Compatible Gardners? TBD

This morning, we have a bit of a drizzle--I imagine it is to be expected after the glorious sun and nearly 50 degrees we had for weather yesterday.  Teri spent the bulk of yesterday out weeding in the garden.  This morning, at daybreak, I was out rummaging and sorting through the wheelbarrow to rescue all the hard-grown perennials, biennials and herbs she'd ruthlessly deemed weeds.  The chickens and I were out there in the grey drizzle trying to poke the ones with some root structure back into the cold ground.  Maybe...maybe they'll survive--which might be more than I can say for the compatibility of our gardening styles.

Here's the thing--Teri likes clean lines, symmetry and a great deal of homogeneous order.  She loves to weed and clip and prune and cut, leaving piles of clippings and "weeds" in the wake of her industry.  This can be a good thing, indeed, an awesome thing, as she removes dead leaves, keeps the bush roses happy, and cultivates the dirt in the garden beds.  I respect this and I often appreciate it, but there are those other times when it seems diametrically opposed to my approach.

My gardening has evolved over several decades and I realize that I garden somewhat like I parented--going for health, versatility, diversity and embracing the chaos a bit.  I've learned that beds of slightly-crowded, diverse plants suffer less from pests and disease so I mix herbs and vegetables and cottagey flowers like calendula, poppies and nasturtiums in and around everything.  They self-seed and crowd out weeds if allowed to establish themselves.  I let things go to seed for the good of the order and prune at different times, depending on what's best for the plant instead of what looks best.  It's definitely not THE way, it is just A way. I'll transplant and divide before I'd ever just rip up and toss something. Do things have a tendency to get a bit overgrown in my garden world? Yes.  Yes, they do.

To me, the whole garden is my little ecosystem play land.  Plants gone to seed attract birds, who then nest in our fruit trees and eat bugs.  To Teri, plants gone to seed are an eyesore and potential problems--creating more weeding work later on.  To me, low-hanging leaves or weak plants that the bugs are eating serve a purpose--giving them something to eat so they will leave the good and healthy plants alone.  To Teri, those slug-eaten holes are unattractive and need to be removed!  I like the way nasturtiums and calendula have a tendency to spill over bed edges and come up in surprising places while Teri wants things to stay where they are planted or risk brisk removal.

We haven't really figured out our co-creation yet.  Teri wants to feel empowered to do what she thinks best and enjoy a good afternoon of tidying and tilling, and I would like to avoid the sinking feeling of panic I get when I come home to find her beaming in her work gloves by a full wheelbarrow.  Dollar signs go off in my head when I calculate how much money and time it is going to take to replace those hollyhocks I've grown from seed since last spring. I clench and want to throw myself down, arms spread, to protect my babies from her sharp and ruthless tools.  I can only imagine she views the untamed bed as spoiled offspring in need of some sound discipline.

So, we continue our negotiations.  I know that it is possible for two gardeners to create together, just as it is possible for two cooks to share a kitchen.  It just takes some effort, ongoing communication, and a willingness to give in and let go occasionally.  We'll just have to see...

Planning for Spring

This morning, we wake to a gorgeous, frosty, Winter wonderland.  With an overnight low of near twenty degrees, every tree, rooftop and blade of grass looks like it has been dipped and rolled in sugar.  It has its crisp beauty and the sunshine is quite nice, but it doesn't stop our plans for Spring!

The seed catalogs have been arriving in the mailbox and I have been pouring over online resources as well.  We've made our list of what we want to grow and Teri is pulling all her warm workwear to the front of the closet in preparation for her mid-January return to the wholesale nursery where she works. Despite the fact that it feels as though Lady Winter is just getting started, we are feeling the need to get ourselves ready for the Spring...

 

With gloves and hats and frozen noses, we crafted the new two-bedroom nest box for our little urban chicken coop on New Year's day.  We have circled the February date on the calendar when the Welsummer and Dominique chicks are set to arrive at the fancy farm store and we want our hen house to be ready.  While our current flock is on laying hiatus for the Winter (we lifted our last egg out of the nest box on Christmas day), we are promised by those wiser and more experienced than us that come February, things will pick up again so it made sense to us to make our improvements while the platform was unoccupied. 

Our big planning and building project is looming: the creation of a top bar bee hive.  We've read our books, we've taken measurements and poked around other versions, we've been to the lumber yard to scope and measure and price supplies and in the next week or two, we'll embark on the Building of the Box. We are feeling a bit of a pressure crunch since we're told February/March is when we can expect to be on standby for the acquisition of a local swarm.  OR, we will need to go the less romantic route of ordering our starter bees from afar. We keep telling ourselves, we can do this and it will probably be a bit of fun in the process.  Besides, the $30 price tag for materials seems more reasonable than the $300+ cost of a professionally built one.

