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: