Mmmm... Gardens

Well, we are forgetting about moving for now. It is very hard to find a place large enough for a family of 7 that falls in our price range of 1200+ utilities, AND that will accept Section 8 rental assistance. Most people's reasoning for not accepting Section 8 is that it won't pass the safety inspection. Why are they renting it out if they know it isn't safe? The one place that I was certain would pass (it had just been repainted - the biggest failure in the places we looked at) just flat out refused to consider it. I cried for a couple of days after that one. The house was perfect for us - 3-4 bedrooms, 1 1/4 bathrooms, full basement with W/D hookups and an area that was begging to be filled with shelves for food storage, a fenced in backyard, a formal dining room to fit our monstrous table, and still within easy biking distance of downtown on a dead end road. So yes, I cried. We have since given up on moving out of the project for now. They have also pushed back the start of construction here, so now instead of March 1, they are *hoping* to start by June 1st. The up side is that most of the people we truly don't get along with have either left or are on their way out. Having obnoxious neighbors is one thing, but believing they are dealing drugs in another matter entirely. I don't know why no one has been arrested over there yet, but I have been assured that they are being evicted and they agreed to it in court, so they can't change their minds now.

All this leads up to this post. Since I am staying here, I can plan my garden for here. I got my seeds from High Mowing Organic Seeds (on Sharon's recommendation) yesterday and have been planning and replanning my garden. I now have a schedule for my starts and plantings that I don't suspect I will change anymore. I had done a nice schedule based on our frost date and how long before that each plant is supposed to be started indoors. Then I saw Matt mention that he had done some planting based on moon phase, so I decided that I needed to schedule mine all over again. Now it all laid out on the little generic calendar I printed out for this purpose based on moon phase. That means I fudged a little on my frost date, but I dont' think that will be a significant issue. For example, one of my plants says to start indoors 5-7 weeks before the danger of frost has passed. The last frost date in my area happens to fall almost on the new moon in May, which is perfect for putting plants in the garden. Since I am not sure if the moon phase applies to starting seeds or putting them in the ground or both, I opted to start them inside 4 weeks before and and put them out on the new moon. The other option was direct seeding after frost. My first plants will be started this Friday. I panicked for a little while yesterday because I couldn't find the peas and lettuce seeds I had saved from last year. I hope they are viable, since I have never saved seed before. But I want to start my lettuce on Friday and I couldn't find the seeds! I searched everywhere I could imagine I might have put them. At the end of the day I found them packed up in a box labeled "Gardening stuff". Imagine that. :)

Since I can't put much in the ground for two more months, I am sure my layout will still be changed up before then. But soon I will have little greenies growing in my house. Hopefully the cats will not try to eat them. Yay!

What I've been doing

It seems that it has been almost a month since I last posted. Shame on me. So what have I been doing? Well, we have been finishing up the garden. We got about 10 carrots, the longest of which was about 3-4", a dozen or so good sized potatoes (which is remarkable, since I never hoed them or did anything else with them), a handful of tomatoes, a boatload of cherry tomatoes (which we don't eat and I would have bought a different type of tomato if I had realized that one was a cherry tomato), a few peas, several cucumbers, several blossoms of broccoli and cauliflower, some lettuce and lots of lettuce seeds, a strawberry or two in the few days after we brought them home, some tiny onions, and a couple of radishes that never got big enough to even be a single bite. We are still waiting on the beans that I planted very late. The beans are growing nicely, but now I worry that they won't have time to dry properly before the season is over.

I learned some valuable lessons with this garden, though. First of all, I can actually grow something and not have it die as soon as it sprouts. That discouraged me for a long time. I learned that watermelon and pumpkin really do need sun rather than mostly shade. The potatoes did okay in the shade, producing a half dozen or so that were as big as my fist. We had nine potato plants. The "Atomic Red" carrots are really red and look neat. Tomatoes should definitely be caged, preferably with something other than a bent split cheap curtain rod. Trellises need to be securely planted in the ground for the peas and cucumbers so they don't continually fall over onto the peas and beans and squish them. Slugs really like strawberry plants. Inchworms really like broccoli and are nearly impossible to see there. It is a good thing I started working with the white cauliflower first and saw the green worm against the white flowers. Yuck. If I hoe the potatoes, I could probably get a lot more potato from each plant. Fences would have been nice so as not to lose baby plants to 3-year-old neighbors stepping on them to reach the first bright red cherry tomato or to 5-year-old neighbors playing lawnmower with a stick. I can really put a lot of stuff in a small space using the square foot method, but I really should do it right and not try to fudge it by eyeballing distances. My "feet" turned out to be closer to 14-15" rather than 12", thus requiring a bit more weeding. I already have nest year's garden planned out, and it will be roughly twice as big as this year's.

In addition to the garden, the school year has started up. Moira has done a block of mathematics and is now starting a block on farming, while Lauren started with a block on form drawing and is now beginning her letters. Oh, and we did a week on nature as well at the equinox. One day that week we harvested elderberries from a tree in the park nearby and made elderberry syrup for coughs and colds this winter. The people on the internet lie. Whoever would put elderberry syrup into yogurt is masochistic. The stuff tastes like Robitussin, which I suppose is appropriate. Ick. Even with extra sugar to try to make it more palatable. Now it tastes like a very sweet bitter flavor. Moira agreed that it did work for her the one time she took it, and is amenable to taking it again if she gets to hacking her lungs out again.

