Robin Hill Gardens – Page 81 – Be joyful though you have considered all the facts

The 100-Books-a-Month Challenge

I discovered the Home-Grown Kids 100-books-a-month challenge through Sherry’s blog, and just knew Amie would go for it.

We already read about 100 books a month, only they’re often the same ones. (Could it be we sometimes read the same book 100 times? It sure seems that way sometimes!) So our challenge will be to read 100 different books.

Part of the challenge will also be to give Amie a better idea of what “a hundred” means. She is in her exaggeration stage: everything “a hundred and a million!”Â nowadays. And though she needs no help with addition and subtraction (up to 20), those hardly contribute to estimation.

We also discussed what “challenge” means. We agreed on a definition: “something we do that is not easy, but a bit difficult but still not impossible for us to do and that is fun and that we learn from”.

Amie is in charge of keeping the list – I hope she catches on to the fun and usefulness of keeping lists. We might also make little notes about whether we liked the book or not, and why, and if we would reread it. Amie will also be reading to me, so watch out for some “first books” on the list as well.

So far (today) we’ve read:

Independence Days – Week 11

Independence Days goes on and on and, round and round.

Not much to report this week: caught a bug and though it’s not getting worse, it’s not much getting better either, so I’m on a low fire here.

Plant. Nothing. The mung bean sprouting didn’t go too well: I must be doing something wrong.

Harvest. Usual (chard, kale, parsley). The one broccoli, I am happy to report, is growing a fruit – I’m happy to say it’s still exciting, to see a fruit grow. Harvesting the grass from the wheat berries.

Perserve. Roasted, pureed and froze more sugar pie pumpkin. Roasted the pumpkin seeds.Â More pumpkins are stored in the basement, waiting for processing. Drying mint, sage, oregano and apples.

A good friend of ours came for a short visit and we showed him our pantry (the canned jars, the sugar and the bags of flour, beans and lentils in the chest freezer). It made him so intensely happy, and he gave me a hug, congratulating me. What a great reaction!

Waste not. Made field bag out of DH’s torn pants and the usual (Freezing our Buns, etc.)

Want not. No want-nots.

Build Community Food Systems. Nope.

Eat the Food. We ate what we harvested. I made a yummy fish-lentil concoction with the frozen bouillabaisse left over from our fish stew feast several weeks ago. And our homegrown basil pesto went over really well with our guest. We did do a take out yesterday, of Chinese food, since neither of us felt up to cooking: a sure sign I don’t have enough ready-made, warm-it-up meals in the freezer.

Home Made Field and Art Material Bag

After being slowed down for the so-manieth time when running out the door by having to collect all of Amie’s desired art materials, I decided to make a field bag, like the one on Camp Creek Blog. One of DH’s ruined khakis served just fine, and the sewing machine cooperated.

I just cut out a piece of a leg to the height we wanted (the largest sketchbook) plus extra for the seams. I turned it inside out, stitched the bottom together and seamed up the top all around. I cut a back pocket out of the pants and sewed that onto the front. Then I cut a narrow strip along the seam of the other leg for the shoulder strap, stitched along the other side, then turned it inside out, and sewed each end to the bag.

What’s in it?

Maybe I can make one for a girl whose sixth birthday party we’re invited to, to stuff with art materials like these. That would make a neat homemade Christmas present for kids and adults alike. I could embroider something special but simple on the front to make up for the messy seams. And I’m going to need one too. I like the second bag Lori made, which integrates the back and the side pockets: I’ll try that next!

Summer 2009 Tally and Notes for 2010 (#1)

We went into the city to visit, among other things, the MIT Museum. Amie fell in love with Kismet, the emotional robot:

And I came back with a bug. That’ll show me to come down my hill…Normally, when I feel that kind of pain in my throat, it’s bad news. But I kept up with the elderberry (I have capsules with dried elderberry and elderberry syrup), and a day later it was no worse, andÂ another day later it was slightly better, and today I am sure I beat it! This afternoon I might venture out into the newly cold, bright weather to put compost and straw on the beds.

