Made by hand

“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”
                                                                                                                  - William Morris

      I find myself thinking about the above quote in the run-up to the holidays as I inevitably have joined in the consumer frenzy of shopping for gifts. I think a person could scarcely avoid it at this time of year, as everywhere one looks—from our inboxes to store windows—there are gift suggestions galore. This also happens to be the month that Mike and I take away from our homestead in Missouri to rejoin urban civilization: our chance to stock up on certain home essentials that we don’t have ready access to in our rural community back home. So what do I know to be useful or believe to be beautiful? How does a person discern what that is amidst all the excess commercial crap that gluts the aisles (and our homes) around us?

     I think this question has become increasingly hard for me to answer with a child in the picture. She craves and needs new stimulus, experiences and objects to learn by, and I don’t quite have a sense of discernment honed in about what makes for an interesting, useful toy—one that “we can get some mileage from” as my neighbor Teri puts it. Caris is beginning to be the age where she will point to anything in a store appropriately color-coded as kid material with an enthusiastic, “dat one! Dat one mama!” Until I pick it up and hand it to her (temporarily), or maneuver us safely out of sight. Truth be told, before she was born, I always dreamed of making her toys, and books, and clothes—her very world—much like I have taken on making just about everything else in our house. But several half finished baby sweaters and a headless doll speak for themselves… it is simply much harder to find time to be a maker once one is a parent.

Carding wool before spinning it

Brian at his forge

Brian's dinner bell-- AcornHillHandcrafts.com

Cynthia's handmade broom

         Though there is a small ache in my heart each time I let go of a project I wish I had the time for, I am learning to celebrate the small amount of making I still do have in my life, as well as the beauty of handmade objects from others makers. Our friend Cynthia recently gave us one of her handmade brooms, for example. Our friend Ian’s blacksmithed candle-holder graces our wall. I never did find time to make Caris a baby quilt, but my Aunt Jane did, and I felt the love she poured into it each time I swaddled her in it. At a friend’s wedding recently, I admired her stunning beaded and sequined dress, only to learn it was made by her aunt. There are small acts of making everywhere, care and craft spent giving form to raw materials: ingredients turned into meals, wool spun and knitted into hats, wood whittled into a spoon. To me, this is love manifesting itself, and I deeply honor each choice to make instead of simply click and purchase. But the life of a maker is not easy in this day and age.

Cynthia Main coopering a barrel

My father making beeswax candles

      Our friend Cynthia, another talented maker (see sunhousecraft.com to check out her incredible craft work), and I were lamenting this a few weeks ago. We live in a world now where pretty much anything that could be handmade can be made much more quickly, cheaply, and efficiently in a factory elsewhere. This definitely decreases the need for makers in our society: a whole range of once livelihoods are now the stuff of hobbies. My mother and her sisters grew up making their own clothes each year before school started—sharing patterns, buying cloth and notions, and excitedly wearing their new creations to school. This arrangement was born out of necessity, but it led to their being the creative, talented, craftswomen they are today. My mother taught my sister and I to sew as well, and I was eight when I made my first outfit (a faux jean skirt and reversible matching vest, tre chic!) I have been occasionally making my own clothes since, but somewhere between now and then, the economics of it all shifted and it has become cheaper to buy clothes instead of making them. By the time you purchase the fabric, pattern, etc., you might be on par with what a pricier piece of clothing costs new. The same holds true for almost every other craft form. It is hard to compete with a world of cheap, factory-made things intended to be disposed of after a few seasons.

     So year after year what I find to be enduringly beautiful (and useful!) in my house are the handmade items—the art on my walls, the furniture and cutting boards, the quilts, the ceramics, the forged drawer pulls and towel rods, the brooms, the whittled spoons, the hand knit sweaters, and so on. I look around and see the effort of people I love in these objects, their hands transforming the materials into function and beauty. So in this season of darkness, awaiting the return of light, what better way to spend the chilly evenings than in a small act of creation, lit by the warm flame of a hand-dipped beeswax candle?

