June is Like That

On Sunday night we got home from a week with the brothers and their families in North Carolina. It was a grand time of connecting and catching up and letting the youngens go to coffee shops and make bamboo huts and play pickleball and swim in an icy mountain creek and sleep on the trampoline.

Gabe and his brother Wayne took 14 of our collective offspring (my brothers’ children too) on a rigorous 6.5 mile (almost 7 miles!) hike up the profile trail on Grandfather Mountain. We ladies stayed behind and picked them up about five hours after they started their adventure. I drove a Suburban up the mountain, and that is as close as I got to hiking on this trip to the beautiful Smokies. I did cross the Mile High Bridge and nearly blew off the mountain in one of those gusts they kept warning us about.

When I was catching up in my diary, I found myself mapping the days by the fabulous food we were served: Becca’s seafood paella, Carma’s homemade pasta with Alfredo sauce, Hilda’s carne asada, the trout BLT at the Live Oak Gastropub. All the food was a wonderful adventure!

We actually planned an extra day on this trip to catch up with old friends who are not family. It was a time that was rich with connections, and by the time we drove into our own lane, we felt that we would need a few days to recover from all the excitement.

I don’t know why we ever go away in June, though. It is so beautiful here this time of year! I almost missed the tiny Asiatic lilies that never bloomed before. Every morning we are serenaded with the triumphant birdsongs that signal a successful hatch. (Let’s just pretend we don’t also have starlings croaking in glee about their babies.) If we slow down on the salads, the lettuce will bolt. I don’t ever eat store-bought lettuce, undressed, just for fun, but garden lettuce is that good, I can stand out there and just eat it like a rabbit. It is advisable to watch for slugs and earwigs though.

Speaking of rabbits: tonight when I was checking on the garden (I do that every day) I noticed that I no longer have a promising row of broccolis. I now have a pitiful row of stalks stripped of any identifying leaves. Then I saw that the sugar snap peas have also been chomped. And as charming as Peter Rabbit is, I feel such an affinity for Mr. McGregor. Apparently the garden fence is not shocking. I checked it by bravely grabbing hold of it. Nothing. No wonder I have pests.

Gabriel has our patio/pavilion finished, except for metal on the roof and a small matter of a pizza oven he wants to build in one corner. We are loving that outdoor space, and spend a lot of time out there. I potted up a bunch of perennials and set them around to soften the edges. The whole thing is delightful, except for the mosquitoes. The mosquitoes we have always with us.

This evening I have the back door open, with just a screen door to keep out the bugs and the night. The girls’ voices are carrying up from their campfire in the woods. They have friends here and just sent an emissary in for food to roast. I sent sausages, a few hotdogs, and a loaf of bread for toast with fresh jam. They have been in and out of the creek all afternoon, which, as I recall from childhood, makes one roaring hungry. My mom used to let us take a Tupperware container of cookies out to share. It was great, because we could float the container on the water and sail the cookies to each other. I do remember the damp from wet hands reaching in to the container, but none of us died from the bacteria we consumed so glibly.

Both Gabe and I were raised with freedom to roam and build fires and cook dubious things outside. We went barefooted and wore practical, sometimes downright ugly clothes. It didn’t matter very much if we tore them or stained them, and we cut our sleeves off short for the hot weather. We star-gazed on the porch roof and climbed silos to gain heady views in the daytime. We rarely sat around in the house in the summertime, and we did kind of a lot of things that were not strictly safe. Guess what? I wouldn’t trade my childhood for any safe armchair experience. We sure as anything send our kids outside now that we are parents. In the world we live in, it feels more important than ever to teach our children how to be grounded to realities. Real dirt loaded with bacteria, water with crayfish in it instead of chlorine, sunburns and freckles, bandaids on blisters, and the collapse into bed at night, completely knackered by the day’s work and play. I could talk about this for a long time, so I will just shut up now, and hope some of you agree with me.

Oh, one more thing… we had ZERO screens in our childhood lives, and we lived to tell the tale. We didn’t even listen to radio. Yet we grew up to be fairly normal people, probably with overactive imaginations, but that’s not the worst that could happen. Our children do have some screen time most days. They use apps to study languages and practice instruments and play Minecraft. They listen to audiobooks and ask to watch movies. It would seem so simple if we could time-travel back to the ’80’s. But we can’t. We are here, now, in this era. It is a tricky one. We listened to Stolen Focus on our trip, and I felt a little panicked for our digital society. Then we got Plough Publication’s latest issue titled “The Good of Tech.” This is the tension we find ourselves in. Lord, help us!

I have to keep looking at the calendar to keep track of where we are going, which day it is, and should the garbage go out tonight, or did we miss it last night? Our homeschool evaluations are done, and we really should be making plans for next year, but I don’t want to! Not yet! It’s June, and it goes by much too fast!

Is anything brilliant happening in your summer? (The perfect watermelon is brilliant, in my opinion.)

What To Do

You know that long week between Christmas and New Year’s Day? I’m sure you have found plenty to do, but I figured I could mention some of the things we have done, just for the anyhow. The whole week feels kind of “anyhow”, doesn’t it?

We suspended all regular scheduled activities. Gabriel had a larger chunk of time off work than we remember ever happening around Christmas: three days! Our plans to have my parents and sister’s family here over that time were all nixed by sickness in their households. We pivoted hard, lit all the candles, and celebrated on our own, with a local friend joining us for Christmas lunch. It was so warm, it was simply amazing in a brown and grey sort of way. There was one tiny snow pile left in the morning, but it was melted by noon.

