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The Benefits of Going Broke

Posted by on January 31, 2012 5 Comments

(When you’re broke and you’re trying to make your own lotions and salves a little mold in your home grown stash of calendula is a depressing discovery)

I don’t like being broke.  If I had a million dollars I wouldn’t feel bad about it.  I don’t hate money.  I don’t think being poor is necessarily more virtuous than being rich.  Bad ethics abound in both economic groups.  On the other hand, it is not my life’s ambition to be rich.  While I certainly wouldn’t mind having such security I don’t need to be rich to have a good life.

But being broke sucks.  This past month we have had to catch up on bills and it has been staggeringly difficult.  We almost had our power turned off, we almost had our internet turned off, we almost had our trash cans toted away, we couldn’t afford to buy half the groceries we’re used to buying.  And we weren’t living extravagantly before this either, so don’t be thinking “Boo hoo, so you can’t buy any brie cheese and caviar, so sad for you and your richie-pants life.”  Naw, we were already living modestly.  We have simply reached a new level of broke.

So you’d think this was a super depressing month.  Oddly enough, it wasn’t.  It was humiliating standing outside in my pyjamas begging the power guy not to cut off our power for five days, but the humiliating bits aside, I have felt oddly refreshed.  I have had to become more resourceful and creative.  I am having to become better at household management.

The Benefits of Going Broke:

  • Better Pantry Management.  I have had to pay much closer attention to what I already have in my pantry and to rely on its contents a lot more.  This is great because in years past I’ve had too much left over in my freezer.  We should be eating everything I freeze within a year.  This summer we packed it full of good stuff but still had lots from the previous year.  I am now using up older stock and am checking the canned goods and the freezer before going to the grocery store.
  • Learning new skills.  I couldn’t afford to buy the expensive Eco laundry detergent we usually use.  I mean, I could afford to buy the really cheap heavily perfumed crap but I refuse to go toxic just because I’m broke.  So I made my own detergent.  It’s easy, it’s super cheap, and it’s natural if the bar soap you use is natural.  I’ve thought about trying this for a long time but as long as I could afford to buy good stuff I lacked the motivation.  So far the home made stuff is working really well.  I did accidentally use a perfumed soap (I was tricked by packaging that hid the heavy synthetic perfume – the ingredients were otherwise completely natural) so next time I’ll be looking for a different soap for it, but the point is that it costs so little to make your own detergent and it takes practically no time at all.
  • Getting more creative in the kitchen.  When you can’t just run out and buy whatever you might want from the store to make dinner with you become more creative.  Especially if, like me, you’re used to having constant access to cheese to cook with.  I’ve been wanting to experiment with making more vegan meals or at least meals that don’t revolve around cheese.  I’m not planning on becoming vegan but I am interested in reducing the amount of dairy we consume by a lot because I don’t want to support the dairy/meat industry which is contaminating our waterways and using up land to feed the cattle instead of being used to feed people directly.  Not being able to afford much cheese has forced our hand in this direction and I’m not sorry.  Yes, some days I really crave cheese but it’s good for me to eat a lot less of it.
  • The combination of going super broke but also being able to keep our house has turned my attention back to the garden.  I have a large city lot and it isn’t being used nearly to capacity for growing edibles and herbs.  I’m pretty good at growing food and plan to get better at it.  If you have beds going all year with at least greens then you can rely a lot less on buying produce.  Prices on all foods are rising and I don’t know that it will ever go down again.  To offset it I will grow more of my own.  It does make a difference.  Even though growing your own isn’t free (water, seeds, starts, tools) it is exponentially cheaper to grow your own once you have beds in place and tools on hand.*  This year my focus will be on having at least a few beds well planned to supply us with dark leafy greens throughout winter and growing more of my own produce for canning and freezing.
  • It has made me more appreciative of the generosity of others.  When you don’t need someone’s help or largesse it’s so much easier to take it with grace and pride still in tact.  When someone is generous with you when you’re in a precarious situation it can either ding your pride and make you want to refuse such generosity (which is stupid) or you can take it, be thankful for it, and find ways to reciprocate that will keep your pride in tact.  A friend bought Max a pair of his favorite kind of shoes on E-bay (we couldn’t find any in his size here in town or anywhere near by) and I almost cried it was so sweet.  They ended up not fitting, which sucks, but that friend’s generosity was really felt by me.  I’m making her some cloth dinner napkins in return.  I may have almost no money but I have things I can make and share with others as a way to thank them for the things they help me out with.  My pride is not bothered by an exchange of things between people.  My pride isn’t wrapped up in money and I don’t have a hard time accepting gifts of money from friends and family who are inspired to do so, provided that I think how I can give back to them either now or later.  So I think being broke is making me feel more generous with what I do have and this is allowing me to not concentrate as much on what I don’t have.
  • Simplifies life.  The best thing about going bankrupt was not having any debt and not having any credit cards anymore.  We’ve been debt and credit card free for two years now.  The hard part is that when we don’t have cash to pay our bills, we’re on the line, we have zero safety net.  I worry a lot about medical issues because Philip and I both have no health insurance.  In the past I would know that in an emergency I could use my credit card for things.  We have zero safety net now.  That’s scary.  The flip side of this is that without credit cards we can only spend what we’ve got.  So there are a lot of things we simply can’t afford to do.  When you have extra resources it seems there are so many situations where there’s pressure to do things (vacation to see family, joining friends out to dinner, etc) and you find yourself squeezing things into your budget you can’t truly afford because you know you can put it on your card and pay for it later.  When you have no cards you just have to say no.  It’s that simple.  Maybe it sounds terrible to some but to me it’s freeing.

