Signs of spring

This morning I woke to the sounds of birds singing. Not any new voices, but all of the winter residents are starting to stake their territory - Carolina wrens, chickadees, titmice, etc. It is such a beautiful sound! I also heard a sound that took a few sleepy minutes to identify. My first thought was that Foxy had captured a small duck and was holding it hostage on the porch. I crawled out of bed to find Foxy indeed sitting on the welcome mat waiting to be let in, but he had no captives. It was then that I realized the strange croaking noise was a FROG in my frog pond!! The pond has only been thawed for a week or two, and already the frogs are back! It wasn't even a spring peeper either; it was a pickerel frog.

After that great start to the day, I was motivated to do some serious spring-y things. First I did some organizing in the greenhouse and planted a couple of flats of broccoli, kale, lettuce and spinach. I LOVE greenhoue time of year. Everything in the greenhouse is so manageable. It's only once you move all those precious plants out into the wide open garden that you realy start to lose all control of the situation.

I then moved on to removing the debris from the flower beds around the greenhouse in order to make it easier for the chickens to wreck havoc expose the beautiful crocuses and snowdrops that are blooming. My cute little twine fence didn't fare well over the winter, but the posts are still standing strong, so I can easily redo it. It was more of a looks thing anyway as it totally failed at his intended purpose of keeping the chickens out. I now have scraps of fencing laid down over the newly uncovered area in hopes that it will be less inviting for scratching in. At least I won't have the goats eating the hyacinths and crocuses this year. I might actually get to enjoy them for once. (Famous last words, but I am setting a warm weather resolution for myself to work on having less attachment to perfectly groomed flower beds, or flowers at all for that matter should the situation get that dire.)

At this point my sunny spring day turned into a real soaker, and I abandoned any further outdoor projects.

Is a half a yurt better than no yurt at all?? Well, yes, but only if you're willing to make the investment to acquire the other half of the yurt; otherwise, no. This is the predicament we currently find ourselves in. We had BEAUTIFUL sunny, warm weather last week, and I took the whole week off of work to tackle the job of cleaning and inventorying yurt parts to ready them for assembly. It was then that I discovered we are missing one half of the exterior wall. Bummer. Considering we have already invested a sizeable chunk in building the deck the yurt will sit on, we are definitely going to continue the investment and order a new half-wall. I just spoke with a delightful representative of the Pacific Yurts company, and he informed me it will cost about $910.00 plus shipping. I wasn't shocked as I had already figured as much. Oh well, it's just money, and then we'll REALLY have a yurt! :)

The good news is the rest of the yurt pieces looked pretty good. The HEAVY-duty vinyl roof has a few spots that need repair, but they will be shipping me a repair kit with the wall. Some of the interior wall linings have some stains on them, but the delightful representative supported my decision to paint over them. All in all I'm feeling pretty good about the whole thing.

Of course, the inventorying process required unstacking Joe's very neatly stacked and well protected yurt pile, the pieces of which we then spread all over the deck where the yurt will soon stand. Several of the wooden pieces need some repair, and I'd like to give them all a recoating of tung oil, so we've left them spread out for the moment. We purchased a huge tarp (was I the only one who did not realize how expensive tarps are??) to cover the whole kit and kaboodle. There is apparently no amount of weights, logs, boards, etc. that will hold that tarp in place. Last night, anticipating two days of rain and wind ahead, I went out for the umpteenth time to recover and resecure the tarp. This time I have used bungee cords to tie the tarp to the deck posts, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

In other news, after only a few strokes of the pen from a judge happy to see so many smiling faces in his courtroom, Logan Samuel Harding has become my legal nephew!! Two days later he celebrated his first birthday!! As a party gift to the supporting friends and family in attendance, the proud new father gave everyone a stomach bug. Oh well, the family that vomits together stays together, isn't that what they say? Totally unrelated but also exciting - my chickens are now laying 4-5 eggs a day!!

Battle of the Bugs

Like seemingly everyone else in the country, Joe and I are unwillingly sharing our house with scores of stink bugs and ladybugs. For the most part they have stealthily sneaked in and hidden themselves away in little seen nooks and crannies, but when the conditions are just right, they come out in force! The conditions which turn a lazy ladybug into avid explorer are mostly centered around temperature. Most evenings, we go through a complex series of mental calculations and deliberations in order to make the very important decision of when to stop loading the woodstove in order to achieve the perfect sleeping temperature. This is not a fool-proof equation, and we often err, usually on the side of making it uncomfortably warm. The aforementioned unwelcome insects, however, do not find the heat uncomfortable and just when we are getting ready for bed, the bugs are coming out to party!

