Leatherstocking Tales

Ordering Seeds for Fall/Winter gardens

I have a question.  Do I order the seeds for my fall/winter garden at the same time as the other seed?  (We'd like to try a four season harvest.)

The February List

I haven't blogged in a while because we've been busy getting doctors together for our oldest and one of the babies.  One of the babies has torticollis, a hereditary condition in which the muscle on one side of the neck is too tight for him to hold his head up straight.  (Apparently this used to be called "wry neck".)  He had his first PT appointment Thursday.  It's a good place but a little over an hour's drive.  Thankfully, since this is our third kid out of five to be born with torticollis, the PT said we could just come once a week.  We'd already been doing the stretches at home anyway, just waiting for the doctors to catch up.

I've also been trying to get a new schedule in place for our homeschooling.  I don't dictate much about when or what the kids do, but we needed some more uninterrupted blocks of time for read alouds and for them to choose activities. It's been hard work, but it's already paid off.

Stuff we've been thinking/doing lately:

1.  Going to need another vehicle if we're going to do all these doctor appointments in Albany.  Do we straighten out the title mess with the station wagon and get it running?  Or do we straighten out the title mess and trade it for a used pickup?  (Last summer we used the station wagon to haul firewood out of the tree line.  That was sort of interesting.  It reminded me of David and Micki Colfax and their Volvo.)  This decision depends on what we want to earmark the savings for.  Do we pay off the rest of the student loan first?  My husband makes good money at this job, but our biggest concern is to save for the kids' college and to live as debt-free as we possibly can.  Lately we have been wondering why we didn't do what we'd thought about doing when we were still looking for a house: we considered buying land and putting a mobile home on it for a while.  I now think I would have preferred that option, since the road in front of the house is busier than I'd like and the house payment makes me cringe every time I pay it.  Blame it on pregnancy and stress hormones, I guess, which is probably why you shouldn't move 1000 miles when pregnant with twins.

2.  We haven't been able to use our woodstove because the chimney is leaking.  When it was warm Andy got up on the roof and discovered that the bricks are pretty much falling apart.  Repairing it gets added to his lengthening list of things to do.  (He's building a bookcase for our oldest, too.)

3.  We picked out our garden site.  It's a 60 x 60 ft. plot.  We have a lot of deer here so we're thinking we ought to put up a deer fence.  One more thing to add to the list.

4.  We're going to Tennessee to see our parents for 3 weeks in March.  I'm trying not to think too much about why we decided that taking twin 4 month old babies on a 20 hour car trip was a good idea.  But we're going to do it anyway. 

5.  When we get back, we have to investigate a better source of goat milk than Wal-mart that doesn't involve getting a goat (because I'm not ready for that yet!).  Andy brought home a list of local organic farms the other day. And I have to join the local natural foods co-op.

6.  I have promised the girl child a hamster when we get back.  But what I would really like is a dog. 

Saturday Morning plans

I made a Finnish sweet bread the other day called pulla, and it turned out wonderfully enough that it made up for the scorched granola and the dry rice bread.  I got the recipe for pulla out of the Sundays at Moosewood cookbook.  That cookbook was the first one I ever bought on my own.  I picked it up for $1 on a bargain table, brought it back to my little studio apartment, and attempted to make groundnut stew for my boyfriend (now my husband) and one of my friends.  It took a lot longer than I had expected, but the results were still pretty good.  In fact, I have never made anything from that cookbook that didn't turn out well.  In our vegetarian phases, it has been very helpful.

We're starting to narrow down our garden choices.  Or, rather, our garden is getting bigger every day ;-).  I'm going to try to plant okra this year.  I may be doomed to failure, as we are in the great frozen north now, but I have a craving for pickled okra and fried okra.  I would also like to grow black-eyed peas and sweet potatoes.  The Henry Fields catalog has a sweet potato they say will grow in northern gardens, so I think we'll try it.  (Can't remember offhand what the variety is.  Will have to look it up.)

Andy is on his way to the dump, which begins our Saturday routine.  Then he's going to take the kids and stake off the area for our new garden.  Before all the snow gets here and we have to wait a few more months to do anything about it.  He dug two beds last fall, but after looking at things a while, we decided that the big garden should go back of the tree line at the edge of our field, where the entire garden can be in sun for most of the day.  The problem right now is avoiding all the wet areas, where the water runs down the hill.  Drainage patterns are easily seen right now with all our snow melt, and that rain we got yesterday.

Crockpot Granola

I tried to make granola in my crockpot today.  The recipe comes from Not Your Mother's Crockpot Cookbook.  I have this feeling it would have worked better if I had paid more attention to the instructions.  The recipe calls for toasted wheat germ and dried cranberries and apricots.  The kids don't like cranberries, so I substituted a dried berry mix and dried apples.  Only instead of waiting until the end of cooking to add the wheat germ and berries, I added them with everything else.

Oops.

Also, I think my crockpot runs too hot.  The granola seems almost burnt, and I didn't even let it cook the minimum time. 

If the granola turns out in spite of it all, I'll post the recipe.

I'm trying to make more of our food from scratch.  Our oldest ds was recently diagnosed with Tourette's Syndrome, and after doing some research on the web the other night, it looks as if B vitamin therapy and magnesium supplementation might be helpful.  It also looks as if these kids may be quite sensitive to food additives such as MSG and dyes.  So we found a supplement that looks pretty good from Mountain Naturals of Vermont, and I went shopping yesterday for more whole grains, etc.  Unfortunately the natural foods store was closed, so I had to reply on Wal-Mart -- never a good idea.  I did manage to find some organic brown rice flour,  however, and I made the honey rice batter bread recipe on the back of the box this morning.  (That worked out better than the granola, I think, although no one's tasted it yet. 

My husband keeps grabbing spoonfuls of the granola from the crockpot as he walks by, so maybe it's ok. 

Waiting for Spring

It's winter again today.  Three inches on the ground and it's still coming down.  Makes up for our 50 degree Saturday morning.  The kids are not enjoying this like I thought they would.  They are ready for everything to melt and spring to come.  What scares me (well, it doesn't really scare me, but it's food for thought) is that this is a warm winter.  What are they going to think next year if we have a real winter?

(Also, I wonder what happened to those new fern fiddleheads we saw pushing up through the leaf litter this weekend.)

In the snow, everything is waiting, like we are waiting.  The kids get impatient with it, and I do, too, but it's a good thing, really.  We need time to think through spring and summer and fall in advance.  Seems like maybe gardening will help bolster my organizational skills, as well as my self-discipline.  Discipline sounds like such a scary word, especially when applied to gardening.  It sounds like sticks and rulers.  There's got to be a better word for keeping at something when it gets hard just because you have a goal in mind and you enjoy your work most days. 

Maybe it would be better to call it persistence.  Diligence.  Something virtuous and high-minded.

Or maybe that's just putting on airs. 

Building from the Ground Up

Lately I've been frustrated because so many of the things I have wanted and felt like I am called to do -- homeschooling, for instance -- have been sliding as I care for the babies.  I am not frustrated about having the babies, because they really are a miracle, just worried that I'm not doing enough with my other kids.  And we have not been eating very well either, as meals are pretty catch-as-catch-can.  I know that eating better would improve everyonbe's disposition, especially in these winter months. (Although right now it is 50 degrees and sunny and almost all the snow is gone, forming a lake in one corner of our property... good thing we had to wait a season to put in a garden, because it might have been inundated until too late in the spring to plant, and too wet to grow well.) 

Anyway, I was thinking that maybe the thing to improve everyone's spirits would be for me to a)relax and b)build our foundation first, then c)worry about adding a little more structure as far as "school" goes. (Not that we ever have a tremendous amount of structure, but it is helpful for me to set aside a few hours when we will all DO SOMETHING.)  So my goal now is to discover many recipes that I can make that don't include much prep time (I already have a collection of some of those, but we need more), and to decide how I might possibly do once a month cooking.  Then I need to stick with it.  I also need to keep working on the house as I can.  Since we moved when I was nearly 30 weeks pregnant, I wasn't really able to do much unpacking or organizing.  The house shows it.  I recently read in a Montessori publication that, in order to increase self-reliance in children, about 90% of their possessions should be packed away at any given time.  That way it's easier for them to maintain their own areas.  Then the toys can be rotated as the child is bored of the 10% that's out.

I have to add something to that.  For the past year or so, I have been ruthlessly paring down everyone's "stuff" (except for the books, which are my weakness.  But they're books, you know.)  This is a constant battle, because of the gifts the kids often receive from well-intentioned relatives.  I thought we had gotten the toy count down to a somewhat more manageable level, but then we had Christmas.  Anyway, I'm going to have to get to work again.  I think there are still things we can give away or set aside for a garage sale, and then we can box up 80-90% of what's left.  I dislike storing anything, but some of the toys my eldest does not play with anymore would still be good for the little boys to play with when they get older. 

I do like having a plan.

