We live on a little half-acre plot that's just OOZING with estrogen. There's me, the two girls, a female dog, and 5 hens. In the midst of all this female-ness, my poor hubby does his best to maintain his sanity and assert the importance of y chromosomes in our world. So, after a hard night of ironing seams for me while I sew, letting Sierra put bows in his hair and studying up on his disney princesses, he retires to the backroom to be all manly and do wood working projects. I kindly ignore the sawdust in the carpet (most of the time) and have just turned the room over. In return, he asks what I want. Last night, he finished the bookshelf I requested for the girls. YAY! He put up pictures on his blog. It is all done except for final painting touches. We can't decide whether to let the girls paint what they want on it, or have them just do handprints on it. The girls are very excited and already have it stuffed to the gills with books (ummm....honey? maybe we need two...)
He asked me what the next project was on his list. I went with compost bins out back because we have scrap wood and can do that for free. The longer term project though, is to build this built in bed for our room. The under the bed drawers would be sized to hold books (like a book shelf laying down...pull out a drawer, select your book, then close the drawer). Our plan is to put this in the corner of the master bedroom so that the foot-board wall will be a new bathroom wall (and add space to our teeny tiny bathroom). The head-board wall will hold more books and be the beginning of my quest to cover the house in built-in bookshelves. swoon Obviously, that's a much more involved (and expensive) project and we might as well save up the money for the bathroom remodel we were planning before we get too far into it.
We haven't done anything in the garden this weekend (aside from taking care of seedlings) because the weather went and got all crazy again. We got down to 31 last night and forecast for 31 again tonight. Should be back in the high 70's by Tuesday.
I have been doing lots of homeschooling reading. Ever since I was pregnant with Sierra, Josh and I have discussed homeschooling. We both like the idea, but it was overwhelming and scary. Then Sierra (and her amazing, never-ending supply of energy) came along and it seemed even more overwhelming and scary. Currently, she does pre-school at a local Montessori school that goes through Kindergarten. It became clear very quickly that this is the IDEAL situation for her. Unfortunately, no Montessori for big kids around here. The idea of trying to replicate Montessori at home was even more overwhelming to me and I was starting to chicken out on this whole homeschool plan. Then, I went to a little meet 'n' greet with a local homeschool association this week and learned about the Charlotte Mason theory of teaching. I've been reading through the Ambleside Online website and falling more and more in love with this teaching method. It sounds GREAT for Sierra and sounds like something I can do without freaking out over creating a curriculum from scratch. There are things I don't like about it (testing is the biggest thing I'd change), but the beauty of homeschool is you can change things up where you want. In addition to this, I've learned that the local homeschool community is even bigger than I initially thought. There are TONS of resources here---everything from co-ops, to sports teams, to "school" dances, to a specific section of the local library with curriculum and text book resources for younger kids. We've done a LOT of talking about local schooling options this week and it looks like we will be leaving her where she is through kindergarten (and starting Sedona at that same school when she's ready), then homeschooling starting with 1st grade. Speaking of homeschooling resources...whether you're doing school at home or elsewhere, one fun resource I've discovered is Homeschool Freebies. They offer one free download each day. Especially lately, there have been a lot of GREAT things on there. You can just go to their website each day to get the freebie, but it's nice to sign up for their email list because they send out an email on Sunday to let you know what will be coming up on what days throughout the week. Lately, there has also been one extra freebie each week for email list subscribers.
Showing posts with label woodworking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label woodworking. Show all posts
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Chore List
It's somewhere around 50 degrees outside and our nightly lows have been in the 30's. So you know what that means....Time to Prepare for Spring!!!! When you intend to truly replace much of your store-bought diet with food produced in your own backyard, gardening is a year round task. For our area, there is almost always something that can be planted. Heat tolerant things like okra and peppers and black eyed peas in the summer; onions and carrots and strawberries in the fall; broccoli, cabbage and brussel sprouts through the winter (in those years we actually HAVE a winter); then start spring garden seeds indoors in February, transplant in March/April and start all over again!
Our chore list for this weekend:
1)Uncover strawberries. We had freezing temps this week, so we picked up leaves neighbors had put out for trash and spread them on top of our strawberry bed. Now that the freezing temps are gone, time to uncover the leaves and let them continue building up nice, healthy foliage.
2)Pick up manure. We're getting a truckload of composted horse manure from a local family today.
3)Bake bread.
4)Plant more indoor lettuce pots. Started two last week, will start another two this week (so we get a small, steady flow of lettuce instead of a huge amount all at once)
5)Start preparing for seed planting. We need to make newspaper pots, start filling pots, clean off our table we use for indoor planting and check out the grow light to be sure it's in working order. I'd rather start this now, then try to do it all and plant seeds in one weekend (I'm thinking we'll have nearly 200 pots)
6)Prune fruit trees? Not sure on this one--we just planted the trees last year and we're still learning on this one. Typical pruning time is February around here, but I just have a feeling we're gonna have an "early spring" this year.