Hopefully this month will not be quite as brutal as last month but there’s always something.  All our pets are due for vaccinations and I’m really working hard not to think about the leaks in the house and all the things that could go wrong that I can’t afford to have going wrong.  I’m choosing to focus on the fun of being literally forced to do what I love best in the world: getting back to urban homesteading.

And writing.  Writing is always free.

*In arid desert cities where water is much more scarce and droughts are common water tends to be way more expensive and sometimes rationed so this may not actually be true in those places.  I live in the Pacific Northwest and one of the blessings of living in the land of rain is that water is rarely scarce.)

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Winterizing Your Home: Plugging Up the Small Holes

Posted by on January 18, 2012 2 Comments

Our farmhouse is over a hundred years old and consequently it has many funky charms such as several non-standard door sizes (tall people sustain more surprise head injuries in our house than anyone else) and windows installed at floor level upstairs.  We love it.  What’s less charming about a house this old is that it’s had plenty of time to be worked on by all kinds of unskilled people who have made a bungle of things.  This dryer vent is a perfect illustration.  Clearly the house wasn’t originally built to accommodate an automatic washer and dryer.  Some clever jerk decided that this wasn’t a problem.  To install dryer vent: sledgehammer a hole into the outside wall the approximate size of a dryer vent et voila!  All set.  Don’t mind the big gaping corner through which light and air travel freely – this allows you to breath fresh air even in mid winter.

WRONG.  Anyone living in an old house knows that one of the biggest problems is paying to heat them.  They are famous for these “creative” bits of crappy handiwork that let the heat drain out.  You don’t even need gaping holes like this one, there are so many ways the heat gets out.  So this weekend, because we got a really high heating bill we couldn’t afford, we set about identifying some problems and fixing them.  One problem is that we didn’t put all our storm windows down.  Duh.  Let’s not talk about how dumb that was.  All the functioning ones are now in place.  This hole in the laundry room is something I was vaguely aware of but didn’t think too much about until we got our highest ever electric bill.

You probably don’t have this exact problem in your house.  So I’m not offering this up as a tutorial on how to fix the hole around your dryer vent.  You might, however, have some other little gap letting heat out of your house.  If you have the money (or ACTUAL skills to fix holes properly) you will obviously do it the professional way.  We have no money.  We are so strapped for money at this moment I’m stressed out that I’m going to have to buy cat food today*.  So how do you go about plugging up holes in your house with zero money and no professional house-fixing skills?  You get creative is what you do.  Some day I’ll have that gap fixed with plaster or something but this weekend I came up with a good workable solution:

My main concern was that a dryer vent could potentially get hot.  I know it isn’t likely, especially if you dry all your clothes on low heat – but I’ve had a house fire and I’m paranoid about creating flammable situations.  At first I was going to make a cotton tube and fill it with dryer lint.  We thought that had a kind of poetry to it.  However, cotton is quite flammable as far as fibers go.  So is lint, for that matter.  Wool is not very flammable.  You can burn it but the fire goes out very quickly.

Philip told me this and I didn’t actually believe him.  In an effort to locate a piece of 100% wool in my craft room I did burn tests on swatches of what I thought was wool.  I discovered two things, a) most of my wool fabrics are not 100% wool but are wool and synthetic blends and b) real wool doesn’t burn easily.  The real wool I found was a pant leg from an old vintage pair of army pants.  I trimmed it and sewed it into a tube and stuffed it (loosely) with cotton batting.  Then Philip stuffed it around the dryer vent like a collar – pushing it into the gaps.  It worked perfectly.  No more air flow at all and no more light.

