Planting and storing

 

      

      Spring is finally here! For weeks we were watching for the moment when all the bare tree branches would leaf out and turn green and all of a sudden, we looked around and realized that it had happened, that the forest was a light shade of green instead of brown. It is a pretty miraculous process to see a bare stick form a tiny bud and then watch the bud unfurl into tiny oak leaves. Baby animals are abounding around us-- many of our neighbors have new piglets, pullets (chicks), goat kids, lambs, calves, and fowls frolicking around, rendering everything a little picture-postcard perfect. The only babies we seem to be harboring on our land are tick-babies, but that is okay, one day we will have more animals! In the meantime, we have started working one day a week at our friends, the Crawford's farm, Butterfly Hill Farm, which is a much more established version of what we are working on ourselves. Richard and Glinda are both retired from university careers and are both a wealth of knowledge on native and garden plants, animals, birds, and much else. As Glinda is recovering from a long struggle with cancer (and Richard as well, as care-taker), and they are preparing for their daughter's wedding on the farm later this month, they both felt the need for additional hands preparing their land and gardens for spring. And since we adore them, and are eager to learn from their experience, we stepped up to the job. (Pictures of their gardens below and above and more to come in the next post from the wedding.)

    Meanwhile, the Crawfords offered us use of part of their garden beds to plant some of our own veggies this summer, while ours are still getting established, and we have jumped at the opportunity. We started some plants from seed and have been nursing them along through random late frosts (May 9th?) and blistering days of sun to the point where they will leave their little plastic cartons and become one with the earth. It has been hard to limit ourselves to only a few easy plant varieties, since we are now cooking out at our land and are somewhat limited for fresh produce. "One day..." we keep saying, "we should really focus on the house this summer..." Sigh.

And yet! One thing we really went for this year, and could very well be the major theme of the last few weeks, has been tree planting. Missouri's conservation department has a very amazing service where one can pre-order and purchase native tree starts from their nurseries for, well, .33 cents a tree! What a deal! Last fall we went in with our neighbors on a big order and ended up with 350 young Persimmon, Wild Plum, White Pine, Redbud, Flowering Dogwood, Paw Paw, Serviceberry, Mulberry, Choke Cherry, Black Locust, Elderberry, and Nannyberry tree that arrived in the mail three weeks ago. I am not sure what inspired us to such an ambitious order, but it has been quite a lot of work to get them all in the ground, watered and mulched! Still, it has been a good process for us to go through, envisioning natural privacy screens, windbreaks, firewood coppicing and edible gathering paths through the land, plus of course, an abundance of spring blossoms for bees and beauty of course. The best part about it all has been actually having a water source to pre-soak and water them with. We keep repeating to each other, "I'm so glad we put in the pond last year...", since we not only use the spigot all the time, we also now have a spectacular sunset view over the pond were we rest our weary bones at the end of each day and pause to watch the sky turn colors. Such a sweet world.

    We have now been actually living on our land a little over a week, thanks in large measure to Mike's rain barrel and water filtration set-up that he has been working on. I realize that much of what enables us to live on our land is our ability to store food and water effectively. We have refined our systems greatly since last summer and now we are really self-sufficiently using the natural resources around us--rain and wood from the land--to drink, do dishes and cook food with. Mike figured out a way to use 5 gallon food-grade buckets plus the filtering components from Berkey filters to make our rain water potable. We also found these great twist-off lids for 5 gallon buckets that makes them much more usable for bulk food storage. We put in our first order from the "bulk buying club" that many people in our community are a part of (ordering once a month from bulk distributor UNFI), so now we are cooking and eating our meals al fresco in our little open-air kitchen/dining area. For that matter, we have hosted and fed guests several times now (including a bachelorette tea party), and it feels really good to be able to offer a space and meal to friends. More to come about our rocket stove and sun oven, since they are such amazing cooking tools and merit their own post.
      Though most of this post has been about to-doings on our land, we have involved in a number of great community events that I seem never to have a camera on-hand at, including a May day party (complete with pole and ribbon dancing), a contra dance in the Duplex structure that I worked on two summers ago, work parties, birthday parties, potlucks, and we are about to take a four-day course at the neighboring Peace and Permaculture Center on Restorative Justice being taught by Dominic Barter (an amazing system of communication and conflict-resolution that is spreading around the world). So, more to come soon. Much love to family and friends reading along--spring blessings!

