Riot – February and March 2013 – Months 52-53

OVER FOUR YEARS OF RIOT! This is the Riot for the months of February and March 2013 for the three of us. My summary of our first three years is here. Edson fixed the calculator: all go tither to crunch those numbers! Gasoline.  Calculated per person. 9.3 gallons pp. 22.6% of the US National Average Electricity. This …

Other Goings On: Racking the Wine, Painting Earth Day Signs

I see it only now, at the end of the day, how much was accomplished: cleaned out the chicken coop,  collected four eggs (we’re back to four!), inspected the beehives, painted the last of the signage for our town’s Earth Day, and racked the wine.  Four. Amie paints her own sign in the new basement …

Sewing – a Lesson in Delegation and Giving

Amie sewed this! I am very terribly awfully bad at sewing – any kind of needlework, actually. I blame it on a tyrannical needlework teacher I had in secondary school. Also, I don’t have the patience. So I am happy to delegate the learning and practicing of this skill  to my daughter. She took a sewing class …

More Seedlings at the Center of the Universe

More and more lights are being switched on in the basement. In fact, we’re almost full up! We’ve got three shelves going now, the bottom one with heat mat, the top two for “growing up” and cold germinators. I also have  a couple of flats sitting on the shelf in the porch, behind a curtain: …

Of Flowers

I’m sitting at my desk, drinking hot tea of .         chamomile, .     peppermint, .   licorice, and honey. There’s a book open, in the pool of lamp light. It’s William Carlos Williams’s Collected Poems, at “Asphodel.” Reading it is like descending, step by step, into a deep sorrow, from .   root, …

Medicine Garden

This, dear friends, is a massive apothecary! The beginnings of it. Some of these envelopes hold just 5 seeds. Many hold seeds that need scraping with sandpaper and intricate regimes of warm-moist and/or cold-dry conditions. Some will take years (years!) to germinate. Suffice it to say, these aren’t your average lettuce seeds. Each one is …