So how can you use my solution to help you come up with your own?  If you have the money or skills, fix your holes professionally.  If you are in a similar situation as I am then think about how you might fill small (or big) holes or cracks to stop drafts.  Some ideas to consider:

  • Fabric scraps can be very useful in plugging up holes.  The more dense the fabric, the more effective.  Tight weave fabrics are your best bet.  Wool is a fantastic insulation fiber so if you have any wool scraps on hand, consider them as a great material.  As long as the hole you’re filling isn’t near a heat source (like a heater vent or a fireplace or a stove) cotton is perfectly good too.
  • Another way to stop drafts from coming through doors is to sew tubes of fabric the length of the door and fill it with rice.  You place this along the bottom of the door and it will block drafts.  This will also work for drafts coming through windows.
  • Caulking.  If you find really small holes in your house letting the heat out you may be able to caulk them.  This is cheap and doesn’t take great skill to do.  As you can see, my hole was much too big to fill with caulking and we also needed to be able to take the vent out if necessary.  But there may be other small holes or gaps that can be closed with caulking.

So when you’re looking around at the many ways heat is escaping your old home, consider what materials you have on hand and be creative in thinking about how they might be used.

*Don’t worry, I can cover the cat food.  It’s just THAT tight that it stresses me out every time I see we need something.  If it came down to having to borrow money from a friend to feed my cats I would have no shame in asking for help.

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The Best Beginning

Posted by on January 11, 2012 7 Comments

We just found out on Monday that we were approved for the HAMP loan modification that we applied for so that we won’t lose our house.  This is the best possible way to start the new year.  I don’t deal well with uncertainty and we’ve been going through this for two years now.  Well, truly, almost from the day we first moved in here four years ago.  If you want more of the details and thoughts that go along with this news you can read about it here.  So I’m feeling deeply relieved and deeply thankful for this news.

In the past couple of years I have been more focused on just coping with stress from day to day, trying to help my kid with his challenges, and I have retreated into my writing – all of which was good and necessary but leaving my garden to do its thing has resulted in a giant mess.  A colossal mess.  Now that we get to stay we have some real things to face.  The first is much more extreme budgeting.  This is not going to be easy but it is necessary in order to make this work.  (No, the bank didn’t reduce our loan by much money – they fixed some other things that would have forced us to move soon, such as the adjustable rate and other things I can’t be bothered to go into.)

The important thing is that now that we’ve been approved for this adjustment we know the bank isn’t going to kick us out and as long as we can make our payments, we’re here for good.  I have to admit that there have been times when I fantasized about getting kicked out because then we could move to Portland out of this god-forsaken little town of ours… but truly, I love my weird house and I’ve become accustomed to being a freak in the Oregon bible belt and we know most of the cool people here.  Plus, it’s pretty around here.

So here are a few things I want to work on around here as time allows:

Budgeting:

  • Soft spendy cheeses for special occasions only.
  • No beer except for very rare occasions (cheap wine instead, but only a few days a week, not every day).
  • No second pots of coffee.  When first pot runs out, make tea.
  • Cut Kung Fu classes.  (We can still practice the Kung Fu we already know)
  • Meal planning.  (I have the toughest time with this but every time I do it, I spend less money on grocery shopping.)

In the Garden:

  • Continue to cut back and uproot all the blackberries.  Huge job.  Long-term.
  • Prune the roses so we have a great crop of them this year for filling vases and cheering our poor asses up.
  • Have Philip relocate a couple of the roses that are too close together.
  • Clear out the two empty square beds in preparation for spring planting.
  • Plan the spring garden.  Just list the things you really want to grow, all your priorities, and roughly plan where you want to put them.  The more food we grow, the less we have to buy.
  • Prune the fruit trees by the end of February and apply dormant oil if you can find some that isn’t petroleum based.

Inside the house:

  • Get on a regular cleaning routine.  Starting this Saturday.  Just concentrate on: washing and changing sheets, vacuuming, cleaning the bathroom, mopping kitchen floor.
  • Apply diatomaceous earth to all floors in the house.  (This was a tip from my friend Ann that our vet agreed was an effective and non-toxic flea control.  Pippa, it turns out, is very allergic to fleas so we need to be on top of this)
  • Curtains on Max’s bedroom window.
  • Wash and sew new covers on all his comforters that have become gross and ratty and depressing.
  • Continue to work on the home-made lotion trials.

That’s plenty to focus on.  It’s important not to overwhelm myself before I even get out the gate.  I have writing to do as well, but these other things need to be given more priority than they have been.  Such improvements will help ease my overall depression which has been so bad lately that I literally want to sleep all the time.   While that’s a classic symptom for many people with clinical depression, that’s not been one of mine.  I don’t sleep well at night, ever, and then I just want to stay in bed all day.  Anyway, fixing up some of the things that depress me that I see every day is a step in the right direction.