A Pulse of Life

     We have been back in Missouri for two weeks now, and have very much hit the ground running. Thankfully, we have been surrounded by wonderful, welcoming community and friends who have been helping us in one way or another every step of the way. Part of what has softened our transition from cozy, convenient city living to scrappy, roughin' it tent dwelling on our land has been staying with our new neighbors, Brian and Terri Thomas and their two awesome kids, Ella and Everett in their rented house in town (read: hot showers and gas stove, woohoo!) We are all in the same boat in that we are all new-to-Missouri transplants building houses on our undeveloped land side by side, currently trying to transition into some sort of a comfortable temporary set-up to keep from going crazy from the mud, the bugs, and soon to be coming, the summer heat. So it has been nice to brainstorm and compare notes and building ideas with them, as well as catch up on all that has been going on since we left. Needless to say, we are pretty excited to have them as immediate neighbors since they are not only great folks to sit down and chat with, but also super skilled gardener-homesteader-craftspeople who have more than a thing or two to teach us!

Ella, Everett and the chicks

     We also have been very impressed with how they are integrating their two kids, ages 5 and 2 into this ambitious endeavor, no easy feat to be sure! Ella and Everett are very hands-on and help with lots of tasks like cooking (Everett mostly in the sampling department), planting seeds, taking care of their ten chicks recently acquired for the season. Chicks make even better kid entertainment than any game apps, and just about every evening, we have chicks wheeling around the kitchen on the backs of toy trains. Bonus: the chicks get comfortable with human handling, making it way easier in future months to tend them!

     While we have been sharing meals and a roof overhead in town, we have been going out to our land every day to work on our first projects and to get acquainted with how our land handles what is proving to be the wettest season we have yet experienced. There has been rain after rain after rain, infusing our softly rolling hills with little rivulets and lots of mud. It has been GREAT for our pond, which has filled almost to the top with water and great for our dam wall which is now sprouting with green shoots instead of eroding away (so glad we spent a week last fall seeding and mulching it!) The other totally fascinating feature of our land in this season has been our creek, which in its summer incarnation is a dry sandy ditch. We have always had a hard time imagine it full and running, much less, overflowing its banks and flooding our bottom land; but lo and behold, after two consecutive deluges, it did just that and a mercurial brown snake was ribboning its way around our land. Our lower field had standing water, and just about all of the ten acres to the east (woods side). We explored around in it, just dumbfounded at the elemental power of water to both knock heavy things out of its way (gravel, tree trunks, and our neatly mulched pathways) and infuse everything with a pulse of green life in its wake. Just as quickly as it came, it has subsided and by the time we got our camera out, the creek had sunk a foot or so, leaving vernal pools around for the frogs to spawn in.

Pond almost full!

A very swollen Bear Cub Creek, which weaves through our bottom land

     While we didn't have kayaks to go out exploring our flooded lowland, we did get to spend a day hiking and boating in nearby Thousand-hills State Park for our friend Beth's birthday, our first time there. No morels spotted yet, but Mike--the consummate mushroom enthusiast--is ever on the hunt. He also just took a two-night workshop on truffle culture, which he is now excited to add to our future farm-products list. Our visions are getting more and more gourmet by the season, since after completing construction of a wine-cellar for our friend back in Philly, we also have ideas about growing grapes and doing some home wine making. But everything in good time!

      For the present, our goals are set much lower and more immediate. We decided that our most pressing need was to create a more comfortable tent-covering structure with a shed roof and level floor platform. We jumped right into construction last week, using various lumber scraps we have scrounged together last season. We dug post holes (which promptly filled up with the swelling ground water) and used our auction-bought transit level to level the tops to one another. We used gravel to tamp around the post bases, which locks them surprisingly rigid. Some more scrounging resulted in used plywood and roof metal, a few needed 2x6's and rafters and by the end of yesterday we were done. I can't believe we went through one whole season on the land without this structure, and am already grateful to have the rain-cover and shade that it will provide us. Also, thanks to a gift from Mike's mom, we have a new tent to set up next week, minus the holes and broken zipper of our old one. 2013 Missouri season, here we come!

Our finished tent platform! Tent will go in the right bay, benches and table in the left bay.

