Momentarily organized

In the middle of thesis-writing, maintaining two gardens, and keeping Jason & I fed and clean-clothed, we did manage to accomplish one small task--painting the old metal shelf, screwing it to the fence, and bringing the last of the houseplants outside for their summer holiday....

So that's one more cluttered corner that's had a makeover!

And here are a few pictures of the up & coming loveliness of summer at our place:

The first sunflower, about to burst out in bloom...

...and a truly gorgeous salad waiting to happen...

...and last, but not least, a quick visual tutorial on how to chicken-proof your blueberry bushes.  The berry plants root very shallowly, and the girls love to dig up spots for dust baths.  Disaster! 

So, first, some long overdue weeding:

...and then a nice layer of peat moss, followed by some hardware cloth.  Take that, you digging fiends!

It is funny to watch a chicken brain at work.   There is all of that lovely, open dirt, right there, and yet they can't scratch it.  Or kick it up over their backs.  Or roll around in it in an ecstasy of luxurious, dusty bathing. 

So, they scratch a little around the edges, in a half-hearted, disillusioned way---and then take off after a moth without a care in the world.  Ah, to be a chicken.  [yet another thing I never thought I'd say]

Back to the thesis.

Bikes. Birds. Baking soda.

For the past several days, I've been biking my errands.  This is a very good feeling, this no-gas-consumption feeling.  And with traffic being what it is, (and with the canal path and the Monon so handy) I typically get there faster than I would in a car.  Parking alone makes me deliciously smug, especially during the summer when the suburbs empty into Broad Ripple on the weekends and traffic reaches epically nasty proportions.   I don't usually find myself effervescing about Indianapolis or IN in general, but I do appreciate the trails to which we have managed to live in close proximity during our decade in the area--they go a long way to redeem a city with such poor mass transit.

My grocery-getter bike, the Trek with all its convenient racks & panniers, is still out of commission, a long story of ambitious tinkering friends and boyfriends who commenced upon a tune-up of said Trek and ended with the bike stuck in one gear, the machine victorious over the men and now enjoying a long vacation in the garage.  Someday, I will remember to throw it in the back of the truck and have it fixed professionally, but until then, I grab a backpack and take the more stripped-down Schwinn.

In any case, and no matter what sort of bike and related equipment you have, I would like to strongly recommend getting outside in your neighborhood, whether that means taking a walk or a bike ride or being pulled in a little red wagon.   This is the time of year to stop and chat at the end of the driveway, or admire some nearby gardens, or to barter some of your homegrown lettuce for fresh eggs from your lucky backyard chicken farmer next door....

In poultry news, the girls are all doing very well.  I thought we were going to lose Roxie on Jason's birthday, probably due to heat exhaustion (although she might have ingested some red paint that had dripped into the grass from a project I was working on).  In either case, it was a rough few days that started with a limp, almost unconscious bird in the bottom of the coop.  Yikes.  Why I have to have a hypochondriac, drama-queen chicken, I will never know.  She is back to her usual sassy self now, but has yet to lay me another egg, after going strong for so many weeks.  Apparently I am not meant to have all four chickens laying at the same time!

Fern and Betty accompanied me to another chicken workshop on Sat. 6/18; it was a nice event & Fern's first venture into being an educational chicken.  All new faces in the audience, which was fun, and we held it outside this time, under a tent.  The only glitch occurred when the second presenter began her discussion of first aid and how to raise & butcher a meat flock.  Fern seemed to take offense and proceeded to squawk, loudly, until you could barely hear the woman speaking.  After stuffing her with treats and apologizing repeatedly, I finally had to have Jason pack the girls up and take them home so that we could all hear the rest of the program.  Jeez.  And, as seems to be the custom with these workshops, she promptly plopped out an egg upon getting home and was calm and docile immediately thereafter. 