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Getting Into Fall Around the House

Posted by on October 30, 2011 2 Comments

My experiments with tomato tarts are over.  Tomatoes are officially finished for the year.  At the Saturday Market Denison Farm had a basket of mostly unripe pale ghosts of what I recognize as tomatoes.  It’s over.  As much as I love tomatoes I am not sad.  Everything has its season and I’m so happy that the temperatures have dropped.  My house got down to 55° this week.  My  mom usually can’t take such low temps in the house but she must be getting used to it because I offered to turn the heat on (we haven’t done so this season yet) and she said she was fine.  Keeping the heat down will be important in budgeting now that we’re back to paying our mortgage and hoping to keep the house.  I can’t even remember if I mentioned here that we got approved for a trial period with the HAMP loan.  People can be refused it even after paying their mortgage perfectly on time for the whole trial period, so nothing is certain.  But what’s new?  Nothing has been certain for a long time for us.

Big splurge in my house was buying a bunch more wire bail hermetically sealing glass storage jars for my pantry and cleaning my whole pantry out.  We had a major pest infestation and I had to throw a bunch of grains and old stuff out as well as wipe down all the shelves and clean out jars.  Doing this always feels so good!  We are buying more and more in bulk so it’s important to have a good way to store it all.  We do have food-grade plastic buckets for the huge quantities of legumes we have in the garage.  I hate using any plastic but I can’t see a better way yet for those.  But here in the cupboard the air-tight glass jars are the only way to go for us.  Because I can’t afford to have ALL things stored in them I do have a number of screw-top jars in use.

My Elephant Heart plum tree lost a huge branch.  we have yet to prune it and deal with it.  It makes me so sad.  However, I’m hoping that with a great pruning we can encourage it to survive this setback.

I finally finished canning.  I did.  I finished this past Tuesday with making quince “cheese”.  The project is a bit dubious, I have no idea if it turned out.  I have to wait a few weeks before opening my jars and trying it.  The recipe was actually British and called for using glycerin to coat the inside of the jars so that the quince can be removed more easily and sealing them with wax.  I am inexperienced in this and didn’t have paraffin on hand so I processed them in a canner which made coating in glycerin a waste.  If I like the taste of the quince cheese then I will go the traditional route next year and use wax and glycerin.

I was done with my canning.  I really was.  The grape syrup was a bust.  It gelled but not completely so I re-boiled it and it was ruined.  It lost all grape flavor and became boiled fruit flavor.  Not my favorite.  I tossed it.  Ah well, these things happen.  It’s part of the preserving learning curve.  The apple sauce, at least, was simple and I canned quite a few pints of it.  I don’t even eat much of it but I do love it on savory pancakes with sour cream (latkes or zucchini fritters) so it’s nice to have some on hand.

I was done with preserving and cooking in serious bulk until yesterday when my friend Andre had a bag of tomatilloes he couldn’t do anything with and gave them to me.  Suddenly I have tomatillo salsa to make.  I’m not crying.  Not really.  I love tomatillo salsa.  So I’ll be making that this week.

Food budgeting is beginning.  My first trick is to not shop during the week.  Unless it’s something specifically for Max.  I will not indulge in the habit I have of suddenly wanting to make something I don’t have the ingredients for and running out to buy them.  I am shopping on Saturday for the week and will simply have to make food with what I buy.  No spontaneous purchases.  Next I will work at limiting some of the expensive things I buy like cheese.  Coffee too.  If we run out mid week, no buying another bag.  I’ve got lots of tea to drink in it’s place.  I’m not depressed this time (the year before last was super hard and really depressing).  We have plenty to eat.  Max’s food is the biggest concern because of his picky eating, but cooking on a budget for the adults is not going to be difficult if I get creative.  We have tons of bulk and after this very busy preserving season I have stuffed the shelves with jars of home canned goods and the freezer with good things.  We are already very fortunate and rich with good things to eat.

I also have a great huge stash of walnuts from a dear friend of mine and this makes me feel secure like a squirrel with a full tree trunk.  I look forward to cracking them.  My OCD makes this kind of work extremely satisfying and then I’ll freeze the nuts so that no bugs or bug eggs can survive.  Sounds distressing, I know.  However, I know from experience that these things linger in all real food and sometimes freezing is the best way to deal with them.  I’m going to have so many walnuts to use!

