quickie

I am having the most glorious time on etsy finding all sorts of goodies and gift ideas for the crew. Much of the Yule season gifts will be food and home made yummies. But a few things will be outsourced, by artists only! I am very excited about the finds, foods, and fun!


By the way, happy Autumn!

Strawberry Harvest

Our goal was to keep up with plucking the flowers off the the strawberries the first year, in order to give them adequate root growing time. About late July we gave up because the job of plucking strawberry flowers was over whelming. These are from our ever bearing crop, and boy are they ever!




These pictures were taken on wednesday the 16th. Yesterday I picked at least this much if not more. And even before that we've harvested a small bowl. If this warm weather keeps up we could have fresh strawberries right up to frost! Fresh strawberry yogurt! Local milk, local honey, very local strawberries! Life is good!

Dog Days

Nap time.

Been a while

We've been slammed with all the fall chores that have suddenly jumped up and said "SURPRISE!" So I'll leave you with some pictures of the county fair we went to last weekend. More posts to come...

Towels, Tissues and TP

Some time last week during my surgery down time we watched online a program called EcoTrip. The show covers many topics from salmon, to light bulbs. By the way if you happen to have a Netflix account, which most people do ( I bum off my moms.... thanks mom!) you can watch them instantly on your computer. Which is what we did, owning to the fact we have no TV. I digress...

The show that directly impacted us the most, or where we felt we could do the most changing was the paper napkin. Which can be subdivided into TP, paper towels, and kleenex. Most of the tree pulp used to make these everyday items is "virgin" wood and contains chemicals like crazy to make it white. So owing to the fact that our trees make up the bulk of the army fighting global warming, we thought it wise to do our part to keep some of them standing in our stead. Which means, when I go out anywhere and wash my hands I use a paper towel to dry them. That must change. When I reach for a kleenex and toss it away. That must change. And the big and scary TP must also change.

This challenge from a blog I follow called Crunchy Chicken couldn't have come at a better time. Helping us with all the information and facts about moving to cloth TP.

Crunchy writes:

According to Charmin, consumers on average use 8.6 sheets per trip to the bathroom. That's a total of 57 sheets per day and an annual total of 20,805 sheets. There are 230 million adults in the U.S., each averaging a roll and a half per week. Since each roll of toilet paper averages about .5 a pound of paper, that's about 40 pounds of TP per year.

That equals 4.6 million tons of TP used each year. And that's just from adults. To take the calculation even further, if all U.S. adults used only Charmin toilet paper or the like (aka "virgin fiber" with 0% recycled content or post-consumer waste), the environmental cost is approximately (not including the issues with Dioxin):

78.2 million trees
1.35 million tons of air pollution
32 trillion gallons of water
2.1 trillion gallons of oil
18.75 trillion Kilowatt hours of energy

Rather scary huh?

So we went to our local thrift store to get some supplies. I got a small towel that I cut into four pieces and sewed the edges against fraying. They measure now about 6x3 inches, which will easily fit into a back pocket or in my purse. Now when I or Jacob wash our hands we will have our towel where ever we go. Next up kleenex, I couldn't find any old handkerchiefs to buy, plus I don't like the idea of them being white for bloody nose reasons. Anyway, we got some well used napkins in that same thin fabric like a hankie and today I am working on cutting them into the more manageable kleenex size.

As for the TP I purchased an old Cotton flannel sheet that will be cut and sewn. I am not sure on the size yet because I have some other supplies to get in the mean time. Such as a container for the used TP before washing. Also I am waiting for our front loader washing machine which should arrive on the 25th of this month. I haven't posted about that but I will. For more info and all the questions you could ever possibly ask visit Crunchy Chicken's blog.

Cover Crops and Chickens

I harvested what little buckwheat we had growing today. Those stupid sparrows! They just don't listen when I yell at them! "BUFFET IS CLOSED!" Sigh...