The flock seem quite well-adjusted and confident of their little backyard kingdom...they have created strategic dust-baths around the place, and know where to dive for cover when something sinister flies by.  My neighbor's mulberry tree is dropping buckets of ripe fruit over the fence in the mulch, and the girls are happy to snap many of them up--the downside to this, of course, is that they then continue on to make piles of shiny black, tar-like droppings as they strut their merry way around the yard.  Ugh.  While grateful for the free chicken food, I will be glad when mulberry season is past!

And speaking of chicken food, the girls are so busy nibbling on the plants and bugs in the yard, that I rarely have to fill their feeder, and their egg yolks are a brilliant orangey-yellow.  What a great time of year to be collecting eggs from your own gals!

Inside the house, I have made another homemade-cleaner discovery, and not surprisingly, it has to do with baking soda again. 

Since I've started making shampoo & conditioner and begun to favor locally- and naturally-made bar soaps over shower gels and hand soap pumps, I've noticed one particular problem:  a lot more soap scum left behind.  Which makes sense, of course, since we are using soaps rather than detergents, but who likes to scrub their shower all the time??  Ugh, not me, that's for sure.  So the soap scum tends to build up and then I really dread attacking it.

The last time I cleaned the tub, I decided to use baking soda on a damp scrubber, since it is known to be a great exfoliator and scrubbing agent.  --And it worked.  Not wonderfully, but it did the trick with some added elbow grease and lots of flakey baking soda flying everywhere.  Eh.  Not so fun.

Back to dreading the scum.  So, today, I decided to try a "soft scrub" recipe I've found in several different books:  baking soda, with just enough liquid castile soap to make a creamy paste similar to cake icing.  Since I happen to have a bottle of Dr Bronner's in the peppermint scent, I had the added bonus of a pleasant, minty concoction. 

I think it is the aromatherapy of using essential oils--because I didn't hate scrubbing the bathtub this time.  The soap kept the baking soda from being so flakey and seemed to clear the scummy stuff with greater ease; the whole thing smelled great and left the tub and walls shiny and clean.  I used a scrubber with the paste, and a more absorbent sponge and hot water to rinse; it was a simple, pleasant process. 

I am now prowling the house, looking for scrubbing jobs, since I have some leftover after finishing in the bathroom--who knows, maybe Jason will come home to find me on hands & knees, going head-to-head with the dingy kitchen linoleum....

Then again, probably not. 

In pursuit of a paperless life...

I keep meaning to write a post about all of the ways (big & small) in which I utterly fail at being a homesteader--I worry that I may come across as though I'm competing in an asceticism-contest, bragging about my triumphs of self-denial and anti-consumerism.

Well.  Let me just say:  we are not that annoying super-environmentalist couple who exist on filtered air and sprouts and live in a yurt (ok, we would love a yurt, actually).  We consume plenty, we waste things, we splurge, we cheat--I mean, I bought disposable razors not too long ago which is pretty much indefensible no matter what angle you take. 

Disposable stuff--in general--I am working hard to avoid, and while we have yet (I feel) to adequately address the amount of plastic that flows through our household, we have definitely made some improvements in the realm of paper consumption.  We use paper plates if we have more guests than china, but otherwise we use our dishes and wash our cotton napkins regularly.  We have hankies, and we are determined to start using them some day.  :)  We recycle or re-purpose our junk mail, get our news online, reuse paper for notes and lists, buy recycled TP (from Trader Joe's where it isn't as wretchedly expensive), and very rarely print anything.  I can't do electronic books yet.  I just can't.  But I make use of the library ad nauseum and buy used books online if we need to own them.

However, I think the biggest change that we've made in regard to paper is a complete eradication of paper towels.  Really.  Haven't bought them since we ran out sometime last fall.

And this has been a bit of an adventure, this paper towel-less life.  We have cats.  They puke, they have hairballs.  It is disgusting.  I'm certainly not touching that stuff, so how to clean it without a nice wad of paper towels that can be immediately trashed?  We also like bacon--and we like it cooked crispy and drained well.  I've never, in my life, drained bacon on anything other than a paper towel.  Hmmmm.  What to do?  And what about:  cleaning windows, mopping up spills, cleaning sticky kid's hands and faces? 