Today I’m going to make chocolate zucchini bread from Clotilde Dusoulier’s book of the same name.  I’ve never tried it before but I’m hoping the kid might enjoy it.  (It’s actually “cake” but has less sugar in it than most zucchini bread recipes do).  To that end I must dash off and get dressed and clean the kitchen.  What could be better than baking on a rainy stormy day?

I hope you are all enjoying your Sunday and keeping warm inside.

Pantry Shelves: how to clean, store, and organize your kitchen shelves

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This Week’s Garden Harvest

Posted by on October 22, 2011 4 Comments

This is what I harvested from the garden this week: some cayenne peppers (many more are almost ripe, but not quite there yet), rose hips from my French wild rose, and a handful of snow peas.

I halved the hips and gutted them.  They are now drying.  I tried getting all the hairy bits off but with no success.  That stuff can, apparently, irritate your throat if ingested.  I guess I just have to make sure to use muslin bags for making tea with them.

I haven’t had a lot of time to play in the kitchen and I still have those same pesky preserving projects hanging over my head.  I would truly like to get them finished this weekend.  I need to move on with my writing.  I’m also going to have to clean my house pretty seriously because in a month there are going to be a lot of people in it.  I’m feeling pretty overwhelmed.

Preserving left to do:

sugar up the grape juice to make syrup, and can it

Apple sauce, can it

Quince in vanilla sugar syrup, canned

Shred all the giant zucchinis and freeze them

I have heard from some of my friends that they’re winding their own preserving projects up but are having trouble, like me, getting it all done between work and other responsibilities.  We do it because it’s important but there’s no question that doing a lot of preserving takes time.  What I’m tired of is having jars everywhere, on every surface, and all my equipment out.  I’m ready to put it all away.  But it would be silly to do it before I’m done.

I’m going to go get dressed, go to the Saturday farmer’s market, and then I’m going to get some of this done.  Plus cook a farewell dinner for really good friends who are moving back to Utah.  Boooooo!  We are devastated.  We must feed them so well they will immediately plan they’re first vacation to visit us.

What are you all working on this weekend?  Is your canner finally back on the shelf?  Are you wrapping things up or still in the thick of it?

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Cautiously Hopeful: The Bank Called

Posted by on September 23, 2011 7 Comments

After 15 months of no answer from the bank (12 of which they were just completely ignoring us*) we have been approved for a trial period with the HAMP loan.  This, it turns out, is a little anticlimactic because the reason we applied for the loan was to lower our mortgage because we couldn’t afford it.  It’s only been lowered about $50 a month.  It feels a little like going back to square one.  There is a significant change in our loan, however, which I need to be thankful for, which is that the terms of it now include a lower cap on how much our variable rate can go up which is important because the way it was  before we knew that even if we could somehow keep scraping by paying our mortgage, in three years it was going to balloon up to an amount there was no way we could pay.

I want to rejoice that we’re one step closer to keeping our home but I feel dispirited.  An acquaintance got approved for the trial period too and at the end of making all her payments on time she was refused the loan in the end.  So we are by no means in the clear.  However, that was over a year and a half ago and I can’t see any reason why, at this point with the market absolutely flooded with foreclosures, why our bank would refuse to give us this loan if we make our payments on time and in full.  They have nothing to gain by putting this house into foreclosure.  They won’t recoup their money.  They’re better off keeping us here, making payments on a loan that isn’t much different from the one they originally made with us.

Who can say what will happen?  We start paying our new mortgage starting in November.  What this means for us is that we’re going back to being seriously cash poor.  No traveling for me, possibly ever again.  Serious grocery budgeting.  Back to rarely going out to dinner (we’ve been going out once a week as a family treat for the last year).  It means dropping some Kung Fu.  (I’m hoping to keep my forms class but until we start paying the new mortgage I can’t tell if this is realistic or not)  It definitely means no beer on a regular basis which is great for the waistline but not so great for stress relief.  We will not be able to buy books anymore (we don’t spend tons of money on them or anything but it was nice to be able to buy some great books for Max this year after being able to buy so few before).  It will be hard to take care of things like my teeth which need serious work, Max’s therapy, fixing my scooter (which seems to be having transmission problems), and buying pet flea care ($$$)**, any other crap that crops up that needs to be dealt with.

Do I sound pessimistic?  I’m worried.  I haven’t forgotten the hell year we had of barely scraping up enough for groceries some months.  One other difference, though, is that my  mom is here now.  She is pretty poor herself, depending on social security for her income.  (Incidentally, for those of you who want to abolish this institution – you wait until you’re old and in poor health and can’t work enough to pay to stay alive and depend on your poor relations to somehow scrape by enough to keep you alive- this is no joke.  I am so thankful my mom has something coming in after years of hard work!)  Anyway, my mom’s income is mostly going towards bills that cannot be excused just because she retired.  But she is going to try to budget too so she can contribute to the mortgage.  She really wants to help and that’s what she’ll do if she can.  So truly, things may not be as bleak as they were before.

