Category: homesteading

homesteading, sewing

Reusable Dry Goods Bag

We’ve got reusable fabric shopping bags. Why not have something reusable that you can use in the bulk foods aisle? I came up with this baggie a couple months ago, using fabric from the stash and ? for possibly the first time since leaving school a million years ago. Since then, it’s brought home walnuts, cornmeal, and granola. When it gets dusty inside, I throw it in the wash. The contrasting square is there so I can write in the bag’s weight when empty, which would simplify the check-out process at the store. So far, PCC has been awesome about …

homesteading, Seasons

Beginning the season

 

I took my cough and sniffly sinuses outside today and started Project Garden, 2011, pulling weeds, adding compost to the veggie beds, installing the pea fences and planting pea seeds. The potato bed is just about ready for the seed potatoes, which I expect to arrive in two weeks. I brought in about half of the over-wintered kale, which opens up a half-bed for starting spinach and carrots, assuming I can find my row-cover-anchoring rocks. Things are actually looking pretty good in the garden, despite the snow and the hard freezes we had this winter. There’s plenty still to clean …

homesteading, Seasons

Garlic!

 ,

One of the things I love about planting garlic: you put the cloves in the ground in the fall, when the air is crisp enough to let you know the season is shifting but not yet so cold as to be really unpleasant. Then you go inside, where it’s warm, and watch the weather, the windstorms, the rain, the occasional snow. And by the time the seasons have swung around and you can think about going outside in something less than 14 layers, this has happened: Sometimes gardening is a lot of work: weeding, fertilizing, watering. Sometimes, it just happens …

homesteading

Of Rabbits and Carrots

 , ,

I pulled up the rest of the carrots that were in the backyard over the weekend. They seem to have survived nicely, despite being snowed on and frozen. The greens were a little bedraggled, but the carrots themselves are short and reasonably fat, and cleaned up to a brilliant orange. The only thing left out there now is the kale, some of which is destined for a kale and yam something later this week. Quiche? Or with orzo and black beans? If I can get a similar number of carrots successfully germinated next summer, it’s possible we will be able …

homesteading, Seasons

Spring, she is a Comin’

 

It’s been raining and gray, but there are buds starting to swell on the clematis and the cherry tree, and Cliff Mass says winter will be over in a month. The sarcococca the front yard is blooming, the hellebore might be thinking about it, and the rhubarb is trying again to put up a stalk after the last two have been snowed on and frozen. Gotta love the stubbornness of plants. So it seemed like a good time to sort through the seed box, throw out things “packed for 2007” and count what I have from last year (an unopened …

Caitlyn, in the kitchen
 ,

We received some yummy homemade granola for Christmas (thanks to the Portland aunties!), and at Caitlyn’s request I rounded up the ingredients to reproduce it on our own. I scooped and Caitlyn poured and stirred. I think she had a good time helping, although she didn’t sound so enthusiastic when I asked if she’d want to do it again, something that I think has more to do with the granola-making taking the whole morning and using up her intended Lego time than with the actual granola-making itself. The report from breakfast today, though, was that she ate it enthusiastically. And …