Who has a mustache?
Oh, but I did for about 10 minutes.
Archive for the 'life' Category
I did finally order seeds. But not from any of the listed companies. I forgot to mention that I also requested a catalog from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, and when that catalog arrived, I was no longer interested in any of the others. All the seeds listed are open-pollinated, non-hybrid, heirloom seeds, collected from seed-savers and gardeners from around the world. So, what did we order? Having a very limited experience with gardening and the qualities of any varieties listed, we opted for the Medium Homestead package for northern climates that includes 25 vegetables and 60 varieties (60 seed packets total). So we really have no idea yet what we will be growing, and in a way, that will make our first year of gardening just that much more exciting. There are few, if any, items in the catalog that I would not want (most likely candidates are the summer squash and the beets), so chances are, we will be happy to have whatever pops up. What I don’t care for, Bea will probably love.
I have also brought the grow lights* into the kitchen and we are now waiting to see if the 6 basil plants and 2 cilantro will come up for some early fresh seasoning. At some point we may have to find a window for them, but first things first. I want to know how this grow light thing works, so I am experimenting with the seeds we have. It has only been a week, and not a peep. Other bloggers are reporting sprouts at 10 days for some of their seeds, so maybe we will see some green next week.
Next up is the chicken order. We will be getting 25 chicks, and I have picked out the breeds. It looks like we will mix it up with Rhode Island Reds, Silver/Gold Laced Wyandottes, Black Australorps, and Buff Orpingtons. We are planning on ordering straight runs of the Australorps, Orpingtons, and Wyandottes, but only ordering sexed pullets of the Reds. The reason for this is that we want to have a cock, but don’t want to be stuck with only one to pick from if we order it sexed. So we will order straight runs, cull the cockerels that don’t make the cut, and end up with the favorite cock to watch over the hens. Why no Red rooster? Reds tend to have quite aggressive cocks, and I prefer to keep my spurs at boot level. The next week or so will be spent preparing for the chicks (heat lamp, feeder, waterer, quarters), and plans for the coop and the run will kick into high gear after they arrive (in late March?). Each of the breeds is a good dual-purpose breed, so we should end up with 10-15 good layers, and 10-15 meaty frozen chickens in the freezer. We are hoping to let them run amok (I mean free range), but if it seems like they are getting into things (like the house, or the road), or easy prey for hawks and coyotes, they will be confined to their run.
It sounds like a lot. It is. Still not sure how it will all work out, but it will. Sun is out this weekend, so optimism levels are high.
If you happen to live in a (sub)urban area, the book Keep Chickens! by Barbara Kilarski might be helpful. Many towns allow for small numbers of chickens, and they require so little space, and take care of many table scraps. Oh yeah, and the eggs!
* Bea’s dad did some work for a couple and they asked if he had use for the grow stand and lights. He said he knew some one who did! They are a great couple and have also loaned us an awesome stereoscopic microscope (2 eyepieces = magnification with depth). Frito’s are pretty nasty up close. Anyway, we are very thankful and excited about the grow lights, and will be even more so once we see some sprouts.
I have never had a beet that I particularly liked. I just don’t eat dirt clods that look like they bleed.
But that was before this winter, and a recipe that came with some beets from a co-workers garden. I think it came from a Campbell’s cookbook (page 18), but I have copied it here in the way that we made it (more or less).
Creamy Beet Soup
A twist on traditional borscht. While usually served hot with yogurt, it is also tasty chilled (so I hear).
- 2 medium onions, chopped
- 3 Tbs. butter
- 1 medium potato, chopped
- 1 clove garlic, minced
- 2-3 medium beets, sliced
- 3 cups chicken or vegetable stock
- 1 tsp. salt
- 1 tsp. snipped fresh dill, or 1 tsp. dried dill weed
- 1/4 tsp. pepper
- Yogurt garnish
In a large sauce pan, over medium heat, cook onions in butter until tender. Add potato and garlic; cook 1 minute. Add beets and stock to saucepan; heat to a boil. Cover and cook over low heat 15 minutes or until potato is tender.
