Spring

It is amazing to me, the turning of the seasons. Watching how the natural world progresses. When I was younger, I abhorred the fact that I had to spend so much time at work doing something that seemed so senseless as collecting more numbers for a bank account no matter what it was that I was collecting, selling or creating. It wasn't tangible to me. I never felt a sense of accomplishment. When I made mention of this once, and only once, an older woman chuckled at me and said that my job paid for my house, food, car and everything else. I was gently admonished, but it filled me with a since of pity because of the dependency I had on someone else to help me do what I needed to do. I accepted it, began a career and have been unhappy with it. While I know that I will never be able to get away from a need for employment because I will have to have money no matter how frugal, no matter how self sufficient and reliable I am, it doesn't mean that I have to slave to the system.

Spring is coming and all winter I have despaired over the fact that I will have no garden this year as I am moving north shortly. My family is already there, our lives are in a storage unit and I am stuck here until the end of my assignment staying with good friends. The closer my move comes, the more entertaining the ideas of what I will do to the property when I get there. While I have sat and pondered this while pouring through seed catalogs and looked endlessly at the species of orchard trees I will purchase, I can't help but be excited that I will get to do all of this and prepare for the first actually planting that I will get to do next year. The sting of having to spend most of my time in the service of someone else doesn't seem so difficult to bear when I weigh it against how much I'll not have to spend because I'm busy growing, making it and just doing the home chores myself.

I have taken my initiative from such people as Patti Moreno, Rhonda Hetzel, Fred Dunn, Gayla Trail, and so many more and I hope you can, too!

Ya know...

Now that the holidays are over we're back to planning for our up coming move to the PNW.  I'm very excited that we've going to be moving back up there and look forward to beginning to live a more simple life.  We've been looking into work from home projects, including work from home tech support so that we have more time for our children and more time for the work on the property.  I'm very excited about this prospect, it will mean a pay cut, but there will be less money going out with this: no parking, no huge gas bill and certainly no monthly business wardrobe updates, among other things.

I never realized it before, but moving is a huge hassle when you have a house full of stuff.  And we definitely a house full of stuff, specifically the kitchen.  We're a family that spends 80% of the time together in the kitchen cooking, baking, canning, eating.  And everyone contributes, my five year old made the stuffing for our Thanksgiving and did a pretty good job at it.  Because I don't like stuffing in anything larger than a quail for obvious health hazard reasons, it was easy for him.  But because we are a family that spends a ton of time in the kitchen, we have accumulated sooo many giggits and gizmos and gadgets that we scarcely have enough room for most of them.  And I am proud to say that not one of them is a uni-tasker.  But all of that stuff has to be packed!  Thankfully, we've slowed down on the freezer foods and one of two of our freezers is already lined with cardboard waiting for the contribution of kitchen supplies we'll be packing into it.  We've got one more freezer to empty before the kids are out of school in May so we're trying to keep it at a minimum so that we're not going to end up with a ruined mess when we pull into Portland for our short stay there and then on to Vancouver.

This move has renewed my want for easier things such as the tankless water heater, an aeroponic's system, and of course my obsession with dwarf varieties of fruit trees.  But while it has renewed that want, it has also kicked into gear the other things that we want to do.  Solar panels and wind energy to help get the green incentives that the government has offered and will continue to offer to help ween us off petroleum products and big energy consumption.

I'm taken back to a time when I was a kid when the most we picked up from the grocery store was a gallon of milk, a couple of loaves of "light bread", some cans of spaghetti and some top ramen (we loved ramen when I was growing up, it meant we didn't have to cook a huge meal).  Instead of tins with printed labels, it was jars with hand written ones in the cupboard.  Two large freezers were out in the shed, one for wild game we hunted, and the other was for slaughtered farm critters.  