So, as we warm the nectar in the hummingbird feeders and chip out the ice from the hens' water, we are also stirring warm compost into waiting garden beds and drawing diagrams of where the tomatoes are going to go this year.  While it might seem as though the world of nature stands still in the depths of Winter, that isn't necessarily true.  Early spring bulbs are pushing up through the crunchy ground all around the garden, the fruit trees wait poised with their tight buds, and we've got a lot to do in the next two months!

What the Almanac Tells Us

Last year was the first year Teri ever picked up an issue of The Old Farmer's Almanac. Historically, she's a pretty urban, East Coast sort of person.  But, with our bumbling quest to grow and raise more and get on board the Self-sufficiency Train, it seemed the appropriate thing to do.  So, it probably comes as no surprise that the newest 2013 version of the "Sun, Moon, Stars and Planets" is sitting splay-backed on our coffee table.  The perfect reading material for the first day of a brand, new year!

If you've never thumbed through an issue of The Old Farmer's Almanac, you may not know that it is a kooky American trail mix of weather forecasts, how to plant by the moon's phases, ads for conservative Christian publications, Tarot reading offers, and tips on everything from saving the world with vinegar, to parenting advice and sheep-sheering strategy.  It is something!

You can order choir robes and sausage grinders from the Almanac, but you can also access several dozen spiritual healers, future tellers and psychic readers.  It has everything a person might be to plan and predict for the next 12 months. Some of this information is darn useful: who doesn't want to the sunrise and sunset times by day and month?  Some is a bit questionable: does one in 10,000 female chickens really spontaneously change sexes to become a rooster? Regardless of how trivial, banal or perplexing the information is, it surely does make for some folksy reading and it somehow makes a person feel a bit optimistic for what the coming year might bring.

So, as Teri and I try to figure out when the days might be long enough for our hens to start laying again, or when the last anticipated frost date will be so we can plant out our tomatoes, we are also dangling our feet in the waters of Americana: a little history, a bit of folklore, some mysticism and superstition, housekeeping advice, a recipe or two, and darn, if there isn't medical and first aid suggestions as well! Since New Year's day is traditionally a bit laden with superstition and folklore, what better way to spend a little first-day-of-the-year reading?

Here's wishing everyone an informed, useful, entertaining, and connected year!

A Year of Bread and Books

The past few weeks has found Teri and I in a natural state of wrap-up and what's next? You've likely been in that place too--finishing up the loose ends of 2012 and making little declarations and intention statements about what you want 2013 to be about.  I don't do resolutions and Teri has been somewhat sucked into that mindset as well.  Instead, we do what I like to call themes--what's the focus? What might be an overarching direction, idea or topic for the coming year?  Sometimes, it is as simple as "drink more water" and other years, it has been a bit more structured.  So, we've been working out what our 2013 themes will be...

At the onset of this past year, my intention was to experience more pleasure and less stress.  I hoped this would come in the form of more massages and evening walks, less long work weeks and late nights.  Alas, I didn't really do so well on this intention, as the world seemed to have other plans for me.  Fortunately, there is no failing at this intention stuff, as far as I am concerned, and I just might have to take some other measures for 2013.

Teri has decided that in the next 12 months, she will augment her typical voracious reading appetite with 12 recommended classics.  A couple weeks ago, she asked me, as the resident English Major, what "classics" I would suggest?  "Well," I mused, "What sort of parameters do you have for Classics? It would be more helpful if you picked a genre, time frame or even a continent as the cannon is always changing--we need to reign in the quantifiers a bit."  So, she decided to ask all the kids at weekly drop-in what books they would put at the top of a must-read reading list for the coming year.  It definitely helped her create a unique and varied list from which to pull her books. She now has twelve personally suggested books in her bull pen:

• Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey
• Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
• Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
• All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
• Night, Elie Wiesel
• The Once and Future King, T.H. White
• Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
• The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
• Catch 22, Joseph Heller
• The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck
• My Antonia, Willa Cather
• Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller

In case you are wondering at the parameters for this little dozen--all recommended by 20-something young adults educated in U.S. public schools--except Tropic of Cancer; that one was mine.

So, that is a little piece of what Teri will be up to for the next 12 months, I have decided to go in a different direction.  My overarching theme is to create more and do more with my hands.  The tangible, initial focus of this is to make all our bread.  I don't know if I'll be able to sustain it or not--it is terribly easy to buy a loaf as needed--but I thought if I could make every loaf and every roll we ate for the next twelve months, it would slow me down just a little and be a good, solid basis for creativity and less cerebral activities. 

