Summer Routine

Now that the ladies are in their permanent coop, I wake up at 6 and head up the hill to open the door and let them out into the run. I watch them for a little while, worrying that they aren't eating enough, or drinking enough. Then I head back to bed for a bit.

The brown stuff is leaf mulch - our dirt is black

My second wake up comes around 7 or 7:15, when my tummy starts rumbling and the sun is too inviting to ignore (if I've slept with my contacts in, this comes sooner, because I can actually make things out when I open my eyes lazily.) I head downstairs and make my morning drink: sun tea, or hot water with lemon and mint leaves. I take my mug out with me to the garden, where I check on all the plants. Morning is the best time to harvest, to I gather anything that looks too good to pass up. Today, I picked a ton of spinach (at the end of its rope), some kale, chard, and a tiny bit of basil and blueberries. Normally I'd water the plants, but the two thunder storms yesterday took care of that for me.

My favorite is the 6 blueberries!

I bring any grubs or worms I find and any crummy leaves I've snipped off to the chickens. They seem pretty excited about it, so maybe that'll make up for my manhandling them twice yesterday to protect them from the storms.

I take my veggies inside and wash them all thoroughly and send them through the salad spinner. This morning, though, the kale and chard leaves are too big. I don't feel like cutting them, so I decide we should eat them right away. I whip up a frittata of:

-peas (from VA farmer's market)
-spicy red onions and their green tops (VA farmer's market)
-basil, oregano, rosemary (from my mom's garden)
-dill (VA farmer's market)
-Chard (my garden)
-Kale (my garden)

The makings of a delicious breakfast

It sticks to the pan a little, but it's glorious with some gluten free toast spread with peanut butter and our homemade strawberry jam. Alex is up by this point, so we eat together on the porch.

I then spend about 30 minutes tidying the kitchen, hanging herbs to dry, emptying the dish washer, and trying to ignore the floor which I haven't cleaned in 2 weeks. Time for house chores! This morning I get down to sanding the floor while Alex helps his brother with tax stuff via the phone. I make it 40 minutes before the battery craps out. Luckily we have two. On the new battery, the sander is overheating and the plastic paper holder is burning up. I get a little scared and decide to do something else. I gather all the supplies to do touchup painting in the hallway, but the fancy new painter's tape won't stick to anything. It's either crummy, or the issue is the layer of sawdust that's everywhere. Regardless, I don't feel like dealing with this by myself and head upstairs to check e-mail and blog until Alex is done. This may seem specific to today, but it's a pretty common scenario. It's hard to stay motivated when doing stuff on your own.

But blogging doesn't pan out either, since none of the photos I took will upload from my stupid (haha)  smart phone. So I bite the bullet and head back down to sand some more. After the second battery goes, I take an air break, check on the chickies, and decide to start on lunch. Faux meatballs, quinoa noodles, homemade yogurt cheese, rosemary, and soy milk don't sound like they'd be good together, but they are an excellent pasta dish. Alex is finally ready to begin house work around the time that I'm totally ready for it to be over, and heads out to weed whack the front yard. He eats when he's done, and we hang out for about 20 minutes before he heads to work.

I occupy myself with e-mail, work stuff, and playing with my new juicer that my totally awesome sister got me for a housewarming present until I feel guilty, try some more sanding, and now it's 5:30. I pulverize a bumper crop of mint in my handcrank blender and freeze the pulp in ice cube trays to use in cocktails and tea later. Then I get down to business r.e. figuring out what's wrong with my idiot phone, and finally post this sucker.

Sanding, days 2-3

For all my complaining, we are a lot closer after yesterday's work.

If the drum sander was my bitch, I was totally the edger's bitch. Sorry for the rough analogy, but there you have it. The thing was 45 pounds, only about a foot tall, and you had to either kneel or bend over and drag it around the room. Kneeling isn't practical since you can't move fast enough to not F-up the floors, so your back is killing you five minutes in. The instructions claim you don't have to remove the moulding, but what they mean is the machine doesn't hurt moulding. It can't actually make it all the way to the wall in many spots, so there is still a lot of work to do.