Sarah and her daughter Etta painting by candlelight

Fall crunch time

     Fall is here for sure now in Missouri. It has been here for well over a month, but I have been in so much denial that it has been anything more than "late summer" going on that it has almost passed me by. Thanks to Mike's erratic organic inspection work schedule, and multiple friend and family visits to usher in new marriages, and new babies, our fall projects and work have been sadly neglected. Now an undeniable chill in the air and increasing numbers of bare branches just can't be argued with any more... our season of "doing" is drawing to a close. Ready or not, fall is here!

     In accordance with the shift in weather, we have been scurrying about trying to eek out a little more firewood for the stack, play catch up in our garden beds to harvest the last peppers, the last broccoli, and dig up the sweet potatoes before the frost gets the best of it. I deposit my daughter in the sandbox and run to fill a wheelbarrow with compost and straw to put one more bed to sleep before she notices I am gone and starts calling for me. What our garden lacks in storage crops we easily make up in bulk purchased local produce, but this year, I have to blink and pinch myself that we finally have a decent fall garden-- straight rows of mature leeks, beds full of dozens of varieties of hardy greens (bok choy, tatsoi, mizuna, komatsuma, etc.--none of which my auto-spell-checker seems to like!), and root crops like beets and carrots and daikon radishes coming on strong. We actually have bell peppers for the first time ever--the big sweet red ones that cost a fortune in the organic section of the grocery store! The last of our amazing purple-podded pole beans are hanging on too, ending their staggering four months of ample production. I am now convinced that a garden is the single greatest way to get kids to eat their vegetables, since Caris grazes her way around its labyrinth beds, snagging beans and lettuce, and biting right into ripe cucumbers. I am also now convinced that giving our soil some love and care at the end of a season in the form of composted animal manure is well worth the hassle of throwing on boots, grabbing a shovel and wading into our Amish neighbor's goat pen!

      Another fall ritual is awakening our cookstove from its summer slumber. When we started noticing how cool our house was getting inside, we realized that we needed to hastily clean our chimney pipe out and get the firebox ready if we were to have any warmth going forward. Would Mike climb on the roof (with a bruised and torn hamstring) and I disassemble the stove pipe and hold a bag to catch the ashes? Or vice versa? And who would sooth our freaked out daughter? Nothing a pair of handy, strapping, young Amish neighbors can't solve in a pinch... Amos and Rudy helped put on our roof years ago with the sure-footedness of mountain goats, and the way they throw up a ladder and go bolting up a steep pitch is nothing short of awe-inspiring (at least to this novice homesteader!) A half hour and a sooty chain later, the deed is done and our stove is lit, and with all of their easy confident advice ringing in our ears--you don't have to do it every year, just when the draw slows down... hold a mirror below the pipe... drop the chain down--and their sincere refusal to take a single penny in compensation--We are happy to help you out! No, we won't take your money, Julie, put it back!--we are as warm with gratitude as we are with warmth from our stove. (We of course figured out how to slip them a few bills later!)

      We aren't alone in the fall rush to get things done--I notice our neighbors also pushing on their projects, squeezing in a little bit more work on weekends and evenings. Regina and John, who are expecting a baby at the end of November, are especially pushing to finish renovation work that will allow them to accommodate more guests at their Catholic Worker farm--installing a shower, bedrooms, a sink and new stove. The sheetrock is flying up thanks to work parties and our handy neighbor Brian just helped them get their plumbing fit just right. I know that baby-count-down well from our own final house push before Caris was born... no such motivator like a woman's pre-baby nesting instinct! Another set of friends also have been working on their cabin, hosting a one-day-plaster-party-marathon before the frost set in. It had been well over a year since the last time Mike and I sunk our hands into a bucket of plaster, picked up a trowel, and set to a wall, so it felt good to stretch those muscles again, joking the day away with the good company of friends in a tight, muddy space.