We accomplished quite a bit already today. Had a good time uncovering strawberries, working on spreading the manure, filling one of the new beds with soil and thinning carrots. It was an experimental bread baking day that turned out better than expected. The lentil bread was a recipe I picked up from TennZen and it came out pretty tasty. It's almost like a whole grain, nutty bread taste, without all that "bird food" in it (as my father in law would say). Josh really liked it. For my oatmeal bread, I tried substituting some of the flour with oatmeal baby cereal (just for the sake of using it up) and it didn't go quite as well as I'd hoped, but it wasn't a total disaster. The texture of the crust is just slightly off.
Had a close friend ask me one time (well, actually, it was originally her husband's question) what we do for FUN. She guessed (and was correct) that this IS our fun. Despite the term "chore", these things are our hobbies. I don't always enjoy all the tasks (watering the garden with a 23 pound kiddo on my hip probably nears the bottom of my list), but there is a wonderful sense of accomplishment to stand at the window with a cup of hot peppermint tea and watch an entire produce section grow in your backyard. It gives a calming sense of security to bring in a basket of fresh veggies and to know how to cook with them and how to preserve them. It's incredibly freeing to know that (contrary to popular belief, unfortunately) you don't NEED 100K a year, or 50, or even 25 to live comfortably. We have (nearly, perhaps) escaped the cycle of needing convenience items, which require more money, which requires more out of the home work, which requires more convenience items....
In other quirky "you think that's fun?!?" hobby news....Josh is making fabulous progress on a bookshelf for the girls. I requested something similar to what they have in the kid's section of the library so that it will be easy for the girls to see what they have without spreading the books all over the floor, and also easy for them to put the books away neatly. He's been making updates at his website. (Check out the link about making your own paint!)
And I think I have recovered from the holiday season and am ready to put an end to my sewing hiatus. I'm itching to make a quilt for Josh and I (which I haven't done yet!). I'm thinking a simple, repeating Amish Star. I've actually got this idea in my head because I've been reading the Abram's Daughters series by Beverly Lewis. They're fiction, but the characters are Amish. Lewis' grandmother grew up in an Old Order Mennonite community and from what I know, the setting she portrays in these books is fairly accurate. If there's anything I shouldn't be reading, it's anything concerning an Amish or Mennonite type lifestyle! It feels my head with all sorts of to-do lists!
Our chore list for this weekend:
1)Uncover strawberries. We had freezing temps this week, so we picked up leaves neighbors had put out for trash and spread them on top of our strawberry bed. Now that the freezing temps are gone, time to uncover the leaves and let them continue building up nice, healthy foliage.
2)Pick up manure. We're getting a truckload of composted horse manure from a local family today.
3)Bake bread.
4)Plant more indoor lettuce pots. Started two last week, will start another two this week (so we get a small, steady flow of lettuce instead of a huge amount all at once)
5)Start preparing for seed planting. We need to make newspaper pots, start filling pots, clean off our table we use for indoor planting and check out the grow light to be sure it's in working order. I'd rather start this now, then try to do it all and plant seeds in one weekend (I'm thinking we'll have nearly 200 pots)
6)Prune fruit trees? Not sure on this one--we just planted the trees last year and we're still learning on this one. Typical pruning time is February around here, but I just have a feeling we're gonna have an "early spring" this year.
We accomplished quite a bit already today. Had a good time uncovering strawberries, working on spreading the manure, filling one of the new beds with soil and thinning carrots. It was an experimental bread baking day that turned out better than expected. The lentil bread was a recipe I picked up from TennZen and it came out pretty tasty. It's almost like a whole grain, nutty bread taste, without all that "bird food" in it (as my father in law would say). Josh really liked it. For my oatmeal bread, I tried substituting some of the flour with oatmeal baby cereal (just for the sake of using it up) and it didn't go quite as well as I'd hoped, but it wasn't a total disaster. The texture of the crust is just slightly off.
Had a close friend ask me one time (well, actually, it was originally her husband's question) what we do for FUN. She guessed (and was correct) that this IS our fun. Despite the term "chore", these things are our hobbies. I don't always enjoy all the tasks (watering the garden with a 23 pound kiddo on my hip probably nears the bottom of my list), but there is a wonderful sense of accomplishment to stand at the window with a cup of hot peppermint tea and watch an entire produce section grow in your backyard. It gives a calming sense of security to bring in a basket of fresh veggies and to know how to cook with them and how to preserve them. It's incredibly freeing to know that (contrary to popular belief, unfortunately) you don't NEED 100K a year, or 50, or even 25 to live comfortably. We have (nearly, perhaps) escaped the cycle of needing convenience items, which require more money, which requires more out of the home work, which requires more convenience items....