I suppose if one were to attempt to capture our separate efforts into a simple theme, you might say we are attempting to get back to basics in some way.  It seems we are both striving for perspective, a deeper connection with the human condition.  As two people who already live rather public, involved lives through our work and volunteer efforts, it seems we might be needing something a little more introspective and personal.  Like all of you, we have no idea what the next twelve months will bring, but it somehow helps to have a little intended structure to send us out into the great unknown!

Lessons Learned from First Year of Urban Farming

Now, we've gardened before, but this past year was our first very intentional foray into the sometimes pretentious world of the urban farm.  We started calling ourselves urban farmers for fun and referring to our "farm chores" but, in all actuality, we have jumped in with both work boots, a pitchfork and a few chickens! Along the way, we've learned a few things to keep in mind as we plan for our 2013 adventures...

We learned that chickens are about as trainable as cats or kids.  They tend to come with their own ideas about how they'd like to spend their days, what they want to eat and where they'd like to lay an egg (or not.) When our first-to-lay hen, Virginia, took up laying her tiny pullet eggs in the cat box, we were admonished by the wonderful guy who runs the fancy farm store. After feeling guilty and shamed, we tried to retrain her to no avail.  A couple weeks later when the second hen, Hilda, started laying in the nest box from the very first egg, Ginny moved her operation into the nest box too.  Like kids, they figured it out themselves and we might have saved ourselves a bit of shamed fussing.

Despite what all the sassy books say, this gardening/farming stuff can be expensive!  That has been another lesson learned.  With the search for organic, non GMO seeds and starts, to the purchasing of chicken coop and supplies, chicken wire, tools and organic slug bait, our garden budget line item was a little high. Could we have done it cheaper?  Probably...in a perfect world...but not everyone is tool savvy and talented in upcycling, recycling and uncycling (or unicycling, for that matter.)  We could have spent a few dollars less for each of our chicks, but we opted for the heirloom, sexed, happily-hatched-local varieties and we haven't regretted that.  It's sort of like growing the heirloom vegetables, why raise and grow the exact same thing we could get at the store?

Thirdly, we could have canned and preserved more than we did.  At the time--in the heat of late Summer--it felt like we put up jars and jars and jars and we would never eat/share/use all those gorgeous glass goblets of tomatoes, salsa, sauce, jams and preserves. We now know that, despite the fact that we grew 22 tomato plants, we could have canned three times as many jars of tomatoes and sauce to meet the reality of how much we use through the fall and winter.  Honestly, we ate the last of our garden grown fresh tomatoes right around Thanksgiving, so we had more than 5 solid months of fresh tomatoes of every size and color AND canned dozens of jars, but we could have done more. We are also already out of pear jam and are hoarding our precious jars of fig preserves--even though we canned a good dozen jars.  Sure, we've given a few as gifts and our adult kids have snagged a few jars from the larder as needed (Who knew they'd find the regular jar of applesauce or marinara sauce to be so enticing?), but we surprised ourselves by how much we use on a regular basis so this next year, we need to do even more!

Additionally, we need a food dehydrator!  We thought about getting one this year, but were a bit intimidated by acquiring more gear that we didn't know how to use.  Now we know we could have dried apples, figs and persimmons from our trees (not to mention some cherries) and would have used them in all sorts of things.  Alas, next year...

Other things to grow more of this year: lavender, cilantro, kohlrabi and we seem to never grow enough carrots or onions.  There were a few things we didn't eat as much of as we thought we would--namely lettuce--we tended to lean more toward spinach, kale and chard for salads than lettuce. Plus the slugs and snails thought the lettuce was a banquet!

We have new projects on the horizon for this year: hopefully bees, building our rain collection barrel system, adding a couple new chickens to our flock, and experimenting with some new ways to grow potatoes. We'd also love to find a place/person to get the fresh goat milk from while we contemplate what our lives might be like with a couple dwarf dairy goats hopping around our back yard.  We'll see, but if nothing else, there ought to be a few more lessons in store for us for 2013!



The Package

Today, we mail the packages.  This year is the first year I have compiled a send-away package for one of my baby heads.  21 year-old Lillian is living out of state for the first extended period and this will be the first time in that many years I haven't shared Christmas with her since her birth.  Teri is more seasoned at this than I.  Along with Lilly's Priority Mail box stacked by the front door, there are two others: one for Teri's twin sister and one for her baby head--both of whom live on the East Coast. 