      But what about our big fall projects? I'll admit that forging ahead on our homesteading dreams to-do list has mostly taken a backseat to keeping up with daily maintenance and chores. But in the small gulps of productive time that appear, unspoken for, I dash outside with a drill and hammer to eek out the next step on our garden shed, and we recently rented a mini tractor to try to accelerate the process of moving our top soil pile (marooned years ago next to our pond from that excavation process)to the various places it is needed on our rather infertile, clay-heavy land. Nothing like an earth-works project to convince oneself that big progress is being made! We are setting ourself up for a spring project cultivating an outdoor kitchen area with covered cooking/serving area, a grape arbored sitting area, adjacent herb/medicinal garden bed, earthen pizza/bread oven and kid treehouse nearby as well as a garden expansion. Yes, a lofty goal for sure, but slowly and steadily I am sure we will get there. I can almost smell next year's wood-fired pizza!

     
     Another fun fall event that we attended was our sister community's 20th year reunion celebration at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. We have formed many friendships with similar-minded folks there who are also engaged in the work of building homes, growing food, raising families and cultivating community. It was amazing to us to reflect on what can be created from a bare patch of land and a founding dream, 20 years later. We walked down neighborhood streets, toured homes, gathered in common spaces, joined in games (village-wide capture-the-flag?) and danced to the music of several bands, all while our daughter frolicked with a small herd of other children, freely wandering the meandering car-less paths. It is always renewing for us to be there and get encouragement and ideas to return with to our fledgling community. Will we ever get there? Here are some photos from the weekend, to give you a glimpse--

   

    Last but not least--acorns! Where we live in Northeast Missouri is the most ridiculously acorn-filled ecosystem possibly imaginable. Oaks sprout like weeds everywhere and anywhere, mostly an irritating nuisance to be dealt with when trying to cultivate a patch of something else, like lettuce, or a path, or a flower bed... something far less productive in terms of caloric generation. My mother once visited and sighed a wistful "I wish we could grow oaks this easily... all the ones I have tried to transplant just die!" Really? I remember thinking, these old things? But they truly are an abundance and every year we promise ourselves that next year will be the year we really get out acorn-harvest on. Well, folks, this year was the year! Thanks to Shaina, a transient, acorn-loving volunteer, who headed up a big acorn experiment with our friend Adam, we now know a lot more about acorn harvesting and processing and cooking! She invited all the women and kids of the community to come out one gorgeous Saturday to hang out and shell acorns, nourished as we went by hickory nuts (another thing we have in ridiculous abundance). It was absolutely lovely and felt so natural, a ritual probably practiced in every primitive culture around the world for all of human history. We ate an acorn pancake potluck feast for lunch that clinched our appreciation--acorns flour is just so good! 

     So why aren't acorns a staple crop on par with wheat or corn or anything else that requires yearly cultivation? Oaks yield a staggering 6,000 lb. per acre without any of the tilling, combining, threshing, etc. Probably because the processing work they require is a bit finicky. Some acorns are "bad" or insect-damaged (these will generally float in a bucket of water), and additionally, once shelled (which goes much quicker with a hand-cranked nut sheller, from Davebilt Co.) they need to be ground (with a simple Corona hand-cranked mill) and leached of bitter tannins. This can be done in a number of ways, from hanging a mesh bag full of ground nuts in the tank of your toilet (I know!) or in a stream, or some other clean, flowing water source. Then the meal can be dried and used a la flour! Suffice to say, the nutrient profile of the acorn is pretty darn good and many native american tribes considered them a staple, basing up to 50% of their diets on them. Who knows, perhaps they will make a come-back. They certainly are in our neck of the woods!

    So with that I will end with a note of small regret--that I am perpetually forgetting my camera and failing to capture the most breathtakingly gorgeous of images that constitute our daily life. For example, Regina driving a team of horses across the pasture, with her full pregnant belly and a full wagon load of wood that will heat their home (and her baby) for the winter... The women of our community shelling acorns in the sun... Caris and Mike coming back from the mushroom logs with their daily "discovery," huge smiles stretched across their faces.... The wild geese crossing the glowing evening sky on their way south.... and so on. But every once in awhile I am able to snatch a sweet moment in time, like this one, that I will leave you with! Happy fall!

The wild and wonderful world of plants

Foraged and gleaned pears and mushrooms

Canning, canning, canning!