It’s been a couple of days since we found out and as it sinks in that the bank is not, so far, planning to boot us out of the house, I am slowly succumbing to some optimism.  Allowing myself to think about planting my elderberry and rose from my friend Riana.  I am cautiously allowing myself to believe we might actually get to stay here.  We love this place.  None of us want to move.  As my mom has  been working hard all summer on our garden and produced for us a great crop of beans and tomatoes and other good things we have been dreaming of the things we’ll plant next year, the beds we’ll add, the changes we’ll make so our property feeds us ever more food.  From one barrel we have a bumper crop of cayenne peppers, we have dried enough thyme to supply us for a year, we’ve dried stevia too, and kale.  There’s so much more to do, so much more we can grow.  And with our financial situation being so tight, staying here means that it’s never been more important to grow food and herbs.

This is the first year my quince has produced anything worth talking about.  The immature fuzz has faded and I have several quince coming closer to harvest time.  I have been watching that ancient fruit forming, clinging to the tree surrounded by a thicket of roses gone a bit wild, and it’s seemed to me a representation of everything I hope for.  I want to see that tree mature.  I want to see crops of quince so large I throw up my hands and say “What shall I do with so much quince?!”.  I wasn’t even sure, months ago, that I would be here to see it fruit this summer.  Now it looks like I’ll at least get to harvest the fruits it made and I can start thinking about what I’ll make with them.

It’s tough for so many people out there.  It just keeps getting tougher.  There are so many people out there having an even harder time than we are.  We’re employed and that is saying a lot right now.  So while I’m feeling cautiously hopeful about being able to stay in this house, I am also taking some time to be grateful for the things we have and the good things that have come our way.

 

*They don’t even look at HAMP applications while you have an open bankruptcy file.  But they failed to inform us of this.  That was 12 months of needless paperwork Philip put together every single month.  Would have been nice to know this.

**I do intend to start using diatomaceous earth in the carpets and on the pets to help control fleas as my friend Ann suggested and maybe eventually that will be all we need (and that’s pretty cheap stuff).  At the moment they are recovering from a bad infestation and they need the big bad chemical treatment.

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Around the Farmhouse: A Not So Leisurely Sunday

Posted by on September 18, 2011 2 Comments

I have my mother to thank for all these tomatoes.  She has been making sure they get water frequently resulting in the best tomato crop my garden has had in years.  It’s so exciting.  In the area it’s been known to be a mild/cool summer with heat spells only showing up the late in August and I know some people are not having great tomato harvests like we are – so I think they must be in a great spot and I also think my mother has some magic.  We grew about 12 plants.  I think I should go count them to be sure and for the record next year.  The varieties we’re growing whose names I know are: Black Krim, Striped German, Sungold (2), Jaune Flamme (2), Yellow Brandywine, and a few others whose names I can’t remember and will be revealed when we rip out the plants and gather the plastic plant tags.  I think there is a Pineapple variety and possibly a Japanese Trifele.

My mom also planted some snow peas around our flimsy garden fence and we’ve been getting quite a good crop of them.   We have some lush lettuce and some beets that look like they might be getting big.  We harvested and dried some kale and have been getting a slow but steady stream of cucumbers and zucchinis.  Again- why does everyone have a “problem” with prolific zucchinis and I just have a trickle?

One of my favorite things to eat this summer has been a simple Greek-inspired salad.  Just cucumbers, tomatoes, thinly sliced red onion, feta cheese and vinaigrette.  The Sungold tomatoes are unbelievably good in this and I could eat this for every meal.  I would do it except for the fact that there’s a lot of other produce to use up too.

45 quarts of dill pickles.  About 17 half pint jars of blackberry jam.  15 half pints of strawberry jam.  11 quarts of marinara sauce.  22 quarts of diced tomatoes.  4 pints of tomatillo salsa (my mom did that one on her own).  5 half pints of peach chutney.  5 pints of peaches in light syrup.  That’s what’s been going on in my kitchen this past few weeks.  I’m hoping to pick up some damson plums tomorrow to make jam with.  A close friend has some Italian prune plums and I’m wondering what I could make with those.  She has a lot of them.  I do like prunes and I’d be interested in drying a few but what else are they good for?

Any ideas?  Please share.  Would they make a good savory plum sauce?  Do they make a good jam?  How about pickled plums?  (I’ve never had those).