Spring migration underway

We have gotten some reports of late from friends who have been checking this blog for signs of life, and have come away disappointed after discovering our lengthy winter hibernation away from blogging. Well, faithful followers, here we are, emerging from our winter cave-abode in Philadelphia, stretching in the spring air, and setting our tires west once again for Missouri!

 It has been a long, weary winter in the big city in many ways, as Mike and I have been working (renovating, painting, constructing) almost non-stop to save money for the coming season on our land. But we will need every bit of it, for as our friend Glinda recently wrote to me, "this will be a marker year for you on the land, for sure!" and I believe she is right. Our list of projects to tackle in 2013 is long, not the least of which is cutting and erecting our house's main timberframe, the skeleton for all that is to come, and capping it with a roof. In a few days we will be cracking open our storage shed, setting up our (reinforced) tent, cooking all of our meals in our yet-to-be-constructed outdoor kitchen, participating in weekly rotating work parties in our community, planting a very modest survival garden, and battling the ticks, mice, chiggers and the rest of the usual gang out on our land! I can hardly wait!

So there are lots of posts to come for sure, but in the meantime, let me leave you with the vision that keeps us going in this crazy endeavor, our plan for Giving Tree Homestead...

Winter migration

     Once again I find myself overdue for an update! Especially since we packed up our bags (and boxes and bins, etc., etc.) and left Missouri over a week ago already. Our final week on the land was a frenzy, essentially, of packing and finishing final projects. Of great assistance in that process was a work party of friends who came over to help for half a day. Together, we finished the third and fourth swales in our future orchard hillside, moved around sixteen giant debarked timbers onto pallets for safe, rot-free winter-keeping (imagine pick-up-sticks for giants, it took four men and the log-arch to move one at a time!), and last, we screwed on metal panels on all sides of our formerly open-air shed (now a creepy-looking windowless/ doorless storage vault). Come spring, we will pry off the panels and unearth our tools and bins and tent, etc. which are now most likely something of a mouse-condominium. Gross, I know, but entropy is the law of the land in nature, and it seemed like the best storage solution for the time being since our Amish auction purchases have greatly multiplied the number of things we arrived with! 

      In many ways, with a week’s perspective, it feels hard to leave the land where we are putting down roots. We have done a giant about-face back to a very different way of life. Just when I was getting used to bathing out of a bucket... back to hot showers! (I tell you, life is tough...) We plan to live in Philadelphia for the winter, work and save money for our next homestead-building phase and reconnect with good friends and neighbors back east. Our re-entry back into civilization happens to coincide with the American consumer frenzy of black-Friday, cyber-Monday, and the subsequent holiday shopping period leading up to Christmas. Quite a strange scene to witness coming from our hand-made, home-grown life in MO. Mike is bravely (and rather ironically) plunging into the very heart of this holiday-consumer world in NYC selling X-mas trees and wreaths with a few friends. The exodus journey seemingly detours to some strange places. Send him warm thoughts this month as he works the rather cold and long night-shift.

    I, on the other hand, am doing handy-woman jobs in my home neighborhood to earn income. I mostly enjoy this work since it is hands-on and usually for neighbors and acquaintances that I feel good about helping. My first week back I have been catching up with the bureaucracy of city-life--renewing my car inspection, registration, license, and insurance and just generally getting legal about things. This kind of stuff is not my forte, and leaves me wondering if there isn’t an easier way to live than throwing armfuls of money in all directions to be allowed to participate in the systems of society. (Hm, I guess that is what I left behind in MO?) Still, it hasn’t all been headaches and drained bank-accounts: on my first night back, I went to see a friend act in the excellent and very provocative play, RACE, by David Mamet, where I ran into several beloved friends from my church congregation. As we sat around openly discussing the play and all of the complex issues it brings up, the thought clicked into my head, “I am going to miss this in MO”. Something about the way the arts penetrate life in the city, constantly shaking up perspectives and interactions... it just doesn’t happen as often in rural settings. Not that our community isn’t doing our best to change that, creating discussion groups, theatrical performances, bringing in or creating music and dance events, etc. But still, I can tell this city-country transition is going to provoke still more meditations on how I want to be living and what kind of world I want to help create. And there are aspects to both worlds that I love and miss either way.

    I should probably leave off there and save our spoon-carving saga for another post. But in case you are a pond-project supporter patiently awaiting spoons or prints, they are in the last stages of completion, soon to be sent your way! There is hope!