      Time has passed way too quickly this past month, mostly claimed by the every day demands that make up the stuff of parenting: runny noses, bath times, swings to be pushed, and meals to be coaxed into picky mouths. The balance of our days has been spent frantically trying to keep up with the bounty of our garden and land. With little warning beans and cucumbers become too big and need to be picked and canned (now!) or become compost. A neighbor calls with the offer of an overflowing pear tree, available for harvest if we can get there in time. A flush of mushrooms will go to waste if we can’t find an hour to pick and process them. There is abundance all around us, and I find myself marveling at the miracle of the plant world: one tiny seed transforms itself over the course of months into a fruit bearing hundreds of more tiny seeds. There are such generous design principles at work in the natural world, and we are their lucky recipients. “As it is, plenty,” writes WH Auden. If we can only keep up! Although I do not possess the green thumb of a master gardener (evidenced by a yearly toll of dead house plants), one aspect of homestead living I love is learning more and more about the flora growing all around us: a seemingly never-ending education!

Beating the birds to the elderberries down by our creek

     Though our annual vegetable garden keeps us plenty busy, the longer we inhabit our land, the more we come to appreciate the uses of all the diverse native plants that already exist without us lifting a finger. One of those realms of use has been medicinal. As I write that, even my mind jumps to marijuana, which I am not talking about in this case! I am talking about the dozens of plants like elderberry, echinacea, goldenseal, St. John’s wort, mullein, comfrey, garlic, hawthorn, ginseng, yarrow, and so on. The list is long, and learning about their medicinal properties and how to prepare them has been one of my goals this year. I am not alone in this endeavor as many other folks in our community have been on a similar learning journey. We have been joining forces in making tinctures and salves and such of late.

     Surprisingly, the medicinal used of plants is also a point of common interest with our Amish neighbors. One evening when I was out on a stroll with Caris down the lane to a little bridge flanked by elderberries, we heard horse hooves approaching. Ira and Lena’s buggy pulled into view and as they passed us, they stopped and Ira hopped out with a knife and bag. “You weren’t going to get those elderberries, were you?” he asked me. Although I had been eyeing their slow progress ripening with exactly the thought of harvest in mind, it was easy to let them go to neighbors who have been very helpful and generous to us. Lena and I had begun comparing notes about medicinal herbs and their uses this summer, and when I lent her my copy of Rosemary Gladstar’s book Herbal Recipes for Vibrant Health, I think it must have opened up another world of possibilities for her. She meekly apologized now for not having it to return since she had lent it to a series of other Amish women who she thought would be very interested. “Where could we get more copies?” she asked me now. Without book stores or internet access, I realize this sort of information doesn’t easily make it into Amish communities. Without hesitation I offered to help her as I understand exactly her enthusiasm!

Horses making a compost delivery

     So, if all goes as it went last year, this winter I will be trying out garlic-mullein ear oil for Caris’s ear infections instead of plying her immediately with antibiotics, and elderberry-echinacea tincture instead of cough syrup, and black walnut-chapparal salve for ringworm (instead of whatever over-the-counter thing it was I reluctantly applied despite the pharmacist’s total ambivalence about whether it could be used on babies.) I confess to feeling rather clueless during our daughter’s first year in the realm of home medicine; her first fever sent me into a total panic, something I am sure every parent is familiar with. It feels good to be a little more empowered and educated in this one area, and to know that the arsenal of conventional western medicines are still available to us when needed as backup. If you too are interested in learning a little more about herbal alternatives, I have found a great online resource is Aviva Romm’s website- https://avivaromm.com. And if you are reading this having a little skepticism about deviating from the canon of western medicine, I offer this consideration: our water, soil, food-supply and medicine cabinets are now considerably contaminated from over-use of antibiotics (with no new strains available to us) and bacteria is only gaining in its resistance. Europe has much more progressive policies regarding use of antibiotics in livestock (ie-only used when animals are sick vs. to help animals put on weight more rapidly) and in their use with humans (ie, children are not automatically given them for ear infections). Clearly we still have a lot to learn, or perhaps relearn!