This isn't to say that I have never shipped away the Christmas presents--when I lived in the Midwest years ago, I put together the paper-wrapped boxes to send back here to Oregon; and my sister lived in Seattle, London and New York city for decades and I sent her treats and treasures every year, but this is different. Strangely fine and strangely not fine all at the same time.

If you ask my kids, they might tell you that I've been raising them for adventures since the very beginning.  I wanted them to know there was a great, big, available world out there and that they could do anything, live anywhere, change their minds, make mistakes, and live out myriad versions of living in one lifetime, so it was inevitable that they would leave home and wander out.  In an over-used phrase, they get to do what they want. But the thought of Lillian actually opening her little presents a time zone away on Christmas is bittersweet.

Sweet in the yay-she's-living-her-life-and-we're-so-proud-and-supportive and bitter in the I-can't-believe-she's-really-all-grown-up. While Teri and I are planning a trip out to see her in the Spring, I haven't actually seen her since she left for the wilds of Colorado this past June. Yes, we talk and text and send each other photos of daily snowfalls, meals and odd happenings, but that isn't exactly the same as meeting up for lunch or plopping down on the same couch. 

According to Teri, packing the Mom's (Moms') Christmas Box takes skill, art and restraint.  A balance must be achieved between the practical and the sentimental.  We want them to have a little bit of momish gooeyness, but not so much as to be morose.  After all, as Teri and I have determined, part of our job now is to send the constant messages that we have complete and absolute confidence that they all can manage their own lives just fine (coupled with the reassurance that we are here no matter what.)

Our kids are all so different and we are really in the early years of separation by time and space and purpose. While we have been letting go for over two decades in this dance of mother and child, as many of you know, that means getting used to walking around with an enlarged, bruised and bewildered heart.  We do our best, whether they are coming to us, running from us, or we are sending a little piece of ourselves out into the world to find them wherever they may be.

So, we've wrapped our packages; tucked in little bits of this and that; cushioned and taped and labeled--and I have likely hidden a little chunk of myself amidst the tissue paper and bubble wrap--just in case.

Christmas Cookies!

This time of year is about a bunch of things--lights, love, charity, goodwill--but let's get real here, it is also about the food.  No seasonal celebration would be complete without its arsenal of tasty treats and at our house, that means cookie jars and tins full of cookies!

In the home I grew up in, Christmas cookies meant dry sugar cookies with or without frosting, cut out in festive holiday shapes.  Period.  We might go to parties or potlucks where there were trays of choices and that is where my youngster self started to realize there was a great big world of colors, tastes and textures out there and they all came off someone's cookie sheet.

As an adult, I've built and developed my own pantry of favorites--greatly influenced by kids, friends and loved ones--and this is the time of year, the oven is working overtime producing everyone's favorites.  I generally bake a few batches of 3 or 4 different kinds each weekend throughout the season to keep the cookie crocks filled.

Some appear every year: thumbprint cookies, Russian teacakes, chocolate crinkles, gingerbread cookies, peanut butter cookies, and some sort of molasses cookie.  Others have been trendy or made by the request of a household member: chocolate chip, peanut butter chocolate chip, and various bar cookies (bar cookies don't fit so well in a cookie jar so I generally avoid them, but if a request is made, heck ya!) So much butter, chocolate and brown sugar...

I still generally do some sort of a cut-out cookie--sometimes a buttery sugar cookie and other times, I use this vintage recipe for cut-out cookies made with honey (I like the honey recipe better.) I confess, this was a much more pleasant process when all the kids were home and they could help with all the cutting and frosting--it can be a big job for one person!

Lately, Teri and I have been on a quest for a cookie press.  She has fond memories of her mother's butter or "spritz" cookies and those are part of her memories of Christmas past.  Now days, most of the cookie presses are made of plastic parts and we are searching for one that it is not.  And one that is not super expensive!  We found one at Hardwick's, but it was in the too expensive category, so the quest continues.  We are about to start searching thrift stores to see if we can't find a trusty old simple one!  Until then, those little buttery shapes are missing from our cookie tray.

I don't know how cookies became a key player in the Christmas tradition.  I reckon I'll credit the Germans--my memories of visiting Germany are dusted in the sugar and spices of some of the most amazing bakeries (die bäckerie or Konditori) I've ever experienced. Windows and windows piled full of yum! My limited German being just enough to get me into trouble in those very bakeries.

Before I indulge my tendency to wander off topic into all the bakeries I've visited around the globe, back to our own kitchen--where I think I'm due to bake up another batch of Christmas cookies!