Summer Rain

This is Sunday morning, something that hasn't been really different from other days for us for the past two years. It's raining, softly, not so that it should be keeping us from working outside, but somehow it is. Jay and Alma are sitting on the couch reading the Sunday Funnies, there's music on, and a cauliflower pie baking. Aside from the dairy (lots of cheese, some milk) and onion, it's all homegrown. Thanks Mollie Katzen! This is what our life is today. In a few months, Jay will start his new job teaching English at Fortuna Union High School, and things will change. It's interesting how I'm feeling about that. Sure, we're going to be more secure, have full health coverage, and be paying into retirement again, but I just don't think I'm cut out to be a traditional "stay at home mom" getting dinner on the table, keeping the house orderly, dishes done, laundry washed, etc. And there will still be farm work to do, because we're not planning to quit. I don't know how things will work, but I am happy to say that I know they will work.

For now, things are growing great guns. Seems like the corn puts on an inch a day, just like the weeds. We ate fried green tomatoes, have been eating broccoli and cauliflower, garlic, spinach, but really we're in a holding pattern until the weather gets warm enough to ripen the 'maters, grow us peppers, get squash and beans pumping, and all. It is quite exciting to see! We are not able to open the stand or get to market yet, but we are so close. Come on summer heat!

Alma is growing so quickly. She already seems much more like a 4 year old than 3, and is thriving in our world, although this time of year is hard on her. We should do so much more to get her to town to play with other kids, and to play with her ourselves, but there always seems so much to do. We have a goal to get down to the river a couple times a week to swim and have a cook-out. That hasn't happened yet, but we will keep trying.

I love seeing her brain develop, her imagination expressed. She is very interested in making things, likes to "wash" dishes, and loves to haul her cat around playing mommy. Just now, she put some watermelon pieces into a small jelly jar with water and a pinch of salt, got a whisk, and stirred it all up. Honestly, it's not bad! What comes with this little scientist and creator is lots of cleaning up, and I often have to surpress my initial "no" response to her ideas because I know it is so good for her brain to have her hands in things, to have an idea and actually try it out, despite the messes and wasted food. I find that "yes" is more and more rewarding.

Time flies on!

A New Year

We shall forget that it has been over a year since the last post. We shall forget the promises made and broken about posting more frequently. Instead, we shall revel in the new year. Spring is almost upon us, most specifically denoted by the almost 400 tomato plants in the greenhouses, and the half-naked toddler (now little girl, I think) running from the rooster. Yes, it is happening. The plum trees are in full bloom, the pear is about to pop, we've had our first round of grape hyacinth, and the seed orders arrived. We've been busy adding a new greenhouse (thanks Charles!) to our rotation, and keeping starts healthy. This week, if all goes well, we may start working the soil, preparing to plant some brassicas for late Spring market and eating.

Our hens are laying quite well, even through the rain and cold (more cold than rain), and we have 17 hens. Two babies haven't started laying yet, but I expect them to begin in a month or so. I'm thinking of adding 4 birds to the flock because one of our local feed stores is getting Coco Marans, a breed that lays chocolate brown eggs. That would give us varying colors of buff, white, green, khaki (from the two baby hens), and chocolate brown. Cool? I think so, but I'm not sure I'm ready to do the chick start again. The birds have prove wily, and are mostly out wandering. When we get the gardens really going, we'll have to reconsider the pen and how to keep them contained and happy.

Market season won't begin until May 8 in Fortuna, but we're hoping to have brassicas, peas, beans, and starts at least. FORTUNA! Yes, we have been invited to be members of the Fortuna Farmers Market, the one closest to us. We are very excited about the prospect. The farmstand is really going to take priority this year, and we are planning to only be in Garberville and Fortuna markets. Now, deciding who goes to market and who opens the stand is a whole other thing...

Pictures of the new greenhouse, new fruit trees, and other exciting projects will be forthcoming. Now, don't take that for a promise...