Place one-half beet mixture in blender or food processor. Cover and blend till smooth. Place blended soup aside and repeat with remaining beet mixture. Return soup to saucepan. Add dill, salt and pepper to taste. Serve with yogurt.
This bodes well for Bea’s plans to grow some of these strange veggies in our garden(s) this year.
As the temps have dropped, and outdoor activities have come to a halt, I am finding that I am thinking more and more about the spring activities. For the first time, I have requested seed catalogs. I poked around on the Internet, looking for companies that sell organic and/or heirloom, heritage, non-hybrid varieties. So, I have catalogs from Johnny’s, Seed Savers Exchange , and Park Seed on their way, and I downloaded the catalog from Fedco. I also started thinking about how we would lay out the garden(s) and how I should go about making a “master plan”. I started looking around for software for laying out a garden (freeware/open source, of course). For OS X I found GardenSketch, which I have used before. It is still in beta, but includes a extensive database of plants, and grabs updates an photos from the MSU (Michigan State University) plant database. I found it worked well, and had great features for planning and logging a garden, but for planning out a 1.6 acre lot, it was a little clunky. It would work very well for individual garden plots within the master plan, but not for the master plan itself. On the Windows side, there were not any good finds that were specific to gardening. I resorted to looking for CAD software, and downloaded several. I must say, some CAD software is infernally frustrating to try to use if you never have before. It is also difficult to find a simple 2D CAD program; most seem to be geared toward 3D drafting. So I did finally find free2Design and found that will a little time, I was able to do what I wanted.
So what exactly did I want to do? I want a accurate aerial view drawing of our property, including buildings and trees. So I went to our county GIS site, found our plat, took a screenshot, cropped it down to an approximate likeness to the actual property lines (209′ x 335′ 6″), imported it into free2Design, and began tracing out the features. When I was done, the image can be hidden, and I have myself a nice drawing to work with. Once I have all the “permanent features”, I can divide the lot into areas, and label them. For instance, we will have a garden area around our carport that will have herbs. That particular section of the yard is area 7 and can have more detailed plans. Same with the shed, the “orchard”, and so on. Now I can develop a master plan, and maybe use GardenSketch for individual areas. Exciting!
So here it is, the map of the piano lot, with trees and buildings, divided into areas:
The areas are really only intended to break up the space into manageable chunks, so there are a few places that the break-up seems illogical. I will still do some tweaking to get it to look more thought out… There are also overlapping areas and areas that consist entirely of other areas in order to provide a unified plan for a certain feature.
Anyway, I am on the road to a master plan, which will also include list and lists of specific plants, which ones don’t get along, and which ones attract bees, repel pests, or attract natural enemies of pests. It is a long term project (years and years), and it feels nice to be able to think that far ahead.
She is a good little dog, even if lame. One of my co-workers *drives for the Amish in the area, and heard that one family was getting rid of a female Yorkshire terrier. It turns out that they bought her for breeding, and thought that her limp and strange gait would go away as she grew. When they took her to the vet for her checkup, he told them they should not breed this dog. So they decided to get rid of it. My co-worker asked them to give her 2 weeks to find a new home, rather than just “putting her down”.
I had recently done some research on dogs, to find out which ones were good for livestock protection. I found a nice long list, and noticed that most were large. At the very bottom there was the Yorkshire Terrier, and I thought it was funny to find it there. So when we found that a Yorkie needed a home, we were ready to say yes.
She is a pretty little dog, but seems to have spine or hip trouble and does not use her back right leg most of the time. She does not complain, does not seem to be in pain, and is still very active.
Even so, I think we have decided on a name… Kalooy (ka-loo-oy), which is Bisaya for pitiful (or too be pitied). We find that we spend a lot of time saying or thinking “poor thing”, so I think it will be quite appropriate.
*Sometime the Amish need to get somewhere that it is impractical to use a horse and buggy, so they pay neighbors to drive them, and generally pay them pretty well.