We were a community of people trading and sharing and helping each other with the trials of failed crops, diseased farm animals, and older folks that couldn't do what they once did.  I was talking with my father last night and he was going hunting today with a couple of friends specifically to surprise someone with a deer kill because the man couldn't go hunting himself, even though my father has already killed two bucks this year and traded a side of one of them for a hog from a local farmer.  And when my father got out of his last surgery a couple of years ago and couldn't go hunting, this man brought him fresh deer and hog kills that were already wrapped and frozen.  He also said that he'd gotten a visit from a couple of others that came by only to grab a jar of jelly and he said he probably wouldn't see them again until they ran out or they brought by some fresh something-or-nother from their own garden.

There is a huge difference in that life from the one I lead now.  I'm still a hunter and a farmer but I'm very used to my city conveniences.  I like my 24 hour grocery stores and pharmacies.  And I also like the short amount of time to get from place to place.  Living where my father is it is a 40 minute drive to Wal-Mart that closes at 10PM.  Newp, I don't want to go back to that, I'm too spoiled.

But what I do want is a place that is out of the way with an couple of acres that we can develop for our chickens, quails and rabbits with our greenhouse and our raised beds and our mini orchard.  We're looking forward to being off grid and being one more person that causes less stress on the system that we currently have and maybe we can help to convience a few people along the way to join us.  And we're looking forward to going to the farmers market with our fresh foods and giving away the stuff we don't sell to a local emergency service for folks that can't afford to feed their families.  We're not trying to change the world here, but we certainly trying to get the movement started with the helps of thousands of others like us.

Thanksgiving has brought a lot of this out.  Our children want to know what the game plan is and we've got one.  They are just as excited about this move as I am and they want to get out there and get their hands dirty.  They want to experience these things and we want them to have these experiences so that they have a better understanding of dependance and independance.

Right now, I don't have pictures of my garden to post and I know that makes a huge difference for a blog (considering no one reads this regularly).  But once we're working on our little farm and the trials that we face and the failures and successes we have, everyone that we're going to miss on the east coast will be able to watch us grow.

Yep I'm a Slacker

I have been hiding in my oven here lately. I've produced what seems to be a pumpkin pie or two per day. Not only this but, I am ashamed to say, I have been neglecting my own blog in favor of posting at Patti Moreno's site. So much in fact that she has asked me to contribute to her E-zine!

I get this email and I'm speechless for like five minutes. My husband finally comes over and closes my mouth for me and asks me whats up. I explain and he looks blankly at me (he is sooo not a dirt farmer) and congrats me out of complete auto-response and then wanders off to do his own thing while I'm sitting there stunned.

Image that. Me who has been gardening and canning since I was a little one contributing to Patti Moreno's E-zine? Me!

Needless to say, I've been glowing for the past couple of days.

On a really cool note, I've been working on getting my seed empire going and making out a list of needful things for after we get a place in Washington state. Our list is rather big so we're going to take it one step at a time.

We want bees. Even though my husband is allergic we still want bees. We like mead and such way too much not to have bees. We cook with honey constantly and I like it in my tea and having honey fresh from the hive sounds worth the risk to us.

Not only do we want bees, but we want chickens and quail. Which I have experience raising, keeping and incubating both so that isn't hard. I have the plans for the chicken tractor I want to be able to move from bed to bed so that we can have a nice fertilized soil.

We want rabbits. Fried rabbit is a good thing. Stewed rabbit is a good thing. I can make both. ;) I'd probably get a visit out of my father who lives 14 hours away if he knew I was making it on any given day. Rabbits are very easy to raise and we're looking forward to having some. I have vague memories of raising rabbits as a child. I can't remember why we stopped raising them, but we did. Sounds like a good reason to call Dad!

Aside from the critters we'll have a cat, two dogs. We also have two kids for cheap slave labor to tend the garden beds and grow the stuff they don't wanna eat. ;)

I've been nuts for dwarf fruit trees and I've also been checking into small nut bearing bushes and trees. The smallest one is a hazelnut bush. Everything else grows on these huge stately trees. Ok, so we'll need another acre.

Aside from this huge garden plan we've got plans for solar panels, rain barrels, a water cistern if we can swing it and a green house and a winter garden area.

Our plans are definitely not small but we're looking forward to it. My husband swears that we'll have a cow... but I don't believe him. I didn't like milking them when I was a kid, I certainly won't be up for it now.

Sooo many plans.