But in any case, this is what I really wanted to post:

…

The first in a series of posts tallying the Spring and Summer harvest in lbs, success, and satisfaction, and noting recommendations for next year’s Spring and Summer garden.

Lettuce was our first crop. I started the seedlings (Black-Seeded Simpson) in February and moved them into the cold frame up front in April. There they survived the last good frosts to make for a big bed of twenty very yummy lettuces. For a long time they were our only but seemingly never-ending harvest as I cut only the outer leaves, for many months. It was very satisfying. I even got to give some to our neighbors. I pulled the plants when they got bitter, though they never actually bolted. Unfortunately several of my in situ succession plantings of lettuce got eaten by slugs or drowned by the rains, so this turned out to be the only lettuce crop we had.

20 Black-Seeded Simpson lettuces, harvested over a period of two months (? lb)

2010: Sow the Black-Seeded Simpson and some other varieties too, and more successions, all from seedlings indoors/greenhouse (not in situ). They don’t need a prime sunny spot. They will need the cold frame (which I can convert any bed to) or at least a row cover in the beginning.

I sowed the tomatoes at the beginning of April and all those seedlings made it into the garden, most in the beds and some in containers. Even though I kept potting them up and transplanted them at a deeper level each time, to make them stronger, the young tomato plants looked leggy and scrawny to me. They never did put on many leaves, and in the end what leaves they did put on were attacked by blight. But the yield in fruits was nevertheless successful, I think, or my first time growing tomatoes from seed.

Sungold Cherry tomatoes (3 plants): 3.7 lbs.
Ida Gold (9 plants): 9.5 lbs
Glacier (9 plants): 9.1 lbs

2010: The plants probably didn’t succumb to the blight because I planted them so far from each other: 3 rows of 5 plants each in a 4’x8′ bed.Â I’d like to grow more tomatoes next year, though. We’ll grow most of them in the movable hoop house and I am considering growing them closer together.I’d like to grow these varieties (Sungold is the best cherry tomato I’ve grown so far) plus some high-yielding plum or beef tomatoes for saucing. I need to fertilize the plants more often. And in the greenhouse I will have to keep an eye on the blooms, and probably do some hand pollinating.

After these two successes, a bad one, actually the worst crop of 2009: the potatoes. The Keuka Gold did okay, but the rest was a dismal failure, especially the towers. The towers probably didn’t get enough sun. I had to slash down the plants prematurely because of the blight, so many potatoes didn’t get to grow big enough.

Bintje (8’x4’x3′): 5 lbs seed > 106.6 oz (6 lbs 10.2 oz) = 1:1.33 (seed/yield)
Salem (4’x4’x3′): 2.5 lbs seed > 17.5 oz (1 lb and 1.5 oz) = 1:0.43
Banana fingerlings (3’x5’x1′): 1 lb seed > 8.6 oz = 1:0.53
Keuka Gold (4’x4’x1′): 2.5 lbs seed > 135 oz (8 lbs 5 oz) = 1:3.375
Dark Red Norland (4’x4’x1′): 2.5 lbs seed > 61 oz (3 lb 10 oz) = RATIO 1:1.5

2010: Let’s assume the weather and national blight don’t conspire against my potato crop next year, still I am considering not growing them again. Potatoes are an important part of our diet, they are easy to grow and maintain, they keep well in a simple root cellar, and organic potatoes are expensive to buy…Â But I don’t have enough space in my garden beds. I could move the towers to a sunnier spot, but then I’d have to buy all that compost to fill them again (previous soil has blight), and I’m not so sure anymore if the tower system works (One Straw has his doubts too). I could get a community garden plot just for potatoes, but also our community garden were riddled with blight, so that’s out. Also, the seed potatoes are expensive, and they’ll probably cost more next year. If I grow them, I need to let them grow bigger, and find a way of shoring up the plants in case of heavy rains, and maybe grow them in buckets…

(Mostly) Homemade Halloween Costume

My first attempt at making a costume or even a piece of clothing. Amie chose the fabrics for the cape and the skirt and patiently tried it on at several stages. I sewed it together on my machine, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying, but mostly laughing. If there was a prize for the crookedest hem… But it all held together through much dancing, crawling and getting up and sitting down again.

