Staying Busy

We had the house inspection on Friday, and while there were a couple of minor plumbing and electrical issues the main hiccup is the roof – some unfixed hail damage and improper flashing installation means we need a second opinion, and maybe a new roof. Seeing as we’re already at the top of our price point, if the seller (in this case, a bank) isn’t willing to work with us, we might have to back out of this property.

I find myself relieved to know the details of the house – to know what needs attention, how old the furnace is, all sorts of things that foreclosed houses can’t tell you. While some of the best deals can be foreclosures, they can also be scarily silent about what’s transpired under their roofs – if you haven’t lived there, you can’t disclose anything about the property, so they bank can’t share a thing about the state of the fuse box, what’s hiding behind the dry wall, or the quality of the garage.

But, of course, seeing as how it’s the weekend, we must simply twiddle our thumbs while we wait for news from a roofing specialist on Monday and then begin the terrifying process of negotiating with the bank. We can’t pack, we can’t plan, even dreaming can be dangerous if the house falls through – so what can we do? Garden and keep busy, apparently!

Early blueberries

The last couple of weeks have been so hectic and trying that our poor seedlings haven’t gotten much attention. They have really taken off and are tangling together under the delicate warmth of their plant light, so it was time to start transplanting to larger pots with more nutrients to offer. We picked up some compost from our city compost center and I spent some of Saturday afternoon in the sun, with the kitties, transplanting the scraggly seedlings into reused pots from last year. Evan planted double what we will end up needing, so I sorted out the weaker ones for compost and planted the stronger. I spent time transplanting our butternut squash, spaghetti squash (which got pretty shocked by the transplant – hopefully they bounce back!), our Roma and heirloom tomatoes, cucumbers, cayennes, and jalapeños. Our bell peppers are still too young – we had a late start planting – to be ready to move just yet.

My potatoes are flourishing in their potato “cage”  – I hope that we can gently disturb this cage and move them successfully to the new place, because I would love to see how successful of a crop we have this year. Hopefully, the garlic will be somewhat close to ready when/if we move, as well, because WOW! My garlic is gorgeous! Thick, hefty stalks and green growth that stretches high to the sky. I’d hate to miss out on our first batch of one of my favorite culinary ingredients.

My mother-in-law is moving up here on Friday – wow, how the days fly! – so I’m feeling anxious to clean and purge. Even if we do not move in a couple of weeks, it’s always a good exercise to step back and ask yourself if you really need seventeen different purses and that garage sale book of which you only read half. There’s no point in packing items I’ll just get rid of at the next house, so I started a big pile for Goodwill out in the garage of clothes, shoes, purses, and random electronics we haven’t touched in ages. I also spent a good deal of time vacuuming and prepping the guest bedroom for her – I’m going to be really grateful for a companion during my evenings home alone since Evan works so many evenings! Not only will I have a friend to help decode those strange sounds out in the country, but Sharon is being unbelievably generous in how she is helping us with our downpayment. We would not be looking at the land or houses we have without her love and support!

As I’m purging, however, something I can’t be too quick to get rid of are bottles! My batches of cider are starting to come around – they’ve spent somewhere between 2-3 weeks fermenting, and are now bubbling happily away! My first batch was just bread yeast and apple juice – the latest batch substituted a cup of apple juice with a cup of rosehip syrup, which I think made things very tasty and upped the level of alcohol content, as the additional sugar gave the yeast more to eat off (there didn’t seem to be much alcohol at all in the first batch).

As you can tell, I was trying to keep busy with things around the house. I have a lot of worries and anxieties swirling around this potential new property, from the lack of closet space and small bedrooms (it was designed as a vacation home, therefore we have to get creative!) to flood insurance because of the river to just the sheer responsibility of owning such a large home, acreage, and the accompanying mortgage and fees. I’m in love with the place, but oh my, am I drowning in the potential adult responsibilities, plus my checkbook is steadily leaking cash throughout this process. All the calm thoughts you can send my way, the better!