My favorite gift is this vacuum sealer for jars. Rita got a gleam in her eye when she saw it, and we promptly started sealing jars full of random dry ingredients. It works like a charm (without batteries!) and opens a whole vista of possibilities in the pantry. My other favorite was The Terrible Speed of Mercy, by Jonathon Rogers. I have to say, Gabriel really came through on my Amazon wish list. I don’t know if there is a better definition for “broad hint”, but it works for us.

This week there were games and puzzles and eggnog made with raw milk, free-range eggs, and freshly ground nutmeg. We have perfected a lavender latte that even my brother Nate would surely approve of. There were cookies and way too much candy, so that I hid some of it away for later festivities when the cousins are better and come to see us after all.

The girls spent hours and hours assembling this tiny book nook. It required much more patience than I have, but they loved it.

We made bread: normal bread, garlic bread stuffed with cheese and butter, raisin/cinnamon sourdough bread. We’re working on the leftovers of ham and potatoes, but we also had nourishing vegetable soup and lots of oranges.

Rita’s tiny chicken started laying tiny eggs, which she gloats over and fries for tiny meals. The chickens are living their best December lives, since I am allowing them to free range. They scurry to the ground under the bird feeder first thing every day, scratching up anything the chickadees may have dropped.

I ran out of printer ink half-way through the annual Christmas letter, so when the ink refill came in the mail, I finished that. I actually love that little rite of passage! Some of you will be getting those letters this week. There were quite a few letters in our mailbox this week, as well, and I bless every one who takes the time to send us a family update!

The students around here worked long and hard to get through second semester exams before the holidays, although one of them did not quite get her pre-algebra test done, so that was kind of hanging over her in this aimless week, and finally she just did it. That means that the girls are halfway through this school year! Wow.

By Thursday, Addy was so bored that she decided to do some lessons just for the anyhow. I won’t say we worried overmuch about doing maths in PJs, and we might say, “Some things were learned without too much supervision or aggression.” Addy is currently finishing an astronomy report that she thought would be terribly boring. The problem was that she chose that enigmatic planet, Uranus, and I had to help her dig up some excitement, but in the end she prevailed. Conclusion: we humans could not live on Uranus.

Olivia is trying to narrow down her ideas for her library research report coming up. She needs a large subject so that it can fill many pages, and was considering a history of France. “No way!” advised Rita, “you don’t want to deal with all those King Louies!” I agreed, and she is now thinking of doing a report on the country of Mongolia. Yogurt, yurts, and yaks sound much more writable.

The older girls played volleyball and Addy and I went sleuthing for bubble tea and a quiet place to read library books. Then we still had time before we needed to pick up the girls, so we stopped to visit a friend who is 104 years old. As usual, Sister Fran’s tiny frame was spilling over with sweetness. She held Addy’s face in her withered hands and blessed her for her smile and her sparkling eyes, “May the Lord bless you and keep you all the days of your life, sweet child.”

Gabriel and Gregory spent two days in the basement, cutting out openings in the block wall for egress windows so that we can have bedrooms down there. The wiring needed to be redone, and a wall installed. They are ready for drywall and light fixtures. It took me back to the other days of renovations when my best contribution was hauling out trash and sweeping, sweeping the endless mounds of debris.

This morning when the sun shone brightly through the south-facing windows, I noticed a thin film of concrete dust that apparently filtered up through cracks onto everything, so we spent some time fixing that problem. The dog bed got washed, the pine branches that were shedding got thrown out, and here we are. It’s only Friday yet.

I googled “why isn’t my dryer heating?” this morning, and thankfully hung sheets on the line in that same sunshine that had shown me the dust in the house. It’s gone now, smothered by the solid clouds we have come to expect, but it was there long enough to reassure us that there is, in fact, a sun up there. That is good!

I have one more frog to eat this week, and this post has been my stall tactic. I need to do the tax prep for my pottery business. It has been the worst stressor in our marriage in the past. My husband is a very credible accountant and I… am not. However. I have learned to keep records more carefully throughout the year. Last year I did the books all by myself and this year I will do so again. The statements are printed out and right here beside me. Thoughts and prayers appreciated.

You Shouldn’t Forget the Marshmallows

Last week was a summery one, hazy skies of smoke one day, glittery sunshine the next, warm breezes, earth so dry that driving in the lane raised a cloud of dust. We planned a camping trip with the cousins at a park between our houses. Gabe is currently working in Altoona, so he was going to meet us at the campground after his three shifts were finished for the week.

With that in mind, we made lists and gathered supplies for camping before he left for work. My contribution is always the food and the comforts, such as bug spray and sleeping bags and making sure everybody takes jackets and socks for the nights. I have a tote with just camping gear: old dishes and utensils, cracked mugs, lighter, ratty tea towels and dishcloths, soap, bucket, dishpan, plastic tablecloth, foil, salt and pepper, etc. But I always have to inspect the tote to be sure nothing has gone AWOL or been emptied.

I’m also in charge of provisions, and experience has taught me that starving people aren’t very fun to camp with, so the criteria for meals is simple and nutritious. I can only pull out the Ramen or the instant oatmeal so many times before there are problems with the protein intake. With that in mind, I planned to make my Saturday meal mostly on our Coleman stove: grilled chicken breast, fettucine with Alfredo sauce, and green beans. Actual vegetables toted into the wilderness. I lofted my nose into the air at the thought of using canned Alfredo and bought cream and parmesan instead. This should have been a red flag in my own head that something was not working properly in my brain, but apparently it didn’t flag insistently enough.

I had a huge distraction in my week, because I realized that I would have to put my Father’s Day mugs on Etsy quickly so that I could ship them before we left so that people would get them in time for gifts. It wasn’t very many, but it took brain space and a number of hours posting and packing them. Would you like to see how they turned out?

