Robin Hill Gardens – Page 82 – Be joyful though you have considered all the facts

Grandmothers’ Quilts

I am very fortunate to have handmade items in my home. Many of them are Amie’s, of course, most of which I’ve already shown here. There are alsoÂ those made by strangers and mostly presented to us as gifts, a lot from India. The ones I want to show you here are two quilts made by my Mom and my mother-in-law (MIL). Both are fantastic crafters with needle and thread.

My Mom made this quilt a long time ago. I always covered Amie with it, in the stroller, when we went out on a chilly day. I dug it out a week ago, sewed back the plain strips on the three sides (for tucking in), and hung it in our bedroom.

This quilt was a collaboration between my MIL and her MIL, Amie’s great-grandmother, who lives in Kolkatta, India. It was made from my husband’s baby clothes and blankets that my MIL had saved. The border on the other side has “Hit Tima Tim Tim,” a Bengali nursery rhyme embroidered on it, in Bengali script and transliterated in Latin script.

Together they add cheer and warmth to our small bedroom .

Some day I hope I will have the peace and quiet – in my life as well as my spirit – to sit down and make a quilt, or an embroidery. Though I have never had the patience for any kind of needlework, and in my youth was known to look down upon it, it appeals to me now, especially if the picture in my head also has Amie in it, sitting next to me, working on her own thing. Maybe in winter we’ll attempt it.

Your Average Sunday Afternoon

It’s coming down hard: thick globs of melting snow. The wood stove is giving off enough heat to dispel any gloom: it’s merely cozy, as long as I don’t need to go out there.

Which I did have to, earlier on. One of the rain barrels was overflowing, and not through the overflow tube. In this weather I would have left it but the excess water was undermining the cinder blocks the heavy barrel is sitting on, slowly eroding away the soft soil. I didn’t relish the thought of it coming down right by the side of the house and the bed with the chard.

So out I went, and shook the overflow pipe, but nothing came out but a dreadful stink. O-ow, dead animal alert! I opened the barrel’s lid and saw the hind part of a chipmunk sticking out of the overflow pipe. It must have crawled up the pipe in drier weather, landed in the water, then made it back to the pipe only to get stuck.

It had that ghostly look of a thing dead in water. That half looked well preserved in the cold water, and I only considered for a second what the other half looked like. When I tried to dislodge it with a stick its skin just came off. I un-threaded the pipe and as the excess water suddenly rushed out all over me I shook the poor dead beast out in the bushes.

I usually take a picture of any dead animal I see (here and here and here) but this one, well, it was just too gruesome.

We’re spending the rest of the day inside, drawing animal tracks in snow. Squirrels, deer, chipmunks…

Honest Scrap

Leigh form 5 Acres and a Dream awarded me the HonestÂ Scrap Award. It’s my first award ever. These are the rules:

Choose a minimum of 7 blogs to give this award to that you feel to be brilliant in content and design. That’s the toughest part.
Show the 7 winnerâ€™s links on your blog and leave them a comment informing them that they have been given the â€œHonest Scrap.â€ That’s the easiest part.
List 10 honest things about yourself that people may not know.

So here goes:

I was born in Congo (it was called Zaire back then), where my parents were doing missionary work – my dad taught math at a country high school. We left when I was one, so I don’t recall that adventure. I grew up in (Dutch-speaking) Antwerp, Belgium, the oldest of two. I moved to Boston in 1998. The idea was to stay for a year to do my Masters (in Philosophy) but I never, or at least haven’t, left. I haven’t been back to Belgium in over three years! We’re trying to make it work this winter.
I like being alone. DH will call it like it is and say I’m antisocial. True, if you let me I’ll just potter around here on my hill and be totally happy. But I do love the company of good friends and good friends-to-be and am never more thrilled than when they stay over for a meal or a sleep-over. Then I will molly-coddle them to make them come back more often.
If I didn’t have my wonderful family, I’d be a drifter. I’d live out of my car, on a dime, and travel this great continent seeking out nature. I discovered this about myself when I moved here. I traded my beloved medieval Europe for the adventure of America’s wide-open spaces, dense forests and mountain peaks…
I am obsessed with nuclear threat but am careful not to indulge myself too often. It goes back to when I saw The Day After on television as a young teen: it sent me into a tailspin of depression for months. Now I sometimes consciously seek it out, because in some ways it makes me feel more alive. But I’m careful. I know my limits.
I’m addicted to the written word. I must read and I must write, every day, or I go crazy. The most gruesome moment in Cormack McCarthy’s The Road was not the nuclear disaster or the cannibals or the dying world or the physical and emotional deterioration, etc. etc., but the scene where the protagonist looks at a sodden book and can’t remember what once attracted him so to reading and learning. Chilling.
I despair a lot, yet I go through life smiling and my smile is sincere. How do I do it? I don’t know, I just don’t see how a gloomy face could help… Same with my blog: it’s mostly chipper and the gloom only comes through once in a while. Whenever I write an entry about how scared and sad I am I over-write it and then it doesn’t feel right, so I nix it.
The stuff we do here (like the Riot and Freeze Yer Buns etc.) gives me a lot of personal satisfaction, as in it’s fun and makes for a healthier lifestyle, both physically and spiritually. But I don’t think any of it will help to make the future better, unless we start something like Transition in our towns.
I’m lousy at most homesteading things – you should see my needlework (cough) – but I don’t care. I’ll get better with practice.
I walk away from arguments. I’m the most non-confrontational person I know. If I stick with an argument I soon get upset to the point of tears and often feel physically sick. I think that’s why I walked away from an academic career: even arguing metaphysics was just not in me.
I’m a procrastinator but I have some ways of overcoming that. I’m big on making TO DO lists and will always include something I’ve already done, then will tick that off and that gets me going. And sometimes I will post something on the blog as having been accomplished, while it hasn’t yet, and then I’ll feel so guilty, I just have to do it!