The Lehman's catalog! and thinking about butterflies

The Lehmans catalog came last night, and I'm so excited!  I was feeling pretty down about various things this morning, but this afternoon while rocking my babies I pulled out the Lehmans and remembered one of the reasons we came here.  I think I will have to get their "Lehmans Best" pick foodgrinder soon, because the babies are 3.5 months old and soon we will be doing baby food.  I don't think the local Wal-Mart has enough jars to supply my twins anyway!  I am also looking at their pressure canner.  It's expensive, and I'm not sure I have enough guts to can anything that might have a risk of botulism yet.  When I was a kid all my mom did was pickles and jelly -- hot water bath canning.  I figure I'll start there.

I also noticed their tank-free hot water heaters.  They're expensive, too, but our hot water heater is electric and with the amount of hot water we use with 5 kids and 2 of them infants, our electric bills are really getting out of hand.  I'd asked dh about replacing ours, but it's out in the garage.  He thought the wind would just blow out a pilot light.

Gardens are shaping up... at least in our imaginations.  The butterfly garden will have coneflowers, black-eyed susans, and asters in it for sure.  We're working with the lists in The Family Butterfly Book, which has lots of good info in it about attracting, identifying, keeping, and raising butterflies.

Right now we're trying to determine where to put a bird feeder.  We hung one up close to the house, but it hasn't been visited by a single bird yet.  The only birds I've seen around here have been crows and chicadees.  Do any other birds stay in upstate NY for the winter?  We're pretty close to the southern Adirondacks.

Dinosaur Garden

My son stole the Territorial seed catalog because he says he wants a dinosaur garden.  He said this after my 6 yo daughter said she wanted a butterfly garden.  He's been making a huge list of all the plants he wants to put in it, to make it look like a place where dinosaurs would live.  I think stargazer lilies and astilbe feature prominently in it.

After our eyes popped out at the length of the list, we told him we'd give him a budget.  He seems excited.

And all the seed starting stuff is out at Wal-Mart.  So that must mean it's time to clear off the shelves in the dining room, so we can start some seeds :-).

A New Blog!

Angel's entry:

We're setting up this new blog for a couple of reasons.  One is that we were both so excited to find homesteadblogger.com that we immediately wanted to be a part of it.  We've been reading about organic gardening and homesteading for a long time now.  I think I was the one who started it.  I grew up on 3 acres outside a small town in middle Tennessee.  My parents had moved us there from northeastern Ohio (with a short stint in Alabama) because they wanted more privacy than the suburbs could offer.  My father put in a half-hearted garden for a few years, and my mom canned a zillion jars of pickles for the same amount of time.  Then the garden fizzled as my dad devoted all his time to rebuilding his Cessna 140 (in our garage), and the pickles sat in the cupboard until I helped my mom throw them out about two years ago.  But growing up in the woods rubbed off on me and my sisters, as we've all searched for a spot of nature in which to make our homes, even though we've all lived in cities since leaving home. 

My parent's house had (has) no real front yard, just a bunch of trees, moss, and a few mounds of dirt brought in to level things off which never got spread, and were quickly overrun by blackberry bushes.  The backyard was an obstacle course of boulders rising up through cedars, oaks, hickories, and the occasional black walnut.  A depression ran past the front of the house -- an old road, dating back to at least the Civil War.  Out of the red dirt came mostly fossils of a long dead sea, and nothing like anything you could eat.  But it was a great place to grow up.  A few of our neighbors had horses, though I never learned to ride.  And the mountains ringed us all around.

My husband (who will also be adding entries) was born in an Iowa farm town, but lived most of his life in the suburbs of Memphis.  The first garden I planted after we were married, in the tiny backyard of a rented townhouse in a Washington DC suburb, he "weeded" for me by pulling up all my tiny little bean plants.  But this morning he and my oldest son were poring over seed catalogs, gleefully planning a huge garden.

My husband switched jobs last April, in part to movbe us away from the traffic, long commutes, and new construction of St. Louis, where we'd lived for about 7 years.  We'd bought our house there because it backed to a field that was supposedly never going to be sold.  Two years later it was sold and immediately filled with 3000 square foot houses jammed together eave to eave on tiny lots.  We attempted to put a small garden in our side yard, which was immediately vetoed by our neighbors, who believed that gardens didn't belong in subdivisions... and so here we are now, in upstate New York.  We've had a kind of rough beginning, because we moved (twice!) while I was pregnant with our twins, who were born in October.  But now we're trying to settle into our home and our community.  We're hoping to make our little plot of land a place we will all love.