This spring I messed with underglaze transfers on mugs and I was pretty happy with the result, even if they were fiddly. Anyway, I got the mugs sold and packaged, took them to the P.O. and then went right to Aldi’s for the groceries for camping.

I was keeping a list of things in my mind that I hadn’t written on my list, always a risky thing to do, especially when planning to cook things like Alfredo sauce in the woods. The girls and I gathered everything together for Gregory to load on the fishing boat as soon as he got home from work. I kept thinking of last minute things like shoes, a mattress cover for the air mattress so it isn’t so chilly, towels for the showers. Seriously, camping in a civilized manner means so much to remember! We got everything loaded and strapped down, the huge tote of tents and sleeping bags in the boat, two kayaks on top of that, and our backpacks and food in the Sub.

Setting up camp is always a jolly thing. Gabriel is a master at putting up tents and figuring out where the best places are for each thing. He did notice that I had bought the wrong kind of fuel for our aging camp stove so he and Greg went on a ride to pick up camp wood and the right kind of fuel.

The girls have a small tent they can erect by themselves and so does Gregory. I put the bedding on our mattress and noticed that I forgot our pillows, but oh well, we can always wad up some jackets or something to put under our necks. We circled our camp chairs around the fire and chatted with the cousins. Good times. Deluxe hamburgers and strawberry pie for supper made by my sister-in-law, Ruby. Enormous trees arching overhead, foxes yipping in the woods, cool air swirling. Ahhh.

At some point I French-braided the whole row of girls in what we call a “three-day-hairdo” and they hit the woods swathed in tick and mosquito repellent. The play was dramatic and absorbing. Lady took on the role of sniffer dog. I heard one small girl say to the dog, “Go find them, Killer.” The fiercest thing about Lady was her vicious tail-wagging excitement at being involved in the game, but she obliged them by sniffing everywhere.

We discovered that the camp bathrooms were the grossest we have ever experienced at a campground, and we have seen dozens. A dip in a river or a lake would be preferable for cleanliness, but at least the water was hot and you could wear flip-flops in the shower.

Bedtime was late, and the pillow situation was more problematic in our middle age than it used to be in our youth. We coped, though, and settled onto our mattress. Our new, inflatable mattress, I might add, that fits just right in the tent because Gabe did his homework and got the right size. I shouldn’t have read the reviews, because I was skeptical from the start, but that mattress definitely seemed to be losing air, just like the reviews said. Gabe was sleeping before we hit the ground, and I tried to sleep for a few hours, but gave it up as a lost cause about the time the raccoons found the tin pie plates from the strawberry pie and rattled them around. We had neglected to stow the trash out of reach and they were ready for the party.

Astonishingly, Gabe slumbered on, so I decided to crawl out and find a zero gravity chair for a bed. That woke him, and he did some troubleshooting, discovering that the one inflation valve wasn’t properly shut. After he inflated the mattress again with the last gasps of battery in our air pump, I gave it another try. It was better and I slept a few hours before we hit the ground again. That time I did crawl out and find a chair to tilt back for sleeping.

I drank real coffee that morning after my daughter suggested that I may be a little grouchy. It helped to enliven my weary bones and we had a lovely day. As I was assembling my ingredients for supper, I noticed a conspicuous lack of garlic. If you have ever had Alfredo without garlic, you haven’t had Alfredo. The small town of Tionesta was nearby, so we ladies went questing for garlic and found a cute thrift store with tiny withered ladies presiding over it “for the church”. Most things cost less than a dollar. Books for 10 cents? Is that even a thing anymore? Gabriel texted me to check if they have any pillows there. I didn’t see any.

When we got back, I assembled my ingredients. Gabriel tried to start the stove a-burning, but it would not hold the pressure needed to ignite the burner. After much trying, we gave up and made a plan for cooking over the fire. First the sauce, then the green beans, then we grilled the chicken and lastly made a blazing fire to bring a pot of water to a rolling boil for the pasta. It took forever. By the time the noodles were cooked, the rest of the food had cooled considerably under its foil covers. But it was good anyway.

The girls had seen a recipe for making Mexican s’mores by putting mini marshmallows and chocolate chips on a smear of peanut butter inside a tortilla. You fry them to melt all the gooey things together, and they had their hearts set on that even though I also had the ingredients for doing strawberry cheesecake dessert tortillas. Guess what? I forgot the marshmallows. By this point, I was ready to admit that my head was somewhere else when I was packing. I am quite sure it was busily thinking, because I was with it, after all.

Gregory saved the day by driving to a ubiquitous Dollar General about a mile out of town. Which raises the question: are you even camping if you are that close to a D.G.? And the answer is yes. In our neck of the woods, you practically trip over them all over the countryside and they are very handy too. If only we had told Gregory to get pillows.

We inflated the mattress again with a recharged inflater, very full, and very hard. That night it held. We stayed suspended on a brick, four inches above the ground for the whole night. The raccoons didn’t show up either, so we slept.

It was a good time. Relaxing, visiting, eating, drinking tea, and washing dishes in tepid water with questionable floating things in it. Everything packed down nicely and we came home to run the washer and the shower and to scrub the blackened cooking pots.

I was sinking into our wonderful bed when I got the text from my mom that her brother, Paul Miller, had died suddenly while taking a walk. In an instant, their family is changed forever. The shock and sadness of it kept me awake for quite a while, thinking.

What did it matter about pillows and marshmallows? What does anything matter in the face of loss and death? And how is it so easy to forget that we are all marching along to our graves?