Caris paying a visit to her favorite Aronia berry bush

      Aside from the properties of plants useful for healing, there are scores of plants that are wild and free, edible and chock full of vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants for building up our health and vitality in times of wellness too! Some of the most nutrient dense plants our there are those considered to be weeds or are otherwise not found in grocery aisles. Dandelion greens, Curly dock greens, stinging nettles, Aronia berries, and the wide world of edible mushrooms. We just learned this year that Aronia berries are now classified as a cancer-fighting treatment because of their extremely high antioxidant content. This is nice validation for us for having planted a dozen Aronia bushes around our property. And despite their astringent, slightly bitter sweetness, Caris makes a beeline for them every time we go outside in the morning. She is a quick study in the department of wild edibles, and we munch our way through long stroller walks—black locust blossoms and clover heads in spring, mulberries and dewberries in early summer, wild grapes, Aronia and serviceberries in late summer, perhaps rosehips and autumn olive berries in late fall. Beats paying for Flintstone’s chewable multivitamins!

Sarah spinning natural dyed wool

     Last on my review of the amazing properties of plants, I cannot forget to mention their dye properties! For some reason, this is a realm that has always fascinated me, and thus I have been experimenting and studying about all that can be done with plant dyes. Plant dyes are the most stupidly easy thing to learn (obvious to anyone who has accidentally given themselves grass or berry stains) and also quite a complex thing: though plants rich in tannic acid (think acorns and oak galls, black walnut, barks of various kinds) have no problem fixing themselves to the fibers of natural materials (like wool, silk, cotton), most other plants need an intermediary chemical to bind with fibers and become permanent. Those chemicals are things like iron, alum, copper, oxalic or tannic acid, and several more toxic ones. Each chemical, or “mordant”, reacts slightly differently, altering the color sometimes considerably. So from one plant (or flower, bark, nut, wood, etc.) you can get a huge range of color. Those are the basics, and start throwing in different techniques of printing and wrapping and using hot or cold baths and so on and you have a hobby that could keep you busy for a long, long time! One fantasy I have is of planting a whole dyer’s garden specifically to cultivate dye flowers and plants. What keeps holding me up is the fact that our land is already so full of wild plants, flowers, and trees ideal for dying that I have more than enough to work with already! Here are some of my latest experiments, learned just this summer, to show what is possible with printing rather than straight dying.

Some new natural dying techniques using light sensitive willow bark dye, and maple leaves/ St. John's wort plus iron

     With my apparent enthusiasm for the amazing powers of plants, perhaps it will come as no surprise that one project I have been chipping away at the past month has been planting dozens of perennial bushes, vines, and plants around our house, focusing on things that are either edible, medicinal, dye-yielding, or that provide habitat and nectar for native bees, butterflies and hummingbirds. With any luck, next spring we will be bursting with new growth and new possibilities to keep us busy for a long time to come!

Five Years Anniversary

     July is tough month to leave the homestead. In the past few weeks, both Mike and I have found ourselves called away for various periods of time (for work and family visits mostly), and though our home economic situation is starting to pan out as we had hoped it would, our homestead has suffered for our inattentions. When we finally returned a few days ago, we found that in our short absence, nature had filled the vacuum. The electric strand fence that we had proudly strung around our corn, confident that it would keep marauding raccoons at bay, had shorted out due to the growth of weeds underneath it and the corn had been ravaged, almost down to the last ear. Our tomatoes (my favorite vegetable to grow and generally my baby in the garden) were under attack from above by tomato horn worms and below from blight, reduced in places to skeleton vines. Noooo! An hour’s work culled the majority of dead leaves and produced several dozen fat green worms that Caris and I gleefully fed to the fish in the pond. Still, the tomatoes have clearly taken a hit and look much sadder for it. It is hard not to feel overwhelmed by all of the demands of the homestead at this time of year. It is the turning point where all of our spring gardening fantasies crash and burn as they confront the realities of pest pressure, weeds and neglect.