Well, the answer is--truly--simple.  Your grandma knew it, I guarantee.  Rags.  Old cotton t-shirts, faded bath towels and washcloths, cloth diapers, microfiber cloths.  Here's the real news flash:  they are washable.  Really, they get clean again!  We (as I chronically complain) have been thoroughly bamboozled by advertising--there are few things in this world that are so gross/dirty/germy that you need to throw away whatever touches them, and hopefully you are never using any of those scary things in your house anyway.

So, I have a few squares of old t-shirt that we use to drain bacon.  I suds one up with dishwashing soap (which is best on grease) after we use it, rinse it out in hot water, and let it dry.  When we knock over a wine glass or spill some water, I grab one of our old towels.  The toilet gets cleaned either with sponges no longer good for dish-washing or old rags that I rinse with soapy water prior to laundering with everything else.  There is typicallly a small pile of used rags and towels on my dryer, waiting for the next laundry day.  If they are really gross, I use hot water to wash them and make sure they dry in the sun, which is a fantastic (free) disinfectant and bleaching agent.

Cat puke is still where I draw the line; I suppose I could take the dirty rag outside and hose off the worst of it, but instead, I just use whatever junk mail is handy to scoop it up and into the trash.  Then I clean the spot with a rag and put it in the wash pile.

For something that seems so ubiquitous in our daily lives, it is comforting to me to find it fairly easy to adjust to a world without paper towels.  I know that this is a small thing, but in some ways it seems spectacularly indicative of the many ways that we casually throw away precious things.  I would never look at a tree and think:  I should cut that down so that I can use the pulp to clean up cat puke.

And if you think no-paper-towels is weird, take a look at my new cotton balls!  So nice to freshen my skin with a little witchhazel without throwing something away at the end.  Heh heh heh.

...and, the food dryer works!

Holy Strawberries!

Went berry-picking with my school garden kiddos, and it was a bunch of fun.  Hot, yes.  Muggy, yes.  But fun nonetheless.

Since my sister & I didn't have any smaller helpers for our row, we cleared a lot more strawberries than the mommies with hungry pickers (two dark red ones in mouth...one green one for basket!)  This is all great and good--until you get home and realize that you have pounds of almost-over-ripe berries to address!  Yikes!

So, last night, after another hot day in the garden (finally, finally addressing the bed where the squash and beans need to be planted), I knew I had to figure out the berry situation.

First:  time to get out the food dryer and do some experimenting.  I am already imagining the granola that will showcase these yummy things.  My dryer is a super cheap impulse buy from Aldi last summer--no fan to circulate the hot air, so it takes longer to dry things.  Somewhere around tray #3, I stop being disciplined about slicing thinly, so who knows how long these berries will take to be fully dry....

And yes, my arm is blurred because I am a WICKED fast berry slicer!

This is my prelude to figuring out a solar oven for use with the kids in the garden.  I want us to learn how the sun's energy can be harnessed by people as well as plants.  However, since I have not done a lot of food drying, I thought that starting with the electric dryer might be a good plan.  Perhaps something less juicy and sweet for our first outside drying-attempt!


Once I filled the dryer trays, I moved on to freezing the berries:  sliced and placed on waxed paper, in layers, on a cookie sheet.  They freeze quickly and are much easier to handle if you arrange them in single layers. 

That took care of the really ripe berries.  I probably have another quart or so of ones that need a bit more ripening time, which can thankfully be put off for a few days. 

My produce-processing, however, wasn't quite done--I also picked peas yesterday.  My poor pea plants are completely bewildered by the hot weather, and the pods themselves remind me of emaciated pregnant women--every last bit of sustenance is going toward those little peas, while the pods are stretched and twisted thinly over them.  No fat, happy pea pods with swollen ankles this year--these are the back-in-a-bikini-next-week expectant supermodels of my spring garden. 