My uncle Paul loved Jesus and he loved people. He had a tender heart toward anybody who was hurting or lonely, spending hours on the phone to stay connected with loved ones. That will be the part of him that will live on: his kindness and love.

I was thinking about this, and about the indisputable fact that we have to keep living in the world, living well, even though it will all pass away in the end. We buy Pampers for the baby shower, make finger jello for the picnic, and pick flowers for the table, all while marching step by step toward the day when we meet God. We do impractical things like setting up housekeeping in the woods and letting our children get gloriously dirty, making memories with their friends, presumably because we love them and we have only a certain number of days with them.

We keep living and we keep loving because that is what we are supposed to do. We are given this one wildly precious life and the people around us to share it. We pour out our love with funny things like marshmallows and story hour and French braids. I do not know how God takes the raw ingredients of what we offer to Him and to our loved ones and makes them a beautiful thing.

That is His work and He is good at it.

The Short Month Recap

Obviously, I did not post every day in February (despite doing a lot more writing practice than usual) like I used to in the good old days when I had five little kids and stayed home all the time. Now I have five big kids, one coming for visits occasionally, four of them hanging about daily with ideas and plans and schedules. They help me with the housework, and yet I do not have the time or mental space I used to have for blogging. I also tend to pick up projects and volunteer for things because it seems I should easily be able to get them done with all my helpers. I ask myself what in the world I was thinking, but then I just up and do the thing or assign it to the girls. I actually really like this stage in life, flagging energy levels or no.

I just made the tenth run in two weeks to pick up a vehicle at the garage. Our aging Suburban has been having glitches with the four-wheel drive, and we didn’t want to go into winter with a helpless whale of a vehicle. Here we are on a 61° day in March, and the four-wheel drive is still not fixed, and the part that hopefully will fix it is on order. For the third time. We’ve also had Gregory’s car in and out, working on bits of restoration. We’re dealing with three different garages, all within 2 miles of our house. They’re great people. They do what they can, test it out, refer us to someone else who can maybe fix it, who then orders parts and we pick up the vehicle until the part comes, then take it back. And that’s what happens when you have old cars. Thankfully it still runs fine, just occasionally in four-wheel with no option of switching it when you don’t need it.

I laugh every time we drive out our lane that is lined with reflective posts to show where the snow plow should drive. That is, if we even had any snow. Last year we kept getting snowed under deep enough that it was just our best guess where Gabriel should plow the lane. We weren’t going to let that happen this year! Hilarious, how we manage or try to manage, and then there you are, with the muddiest, rainiest four months of winter you can imagine. (And you really cannot even imagine the mud unless you live it.)

We have decided that we absolutely must do something about the lane, which is sinking into elongated potholes along all the wheel tracks. No amount of surface fixing will suffice. Last spring after all the gravel we had spread on our lane had disappeared below the surface of the earth, I enlisted the troops in bringing up creek gravel by the bucketfuls in the trailer we pull behind the lawn tractor. We have endless supplies of that, and I hoped some large pebbles would firm up the situation somewhat. It was a fail. The pebbles went the way of the 2B limestone before it.

The little girl I babysit loves the Henry and Mudge story called Puddle Trouble. She thinks our lane is puddle trouble and she isn’t wrong. I’m guessing by the time we get it fixed, we’ll hit a winter with Sub-Zero temperatures and rock hard surfaces for months.

The daily question. Which will it be? It was 71 degrees the day before I took this picture.
( And yes, our front porch is that dirty. And yes, I care, but it is what it is. When you come, feel free to wipe your feet on the welcome mat.)

The girls set up the trampoline again, and we have two hammocks strung in the yard. That way we can enjoy the every-other-day warmth, and on the in-between times we can make a fire in our fireplace. Have I mentioned, it is hilarious. My children think it’s the lamest winter they’ve ever heard of, and my cousins who moved up from Kentucky to Pennsylvania say winter here is either bipolar or menopausal. They aren’t wrong either.

I did something new this week, that I couldn’t believe I was doing. It wasn’t even on my bucket list of being a chicken owner. I found myself with a hen who was having problems. Have you ever heard of vent gleet? I’m not surprised, I hadn’t either. As per internet instructions, I found myself tenderly soaking a chicken’s bottom in warm water, cleaning her off, and putting ointment on her sore (you guessed it) vent. I am happy to say the treatment worked, and she’s doing much better.

Last week the girls helped me deep clean the kitchen: cabinets, pantry, and the netherworld behind the stove. I told them if they find something we haven’t used in the last year, they should set it aside so that I can decide on it’s usefulness. This is a very different process from deciding if things “spark joy,” more like seeing if they deserve lebensraum. A few things went to the storage room in the basement, but in general I was pleased that the worst we encountered was crumbs and dust. Well, I don’t want to talk about the space under the stove.

I decided not to start my own garden plants inside the house this year. We plant to do some traveling, and it would be unnecessarily complicated to keep them alive. There are some very deserving greenhouse owners close by who will get my patronage. That said, I have been resorting to looking at pictures of the garden to bolster my hope that green will soon come to the land. The photo on the left was July. The one on the right is today.

The present colorless landscape requires all the fortitude my soul can summon, and a lot of supernatural work in my spirit, too. When we have blue skies, my heart expands. I can feel it. Things become possible. Green really will return. Meanwhile, how about some more tea?

Happy Gardener Attempts to Manage Peas, Occasionally Failing

And they do require managing. Peas are probably the most labor intensive thing I grow, but the vegetable we look forward to the most. “Plant as many as you want, Mom,” they say. “We’ll help you pick them.” Of course, this is a bit of a joke because I don’t let the children pick peas without supervision. The plants are too finicky and it’s hard to tell when they are ready.