We got the same amount of sand paper rolls that we did for the drum sander, which wasn't really enough. No matter though, since we only had a limited time and couldn't really get to everything anyway.

Alex did 99% of the work, with me relieving him twice for about 4 minutes each time. I vacuumed a little and made sure he didn't trip on the chord, but I'm really not strong enough to use that machine. If I did this again (and I will, in my bedroom) I will buy a more powerful plug-in hand sander and use that instead. Our little hand sander isn't designed for extremely rough work, so the lowest grit the paper sheets come in is 80. Hence, it taking so long to do final touch ups.

Others come in 36, so that's my recommendation. The edger is awkwardly designed, heavy, and you have to change the paper every 10 minutes anyway, so a hand sander is a better bet.

Stupid sander disks! Why can't you handle a little floor finish? Wimps!

Our little hand sander does still get mucked up really fast by the floor finish, though, so I've gone through a lot of sheets of 80 in the last few days. Hopefully we'll be done in another 2, which is about when I expect the (expensive as all hell!) non-VOC floor stain to arrive.

We are so close (ish) to having two usable rooms!!

This Means War.

Snap Peas, just minding their business....

With 2 weeks of 85-90 degree weather comes....bugs. Leaf miners are taking more and more spinach leaves each day, but since we've only got a few more days before the spinach is finished, I'm not too stressed about it. The arugula is already out of commission. We've finally seen the deer in action, and they bit the tops off most of my snap pea plants a few days ago, which I cannot abide.

See any blossoms? No, because they were all munched!!

New cabbage worms hatch every day and leave the tell-tale little holes in anything in the cabbage family (Kale, collards, Cauliflower, etc.) Today I went on the offensive and rubbed both sides of affected leaves with soapy water. This killed the caterpillars, hopefully removed some of the insect eggs that were just waiting to hatch, and made the leaves inhospitable for buggies. I think the soap makes it so they can't breathe.

The soaped-up underside of an attacked cauliflower leaf

Naturally, every time I do this (or spray liquid fence), it decides to rain. Today was a doozy. The poor chickens were out of their minds. The wind was bending the trees at alarming angles and spraying water everywhere, so I felt for the babies. Their safe, warm coop was just a ladder climb away, but either it didn't occur to them, or the trip would have been too scary. Instead, they were cowering under the coop, where there is a wind break on one side, but open wire on the other.

I know the fastest way to a dead chick is to make them cold or damp, so I pulled on a hoodie, went out in the rain, scooped them out from under the coop (no easy task) and penned them up in the coop until the storm was over. Maybe they'll do it themselves next time. My arms aren't quite long enough to make that a pleasant job.

First Canning of the Season

Nothing too major, just a small batch of strawberry jam from the gorgeous strawberries we found this weekend at the farmer's market. We were visiting my parents in Virginia, where the growing season is a little further along, so the berries were just right.

Those that were blemish free were mixed with sugar and left in the fridge a few hours to release the juices. The bruised ones weren't wasted though. They went into the strawberry sauce pot. A jar of strawberry sauce is now at the ready in the fridge. I poured it on my granola with yogurt this morning, and it was glorious.

For those who want to try jam making without a ton of sugar, I'd suggest trying Pomona's Universal Pectin instead of regular pectin. It's activated by calcium powder instead of sugar, so you don't need to add so much. It's a little more expensive than the other stuff, but it makes a lot of jam (I'm still on my box from last year and I canned 12 jars worth) and lasts forever. This small batch filled three half pint jars, which is pretty exciting. That's probably all the straight strawberry jam i'll put up this year. If there are gorgeous berries I can't resist at the market, i'll either make strawberry vanilla jam next, or half and freeze them for smoothies all year long.

Other scores from the farmer's market in VA included english peas, which I'll use to make cheesy pasta tomorrow, radishes, which I'm going to use for refrigerator pickles, spicy onions, southern sweet potatoes, mint, and a fruiting blueberry bush I got for 20 bucks. More on that later.

Memorial Day = Moving Day

Not for us, for the chickie babies! It's 80-90 degrees every day outside, we think they'll be warm enough in the closed coop at night without a heat lamp because they have a lot of feathers. Plus, I think the ladies had done all the exploring they could in a 2x2 foot box.