I am waiting for some inoculant (stuff that you soak seeds in to give them the right signal to sprout) before I plant my biomass peas and cereal rye. With any luck they will both grow right through the winter. Thus keeping weeds from germinating and my soil from erosion during heavy spring rains. I am concerned that the birds will get them, but both these seeds need to be planted deeper in order to start whereas the buckwheat can be surface planted.

The baby chickens are in the garden for the first time and not quite sure what to do with the extra space. Now that the growing season is pretty much over I don't feel bad about letting the girls out into the garden again.

What to do with the front yard grass?

Over this weekend Jake and I have been toying with what to do with the grass in the front yard. We considered doing rows of strawberries with grass clover mix in the walk way. But I've seen how most June bearing strawberries grow and I don't think we could make it work. Plus our next door neighbor is FAR from organic with her turf bright green front lawn. I wouldn't want any ground growing edibles near the property line. Then we would have to build a fence to keep everyone out of our lovely strawberries! Plus the watering system.... right. So we've decided to grow strawberries in the circle cut out's we made for the fruit trees. Like so:
But that still leaves us with the grass problem. My big dilemma with grass is the fact that it doesn't feed anything I own. If I had a goat... I would consider keeping that lawn. Since I don't own any thing that eats grass I want something that feeds me or feeds the bees. We are going to do lawn/clover mix in the back yard so the dog, chickens and bees will benefit. In the front yard we've decided to go with a creeping thyme lawn. It has the best drought and foot traffic tolerance. Once it gets established it needs watering like once a month! It's been on our minds because the neighbor down the road has an almost completely filled in thyme lawn. It flowers purple in the early spring and the bee's were all over it. It NEVER has to be mowed and smells wonderful when walked on.

See how this is almost grown in. more photos here.
But in order for the thyme to "take" well it must be done in the spring. So come spring of 2010 we will rent that sod cutter again, receive many strange looks from our neighbors and rip out more grass. The clover for the back yard will have to be done in the spring for the same reasons. Hopefully this will solve our barren grass issues. We really have crappy soil here. If you ever wanted to put in a clover lawn mix this is a great article. Establishing White Clover in Lawns.

Late Summer Potato Update

Last week my Mom dug into the potato beds for me, because why not? In about a 1 foot square and only 2 of the 3 boards down she pulled out 1.5 pounds of Rose Fin Apple fingerlings. Based on this fact I think the potato growing up experiment worked! When we actually harvest both beds we are going to get a weight per bed/type of potato. But for now... look how huge these guys have gotten!

Bumble Dinner

Wouldn't it be weird if this looked like dinner?

Today Show features raising chickens in the city

I saw this video on another blog I follow. But I wanted the rest of my family and readers to get the scoop too. Backyard chicken flocks!

Lettuce gone to seed

We had a leftover lettuce plant that volunteered this year. Considering it was planted 2 years ago we decided to water it and let the super thing grow. It is a type of red lettuce similar to butter head. I like most mortals had never seen what a lettuce flower looks like, and wondered how do you get lettuce seeds. Wonder no more.


No it's not a weed but it sure looks like one....

The growth of Chickens

Man they get big quick. Sometimes when they are in the brood box it seems like forever until they go outside. But all the girls have been outside together for a little over 1 week. The RedStars are much more wild than the Buff Orpington girls. Flying is top priority for them, when they were in the brood box I was calling them Raptor Babies! Anyway, we haven't clipped there wings yet probably tonight. As they get bigger Curious looses her hold as dominate chicken, she was never a leader anyway. Red will probably take over the "roo" role in this flock.

It only took them 3 days to figure out the ramp up into the coop. Curious was a really shitty teacher so Jacob had to go out and coax them up the ramp with seeds. It took the BO girls well over a week to "get" the ramp. The RedStars are figuring out how to roost now which will be much better for clean up and the overall care of the coop.

A video of Redstars Vs. Curious and the sunflower seeds. To give you an idea about the size difference.