Since I do not anticipate a bumper pea crop this year, thanks to our August-like June weather, I will just fill up a freezer bag or two as I harvest them and maybe try to plant a fall crop.  If we are lucky, we will get to recreate our wonderful meal from last spring:  peas and new potatoes with a bit of butter, salt, and pepper.  Ahhhh


The other basket of goodness from the garden is my first harvest from the garlic beds--the gracefully curling flower heads known as garlic scapes.  Since it they need to be removed in order for the bulb of garlic to continuing developing well underground, it is awfully nice that they are good to eat too.

Most recipes tend toward pesto-esque uses for these little squiggles, although I'm thinking I'll try this delicious recipe too!  One hint is to make sure to cut out the white flower head when you use them, so that the garlic flavor isn't too overpowering.  (Of course, you may be like me and wonder how, exactly, one rates too much with regard to garlic!)

Party Chickens

Ever heard a chicken with hiccups?  Yeah, me neither...until yesterday evening.  

We had a group of our nearest & dearest over yesterday to celebrate Jason's 40th birthday, and it was a great day.  It was one of those perfect events where the people that you love and never get to see all together were largely able to be here, and through some miracle, my hostessing duties were virtually finished by the time the first guests arrived.  For once, I was able to relax and visit too. 

My intended chicken itinerary was to let the girls roam at first and then to pen them up when the food came out, so that they wouldn't be obnoxious and start snatching treats out of little hands.  However, they seemed a bit cowed by the number of humans, big and small, in the yard, and for a while Fern, Betty and Roxie stayed on the edge of things.  Even Ramona, while more adventurous, was using her manners.  So, I let the girls continue to run around, much to the delight of the children also roaming the yard.

As more people arrived, I got busier and asked some friends to let me know if the girls became a nuisance.  The next time that I caught up with the chickens, they were neck-deep in snacks from the kids--potato chips being the main course, supplemented by watermelon, graham crackers and who knows what else.  Then came baby Mia's high chair tray--a smorgasbord of potato salad, hamburger, pasta salad and related goodies.  Mia was finished, the tray was on the ground--need I say more?  We had four chickens wiping potato salad from their beaks for ten minutes afterward.

I think I finally realized how much food the girls had had when my friend reached down with a piece of pasta--the ladies' all-time favorite--and we watched Ramona eye it, cock her head, and then turn away.  Whoa.  Is it possible:  a FULL chicken??

 
As the afternoon dwindled, our guests also began to say their goodbyes.  Finally, there were just a handful of us left, sitting in the shade of the pergola, when a funny noise occurred.  Ramona was making an odd squeak every few minutes.  At first, we thought that she was alerting her girls to some dangerous creature...but nothing appeared, and no one else seemed alarmed.  The other girls were, however, coming up to Ramona and looking intently at her face--even leaning in closely as if there were something wrong or she had missed a spot of potato salad.  And then it hit me:  pretty sure those are hiccups.  My greedy chicken had eaten so much that she'd given herself hiccups!

Eventually, Ramona stopped squeaking.  The rest of our guests went home, and Jason & I lighted a lantern, re-applied some bug spray, put our fat chickens to bed, and enjoyed the beautiful night alone in our now-quiet back yard.  Jason had had a great time, and we rehashed some of the party's highlights as the night deepened around us.  It had been fun to see how our guests adjusted to having chickens underfoot--such kind people to accept our strange pets and love us as we are.  Ramona had been picked up, petted, and passed around all day long--really, the nicest little feathered creature imaginable.

And, this morning, four sassy ladies came barreling down the ladder from their coop once I opened the door to let them out--no one had gone into a diabetic coma or otherwise expired overnight in reaction to the mountains of human food they had consumed.  Really, a successful party for the whole family!