      Not everything has been a loss though, and fortunately, we were welcomed back to the greetings of many friends and neighbors at a community potluck where we swiftly had a week’s worth of meal invites, parties, game/social dates (for the adults), and play dates (for Caris) lined up. Many others in our community are feeling overwhelmed too, and we realized if we could team up and share in the work load, we would all be happier and more productive for it. So group canning sessions have commenced, and the hope, at least, of more work party rotations in weeks to come.

Sunday game day has become an institution

Corn cooked in the solar tube

     One of the big take aways for me from this experiment in homestead living is that living in close community is the way to go. I could reluctantly leave many other parts of the lifestyle—the animals, the garden, the orchard, house building and all of the many other physically demanding aspects of the lifestyle. But if Mike and I were alone endeavoring to do it all, we wouldn’t make it. Instead, we are regularly saved by the good company, help, and wisdom of friends living close by, sharing in our ups and downs. From several older and more experienced neighbors down the road, for example, I received the good advice to triple strand our electric wire around the corn patch and scalp the earth underneath it. We received a trunk load of free organic corn, excess to the farmer who grew it who was happy to see it go to a human mouth and not a raccoon. Another kind neighbor walked me out to her corn patch and picked out a half dozen ears for our supper when she heard our bad news. Instead of feeling devastated, now I feel buoyed to try again next year with my newfound advice and my belly full of delicious corn.

     This isn’t the first time we have felt overwhelmed with the demands of our life here. It has been a constant refrain since we began this project five years ago. Sometimes I only have eyes to see the half done projects and all that we don’t have time or energy to accomplish on our to-do list. I was taken aback by the praise of a neighboring homestead friend who pointed out how impressed she was with what we had built and created in our five years here. “Yes,” I countered, “but our gardens aren’t doing that well and we haven’t made headway with the last big pieces of house construction. We haven’t been able to even make a chicken coop!” (My dream of having chickens has been on hold for years!) She countered back with, “Your bean trellis looks amazing, and sweet potatoes vines are spilling everywhere, your garden looks great to me. And your house… you’ve done SO much.” It is the first time that I stopped to consider that she might be right—maybe I just don’t have eyes to see it. As I considered what we have accomplished, and what might be reasonable to encourage other to try and create from scratch, I decided to do a short survey of our five years of major projects and review what worked and didn’t, what we would do differently. I thought it might be useful information for anyone else who might be considering starting down the adventurous road of homesteading!

Pond-
     Although the pond we had dug on our land our first season did not involve much time or sweat labor on our part (we hired an excavator to dig it in three days for around $3000 which we fundraised), it has turned out to be a great asset to our land and a great decision to make at the outset. Our pond helps us stay cool, attracts wildlife, is home to our growing fish nursery, and best of all, is a reliable, free source of water for irrigation downhill, which we use all the time. When we started thinking about the layout of our land, we hadn’t consulted an excavator specializing in ponds (there is some logic to their placement in terms of catchment area and damming possibilities), so I feel lucky that it worked on our land to have it uphill from our cultivated land. If I were doing this again, I would try to choose a piece of land that did have pond site possibilities uphill from where I wanted to move water to. We also lucked out with our Missouri clay-rich soil that holds water effortlessly. I know what the hassle and expense of installing a pond liner or attempting other methods of water retention in other soil types, so it is something to take into consideration. What would I do differently? I would have had a plan ahead of time for moving the mound of top soil that the excavator removed to the side for us to use later as it is a HUGE hassle to move it when we need some elsewhere.

Swales/Orchard-
     Our hugelculture swales are another big earthworks project we started in our first year, by hand digging trenches along contour of a hillside and slowly planting fruit trees into them. They were a big expenditure of time and energy to do by hand, even with the help of friends, so something I would DEFINITELY do differently is to rent a small backhoe to expedite the process. We could have done a month’s heavy work in a day for several hundred dollars more. I would have used that saved digging energy to plant cultivar fruit trees in our first year, instead of in our third. Another lesson learned is to fill a vacuum faster than nature can, so I would have quickly planted a ground covering on top of the swales instead of procrastinating and having many times the work weeding later. Still, the fruit trees we did plant in the swales are all doing well and putting on their first fruit this year!