Well, I wanted to make an upbeat list, but I guess many of these points seem rather negative and gloomy. What can I say: it’s honest scrap.

I nominate, in alphabetical order:

Snow

We had our first frost last night and this morning the forecast changed from rain to sleet to snow.

There is no plastic on our hoop house yet.

I harvested our last beans and carrots of the season, and tiny eggplants, then pulled all the plants.

I rushed to transplant more seedlings and covered their bed with hoops and row cover, which I hope will not cave in under the snow (see appropriately gloomy picture, taken from bedroom window, which also shows part of the door setup). I transplanted the broccoli, kales and parsleys from other parts of the garden into another hoop house bed and tucked them in with straw. I also put straw over the garlic and rhubarb and onions, all of which are not in the hoop house.

I moved all the herbs into the porch and covered them with row cover – and was bitten by a huge spider guarding a fat egg sack. Eventually I want to move them into our “Annex”, which we keep at 40F in winter and has a large south facing window.

I ran out of light and Amie ran out of patience. It’ll have to do for now.

Independence Days – Week 8

Amie’s drawings of a flower and Amie in the garden

Plant. Did that!

First planted the hoop house frame, sewed the row covers together for the quick hoops (3 5×10′ covers make 1 10′ x 15′ cover), and ordered more row cover from Johnny’s.

Started sprouting fenugreek as an experiment – that count as planting, right? – and love it: so easy and yummy, a mini-garden right in my kitchen.

Planted Farmers Market peach seeds (Canadian Harmony) in a bed that will be mulched in Winter – whatever comes up in Spring will be transplanted into a pot.

The big one was transplanting into the hoop house beds the winter harvest seedlings: spinach, several lettuces, broccoli, kale, chard, purslane, parsley, mizuna, and mustard greens. Also the big broccoli plant, the two largest kale plants, and the chard plants from other beds. There also sowed more of the same plus claytonia, mache, tatsoi, and other hardy veggie seeds. Covered all these up with my row covers. I hope the clamps arrive soon so I can put the plastic up.

Harvest. Still chard, kale, carrots, green beans, lima beans, peas. And fenugreek sprouts:

Preserve. Canning has slowed down since my Farmers Market closed. The last apples went into two quarts and two pints of unsweetened apple sauce with peel (a beautiful pink). Froze more vegetable stock. I got our tiny chest freezer going, stuffed with flour, rice and sugar, and tomorrow when it’s really cold will transfer to it some of the foods from our overstuffed over-the-fridge-freezer.

Waste not. We finally wrapped our hot water boiler. We also got a big load of beautiful and well-fitting Winter clothes for Amie from a friend (thank you!).

Want not. Split more kindling. Ordered 10’x 500′ of row cover (that’ll last us a couple of years).

Build community food systems. Our hoop house is extremely visible from the street :)

Eat the food. Ate everything we harvested and the freezer food is getting good rotation. I’m so tempted to open one of those peaches in syrup jars. We did order a take-out pizza one evening, though. Also drank our first glasses of raw milk.