The Rain Sets In

I think it has happened: the rain has come. Today's forecast was "partly cloudy" which is giving us drippy, moderately showery skies. From now on, I'll expect water to fall from the sky every day, unless the forecast calls for sunshine. What this means is that the soil is already wet enough to be difficult to work, which I'm told will last until March or so. What are we to do then, when we can't be out working the land?

Yesterday Jay and I measured the garden space immediately adjacent to the house, and marked out where we want to build a deck. He will take these figures and make a grid that we can use to plan the house garden, experimenting with moving paths, building beds, keeping what's there, moving it, cutting hedges back, and all that fun stuff. Then it's a matter of deciding what we're going to grow there, and perusing seed catalogs. The next dry day we will measure another section of garden, just behind the truck box. Slowly we will have a more accurate picture of the space available, and be better able to design gardens for the long term.

Jay is planning to spend some time tinkering with the small engines that aren't working, which he can do under the truck barn roof. It will be cold, but stays quite dry, and it will be nice to have the chipper/shredder, gas weed whipper, and chain saws up and running. I have indoor projects pending, working on finishing several knitting and crocheting things, and we will continue making Christmas gifts as well.

Will these things occupy us all the way to March? Don't know; don't really think so. If you see posts in a couple of months begging for your movie suggestions, please be kind and send lots of advice our way. I am also looking forward to attending more North Coast Parents events, which will take us to Eureka several times a week, and Alma will start her music class at HSU on December 4.

We planted the next set of starts in the ground this morning, just before the rain started in earnest. Hopefully we have enough onions, leeks, carrots, beets, and various brassicas to keep us in vegetable matter until spring. Jay picked wild mustard greens yesterday, which were delicious with roast beef, so if our starts fail, at least we'll have some wild greens :)

Here's a photo of Miss Alma on her second birthday, in her new wagon. The tricycle we bought to go with it was a victim of a hit and run (well, not exactly, but let's just say that Daddy couldn't see the poor cycle from the cab of Oscar) the very next day, and we haven't replaced it yet, but expect photos of Alma speeding along on her cycle soon.

Busy, busy!

My brother asked me the other day if we were getting bored yet. Let's see: clearing 4 acres of overgrown filled-with-heirloom-plants, raising a child who is almost two, figuring out what it is we can realistically do with what we have once it is cleared, finding a community, hosting out of town guests almost weekly, cooking and cleaning, taking time to read Dr. Seuss, nope, not bored yet!

It is somehow more difficult to tick things off the to-do list when you don't have a defined person or group of people counting on you to accomplish things. We're finding that we set priorities, begin work on them, then discover that some other huge thing needs to happen before the thing we thought we wanted done can be completed, or (as happened recently), we find out that a temporary fix needs to be undone immediately. Jay had been working daily on clearing some space around ancient pear and apple trees, taking as many as three truckloads of green waste to the dump every day. Our goal was to have that space cleared, tilled, composted, and planted in cover crop before things get really wet here, in hopes that it would make a good spring garden area. He's really close to having it clear enough to till, but yesterday we found out that the portable classroom (see one of the first posts) in which we parked all our books and some extraneous furniture, needs to be cleaned out so Uncle Charles can begin renovations next week. Time to switch gears! This on top of having just had two (very very fun) weekend visits in a row, and a North Coast Parents event scheduled for next Sunday. OK - go!

What this means is: 1) the pink trailer (the one in which my grandparents lived after the '64 flood, and that no one has been in for 5 or 6 years) needs to be accessed, which means that: a) the rotting deck needs to be pulled off; b) the overgrowth of hazelnut, fig, maple, berries needs to be cleared; c) the wood loaded up and dumped; d) all rotting metal and broken glass removed so we don't pop a tire on the truck; so that 2) we can pack up some of the junk in the pink trailer to make room for 3) moving boxes of books from the portable to the trailer. Follow all that? I only barely did, and I'm working on the project!