House- 
     Clearly, our house is where we have spent the majority of our time, energy and money thus far. So I was surprised when I tallied the results of all of our construction expenses thus far and found that it came to a grand total of…. drum roll please… $22,500! (That doesn’t include our cistern and we are still building, so I think it would be safe to round up to 25K.) Where did we save the most money? On labor costs first and foremost—we have done most of the work ourselves, and only around $2,500 of that is for paid help during our fall crunch trying to get the roof on. But that saved money translated into four years of our lives working quite hard, which isn't for everyone... We also saved quite a bit scouting used windows and doors, second hand wood for interior framing, subfloor and the underside of our roof, and really cheap local lumber for everything else. Also, the bulk of our walls are strawbales, which cost $1,000 in total and plastered with clay and sand on the cheap. It took forever, but saved us quite a bit. The most expensive part of the house was the roof, costing us $7,000 total from rafters to metal and some labor costs. But no leaks yet!


     What would I have done differently? One thing I definitely consider is whether it was worth using timbers from our land for our timberframe. Visitors and tour groups always rave about the cool look of live-edge round logs, but in a sense, it cost us a year extra of work, rather than just ordering pre-milled square timbers from our local mill. If we had taken the short cut, we could have built our frame our first year instead of our second. And although I love our house with all of its character, and I don’t exactly regret the cool learning process of working with roundwood…. I just can’t say I would recommend it to anyone else. That was a tough year. It also occurred to Mike and I, as we are in the process of throwing up a simple stick frame garden shed, that if we were to build another cabin on our land, we would NOT make it strawbale. Working with straw bales (and plastering them) was another time-costly and frustrating process. We would build stud frame and infill with lightly clay-coated straw or recycled batting insulation which we would plaster on the inside and find used siding for the outside. We probably could have saved ourselves another year doing it that way. Still, the thermal properties of the straw bales have been amazing, and we went through not even two cords of wood to heat our home last year—not bad!

Water/Cistern-

     Our water systems are one thing I feel glad we have tackled early and have good, redundant systems for. Our rainwater catchment cistern behind our house is one such system. It works well, almost too well, since our cistern is always full. The cistern so far doesn’t leak and last winter, our water supply line to the house did freeze but didn’t burst and we thawed it back out quickly with a heating coil we had pre-installed. So all in all, everything is working smoothly and cost us (including pump and plumbing and some labor costs) around $5,000. What would I do differently? One thing we didn’t consider when installing it all is the future of hot water in our house. We would love to try a solar hot water heater, but we would need a pressure tank that could always be kept full to resupply the hot water as it gets used. Currently with our beloved hand-pump, we can pressurize a water tank, but it slowly dissipates until empty and we pump it back up again. So we are trying to figure out other options, and it seems like the easiest is going to be some sort of manual system, at least for now.

Our dream garden shed is finally happening!

Gardens-

     We have slowly been expanding our gardens and trying different styles—raised beds on contour  in one area, flat beds in straight rows in another, etc. Lately I have been wishing that we had invested right away in getting a detailed soil analysis done and remineralizing and fertilizing the soil for a year before planting. Maybe even planting one year of a fertilizing cover crop. I know that soil fertility is something that takes time to slowly build up, and so maybe there is no short cut. But just getting things planted takes quite a bit of our energy, so fertility and compost making are almost always last on the list of what gets done. Still, we continue to eat out of our gardens and produce at least some extra to preserve for the winter. What we are learning is that yet another plus to living where we do is that there are lots of very cheap options for local, chemical free produce and grain (thanks to Amish farmers especially). We just bought a 5 gallon bucket of essentially organic tomatoes this morning from our neighbor for $4 to help off set our beleaguered tomato plant’s lower yields. I think that might buy one fancy heirloom tomato in the city. If it were on the small side…




















     It has been a long road home and we are still going, but for now, I am celebrating the five years of hard and wonderful work that got us here. Writing this post has actually been a great reminder that we HAVE done a lot and I am not taking a a minute of it for granted! Maybe I will kick up my heels for the afternoon in our beautiful house and actually rest a little. Well, maybe....