The hat was going to be the trickiest part, as all our fabric was so flimsy. A friend, hearing of my predicament, gave us this hat (with hair attached) as a backup, in case the one I made failed to pass muster. DH however showed itÂ to Amie before I could even attempt it, and that was that.

I figure I’ll be fine with my one-stitch machine and improvisation skills as long as Amie wants to be a witch or (even easier) a ghost.Â Anything beyond that, I’ll have to get some sewing lessons.

I also baked about 30 big cookies in the shape of pumpkins for the kids at Amie’s school to decorate. And Amie and DH carved the first of the big pumpkins, and we roasted the seeds.

Can you believe it’s that time of year again?

UPDATE: It’s over. I stayed home and some kids did brave our long and winding and dark driveway for our treats. Amie and DH went out together into the balmy and windy night, under the full moon playing hide and seek behind the clouds.Â They were gone for abut two hours. Amie came home expressing her disappointment that she hadn’t managed to scare anyone. She has about 20 pieces of candy – she took one at each house – and she is so excited about them, but I know half of them won’t even get eaten. DH is putting her to bed at the moment. I can hear her constant chatter. It’ll be a long night.

Riot for Austerity – Month 12

We finished our 12th month, we made it around the year! I’ll list this month’s consumption first and then I’ll discuss the yearly average.

Gasoline.

7.4 gallons pp =18 % of the US National Average

Yearly average: 24.8%

I just saw that I never calculated DH’s miles on public transportation (shuttle). I’ll start adding those in the next year.

Electricity. The only change we made this month was the firing up of the small chest freezer, and it doesn’t seem to have made much of a dent in our electricity consumption.

313 KWH (all wind) = 9% of the US National Average

Yearly average: 18.2%

Our present consumption is so much lower from the yearly average because we switched from conventional to wind in the fourth month of our Riot, which practically cut our percentage in half.

Heating Oil and Warm Water.

13.6 gallons = 22% of the US National Average

Most of this was for hot water this month, but it did fire up several times to heat the house, either at night or when I wasn’t on top of the thermostat (which is set at 59 F during the day and 55 F at night). This is good news, because it’s the same as our usage in September. That means the extra insulation and the wrapping of the hot water tank helped.

As for our wood usage, we haven’t used the kind of amount that would allow us to calculate how many cords we’re going through, yet. Once we reach one cord I’ll enter it all in that month.

But wow, the weather has been taking us for a ride this month! Today for instance started off coldish, around 57 F inside the house, so I was preparing to light the fire when I noticed on the outside thermometer that it was 60. I opened all the windows instead and within an hour it was over 70 outside and a nice 62 inside (our house seems to be well insulated, then). The same thing happened over a week ago, when all the windows of the house started steaming up, on the outside. We’ll have an almost tropical Halloween (with rain, though), then the temperatures will plummet again.

Yearly average: 77%

What can I say: it gets cold here in the winter months. We’re Freezing Our Buns as it is and the house is as insulated as it can get. We did make several improvements to that insulation, and we got a wood stove installed (renewable energy used responsibly), so let’s see what next winter brings.

Trash. Our weigh-in of our trash for the 3 of us for 1 month:

6lbs = 1% of the US National Average

Yearly average: 7.3% OR 31.5%

The second percentage refers to our construction/capital improvement waste, which according to the powers that be at the Riot count for half their weight.Â So with that we still didn’t do too bad, and we’ll do better because I don’t see any major waste producing capital improvements coming up in the next year. Without that we did even better than the 7.3% suggests, because I usually eyeball the trash and this month’s actual weigh-in suggests that I’ve been overestimating. Our trash is mostly soft plastic and foil food wrappers and the occasional hard plastic casing of some electronic device, toy or pencil. Everything else goes in the compost or the recycling.