You have seen this photo before, of my over-achieving pea vines, over five feet high. If I had planted them 3 weeks earlier, I feel confident that the yield would have been better. Honestly… 6 quarts in the freezer and a few quarts eaten fresh is not a stellar outcome. Next year I will shoot for planting in mid-April instead of early May. They should not be this yellow while still bearing pods. My bad.

I did three different versions of plantings in my mulched section. Row 1: we raked the old hay aside and let the ground dry a bit before tilling up that strip and planting a double row. We did not re-mulch until the peas were up. Row 2: we raked the hay aside, but did not till the row. Instead we made a shallow row with a hoe and planted a double row. Row 3: we used a string stretched from one end to the other as a guide, and simply poked holes in the soft soil to drop the peas into, leaving the old hay/mulch just as it was. The last method seemed to work the best, maybe because we had an uncharacteristically dry spring. Those peas came up more quickly and climbed up the support fence we put in between the rows. The other two methods caught up, but obviously the tilling and hoeing were not necessary.

We had three double rows, 25 feet each, 150 feet of peas total. The reason for this is that the fencing we use for support comes in 25 or 50 foot lengths. Cutting them in half makes the rolls easier to manage and store. There is psychology involved as well. A 25 foot row is not nearly as daunting to pick as a 150 foot row.

Peas need support to grow, unless you want to bend over to pick until your back is screaming to buy Del Monte mushiness in a can rather than try to grow your own peas. It’s a valid option, but not one we choose.

As you can see in the photo below, we have a variety of fencing materials. The bottom, PVC coated wire, was some we had on hand from our farm days, probably to keep ducks where they ought to be. It is sturdy and would be fine except it is only 2 feet high. The peas didn’t have enough support and doubled over the top. The black plastic chicken wire seemed like a good idea, but even with the fence zip-tied to holes drilled in the wooden posts, it sagged under the weight. We will still use it, but it will require twice the amount of posts. All the way at the top is the priciest option, 3 foot high, PVC coated wire mesh. We have had that fence for years. It was a good choice and I wish we hadn’t wavered when we saw the price difference this spring when we needed more.

I pulled the vines yesterday and before I threw them onto the compost pile, I had a lightbulb moment. Aha! I can chop them up and let them compost right in the spot where they were growing. It worked too! The lawnmower coughed and choked a little, but in the end we prevailed. I had laid down a fresh layer of cardboard before I dumped the chopped peas back into the garden. That should smother any opportunistic weeds that were growing alongside the peas.

I want to plant some more fall broccoli/cabbages in that spot. The other pea row got replanted with more green beans and a hopeful seeding of sugar peas for fall consumption. I don’t know how well that will work, but I had old seeds that needed to be used, so I threw them in. I covered them with old hay, no bare spots. Low stakes, so we shall see.

Recently I read an article that stated this: “Whenever the soil is tilled, the subterranean community of lifeforms within it is hit with a hurricane. All the bacteria, protozoa, nematodes, and fungi that sustain and support plant growth are thrown into chaos, season after season. Weeds often help to bring them back to balance, like aid workers after a disaster. The way that creation keeps the soil healthy, building it generation after generation, is by always keeping it covered.”

That is why I am so fascinated with my no-till experiments. If you ever noticed how quickly nature covers up bare soil with plants, you will know what I mean. I do not like having an unsightly, weedy garden. With the traditional methods of tilling, it meant getting out the rototiller at regular intervals, and hoeing the rows as well. Keeping the soil covered with mulch or cover crops, while not truly “no-work”, is certainly less work. For me, the secret to enjoying gardening is to keep it to manageable proportions. I use anything that decomposes cleanly for layers of mulch: cardboard, newspaper, old pine straw, wood chips, chopped vegetable stalks, dead leaves, etc. Any slimy peelings or kitchen scraps get thrown onto a compost pile that I neglect shamelessly. I hope it eventually turns into useful compost, but until then I just keep adding to the top.

I get lots of good ideas from the experts, but I do whatever I jolly please in my own bit of earth.

That means planting flowers with the vegetables, filling in the cracks with last minute delights such as broom corn or black beans that bloom purple or spaghetti squash that may or may not take over the space entirely. I don’t play by the rules, and that is why I have so much fun. 🙂

I want to conclude with a funny story. Mennonites love iced mint tea. We call it meadow tea, garden tea, fuzzy mint, spearmint, etc. Awhile ago our elderly neighbor came over for a visit, I offered him a glass of chilled spearmint tea, explaining what it was as I handed it to him. He took a tentative sip and murmured, “Hmm, kind of piney.”

How about we raise a glass of iced mint tea to happy gardeners everywhere!

Five Organic Ways to Take Dominion over Weeds

Nothing quite brings the country dweller down from their Back to Eden aspirations like a flourishing crop of weeds running wild over the land that they fondly slated for productive growth. We went away for 5 days after school was done and when we got back the jungle was encroaching. It has been raining buckets this spring, meaning we didn’t get our gardens planted until last week. The lawn went to seed for a while before we made hay, and the goats cannot possibly keep up with their pastures, even with their nonstop chewing.

We made a plan to bring the rank growth into submission. Using all the weapons in our arsenal, we have been making slow progress. It’s times like this that we are glad our property is limited to less than five acres. I will not mention the options that rhyme with keed-willer or pound-sup since they are bad, bad, and we try to be good with our weed control methods. That is not to say that we never resort to desperate measures, but I will list our favorite methods.