Missouri Falling

        Well, time is certainly flying here! It seems like just yesterday that I took the photo to the right, remarking to Mike, "hey, the oak tree next to our tent is beginning to change color! Look at the lower limb, see the little bit of red tinging the leaves?" It has been almost a month since that first color siting and this morning I noted bleakly that what few leaves that were left on the trees around us were a boring brown. Color swept through and left town in a hurry.
      Still, it has been an interesting month. Adjusting to the cold snap that hit a few weeks ago was a challenge. One chilly morning we woke to find the world outside our tent flap a white-frosted wonderland. It is one thing to marvel at the frost from the toasty comfort of your home window and quite another to have to heat up your morning tea water in it. First step- break ice up in water pitcher. Second step, fumble around in gloves to get paper and twigs amassed enough to successfully light fire. Third- huddle shivering around little stove, eeking out the scant warmth it provides for the ten minutes of burn time it takes to heat water. And so on. But then, weirdly, a week later we were out in tank tops and shorts for a late warm-weather blast, basking in the sun. There is a saying in Missouri, "if you don't like the weather, wait a minute or two". Very true.

    The other shift in weather that has been defining the contour of our days is the increase in rain. Cold and warm fronts have been battling it out in huge thunder and lightning storms. We have gone from a severe drought to a severe deluge of water. We had our Belgian friend Geoffrey staying with us during one of the worst storms which struck around 4 am. We tried to sleep through it in our rather leaky tent despite the streams of water aiming themselves directly at our bed. Geoffrey apparently was also getting soaked in his tent and came seeking refuge in ours. He laughed and made an about-face when he saw how much wetter it was in ours... after 7 layers of blankets got soaked through, we started catching the water streams in trays and buckets. I can only hope one day we look back and laugh at these moments. Mike has since taken initiative to reinforce our tenting situation with a huge heavy silver tarp that we got at an auction. Our tent now looks like some futuristic metal dome-hovel. Oh well for aesthetics! We are now the eyesore in the otherwise bleak landscape.

      But the silver lining about all the rain is that our pond is really filling! We probably have about a foot of water so far, and little green sprouts shooting up through the straw surrounding the dam wall. (The trees in the pond bottom in the photo above are for future fish-nursery habitat). We took some time and care to gather native grass seed from around our land and our neighbor's, the Crawford's, land nearby. Richard Crawford is a specialist in prairie restoration and taught us how to harvest and identify native grasses vs. introduced grasses (ie- Indian Grass good, Fescue bad...) It is amazing how many wildflowers and grasses there are all around us, the variety of which I had formerly lumped together in my mind as "grassy stuff" instead of Little Bluestem, Mountain Mint, Goldenrod, Greyheaded Coneflower, etc. It occurs to me that this year on the land has been about learning the landscape around us, which I suspect will be an ongoing education. Mike has been furthering our knowledge by reading up on wild-foraging and we have been astounded by how much of our landscape is actually edible. He has also been mushroom-hunting up a storm, and almost every other day we have mushrooms with breakfast. So far he has found Chicken-of-the-Woods, Elm Oysters, Oysters, Wood-ears, Puff balls, and he has inoculated around 20 logs with 5 other species of edible mushroom spores which will fruit in another year. Yum!

     And otherwise, work on the land continues as best we can here... Digging swales, still processing wood and debarking logs, putting in a spillway ditch for the pond and carving spoons out of black walnut and cherry wood for our fundraiser thank-you gifts. We also have had new neighbors move in, a young family of four who have been long-time friends of Ethan and Sarah. They too are moving onto new land without existing structures and will be embarking on a homestead-creating adventure along with us. We also have gotten to meet other local neighbors, folks who have dropped off a bucket of turnips, offered us squirrel meat (hmmm...), given us tree seed and offered advice and history of the area and our land. We learned our parcel used to be called "happy Jack's place" after the fellow who used to own it a few decades back, who was, apparently, a happy guy! Well here are a few more shots of the fleeting fall beauty over at happy Jack's place. With a few more weeks still to go, send us some warm wishes :)