Hoop House Frame is Up, and Winter

Over the long weekend it took us – two adults versus one four-year-old – to set up the hoop house PVC frame. Initially we thought that the simple hoop house might not be high enough on the sides for the taller plants, like tomatoes, that we want to grow in it in summer. So we wanted to make a box with an arch on top, but this involved specialized pvc connectors that we would have had to order online and pay big bucks for. Once it was up, though, the height at the edges doesn’t seem much of an issue, especially if I grow the taller plants in the middle. (These pictures don’t show the door structure, or the reinforcements – don’t want to take a picture in the current rain).

Amie loves it, that big ribcage in the sky, a building yet not a building.

It will cover three beds and leave room for a bin with compost – which we’ll need and which will have to be kept somewhat unfrozen – and several container plants, and tools. We’ll work on putting a bed there in the Spring. We’ll put lots of straw all around, and stack bales on the north side.

Speaking of warmth…

This picture of risa’s kindling box got me outside splitting some of the larger logs into thinner logs and kindling. DH came out to look, and again with the commentary! But I’ll get better at it, with a stronger body and tougher hands and a better aim. Amie understands that, about practice. And besides, even though I’m not especially good at it, I enjoy splitting firewood, inordinately.

DH will be gone for 10 days so I will have to tend every fire – the oil furnace is on standby for nights (at 58 F) – and make sure there’s enough wood. I’ll also be the one draining the rain barrels and stashing them away – we have a frost coming, soon. I’ll clean up the rest of the garden when it stops raining and cover what is still growing with quick hoops and row cover. If the clamps arrive while he’s away I’ll try to put the plastic on the greenhouse myself. I will transplant the Winter seedlings and sow more Winter and early Spring crop.

I will go looking for elderberry syrup to supplement the vitamin D we’re taking daily. I will also start plotting window quilts to keep the draft out in the bedrooms, organize our winter clothes and buy (or make?) flanel sheets and pj’s.

And for peace of mind I’ll call up the farm that supplies the raw milk that is coming this Wednesday to ask how often and by whom it gets tested, and what their milking procedures are (thanks again to Nika). Then I’ll make my first yogurt, and I’ll try butter and paneer.

And maybe I’ll bake some bread…

Winter is coming. It’s the first time I am feeling it so keenly in both body and spirit.

The Ever-Recurring Year

I was talking with a friend today and she mentioned my picture a while back of my canning pantry. She said she certainly understands the feeling of growing, harvesting, putting up and getting the firewood ready from her reading of the Little House on the Prairie books – which I admitted I have never read (all gasp), as it’s not quite part of the European schoolgirl’s library, and as I simply never felt the need to read it after my school years. She told me that especially the ritual of putting up always gave her a sense of security, and how had she lost that feeling?

I said when you live according to the seasons, you live according to the ever recurring year, with its waxings and wanings, its rituals of life and work, its periods of plenty and of less, and its ample pockets of security in rough times… A life, in short, that can count on certain comforts even if they’re not present, because the recurring rituals hold them in place in the future. This gives you a sense of security without however lulling you into a false sense of security. Because it is a whole year, it doesn’t get boring, and the periods and transitions within it cannot be taken for granted.

This unlike “modern life”, which lives not the recurring year, but the recurring day, over and over again the same day, with (as per usual at least) not a one big shift, whether gift or sacrifice, to make us feel alive and the passage of time.

This friend understands what I’m trying to do here, and I appreciate our conversations, however interrupted by kids and “modern life”, more than she knows. I hardly ever write about the emotional side of our endeavors and dreams on this blog, I don’t know why. Perhaps I fear of the dreaded “No Comments” under the entry headings. But most of the time, it is simple exhausting to try to get the maelstrom of emotions to stay still on paper/screen, in neat sentences let alone paragraphs. Easier to let it all come pouring out as a warbled stream of consciousness into the ear of a dear friend. And, later in the evening, to salvage a few choice thoughts.

Pity, but no Mercy

3998910676_cb8bd233ed — sewing machine in bedroom

I finally managed to sow the row covers together. I used these 5′ wide spun covers to shield the beds from the downpours over Summer, but they were a pain to position because they were too narrow for the 4′ wide beds. Some end of it was always coming undone, and because we couldn’t stretch them, they sagged and billowed in the wind. The solution was to sow two strips together into one comfortably wide one that would stretch over the hoops and have some left over on the sides for anchoring.

Not wanting to sew about 40 feet by hand, I got out our sewing machine. It is a hand-me-down from my aunt and makes only one stitch, but that is sufficient for most of our purposes. Both my mom and MIL used it when they were here, and they showed me how to thread it. Many times over. But, not having a head like that, I forgot. So imagine my horror when I opened the lovely red suitcase to find it… threadless!