After a few late(ish) nights in a row recently, Joe was looking forward to a strict early to bed night to get himself back on track. Lights out (for him) at 9 o'clock sharp! I was happy to support him in this cause, but I was nowhere near sleep myself when 9 o'clock rolled around (I rarely am). Luckily, Joe is not bothered by having a light on while he sleeps, so I usually leave my LED reading light on over my head and read for an hour or so past when he goes to sleep. This night in particular, though, we had made the mistake of throwing one too many logs on the fire, and the shanty was toasty to say the least. All of the bugs that were coming alive due to the warmth were of course headed straight for the "sun" (aka the reading light over my head).

I was determined to ignore the dive bombing bugs and even bite my lip and tolerate being crawled all over to avoid disturbing Joe....but then the ladybugs started biting! I can handle a lot of things, but I will NOT put up with being BITTEN by a LADYBUG!! So, I grabbed our bug-catching cup and decided I'd just capture each one that came my way. Easy solution. Well, I never got to read more than two words in my book before I was stopping to shake shake shake the cup (to disorient the previously caught ladybugs of course) and grab another bug. Joe's a pretty good sleep-through-anything kind of guy, but the heat and all the activity were definitely keeping him awake. Since it was too hot to get under the covers, the ladybugs were biting him too.

The final straw came when our cat, Foxy, came through the dog door with a live vole. Joe and I both instantly kicked into action to grab Foxy and throw him back outside before he had a chance to release his quarry in the house. At that point, Joe decided to forget the early to bed plan and go meditate for an hour in the outhouse. I tried to read for another fifteen minutes or so, but I was soon fed up with fighting the bugs and gave it up. The whole ordeal had tired me out and I fell right asleep. I'm not even sure when Joe came back in. Poor guy...good thing he's so good natured! :)

P.S. I always like blog posts with pictures, so I was looking up a good, scary stink bug picture to go along with this one. Google led me to a photo of a kid EATING stink bugs, which of course my morbid curiosity led me to follow to its original source. I then ended up on a well illustrated web page about bug eating around the world and had to read the entire article. I am literally feeling nauseous right now. I was going to share the web link, but on second thought, I'll spare you.

Yurt Progress

Some photos of our most recent yurt work day, last Saturday.

Zen and the Art of Sweeping

Excerpt from " For the Time Being" by Annie Dillard:

"Earth sifts over things. If you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not. The debris on the tops of your feet or shoes thickens, windblown dirt piles around it, and pretty soon your feet are underground. Then the ground rises over your ankles and up your shins. If the sergeant holds his platoon at attention long enough, he and his ranks will stand upright and buried like the Chinese emperor's army. ….. "Quick: Why aren't you dusting? On every continent, we sweep floors and wipe tabletops not only to shine the place, but to forestall burial."

I first read this passage almost ten years ago, but it comes to mind often, especially when I am on my second or third round of sweeping my house in one day. I spent a whole morning the other day fighting to forestall the impending burial, and I'm feeling at the moment that I may have at least won a battle if not the war. We have had a fair amount of sunshine and blue skies the past few days, and despite the continued cold temperatures, I've been in a spring cleaning kind of mood. I even went so far as to mop (sort of) my floor, something I haven't officially done since we moved in here.

Even more noticeable than sweeping up dirt is the de-cluttering I accomplished. Stuff has a way of landing on a surface, be it floor or tabletop, and staying there….indefinitely. Classic example - we have a half full bottle of motor oil sitting on the floor by the front door. It has been there for years, and I could not begin to give you a reason why. I regularly pick it up, sweep under it, and put it back in its spot. I almost can't bring myself to find a better home/use for it as I don't know that our house would feel right without it. The winter is a particularly tough time for clutter as it seems like our house gets smaller during this season. We have stacked crates of sweet potatoes that can't freeze, stacked buckets of water that we collect on above-freezing days so we can have it available when everything outside turns to ice, emptied canning jars that need to reach a critical mass before warranting a trip out to the outhouse-loft-storage-space, piles of winter apparel, etc. I finally did gather up the two-dozen or so empty canning jars and take them out to the outhouse and that alone freed up almost 3 square feet of floor space. That may not sound like much, but in a house of 192 square feet, it's a considerable chunk!