A storm blowing over at sunset

Pond

        Introducing... our new pond! Or rather, the huge crater in our land that will one day be a pond should the rain gods look favorably upon our small homestead. It is hard to give a sense of its size and position in relation to the land around it, but I have endeavored in the above composite photo. All in all, it turned out to be much larger than we were expecting it to be, but its position on the land is really ideal for our orchard and garden site (downhill on the left most photo of the composite). It is probably hard to see this detail in the above image, but there is a pipe emerging from the dam wall in the pond bowl that feeds out 100 ft. on the other side of the dam to a hydrant where we can connect hoses and run water downhill. As a neighbor of ours put it, "you can keep your tap turned on all year and still not drain that thing!" Not that we have plans to try, but it is nice to know that we will have a decent water supply for our land and a backup for our house, should we need it. It is also nice to know there will be future habitat for frogs, turtles, fish, migrating fowl, cattails, ducks and many other creatures. After the rather destructive process of bulldozing it into existence, it is the least we owe the land and other inhabitants on it. The first day the excavator came and started digging involved the removal of several really old and lovely oaks that stood in the direct path of the proposed dam wall. We made the difficult decision to remove them and then use every part of them  for our own building and wood supply. Even knowing how many other large oaks we have on our land, it was still hard to see them get uprooted and pushed away. Another hard part was watching the top soil get stripped off of the site, along with all of the other prairie grasses and life inhabiting them. Again, a huge compromise for the life that will be able to flourish in its place. But after that, the bulldozer began stripping away beautiful layers of clay, full of interesting swirls of color, and it was rather interesting watching how he reshaped them layer by layer into a bowl. Sort of like a giant ceramics project minus the wheel to throw it on. The excavator, Ralph, was able to push top soil back onto the outside sides of the dam wall so that we can plant stabilizing grasses and turn it back into prairie again. In the meantime, we have been busily dissecting the huge trees that were pushed over, making piles of dry twigs for cook stove fuel, green branches to be turned into wood chips for our swale project, medium branches for firewood (we already have 1 cord! Now for the house to heat...), the main trunk to be milled for our building beams, and the root balls which we will roll back into the bottom of the pond for fish hatchery habitat. All of this, you can imagine, is more work than we bargained for, and is definitely delaying our main project (ahem... the house?) But still, we feel we should finish what we started and thus you can imagine us out on our prairie slopes, sawing and stacking away and enjoying the sun for once! Below are some photos from the process...

Work Parties

   

We are back in Missouri after a month of visiting family and attending a friend's wedding out West. Apparently we are making up for lost time since in the last week a lot has been happening to move our projects forward. For one, we made our Pond fundraising goal and we have set up a date next week to have our pond excavated (woo-hoo!) Another hurdle that was slowing down our progress on the house was actually moving the timbers we cut in the woods nearby our house site. Mike and our friend Dan moved the timbers down hill to accessible paths (via the log-arch, an incredible tool... see left) and then our Amish neighbor Jake used his team of work horses and work cart to maneuver the logs to our work site. The horses make this task look ridiculously easy, often snapping two logs positioned at different angles together and deftly maneuvering them through a labyrinth of trees and underbrush at decent speed. The real feat Jake managed to accomplish was getting the logs over a 16 ft. creek bed that separates the woods from our house site. He did this by dropping off the logs on one side of the bed, bringing the horses around to the other side of the creek (the very long way) and then using a long chain and several people feeding them across to pull them across. It is a huge relief to have this step done.

 Another interesting thing that happened this past week was our friends the Crawfords annual sorghum-molasses pressing party. We helped them for a day prepping and cutting cane in their field (imagine a corn-like plant only taller). About ten of us moved through the rows with wooden swords, whipping off the leaves and cutting the top seed-clusters before cutting them at the base and bunching them. Once they were all gathered and carted off, the second part of the process started the next day at the pressing-fest. The extended Crawford clan gets together annually to do this, bringing together  four generations and several acres of cane to be pressed. It takes two days and one very old cane press that has been in Richard Crawford's family for generations. I was surprised that molasses starts off in the boiling tank a putrid green color and cooks down to sticky brown.

   

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble, eye of newt and toe of frog!

       Last, we hosted a community work party on Monday and had a dozen folks helping out on our land for the morning, stripping bark from some of the trees that Jake helped move to the building site and also digging swales into the hillside where next year we will plant our orchard. The swales will help the hill absorb more rainwater and serve as a spillway for the pond. They are also a heck of a lot of work to create, so hopefully there will be more work parties to come. Either that or we need to train a pack of dogs to dig holes along the contour of the hill. If only. Anyhow, here are some photos of our work party, which was finished with a chili-feast! Yum.