Salt. Nothing fancy, certainly not Epsom salts, which will actually enhance the root systems of vegetables. Just buy ordinary table salt. This works well for fence rows, in sidewalk cracks, along walkways, and to my astonishment, on asparagus beds! My in-laws taught me this trick. They suggest salting the bed once a year, then mulching heavily on top. It works like a charm! Somehow the asparagus continues to thrive while the weeds do not. In other areas, salt will produce more of a scorched earth look, so be careful where you dribble it.
Boiling water. When I do water bath canning, I pour the scalding hot water on weeds in the driveway. Nice and easy, except for the part where I haul a huge kettle full of boiling water through the house, trying to hold it at arm’s length. An easier method is to fill the tea kettle and then pour the boiling contents onto such things as pesky wild rhubarbs or evil start-up vines of poison ivy. I try to hit some of the leaves, but especially the roots right by the stem.
Garden gloves and old-fashioned bending over to pull weeds. You can walk through your grounds daily, nipping things in the bud as they come up. This is not terribly effective if you have too much garden to keep up with. I almost cannot walk past a weed when I get in this mode. It’s terribly distracting. I just wanted to cut a head of lettuce, and here I am, halfway down the onion rows, pulling red-roots.
A sharp hoe. Some people hoe a section every day. I will never forget the sight of African farmers working patiently through vast plots with short-handled hoes. It’s a good practice, very effective if you are into bodily exercise that profits much.
Cardboard with mulch on top. This gets my top vote, because of the way it builds up the soil and retains moisture in the warmer months. There are lots of options. I will dedicate the rest of the post to this idea. (Apologies. This is an edit to what accidentally got published with a title of six ways when I really only have five. I would have made up more if I could have thought of them. Maybe you can help a girl out.)

We have a grass catcher on our mower, so every time we mow, we pile the clippings around garden plants. This works, but it gets weirdly slippery.

Old hay or straw is great mulch for keeping the soil moist, but it is not so great for weed control because the seeds in the bales will abundantly compensate for every weed that is smothered. Maybe you will be fortunate and get very clean hay. It’s a risk I prefer not to take after one year when I had wheat growing all over my garden on top of the mulch.

Composted manure with straw or sawdust is a wonderful option. Sourcing this requires becoming buddies with a farmer who is willing to let valuable by-products leave the farm for other places. We tackled the problem by becoming the farmer. It required building a barn, then building fences, then buying a menagerie that obligingly ate what we fed it and turned out bushels of poo mixed with their bedding so that now we have a fairly steady supply of mulch for the gardens. Since the chickens have already scratched through the compost, there are very few seeds left to cause trouble and the plants fairly leap into the air when they receive rain water filtered through fertilizing mulch.

We also mulch with wood chips, especially around the base of the fruit trees and berries. I don’t recommend twisters, but if you have a storm that takes out a bunch of your trees, you might as well dry your tears, cut the firewood, and run the branches through a chipper. Wait a year and the pile of chips will be fine mulch. Alternately you can take up spoon carving and collect the chips. We have a number of failed kuksas and spoon blanks scattered around the blueberry bushes.

The easiest, least economic way involves carting loads of mulch home from a distributor and spreading it. If you mulch as heavily as you should, about 4 to 6 inches deep, you’re going to run into a bit of money.

However- no weeds! (Unless the chickens get out and scatter it into the lawn.)

Last week my greenhouse friend and I were fantasizing about gardening in heaven. Everything peak season, always bearing fruit, no pests, and no weeds! It’s a tantalizing thought. We just aren’t there yet, so we deal with it.

Spring Cleaning a Different Way

There are no doubt a hundred and one ways to clean your house. It is about as far from my favorite thing as it is possible, and yet I find myself squaring off with the need to clean. all. the. time. My title says a different way, because I have a hot tip for you. I cleaned the entire mess with 1 main tool… a microfiber cloth. Make that four cloths, liberally given into the hands of helpful children. And water, of course. If you would look under my kitchen sink, you would find that I no longer own Top Job or Mr. Clean or Windex. I have not bought these products for years. Let me give you a little backstory.

It started during my second pregnancy with out of control sneezing. I sneezed explosively for days. (One sneeze or even three sneezes, can feel really good. But try it for days and see if you don’t start to feel whiplashed.) Then the itchy, watering eyes started, and the nose running like a leaky faucet. It was miserable. We thought it seemed like dust irritated whatever allergies I had going on, so my husband bought a Dyson with a HEPA filter. It had a clear canister, which made it fascinating to see all the dust collecting in there, out of range and incapable of harm. If you do not understand getting excited about dust collection, sorry, not sorry. I vacuumed the furniture every week during that pregnancy, and things seemed to settle down, at least at home where I had a bit of control over the dust and its mites.

About this time my mom gave me two Norwex microfiber cloths for my birthday, which in retrospect I see as a most loving gift. I was deeply suspicious about the idea of cleaning surfaces with only water. The cloths seemed a little finicky, what with getting gunked up if you use soaps or fabric softener. I gave them a try, though, and then I used them and used them and used them. Occasionally I panicked a little because I was afraid I had abused them too much, but the care directions said either to wash them in Norwex detergent or just to boil them for ten minutes and there we were! Back in business! Those two cloths were the only Norwex ones I had for 4 years. I didn’t even know that there was a special window polishing cloth available, so I washed my windows with one cloth wet and dried them with the other one. I dumped out all my ammonia and PineSol. Judging by how often I was switching out dirty for clean water in my bucket, I was getting more dirt off my house than ever before. Of course, the people in the house were growing too.