Last weekend we were the glad recipients of 14 inches of snow! Our neghbor stopped by to let us know that we were not snowed in, and that he would plow out our driveway. Very nice! He has an old ford tractor with 4 ft. tires and snow chains. While he was telling us that he would release us from our welcome snowy bondage, he also mentioned that one of the trees that they cut down in the hedgerow a few fields over had some bees and honey, and that we should go have a look. So the kids and I bundled up, grabbed a sled, and trudged over to see. We pulled some of the comb out, and there were a lot of dead bees, many smashed from the tree falling. Once we pulled out the easily accessible pieces, we could see live bees, and hear their hum ans they worked to keep the hive warm. Off we slogged, back to the house with our harvest of wild honeycomb.
There was quite a bit of it:
And it was just oozing honey:
I wrapped sections of the comb in a piece of old tee-shirt, and squeeeeeeezed…
It was a rather sticky and messy affair (I felt like Winnie the Pooh), and my fingers made regular trips to my mouth.
But it did indeed work, and in the end we had around 2 quarts of raw wild honey and lots of beeswax that was made about 500 feet from our house!
Later in the afternoon, after all the squeezing and cleanup, I took a jar over to the neighbors. After all, it was their tree, fields, and bees that made the sweet stuff.
‘Tis the season to be thinking about thankfulness. I have been, along with a few other things that might not seem immediately related.
Leading into the Thanksgiving week I started reading The Paradox of Choice: Why more is less by Barry Schwartz, a slightly academic romp into why more options make us less satisfied. He goes into the psychology of making decisions, and what happens when we are presented with more options. Some of the ways that he gives to alleviate the stress of too many options are interesting in the context of our “give me options” culture: practice gratefulness, be content with “good enough”, embrace constraints on choice (more on that in a minute), make decisions permanent, and choose when to choose.
Those can be boiled down to this: gratitude, contentment, relationship, decisiveness, discernment, but I suppose the terms used above might be easier understood. These are all attributes of character. The most interesting of these is the “embrace constraints on choice” item. He elaborates on this, indicating that our pursuit of individual autonomy increases our options, whereas our acceptance of the constrains that relationship and community put on us reduces our options. Examples of this would be both marriage and church. When we accept marriage for what it is, we reduce our options for mates, housing, habits, food, sex, and sometimes clothing and style. The same is true of Church. The key word here is acceptance. If you don’t accept the terms of the marital contract, yet take the vows, you might not be very satisfied with the imposed reduction in options. The end result is that those who have accepted these relational and community constraints on choice are happier. The same with the list of character attributes listed above. The more grateful, content, relational, decisive, and discerning you are, the happier you are as well. I would add that happiness is not really the goal, but character is, and a stronger character leads to a better outlook on life.
Also in the book is a section about gratefulness, both positive and negative. Positive gratefulness would be thankfulness for what you do have: shelter, food, clothing, loving family. Negative gratefulness would be thankfulness for what you do not have: HIV, missing limbs, debt, the draft, a contentious wife. The positive is easy, but we still do not do it very often. The negative is not much more difficult, but in the end leads to a multitude of items on our positive list (relatively good health, the limbs I was born with, accounts in the black, the choice for peace, and a loving, industrious, beautiful wife).
Some of these ideas reassure me that we are heading in the right direction. We have constrained our options willingly, decided to be content with what God has provided, chosen to make commitments permanent, and realized that sometimes we can choose not to choose. As I think about what we are thankful for, I also started to realize that there are many things that I could complain about, but feel none of the anxiety that leads that direction. I am content. Not just with what we have, but also with the state in which we have it, used, patched, rough, ugly, lame, worn, old, second-hand, and unfinished. Part of my thankfulness is for things that do not demand status or prestige.
While I have mentioned a few aspects of the book, it goes into other aspects of the problem of increased options. I would recommend it, despite it’s academic nature.
Links:
TED video where Barry Schwartz talks about the paradox of choice
Google Books info on Paradox of Choice
Retorts