And finally, knitting. My order of yarn came in from Knitpicks.com and now I am slowly but surely working on Christmas presents. Since I know they will never read this blog, I will telly ou what I am making. For hubby and Eirik, I am making earflap hats (scroll way down to #37). For Cait I am making Pixie slippers since she is the only one in the house now without warm woollen slippers. I saw her Shrek slipper today but I don't know where the other one is, unless the one Rowan was using as a treasure holder is the other one and not the one I saw today. Moira is getting a lace cowl, Lauren is getting tights (no pattern or picture, but I am using this yarn, color Princess Multi), and Rowan is getting bloomers. My goal is to have them all done by December 1 so I don't get overwhelmed in December. We will see how that goes.

So that is what I have been doing other than worrying about the economy, the election, and all the other normal everyday worrying that everyone else is doing.

Dinner will be served at the sound of the smoke alarm

Yes, it happened. Or it would have if it hadn't happened so many times before. I was making a new recipe, Chicken with Sweet and Sour Sauce, from Nourishing Traditions and I set the oven on fire. Yes, literally, the oven itself was on fire. The recipe called for broiling the chicken, which I did. I apparently need to clean my oven though, because I noticed smoke pouring out of the burner that is over the vent. I opened up the door and saw flames licking the ceiling of the oven. I pulled out the chicken and turned off the oven, but the oven continued to burn. I couldn't really throw anything like baking soda or flour onto it because it was on the ceiling not the floor, and gravity would have asserted itself. So I waited for it to burn itself out, then stuck the chicken in again to finish broiling. It couldn't reignite since its fuel was all gone, so I figured it was safe. However, the smoke alarm did not actually go off. The house was thick with smoke, but I had unhooked the smoke alarm some time back. I decided to do that when it went off the day after I cleaned the oven. The oven was sparkling clean and still it smoked up and sent off the smoke alarm. Maintenance laughed at me and said I should keep a better eye on my food. But my food was fine and the oven was clean, so I just disconnected the downstairs smoke alarm. The upstairs one is still on. Later in the evening when I was taking the laundry off the line, I heard another smoke alarm going off. I was glad I wasn't the only one. I think I need to clean the oven now. The dish came out well in the end and was quite good.

In other news, we have expanded the garden. We reclaimed 10 square feet from the weeds (which were tall enough to obscure the children when they lay down) and planted more food and some flowers. We each planted 2 square feet. Cait and Lauren each planted nothing but marigolds, I planted beans, Moira planted cilantro and radishes, and Rowan planted beans and lettuce. Half of my lettuce has bolted, so now I get to figure out how to save those seeds. My peas, cucumbers and tomatoes are all fruiting. I have two each broccoli and cauliflower starting. My potatoes flowered and were lovely, I'm not sure what is going on with my onion, though. The strawberries are spreading like crazy, and I think it might have been a bad idea to plant them in the middle of my plot where I did. My watermelon plant finally has 3-4 true leaves, but isn't exactly thriving.

Oh, and a tree decided to land a mere foot from my garden, a big tree, no less. It took several days before maintenance came and cleared the fallen tree away, and they took down a half-dead tree as well. They let me have a bunch of the smaller diameter wood when I asked for it. I asked for the whole tree actually, saying I would have my mom bring over my dad's old maul so we could split it, but the chainsaw guy took it himself to burn in his own woodstove this winter. Fair enough, since I have electric heat anyway. But at least I know have "just in case" firewood to burn in our "just in case" woodstove. You know, just in case. Can't you just picture it? In the middle of some blizzard when the power has been out for a few hours, all we need do is pull the tarp off of the stove, tip it upright (it is currently on its side for some unknown reason), make sure the empty stovepipe outlet is not pointed toward the wooden patio fence, and fire it up. We can sit around the stove outside on the patio, drinking cocoa, cooking our dinner and keeping warm as the blizzard rages around us and we get all wet because instead of snowing on us, it is now raining on us since the snowflakes melt as they get near the stove. Everyone else will be shivering inside while we stay toasty outside in the blizzard. C'mon, it'll be fun! No? Well, it does conjure up a funny image.

Another Year

It looks like it will be a year before we can get out own place. We met with Habitat for Humanity and they say we qualify for their help. The problem is that they are busy through the end of this building season, so won't be able to start anything new until next spring. I'm crossing my fingers in hopes that the farmland will still be available then. I have noticed that many large land properties are staying on the market for quite some time. One we have been watching has been on the market for nearly 1½ years, I think.

I got a garden planted this year finally. The maintenance guys rototilled a nice big patch out back for us. I have 4 tomatoes, 2 peppers, 4 broccoli, 4 cauliflower, 2 cucumbers, 8 peas, 16 carrots, 3 strawberries (one of which sent out a runner that has developed roots), 2 onions, 9 potatoes, 1 pumpkin and 1 watermelon. I wanted a large variety, but I also didn't want to overwhelm myself, either. Some I bought as seedlings, some I planted from seed. Some were things that had started to sprout in my pantry, namely the onions and potatoes. The seeds may or may not be sprouting. It is hard or me to tell if the green I see is the seed I planted, a seed from the mostly composted cow manure I planted them in, or a seed from the field that was dug up. So I will nurture them all until I can identify them.

We are having horrible hot weather here. It has hit 90 degrees a couple of times, and close to it every day for the last week or so. The forecast keeps promising thunderstorms, but they dematerialize before they get to us. We got one rainstorm overnight last week, but it did nothing for the heat. Until the weather breaks, I am keeping the kids in the house. The TV is on more to keep them still so they don't work up too much heat. I can't wait until it rains so I can send them outside. The garden will appreciate it, too. I have been watering it both in the early morning and the later evening, using almost 1.5 gallons each time.

So that is the news from here. I will try not to wait a month again for the next post.