The next place of problems was my laundry room, where the scents from normal detergents would set me off. For a while I used pods, but the smells lingered on the clothes. I started buying everything unscented, but I would rather take my cart full of children through the toy aisle than hang out in the detergents. Just a quick duck in and out to grab my unscented Purex made me feel sick.

In my quest for better options, I stumbled upon Norwex laundry detergent, called Ultra Power Plus. Again, I was deeply suspicious. How could a Tablespoon of powdered detergent clean a load of laundry? (That was early days. I use less than that now unless it’s a mega load.) Again, I was hooked. It worked. It didn’t make me sneeze. It was biodegradable, so my tons of gray water were not killing the environment.

You know what I did next, don’t you? I became a regular. I won’t bore you with my trail of amazing Norwex discoveries, but today when I got an email about a flash sale that Norwex is doing, I thought of all my friends out there who are making a career out of homemaking. I thought of how we sometimes need to work smarter instead of harder. Then I thought it would not be loving to keep to myself a really great deal. There is a flash sale from now through 5 PM Central Time on March 25th. Here is what is on sale and it will bless your socks off:

Wouldn’t it be neat if the gorgeous dishes and the succulent came with it? But it’s the dusting mitt and the envirocloth we want to look at. We use our dusting mitt for dusting, of course, but what I really love it for is to wet it and run it over the window screens. My old technique was to lay the screens on the deck, spray them with a hose, squirt soap onto them, then brush them with a scrub brush to get the dust and “fan circles” (from window fans) off them. My smarter method is to wet the mitt. I wipe first one side, then the other and the thick microfiber picks up everything. I rinse it out, wring it out, and move to the next window. It’s laughably easy.

The enviro-cloth is my top favorite product from this company. It has no rivals, in my opinion. When you wash up a mess on the floor, like a dropped egg, you will feel that you got every little bit of it cleaned up. When you use it to wash your windows, it will clear away grime like nobody’s business. When you clean the toilets… okay, ‘nough said. I will not suggest you slice a tomato on the lid, like someone did.

Alternately there is what is called the Basic Package, which contains the two cloths that you need to clean by far the most of your home. I can assure you that you will never look at window cleaning quite the same way. This is why my children can wash our windows and do a good enough job to pass my inspection. No streaks!

People sometimes gasp and get sticker shock. I understand that completely. When I considered that I used my original 2 cloths for 4 years before buying more, and I started thinking about how I didn’t buy any chemical cleaners in that time… well, it just made sense to continue my patronage. I have crunched the numbers on the laundry detergent as well, and it comes out to the same per load as Tide. Go ahead, do your research, try out an envirocloth, if nothing else.

It’s kind of like having a virtuous charwoman to help you clean. You will start to feel affectionate and protective toward it. You may even want to name your cloths. Of course, if you get your kicks from smelling Irish Spring for weeks, I cannot offer that. I used to love to smell cleaning agents until the sneezing began. Oh, wait. Did I mention that before?

Happy cleaning, however you may do it!

In Defense of Humble Arts

Wanna know what I did yesterday? I felt like I spent the day with either a rag, hanky, dishcloth, tea towel, washcloth, paper towel, Norwex microfiber, you-know-what-I-am-saying, in my hand. It’s what I did. I cleaned up and wiped. I did other things, too, but for the purposes of this post, here is a listing:

I swiped bread crumbs off the table before the day barely started. There was a great honey smear that got missed by the junior kitchen cleaners.

After breakfast I comforted the heartbroken little girl whose kitty got hit on the road, wiping her tears and mine on her pink hoodie while we put flowers on the grave and talked about what a glorious kitty Nimbus was.

There was a grave stone painting operation that spread acrylic paints from the craft table to the fridge door to the little girl’s cheeks, all of which I washed off before it became permanent.

A while later I discovered more acrylic blobs in the bathroom sink from the paintbrush cleanup, mingled with stray wispy hair. Of course, I owned that mess too.

At lunchtime there were bits of mac and cheese on the stovetop. There was a dribble mark of milk under the pitcher and quite a few drips.

During quiet time, while I was messing with clay in the basement, someone unwisely brought a hunk upstairs to sculpt. After their cleanup, there were still smears on all horizontal surfaces, which is where the microfiber cloth saved the day. Meanwhile downstairs the children were now attempting to throw pots on the wheel. After a while, I checked on their operations and discovered a vast, spreading puddle of grey water and a young man corralling it with towels. I have to say that was a mess I turned and slunk away from and he did eventually get it all under control.

I brushed and cleaned out the sandy crud in the laundry sink.

There was the egg cleaning job where I inspected the child’s work and wiped the stray bits of straw off the eggs before putting them into cartons.

Someone cut apples at the table for a snack, cleared away all the snitzes, but forgot the sticky. I cannot stand sticky; it gives me shivers.

After supper, there was the countertop and table again, then the hot chocolate drips from the bedtime snack.

After the children were in bed, I sat down on my chair and looked up at the ceiling, noticing again that the light fixtures were incredibly dirty. My husband was still working on a paper, so I got up and I washed four glass light shades because I didn’t feel like ever seeing them again looking so crummy.

And then I went to bed. It was a good day. None of these activities were remarkable or noble, but as I was drifting off to sleep, I thought, “Well, and how would life be if I quit wiping things?”

There would be glory missing from the world, that’s what.

Coming soon: What is glory in the humble arts?