This pic is of Oscar the truck backed up into the front yard of the trailer.



Here's one to give you a sense of the scope of the project. No, we won't have to cut the trees down completely, but we will have to thin them out considerably.



We're really close to being able to just back Oscar right up to the front door, so the actual moving of the boxes won't be a pain; I just thought you'd enjoy hearing how one project engenders so many others!

I will leave you with a few random pictures from around the place. It is so beautiful here! I wish I could have you smell it right now, with the warm Autumn sun streaming in the window, the breeze soft, bread baking, the only sign of the dark time to come the slight yellowing of fig leaves.

The Pepperwood Cat in his element, carefully holding the road down:



Old-fashioned rose "stolen" from the one-room Pepperwood school house decades ago:



I call this one "Century Plant with Naked Lady"



And an Alma pic, just to brighten things up:

Catching Up

Oh heavens, more than a month since my last post! We've been busy, not just with the Wedding Celebration, but with actually figuring out what we're doing here. Some things we've been working on:

the winter garden



our first 10 gallon brew



finger painting (which ended up more like baby painting)



and much more.

Really, the past few months have been about finding our way, and deciding what large projects need to be tackled and when. Jay wanted to re-roof the garage (and we still will eventually), but after the first rain we saw that it flooded from the front just as much as from the roof, and really wasn't going be a viable indoor space without some major renovations. It moved farther down the list. Our neighbor Mel (of Flood Plain Produce) ploughed some space for our winter garden on the front patch of land just on the Avenue of the Giants, and Jay and Alma worked hard getting seeds in. Things are popping up like mad; it remains to be seen if the soil gets too wet for things to grow, but this is all an experiment at this point anyway. Things we planted: kale, cabbage, onions of varying kinds, lettuce, beets. Here's a pic of the first plot we planted:



We have identified what we think will be a prime spring garden space, and Jay has spent the last few days whacking down about a half-acre of berry canes. He has taken three full loads of green waste off-site, and the plot isn't close to clear yet. Yes, we're currently giving away our chippable waste because we have yet to get the chipper/shredder repaired. That's on the list too :) For those of you who have been here, the location of the spring garden is between the apple trees and the hazelnut, where we have the super big tent pitched. You'd be surprised: there's a path to walk all the way from the tent to the pear tree (yes, there is a pear tree in there!) and back to the road. Short-term, we're looking at finishing that clearing, then covering it with compost from the zoo (cool, huh? the Eureka Zoo gives away free compost!), and planting red clover, vetch, and favas as a winter cover crop.

We have also been busy making and canning things for winter use. I've done a dozen pints of yellow wax beans; we made catsup from beautiful tomatoes from Flood Plain Produce, canned half the batch and made chipotle/blackberry barbecue sauce from half; we also made a basic, concentrated tomato sauce that we canned; with Miss Erica Cherry we put up something like 14 half-pints of blackberry jam; we've dried herbs and made pesto from a load of almost dead herb baskets my Uncle Charles liberated (and we salvaged a bunch of rosemary, mint and sage plants that we're hoping will survive the winter); dried bags of apples and plums; and Jay has a batch of blackberry juice fermenting, with the hope that it'll be a tasty blackberry wine in a few months. Up next is more drying of apples, making apple cider, canning/freezing corn that should be ripe any day now, and in November the persimmons should be going off. Do we have enough vegetable matter to get us through to the next season's harvest? Don't think so, but I do think we have a good store on hand, which should cut down on grocery bills in the coming months.

There is a distinct lack of society here in Pepperwood, and although we have some fantastic neighbors, none of them have kids anywhere near Alma's age. Through a random encounter at Los Bagels I heard about a group called North Coast Parents, and we've been going to activities about once a week. We're really happy with the kinds of things they plan, and the people seem really nice. As Jay said after the first thing we did, he was pleasantly surprised that we weren't the oldest people there.