I’m going to continue to keep myself busy – that’s not hard to do this time of year when you’re a teacher – and hopefully that will mean some additional blogging, as well. It’s surprisingly soothing, to take the time to document and share my journey – while it does take time, it certainly helps me understand, express, and explain our challenges and dreams. Hopefully, in a couple of weeks, we’ll be one step closer to a bunch of our dreams, and I will be busy in a different sense – by beginning our work on our homestead.

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Kansas Spring

 

 

We had highs in the 70s and a tornado warning on Monday.

On Saturday, it snowed. Welcome to Kansas!

 

Snowy garlic. 

 

Fresh growth blanketed in snow. 

 

Time to Explore

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The calendar says we are still weeks away from spring, but our cats assure us that spring is most assuredly here. They beg by the back door to be let out into the warm air, rotate from window to window in search of warming sunshine, and stare in fascination at the growing flock of birds that frequent our feeders outside our front window. This morning the three of us – Cattigan, Olivia, and I – ventured out into the unusual warmth to do a little spring tidying out back.

Early buds on our lilac bush.

We mulched many of our potted plants with leaves and sheltered them by the house from the worst of the cold winds this winter (and even then, we didn’t have many). This fall, my husband raked a bunch of our oak tree leaves into a DIY cage up-cycled from some old fencing wire so we can always have mulch at our disposal – we fell in love with using grass clippings on our garden beds to add nitrogen and this summer we might mix in some leaves as well. We tend to get very hot and dry in August and September, and our poor cucumbers can use all the help they can get to shelter their roots from the heat.

I spent some time raking out the leaves from the woodpile and straightening up the logs, while the cats lounged and explored. Olivia has a new favorite task – she loves patrolling the neighboring fences and rolling in any dirt patches she can find. The cats only go out under our watchful gaze – we don’t need any “presents” or complaints from the neighbors about digging into garden beds, plus it’s bad for the bird population to allow the cats to kill for pleasure rather than need. (Trust me, they’re well-fed.) Here, on the outskirts of town, we get the occasional coyote visitor and birds of prey, and while I don’t worry about my hefty Cattigan I do worry about how petite Olivia will fare against a hawk.

Olivia, mid-roll in the dirt.

Tomorrow, our task will be to sort and turn our compost pile. We take any organic matter from our kitchen – egg shells, onion peels, wilted spinach, juicing remains, coffee grounds, tea leaves, you name it – and deposit it into this giant compost pile. If you haven’t invested in a compost bin, I cannot recommend it enough; we store all of our kitchen scraps (no meat) in a sealable container in the kitchen, and when it gets full we take it out to the yard and dump it in this bin. Every few months you should turn the pile and make sure that it stays moist so the decomposition process can move speedily along. Adding compost to your garden is one of the best fertilizers you can give it, and it’s absolutely free. It gives new purpose to your kitchen scraps, and the chopped up taco topping leftovers that you left in the fridge for too long no longer stare guiltily up at you from the bottom of your trashcan – they return back to the earth they came from and give your plants new life.

This bin is one of the cheapest I’ve found in the process of looking at building or buying our own – when we purchased it, it cost $30 on Amazon. “Geobin” is made of 50% recycled plastic and comes as a roll of mesh that you open to your desired width and hold together with plastic keys on one side. Unless you’re sticking your nose over the top of the pile, there is absolutely no smell with this open air compost – I can be standing right next to it and not notice it is there. It’s a big capacity bin, holding up to 216 gallons and measuring 4 feet in diameter, as you can see with Cattigan as a size comparison in the picture above. I highly recommend checking this one out! We purchased our Geobin from Amazon here.

Cattigan and I checked on our crop of garlic from last October – we planted some hard neck garlic and let it overwinter, and these last few weeks of warm temperatures have made them thrive. Their bright green stalks shot through the leaves and they basked in the sunlight after I fertilized them with some of our smelly fish fertilizer. (The cats always sniff the bottle very curiously when it comes out of the cabinet!)

When our garden is full to bursting, we’ll find the cats navigating the maze of tomato plants and investigating the strange smells of peppers and bean flowers. They love to lounge on our warm patio stones and sniff the breeze – we can’t wait for more warm days that we can spend outside as a family to relax and explore what we’ve grown and cared after.

 

But now, for a nap.

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