Water. The new grass is established, and there’s not so much canning anymore, so we’re back to normal at:

429 gallons of water pp = 14% of the US National Average

This will probably go up a bit as we put the rain barrels out of commission (they’ll burst if we let the water in them freeze) and need to start flushing tap water again.

Yearly average: 16.5%

I’m at a loss here as to how to get it down more. We already take less and short showers, don’t run the taps when brushing or washing, and use rain water to flush our toilets. Honestly I don’t understand how we’re still at 16.5% of the US national average…

Consumer Goods. Yesterday Amie and I went to Pearl, the huge arts and crafts store in Cambridge, and we went wild: we got new pencils, new drawing pads, a watercoloring set, sharpeners (one in the shape of a globe: Amie’s favorite) and an ellipse template, which keeps her happy for an hour. I also bought two books of poem by Jim Harrison and The Peterson Guide to Animal Tracks for Amie. And DH bought a battery charger. All that makes for

$112 = 14% of the US National Average

Yearly average: 27.2%

Food. Our food consumption is slowly shifting from local to bulk, but I’m succeeding more and more in keeping the “wet” foods, like dairy and meats, in the local category.

Teaching Children To Draw: Amie is in It!

It’s finally here, the book!

At the beginning of 2008 I got an email from Marjorie Wilson. She and her husband, Brent, are the authors of the seminal Teaching Children to Draw, published in 1982. Marjorie wrote that they were putting together the second edition. She was doing research on the net when she found the YouTube video of Amie drawing the three-headed person (here). From there on she made it to this blog, where she found “Drawing as it Develops,” my record of Amie’s drawing progress. She wondered if we would let her use Amie’s example in her new Introduction.

Of course!

We emailed, I sent her scans of Amie’s drawings, and we had a wonderful phone interview. Amie picture was chosen for the front cover, and her drawing of Tigger (this one) is printed, in color, on the back flap. The new Introduction tells the story of her drawing from age 1.5 to about 3 and how a lot of what she and we did corresponds with their findings and recommendations in the book. There are stills from the video and photographs of the resulting three-headed person, of Amie’s first scribbles, of DH carrying her in the backpack, and of this collaborative drawing in my journal.

Amie doesn’t quite understand – her first reaction looking at the still of the video was: “That’s not how you hold a pencil!” But she knows how happy and proud we all are.

And for me there could be no greater confirmation of the value of this blog. All those entries on Amie’s drawing are not only a record (that I would have failed to keep so orderly and punctually in my journal), but they are also of actual use to others, for their viewing pleasure as well as for information on how children draw.

So the book is finally out – Amazon says it will only be released in February 2010 but that seems to be a mistake. If you’re interested in childrens drawings, this is the book to get: full of insightful observations, great practical advice and lots and lots of fun examples. Brain food and eye candy. And our Amie, of course.

Now can you believe that I have been keeping this under my hat for over a year?!

Independence Days – Week 10

Plant. Nothing: our winter beds are full. We did improve the bedding.

Harvest. I didn’t plant any Fall vegetables, so I have few plants left in the garden: kale, chard, parsley. The peas and the beans are giving up in the seesaw of warm/cold, but I managed to harvest the last few. Harvested the three small green peppers from the plants I brought inside. Also oregano, thyme, and mint. Sprouting fenugreek, mung beans and wheat berries.

Preserve. At the grocery store bought 20 lbs of organic local potatoes on sale, stuck them in my new “root cellar” – a plastic garbage bin, a bucket of water at the bottom, some sticks on top of that as a frame, then the potatoes; it sits in the coldest part of our basement. Strung apples and hung them to dry above the wood stove (an experiment). Dried thyme and oregano. Froze vegetarian pasta sauce.