The weather has taken on an autumnal air lately, although it got so hot this afternoon that we took some time off to throw the baby in the river. Every day more leaves are turning toward yellow, and the evenings and mornings seem cooler. We're really looking forward to the change in the season, and to what the shorter days will bring. There will still be ample work to do outdoors, but we have indoor projects in mind too, and I am anticipating time to knit and crochet as well as write more frequently.

As a sign off, here's a picture from Alma's first encounter with licking the cake batter beater:

Data Cable Located!

Still not many pictures (I'm awful at taking pictures), but here is one I thought you'd enjoy. It's a long shot of Jay and Alma picking flowers on the first day we were actually here.



This is the berry pie I made Jay for his birthday. It was tart, but I only used honey (at Jay's request) to sweeten it. I did, however, make almond whipped cream to accompany it, with a good dose of sugar.



Here's a shot into the kitchen from the living room:



And one of Miss Alma, obviously up to some hijinks before bed:



I'll take some photos of our little garden tomorrow, but Jay has forbidden me to shoot the interior until we get things more in hand. The really exciting news is that I finished cleaning and clearing the kitchen yesterday, Jay got all our clothes hung up in the closets, and I found a dress for the big day. We're all so thrilled, that most of us were in bed by 9:15. Thank you, and good night!

One Week In

Remember how I thought we'd have time to write more once we moved? Wrong. There is so much more to do than I anticipated, although I think I had an inkling or two. We've been here for just over a week now, and the house still looks like a hurricane blew through. To be fair, with a toddler in the house that is it's natural state, but this is much worse. Picture moving your fully furnished house into a similarly sized fully furnished house, add a handful of toddler, four acres of wild berries, two cats, some poison oak, and you might get the idea.

I have had time to make two batches of sourdough bread, all from memory because I can't find my bread book. If I took the time to list all the things I can't find, I'd spend more time that it would actually take to locate, unpack, and put away the things I'm listing. It suffices to say that today I uncovered the bra I'd been looking for, but we have yet to locate dental floss or Q-tips. But, as a very good friend recently reminded me, the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time, so I consider it a small miracle each time we get one thing unpacked, cut down, thrown out, cleaned, or some otherwise taken care of. It is feeling more and more like home.

Jay's birthday was on Sunday, and I managed to find enough ripe berries to make our first pie in honor of the occasion. We took the day off and went to Eureka to buy an air compressor. What fun! Jay has been spending his time putting together a nice little garden plot (pictures will follow as soon as we find the data cable...notice a theme?), cleaning the truck barn, and cutting down brush and trees. We were absolutely thrilled to find a place we can dump yard waste, including whole trees and unpainted wood, for free, so he has been doing his darndest to clear space in anticipation of hosting 80 people for our wedding celebration in a couple of weeks. I, on the other hand, have been focusing on cleaning and settling the kitchen, along with dealing with a clingy 21 month old who had a very scary fever last night.

Mostly, we're happy and very well occupied, but I am starting to be a little worried about finding our own society, and making sure Alma has ample time and encouragement to play. Right now, she most frequently pretends to clean, paint, weed, etc., and I am reminded of the real and frightening fact that neither Jay nor I know how to play easily. I think tomorrow we are going to go into Fortuna and sit at the park and let Alma explore on her own, if we can crowbar ourselves off the property. Really, there is so much to do that I finally understand why my grandmother never felt the need to leave.

It is definitely beautiful here. I hear more birdsongs, see more variety of plant life, and smell fresh, clean air unlike anywhere else I've ever lived. I love the darkness of night uninhibited by street lights; not having a clock in our bedroom; letting Alma run around naked most of the day. Right now the almost full moon is just peeking over the tops of the trees to the southwest, in a purplelilacblush sky. There is no smog to dilute the shine, it is still light enough outside to not need lights, and the birds are calling the eve. Paradise. (once we find our stuff...)