Today we got our first fall rain.  It’s lovely.  It means I need to go pick as many of the tomatoes that might be ripe out in the garden that I can because they’ll start splitting.  Today I will be slow roasting a bunch of tomatoes and then freeze them.  I also got 10 ears of corn for $3 at Harvest Fresh and will be making a spicy corn chowder with them.  If the corn is good I will go and get more corn and make some chowder to freeze.

I also have pesto to make.  As I’m writing this all out I suddenly feel serious pressure to finish my paid job so I can jump into the kitchen and get cracking on all those food projects.  Food has a habit of going bad when left around.  I wasn’t even going to make pesto but my friend Laurie and my mom talked me into it.  I still have 10 batches in the freezer.  Still, in case you didn’t know it- people love pesto and that makes pesto a great bribe or a much appreciated thank you to friends and family.  Pesto in winter is one of life’s greatest indulgences.  Mine, which my close friend Chelsea and I perfected together, is one of the best recipes out there.  (According to Laurie and my mom) (I like it a lot too)  So I bought supplies to make more and there are four beautiful bunches of fresh basic waiting for me to process them.  I’m tired.  Is it beer-O-clock yet?

 

You can make corn chowder too-here’s my recipe.

If you don’t know how to slow roast tomatoes and you want to try it you can follow my instructions for making slow oven roasted tomatoes.

This pesto recipe is fantastic.  Making it always reminds me of Chelsea.

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A Garden Surprise and a New Garden Hero

Posted by on August 23, 2011 9 Comments

I was waiting for these currants to turn red, the way you do when you’re growing red currants.  They have stayed this pretty blush color for a long time.  Now some of the berries are shriveling up like raisins.  This was a clue to me that these fruits were not going to turn red.  I had this flash of memory back to the time I was agonizing (in the most enjoyable way) over which currant varieties to buy.  I couldn’t help but be attracted to the champagne currants for their ethereal paleness.  I was completely blinded by the romance of them.  In the end I decided that they probably wouldn’t taste as good as the red ones.  I tend not to like pale versions of food.  Except for cauliflower.  I don’t like white eggplants, white asparagus, or wax beans (pale yellow).  So I ordered the red ones.  I ordered three plants.  One died.  I finally planted the two surviving ones and this year (the first time in three years) it produced a few clusters.

So here we are today with two champagne currants.  Isn’t it strange how sometimes what we want comes to us even when we decide we really don’t want it?  I’m going to cut these today and see if they taste good.  They may not because they’re quite old at this point.  Still, I’m not sorry that the universe handed me my fanciful plant wishes – just look how the blushed berries are illuminated by the sun?

If we get to keep the house then I’ll plant a couple of red currants as well.

I have a link to share that I saw on my friend Ann’s blog Thoughtherder which you should check out just to read about her adventures in not using shampoo.  She posted this video of Ruth Stout and I am so charmed by this lady!  You really must watch this film of a wonderful gardener named Ruth Stout.

Thank you for sharing that, Ann!

I have another link to share with you.  If you do any foraging for wild food you will be amused and you will feel yourself in excellent company: Stalking Boletus Edulis – Or How Mushrooms Caused Me to Engage in All Seven Deadly Sins

I still haven’t foraged for any mushrooms but this only serves to wet my appetite for hunting mushrooms.

We got our first real harvest of tomatoes yesterday and they are so good!  Especially the Black Krim which is one of my very favorite tomatoes of all time.  This weekend I canned dilled beans/carrots/zucchini.  7 quarts.  Yesterday I canned 11 jars of blackberry jam and have a discussion I want to start about reaching gelling points with other canners.  Next up, hopefully this weekend, my mom and I will try to get a box or two of pickling cucumbers from Sauvie Island to make my garlic dill pickles.  We’re out and it’s devastating!

What’s going on in your kitchens and gardens this week?

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First Days of Summer

Posted by on June 24, 2011 2 Comments

The Apothecary’s Rose is supposed to have a strong scent.  For me it has never had more than a mild sweet scent.  Even so, I am completely taken with it’s history as one of the earliest cultivated roses and its well known medicinal uses.  When it comes to getting the best medicine from roses you want to get as close to wild roses as you can.  The absolute best rose variety for use in medicine is the dog rose (Rosa Canina) (but good luck finding a nursery that carries this one and if you do, for god’s sake- tell me where you found it!) but this rose is the next  best thing to species roses.  I am not generally a fan of the single roses but this is one of the exceptions.

Borage is charming.  It has uses.  It’s edible.  It’s medicinal.  I confess I like it because it has starry spikey blue flowers that look like they were designed by a ten year old into science fiction.  I haven’t had any in my garden for a long time.  So many things blooming right now are old friends.