About Trash and Stuff

I almost missed seeing the turkeys in the sloping meadow because I was so busy feeling outraged at the litter in the ditch. It’s a real problem here in rural areas where people feel like nobody will see them or report them. My husband picked up a fridge in a wooded area just close to here. Now that is some serious trash! In 1 mile of walking I counted 142 bottles and cans. From my exhaustive survey, (errhrmm) I conclude that beer drinkers (102 beer cans) have less class than soda drinkers (approximately 15 soda cans). There were two coffee cups, 3 fountain drink cups with straws still in them at one of the curves, and in another spot the water drinker (10 water bottles) seems to do her littering. I made another sweeping assumption that this is likely about 5 to 7 different frequent flyers along the road with trash flinging habits, since all the fast food cups were in the same vicinity and the water bottles too. The beer bottles tended to be clumped up at the intersections, which happens to be right outside our picket fence. It is highly annoying.

I was reminded of a walk I took early one morning with my Grandpa about 20 years ago, when he was still vigorous in health. I knew he took a daily constitutional, but when he said 6 AM I thought it was a little plenty early. I managed to get up in time, but politely declined a swig of Jogging in a Jug that he offered before we started. Then he stuffed a plastic grocery bag into his jacket pocket and we set out. I was astounded at the swiftness of the pace he set, and more than a little relieved when he would pause to pick up trash beside the road. He told me that he did this every time he walked, and there were always more beer cans. Being of a frugal mind, he thought they might as well be recycled as in the ditch, so he picked them up. We filled the plastic bag and gave the cans to Uncle Tim to crush in his homemade pop can smasher. When he got enough, they would be recycled and Tim got to keep the money.

I guess there is no point in fuming at the thoughtlessness of others. I might as well follow Grandpa’s example and start picking up trash. My children have this protest pretty often when they are asked to clean up a mess someone else made. “But I didn’t do it, Mom!” While I try to be fair, sometimes I purposely set them up with opportunities to serve a sibling. I decided today that taking the crew on a roadside cleanup would probably be one of the best ways to impress on them to never be the careless flingers of garbage that sullies other people’s lives. I had a school teacher that did Adopt-a-highway with the class every year. I never forgot those lessons and to this day cannot toss even a gum wrapper out of the car window.

Maybe the broken windows theory will take hold right here in our beer-drinking, litter-flinging neighborhood. (Look it up. It is a fascinating social phenomenon that when a neighborhood cleans up it’s surfaces, less crime happens.) Surely if there are no cans in the ditch already, a slightly inebriated driver would think twice before chucking stuff out the window. Or maybe I should just be pragmatic, like Grandpa, and make money off the trash.

Life on the Farmlet

It’s been balmy and sunshiny, so I went outside on Saturday to check on the children who had been ~~out from underfoot~~ outside for hours. At five PM it was still 65 degrees. Here is what was going on, as seen by cell phone camera.

The boots were abandoned in the grass, the dog was tearing around, hoping against hope to get her mouth on the softball, and paper planes, fleets of them, were flying across the backyard.

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This is the girls’ playground in warm weather. The goat girls and pig girls and chicken girls too. It’s a mess. Lumber scraps, extra boards from the barn build, no pasture grass, a compost pile where the pigs play king of the mountain, and one scrawny pine tree where the goats reach up as high as they can to nibble needles. (There is a fence around the pond so that none of the critters can get into it, if you want to know.)

They don’t play with their stuffed animals and dolls much anymore. I am thinking we could majorly clear out toys and they wouldn’t even care. The babies are Valentine, Ted, Daisy, and Stubbs. My human girls get a lot of baths, if you want to know that too. I don’t especially care for goat smell. And Lord, have mercy, the laundry. But it’s all good. We have plenty of soap and water.

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And there, for your perusal, is a photo of Pennsylvania February With Tilted Barn. The barn is quite upright, I assure you. I took the picture from the orchard, inside the woven wire fence. I cannot tell you how upset I will be if these critters breech the fence and ruin our plantings, but for now all is harmonious. The pasture has been diligently plowed by the porkers. We can only hope that what they are so happily digging out and eating is the poison ivy roots that infested that area for years. We plan to seed proper seeds once we get growing weather. Meanwhile the chickens peck over the places that the pigs opened up.

Our farm is turning into the symbiosis that we hoped. (Except for the day the cutest kid died, and the day the pigs ate a chicken. Those were dark days.) We have less than five acres, but if you read enough Mother Earth News articles, you start to believe that a lot can be done with only a little. 🙂 A few years ago Gabe and I looked at each other and asked, “Do we really want to make that much work for ourselves?” Neither of us are animal lovers. I never voluntarily picked up a goat or a chicken in my life. But we looked at our sturdy tribe and we looked at the digital addictions that are ruining children for all practical purposes. We made a conscious decision. Let’s do this!

The gardens were the first and easiest step. Our land was crud: wet, heavy clay. Nothing grew well for the longest time. We have composted and dunged and amended the soil until at last we are getting decent yields. Then along came a dog and some rabbits. Draining the boggy meadow with ditches and tiles to dig a pond was the next huge project. Two garden sheds gave us post-and-beam building experience, but the barn… That barn and the animals have been by far our favorite upgrade. Every child has a special prodigy that they love. Nobody loves the guineas, but we hope they reduce the tick population and earn our respect at least. I feel sorry for anybody who would think they can sneak into the barn past their wretched watchdog racket.

So that was what was going on in our land on Saturday. When it came time to write the post, I was so miserable with a sinus/head cold thing that I simply collapsed into bed in fumes of Vicks and peppermint oil and throat drops, with plenty of tissues nearby.

On Sunday night after we had a party for my mom’s birthday, my husband said, “No way. You are not going to write tonight.” I listen to my husband, if you want to know.

So, here we are, all nicely caught up again. Happy Monday and the rest of the week!