally got a picture of the front of the house.





The rental we're in now has gobs of spring bulbs, which makes for a beautiful and fragrant spring yard. My husband and I were getting into bed one night and he mentions that he'd like me to "Plant lots of those purple and yellow flowers that smell really good so that we can smell them when the windows are open at the farmhouse." He's such a sap! I'm totally on board with that! Come fall I'll get me a spade and a few big bags of bulbs and go to it!

See how pretty it is! This is the back of the house, I don't know why I didn't take a pic of the front, but it has a screened porch.




Here is the road, that runs past the house. It's a private road which means lots of bicycle fun for the kids.

Here is the Springhouse. I just love stone buildings! It's like they're part of the land, not just corruptible wood, but the bones of the fields themselves, somehow. These photos were taken in early April, and you can see the way the air seems to hold an aura of possibility.