Waste not. A friend gave us a humongous bag of acorns (thanks G!). Amie and I had a great time sorting them – though at time I understood what the ballot counters in the 2001 elections in Florida went though – and we were left with 13 lbs of acorns (in shell), for cracking, grinding, leaching and cooking with later. They’re stored in a dry part of the basement.

Want not. Following Sharon’s lastest food quickies, I bought a large box of yeast and 10 lbs of (unpopped) popcorn, all of which went into the freezer, and 5 lbs of salt.

Build community food systems. Nope.

Eat the food. At grocery store bought locally grown sugar pie pumpkins and made four loaves of pumpkin bread – a first. Brought the mint plant inside and am slowly defoliating it as I drink mint tea. We’re in soup, stew and chili mode now, and I take care to make leftovers for freezing. Love that winter food!

Independence Days, Week 9

Nothing much of anything happened this week: I’m a bit out of whack with DH gone, and I’ve also started working on the novel again (again!), while it snows. We had our first frost and our first snow, and the garden is in full Winter mode now.

Plant. Planted pak choi. That will be it for this year’s garden, I’m afraid. Started a few more sprout jars: I’ve got three going now.

Harvest. Last four carrots and three tiny eggplants, Swiss chard, kale, parsley from the garden. Fenugreek and wheat sprouts. I’m eying those four tiny green peppers on the plants I brought inside: they’re not growing anymore…

Preserve. Canned 4 pints of blueberry-basil vinegar I’ve had brewing for two months, then brought my big pressure canner downstairs, as no more produce flows in from the Farmers Market. I got the tiny chest freezer downstairs going and packed it with pounds of flour, rice, lentils, split peas, and seeds for sprouting. I am on the lookout for things like sugar pie pumpkins and potatoes on sale, for storing, but I guess I’d have to drive quite a bit further West or North to find good local deals. There are such big gaps in my food storage, it makes me quite despondent…

Waste not. The average temperature in the house is now 58F and I’m happy to say that, unlike last year, (when we averaged 63F), I’m having no problem with it. When it gets colder than that we start a fire. Amie is herself like a stove, she loves it colder, same as DH.

Want not. Aside from the freezer foods I also stocked up on elderberry syrup from Honey Gardens: there was a major sale on it at a local health food store, and I pounced. Amie gets two teaspoons of the stuff a day, and so far so good. I also got bought a cup of dried elderberries ($30/lb!), from which I want to make my own elixir or syrup.

Build Community Food Systems. None of this. I so wanted to go to the Massachusetts Relocalization Conference, but childcare fell through.

Eat the Food. We’re eating everything from the garden as it’s too little to preserve. Also started eating home-canned green beans and applesauce.

Tending the Fire

It’s been several weeks now that I have tended the fire.

From my studies and my research for my historical novel I know that for the Romans, the Greeks and all the cultures around and before them, the fire in the hearth was the heart of the home, of the city, of life. The fire was where God lived, and so every house was a temple. Or, I should say, it was where the Goddess lived, because the fire was a very female affair. For instance, it was the eldest daughter’s duty to keep it going. Consider also the Vestals, in charge of the Sacred Fire of that ancient goddess, Vesta or Hestia, burning perpetually at the center of Rome and Greece. And in the prehistoric, older-than-old religions the Goddess was present in the trees, the flame and the ashes…

Fascinating!

Our house is small at just one floor with 1500 sq.f., of which we shut off about 300 sq.f. during winter. I make it even smaller by closing the bedroom doors and, when I want the living room to warm up fast, I also close the doors to the small dining room and kitchen. Then warm life contracts to about 300 sq.f., filled with happy people, books, music, two comfy sofas, lots of art materials and toys. Around the fire, roaring in the stove.

I feel empowered having re-taken control of an essential aspect of our home and our family life. I also feel privileged to be the one who starts and keeps the fire going, to have a house with a wood stove, the wood to burn, and the family to warm.