You are dying to ask me if my hands are freakishly small, aren’t you?  (What would you say if I said YES?!)  These strawberry leaves were normal sized when I planted them last year.  My secret fear is that someone (poison-man from next door) dumped some toxic waste on my garden and now these plants have superpowers.  Do other people have such enormous strawberry leaves lurking in your garden?  Please share, cause I’m a little freaked out.

In contrast to the leaves, the berries are normal sized.  There are lots of them!  In a couple of days we’ll be able to pick our first bowlful.  One of the things I love about living in Oregon are all the berries.  I realize that California has them too.  But they’re not as good.  I kid you not.  Especially if you like to grow them yourself.  I could never get any strawberries to thrive in my California garden.  I couldn’t keep the ground moist enough to get anything but tiny little berries.  Here, all I have to do is plant them and wait.  They ripen just as the summer sun comes out (there’s little spring sunshine here) and so I don’t even have to water them to get fruit.  The blueberries here are phenomenal and prolific as well.  So are the blackberries and the -

Speaking of berries coloring up- the red currents are turning too!  I’ll have enough of them to make about a quarter cup of sauce.  Maybe.  I’m so excited about them, even if I just had one bunch to eat raw, I couldn’t be more pleased.  I love tart food!

This is my most beautiful kitchen utensil.  Mitch made it from black walnut wood.  From a walnut tree that grew here in my county.  I never knew a spoon could make me so happy.

Philip has submitted our HAMP loan papers, this time to actually be looked at by an underwriter with the bank.  We should know in a month if we get to stay here.  If we do, we’re going to be really broke again.  I think it will be worth getting to stay right here.  Looking down from my eyrie of an office on my monastery garden full of California poppies, lupines, calendula, columbines, nasturtiums, vegetables, and feverfew.

There is such a chaos of beautiful, edible, and healing things planted all around me here.  I want to be here.

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Beautiful June

Posted by on June 12, 2011 7 Comments

June in my garden means all of my roses are either blooming or are just about to bloom.  While I was working on the novel the other day my mom surprised me with this vase full of gorgeous “Cottage Rose” roses, a David Austin variety.  I don’t know how this rose behaves in anyone else’s garden but in mine it is towering and reaching and wants to be a climber.  The roses are prolific and gorgeous.  The scent is light but definite.  Roses in my garden either have to have a scent or they have to perform some other purpose (rose hips, for example).

Here’s “Cottage Rose” in its natural environment, the jungle of my yard.

This is my bean bed which is coming along nicely.  I need to buy another bean packet to fill in some holes where beans didn’t pop up or where they were eaten to the ground.  I planted all I had in this bed.

I’ve grown bush beans and they’re good but my favorite is always the pole bean.  I am growing Scarlet podded, Helda, and Lazy Housewife.

I have some wild purple lupines from a wild seed packet but this one my mom bought at the nursery and I can see it from my eyrie of an office.  I’ve been enjoying the almost coral color mixed with the orange calendula and California poppies it shares a bed with.

I have been wanting to grow red currants forever.  I have made several failed attempts.  For the first time I’m getting berries and they’re so pretty!  Gooseberries are another ambition I have and now I’m encouraged to try for them next year.

This week we finally heard from the bank about our house.  Through a gross miscommunication we have been applying for the HAMP loan for a year and the bank was ignoring us because our bankruptcy file never officially closed.  You can read about it on my other blog if you like “If My Bank Was My Boyfriend”.   The upshot is that they aren’t ignoring us anymore and we should find out whether or not we get to keep our home within the next month.  Now I’m looking around feeling both dread and excitement at the same time.  I find myself saying (constantly) “If we get to keep the house we’ll replace those dying diseased peach trees with more “Frost” peaches…” or “If we get to keep the house I’m going to plant a gooseberry…” or “If we get to keep the house we’ll get a tub we can actually soak in…”

The reality is that if we get to keep our house we’ll be so broke we’ll just have to sit tight and buckle down with budgets and make do with what we have and there will be no real improvements for the foreseeable future.  I can live with that.  For the chance to see my sour cherry tree mature and put out a full crop?  For the chance to harvest our first Spitzenberg apple?  Worth the poverty.  Not having to move, not having to leave this house we love, not having to uproot ourselves to God knows where and in what hovel… completely worth being broke as dirt.  All my fingers and toes are crossed.  We think the numbers are in our favor and the bank says the only thing they care about is the numbers.

Whatever the outcome, I’m enjoying my roses and seeing my fruits and vegetables growing and maturing.  June is a lovely month in Oregon.

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