We lined the inside of the coop and the nesting boxes with nice straw, but thought that seemed like a waste in the run, so we used clippings from a recent hedge pruning for their bedding. We also tossed in some treats, like the tops of strawberries I used to make jam this morning, and some greens from the tops of radishes. If radishes are like carrots, leaving the greens on zaps the taste and energy from the root, so I wanted to get rid of them fast.

So far, they seem extremely happy. Every time a fly goes by, they try to dive bomb it and end up tumbling into the chicken wire fence or landing in a heap in the new waterer, but they'll figure it out eventually.

Before we moved them in, we put hardware wire on the bottom of the coop too, so dogs or racoons couldn't burrow under the run and get in if we forgot to close the coop door at night. Next week, we are constructing a portable pen for them so they can also hang out in the yard when Alex or I am out there to supervise and deter birds of prey

Floor Sanding, Day 1

Our porch is back to being the storage shed. It almost looks like a very cluttered living room, right? I woke Alex at 6 am this morning and we headed to the Home Depot. The man at the tool rental counter was extremely skeptical, telling us over and over again that drum sanders were "not for amateurs," and warning that if there was varnish on the floor it wouldn't work anyway. We persisted, and rented the thing for a 4 hour chunk. After grabbing plastic sheeting to tape off the rest of the house and a bunch of sand paper rolls for the machine, we headed home. The clock was ticking!

The plan was that I would sand the dining room while Alex pulled nails in the living room (I'm pretty useless at pulling nails when they're this embedded.) While we were given instructions on how to use the sander, Alex, ahem, lost them. So we had to figure it out on our own. I wanted to go up and back; Alex though we should always move forward, so when we hit a wall, we should turn. I tried that, and the self propelled sander almost ran me into the wall. It also looked crummy where we turned since we were going against the grain of the wood. Eventually I got the hang of it (after a few inner breakdowns) and it worked great! You begin with the lowest grit sand paper, and make sure to get all parts of the floor evenly. Forward and back is correct, but you pull the lever up when repositioning the sander, which Alex figured out.

Because our floor is 3/4" and there isn't any subfloor, I was less worried about making it perfectly level and more worried about leaving as much floor there as possible. If there was a groove that the sander wouldn't get, we left it. The hand sander could take care of it. As you can see below, the hand sander is a little messier, since it doesn't suck up most of the saw dust into a little bag.

We had to rush a bit at the end, but we got the sander back just a few minutes late, and they give you a 1 hour grace period anyway. Turns out the home depot employee recommended we get twice as many sand paper thingies as we needed, and since they were 8 bucks a pop, we saved a few for when we do the upstairs, but returned the rest. Score! So far, it's been a 106$ proposition. Still need the edger, and the stain.

The wood looks gorgeous! I definitely want a dark stain down here, given what we're doing with the molding, but up in the bedroom I might just polyurethane it since it's so lovely.

Hooray for progress! We're bringing the little truck back to my parents this weekend, and I'd really love to rent the edger tomorrow or friday to get everything sanded before we head out. Because we have to tape off the kitchen and stairwell from the sanding, it's a little tricky to maneuver around the house at present, so I'm motivated to get this project finished!!

In other news, the wall we've been working on for EVER in the dining room looks much better than the one in the living room. Turns out everyone who said we needed to patch with drywall was wrong. Those places look the worst, actually. No idea if the cracks will come back in a week, but since we've used a bunch of different methods on different cracks, we'll eventually know the best option.

Recommendations for other newbies:

1) Don't listen to everyone - you can use a floor sander. You'd think it was brain surgery or something!

2) Never stop moving when the drum is down, but of course you can move when it's up; you have to get to the next place. No one says this.

3) You can apply a little pressure with the lever when you hit a particularly tricky or grooved spot.

4) Empty the saw dust bag carefully, outside, and with the whole thing wrapped in a garbage bag. That said, it will still be a nightmare and get all over everything.

Happy Two Week Birthday, Ladies!

You've learned so much! Like how to fly, eat bugs, be outside, peck at each other, and roost.