Tuesday, Jan 25: My winter life seems unusually busy this year, and it has been several days since I first started this post. In that span of time, my clean, de-cluttered house has been like the homesteading version of a Buddhist sand mandala - a beautiful work of art created and then "ritualistically destroyed to symbolize the transitory nature of material life." (Paraphrased from Wikipedia) You can only forestall the burial for so long… Tomorrow we are forecasted to be buried in a blanket of snow. I am looking forward to a day at home watching the world turn white while I burn a few calories dancing with the broom. :)



Sand mandala photo courtesy of this website.

WhOOO hung out the Chick-Fil-A sign??

It's that time of year when all the glossy catalogs start coming in the mail and I begin to fantasize about lush flower beds and gardens bursting with hundreds of varieties of gourmet, heirloom vegetables, as if it was all as simple as making a collage of photos from these catalogs. Usually it is the seed catalogs that get me going, but so far only a few have arrived, not enough to reach the critical mass necessary to trigger my imagination muscle. At the moment it is chicken catalogs. We've only received one catalog from a hatchery, but for some reason it has got me dreaming of expanding our chicken flock with a few flashier breeds. Our poultry flock currently consists of five laying hens, one closeted rooster, one young pullet and five guineas. The past couple of nights I have stayed up late pouring over the catalog and imagining how nice our primarily red and yellow flock would look with the addition of a few Plymouth Barred Rocks, or maybe some Speckled Sussex?



Photos courtesy of here and here respectively.

(Of course at the moment I'm actively choosing to forget the fact that only in an imaginary world do flocks of free ranging brilliantly patterned chickens peacefully coexist with lush flower beds.)

I was just about to turn out the light last night and join Joe in dreamland when one of our real live birds started sounding the alarm. All day long our guineas wander the compound and squawk their heads off for no apparent reason, but if they open their mouths at night…it means trouble! So, off went the deep layer of cozy warm blankets, on went the robe and the snowboots, and armed with a small flashlight, I ventured out into the cold dark night. I found one of the guineas on the ground just outside the garden fence. It appeared unharmed, but was definitely flustered. I scanned the surrounding treeline to see if any of the other guineas had opted for roosts outside the safety of the chicken house. What I did find perched in a small locust tree at the edge of the woods was a barred owl, cooly staring straight into the beam of my flashlight, obviously unperturbed by my presence.


Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

I couldn't help but stand and admire him for a few minutes, amazed by the fact that he appeared to be no bigger than the guinea he was hoping to have for dinner. I tried to make some snowballs to hurl at him and dislodge him from his perch, but the snow wouldn't cooperate and stick together. Instead I was only throwing handfuls of light fluffy powder, as if I was trying to anoint him with fairy dust rather than put the fear of God into him. This bird had obviously not read his Bible lately and did not subscribe to the notion of me having any dominion over him.

The frightened guinea was still cowering behind me, so I decided to switch to plan B and see if I could convince him to bunk in the chicken house for the rest of the night. Whereas the guinea didn't want me to pick him up, he did cooperate with my herding him into the chicken pen, which I quickly locked shut behind him. By this point the owl had flown over us and settled in a large pine just behind the chicken pen, still intently watching our every move. The guinea didn't go up into the chicken house right away, but I at least felt better that the somewhat tattered netting covering the top of the pen would protect him from any aerial attacks. I tried again with a few chunks of ice to scare the owl away, but my seriously bad aim didn't so much as make him blink. By this point I decided to settle for what I had accomplished and head back to bed. Luckily Joe, deep in sleep this whole time, had kept the bed warm for me, but it took a long time for me to wind back down into sleep mode. My ears were perked for any hint of further attack.

I did finally fall asleep, and I woke up this morning anxious to do a head count and see if we'd lost any birds. I was delighted to find that we had all 7 chickens and all 5 guineas!! Despite the snow, they were all clambering to get out of the pen this morning. I have no grudge against Mr./Ms. Barred Owl. I'm happy to know he's our neighbor. I love hearing the mated pairs calling to each other in early spring. But, I'm even happier to know that he had to look elsewhere for a full belly last night.

Benefits of having a tiny house

After being gone all day yesterday, Joe and I came home at 8:30 pm to a 41 degree house. Within 20-30 minutes of lighting a fire in the woodstove, it was a comfortable 75 degrees in the house. I arrived this morning at my boss' house to find it had dropped to 45 degrees over a weekend of being unoccupied with lows in the single digits. Two hours after lighting and regularly feeding a raging fire in his woodstove, we're up to a balmy 50 degrees. I haven't taken my coat or hat off yet. Of course, it took all weekend for his large, timber framed house to drop into the 40's, but I think I prefer the quick warm-up of our house.