Well, after a lot of messing about, sighing, cursing, and some foot stomping, I got it done, mostly with the help of DH – okay, he got it done. I got to reflect again on my unkindness to machinery. You should see me kick the vacuum cleaner when it gets stuck behind the corner of some furniture. When my laptop does something weird, I take care to immediately hand it off to DH.

DH was also reflecting on this, but aloud:

– You really have no patience, do you? How come you have no patience with this? Etc. etc.

You know, that kind of commentary. Oh, those poor machines. Lucky for all of us I struck upon the following reaction:

– I have a lot of pity for the machines in this house. But no mercy.

That kind of thing always cracks us up.

Stagnating and Sprouting

It’s Fall. Is that why I feel I’m stagnating? I’ve plenty to do: still a lot of canning and cooking, some harvesting, and a whole lot of work on next Spring’s garden, not to mention our Fall and Winter garden. But I feel the need to do new things, to keep the skill set growing. If only in small ways. The next big one that’s coming up is the chickens, which I anticipate in Spring (we’ll probably start from chicks), but until then…

I’m sprouting. It seems like such an easy and simple and logical thing to do. I have been thinking about it for a while but sometimes a person needs some other person pushing upon her a packet of seeds, just a couple of tablespoons full, and a small leaflet with instructions and saying “Here it is, that’s all you need, it’s simple.” That happened to me at my last Farmers Market on Wednesday and my fenugreek seeds are now soaking in the Ball jar. They need to be rinsed twice a day, which feels right to me: I like that rhythm. I figure I will experiment with seeds and beans and then choose two or three that we like and I’ll buy pounds of it and store them in my freezer.

I feel like lots of good things happened at that Farmers Market. Besides the sprouts I am very excited about the raw milk (great article in Salon here). I read up on the farm that is supplying the milk and am confident it’s the right choice. I want to make yogurt and paneer with it, and later on more “cultured” cheeses. The only downside is that it’s quite expensive ($4.5 per half gallon), so I won’t be able to indulge my milk cravings (I can drink a gallon of the stuff some days).

And sometime this weekend or next week, whenever I find a moment, I am going to bake my first bread. That’s also not a big one, really, not a difficult one, but one that will make all the difference as Fall comes barreling down the pipeline.

Independence Days, Week 7

Plant. Due to a miscalculation of the weather on my part – or the weatherman’s part? – I didn’t get to transplant the seedlings and sow more winter veggies today. Tomorrow, I hope. I did get to clean up the garden beds. Moved the pepper plants inside – but I will not call them houseplants, though, since houseplants invariably die on me.

Harvest. Swiss chard, kale, radishes (though maggots had already munched through most of them), green beans, carrots, peas, lima beans, last scallions, all the potatoes from the towers (Bintje) (made fries, not exactly the most ecological use of oil and electricity, I admit) and the last celery.

dscf7406 — garlic for honey garlic pickles, Caribbean peach salsa and beloved canner in back

Preserve. Started honey garlic pickles: garlic cloves, apple cider vinegar, honey and 12 weeks of waiting (simplest of recipes here). Processed 1/2 bushel (25 lbs) of Farmers Market Cort apples into 9 quarts and 3 pints of unsweetened apple sauce (unsweetened because I want to use it as a replacement for oil and butter in cakes). Canned 12 half-pint jars of apple peel jelly. Froze 90 cubes of vegetable stock made from veg scraps. Made and froze more mirepoix with carrots and celery from the garden.

Waste Not. We pick up every stick that falls on our property for kindling,Â and we learned, with the help of Roz and www.woodheat.org (here and here – the acting is hilarious) how to most efficiently build and maintain a fire (our neighbor’s chimney constantly bellows thick, gray smoke, and we are determined not to do the same).

Want not. Bought 25 lbs of sugar and 20 lbs of all-purpose flour – time to fire up that little chest freezer – the over-the-fridge freezer was getting a bit too full anyway. Reorganized all my seed packets.

Build community food systems. Again not so much “built” as “supported”. I gave my last egg cartons to the egg guy at the Farmers Market and signed up for his raw milk and farm-fresh eggs club. It was the last Market in my town, but there is a bigger one in the next town over that will be going on for a couple more weeks: I might go check it out.

Eat the food. Minced meat out of the freezer with fresh mirepoix, fresh homemade veg stock, homegrown scallions and parsley and (store-bought) tomatoes that were going bad made a nice pasta sauce for a couple of days. Some of the frozen mirepoix went into our seafood stew feast for 10, and we opened the first jar of apple sauce and the first jar of blueberry jam, both of which Amie loved and we’re still alive.