In other quirky "you think that's fun?!?" hobby news....Josh is making fabulous progress on a bookshelf for the girls. I requested something similar to what they have in the kid's section of the library so that it will be easy for the girls to see what they have without spreading the books all over the floor, and also easy for them to put the books away neatly. He's been making updates at his website. (Check out the link about making your own paint!)
And I think I have recovered from the holiday season and am ready to put an end to my sewing hiatus. I'm itching to make a quilt for Josh and I (which I haven't done yet!). I'm thinking a simple, repeating Amish Star. I've actually got this idea in my head because I've been reading the Abram's Daughters series by Beverly Lewis. They're fiction, but the characters are Amish. Lewis' grandmother grew up in an Old Order Mennonite community and from what I know, the setting she portrays in these books is fairly accurate. If there's anything I shouldn't be reading, it's anything concerning an Amish or Mennonite type lifestyle! It feels my head with all sorts of to-do lists!
Sunday, January 11, 2009
My own personal shop
My husband has taken up woodworking, with an emphasis on the skills that replace the need for power tools. This is great for me. I say, "sweetie? I'd like __________" and he retires to the back room every evening for a few days and comes out with a custom piece built to my specifications. Awesome!!! And it turns out frugality is contagious because he has totally come around to my penny-pinching ways. I may be a fabric hoarder, but he, my friends, is definitely a scrap wood hoarder. He's started his own blog to catalog his projects over at sawdaddysaw.blogspot.com. The shoe rack turned out beautifully and I'm very excited to see the kid's bookcase.
I'm getting antsy for spring planting. We went to producer's again yesterday because they have the first of their seed potatoes in now. We got several pounds of those and some garlic as well. Apparently, going in as a family makes us memorable--the head gardening guy and the owner both seem to recognize us now. We had a good talk about what's required to be successful with blueberries in our area and I used some Christmas money to buy a Tifblue and a Premier. I learned that you need two different kinda of blueberries (kinda like with apples) and in our area, you want one of those to be a tifblue, because they're the good pollinator. I've seen some sources say you can have only tifblues, but I'm all for variety. I've read before that if you have lots of pine trees around, that's a sign your soil is acidic enough to grow blueberries. The guys at producer's said our local soil is too alkaline, so you can either grow them in a big whiskey barrel type container, or acidify the soil around the plant. The "natural" way to do that is with plenty of spagnum moss in the hole where you plant (actually, apparently there has been some success with growing in pure spagnum moss). The cheaper, but more chemical way is to add some ammonium sulfate at planting and then twice a year throughout the plant's life.
Our other task yesterday was to start filling the new garden beds with soil. We are going to dismantle our current beds over time and go with more traditional, rectangle beds. They will take more work to water, but be more space efficient. As we took apart part of the back bed and shoveled its dirt onto a tarp to drag to the new beds, I decided maybe I should've named this blog "The Fickle Farmers" because we're always changing something. Josh insists we're just adapting based on whatever our current needs are.
I'm getting antsy for spring planting. We went to producer's again yesterday because they have the first of their seed potatoes in now. We got several pounds of those and some garlic as well. Apparently, going in as a family makes us memorable--the head gardening guy and the owner both seem to recognize us now. We had a good talk about what's required to be successful with blueberries in our area and I used some Christmas money to buy a Tifblue and a Premier. I learned that you need two different kinda of blueberries (kinda like with apples) and in our area, you want one of those to be a tifblue, because they're the good pollinator. I've seen some sources say you can have only tifblues, but I'm all for variety. I've read before that if you have lots of pine trees around, that's a sign your soil is acidic enough to grow blueberries. The guys at producer's said our local soil is too alkaline, so you can either grow them in a big whiskey barrel type container, or acidify the soil around the plant. The "natural" way to do that is with plenty of spagnum moss in the hole where you plant (actually, apparently there has been some success with growing in pure spagnum moss). The cheaper, but more chemical way is to add some ammonium sulfate at planting and then twice a year throughout the plant's life.
Our other task yesterday was to start filling the new garden beds with soil. We are going to dismantle our current beds over time and go with more traditional, rectangle beds. They will take more work to water, but be more space efficient. As we took apart part of the back bed and shoveled its dirt onto a tarp to drag to the new beds, I decided maybe I should've named this blog "The Fickle Farmers" because we're always changing something. Josh insists we're just adapting based on whatever our current needs are.
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