What to do in May (annual repost)

Hard upon the (late) April repost of monthly planning from Jen at Unearthing This Life, here’s what to do in May (a day early)! My May will be taken up with continuing rehabbing (ish) of my house, and of course, getting the garden up and running.

Gardening:

• Skip trimming shrubbery if you notice any nesting. Let those birds have some solitude!
• Plant annuals if you’re safe from frosts and trim back perennials if needed in warmer zones.
• Zone 4 and lower transplant tomatoes, peppers, cucurbits and other warm weather crops. Zone 5 and up– not til the end of the month!
• Tidy up bulb foliage if it begins to die back.
• Allow columbine and foxgloves to go to seed and collect some for next year.
• Trim back blooms on roses and day lilies to promote re-blooming.
• Keep shears and trimmers clean and available for deadheading and pruning.

Outdoors/Yard:

• Set up and clean bird baths.
• Clean Patio Furniture.
• Clean grill.
• Repair/purchase water hoses and fixtures. If appropriate, make sure water barrel systems are in good repair and have no algae buildup.
• Make sure gutters are draining properly by watching them during a heavy rain. If there’s any overflow or tipping, you may need to have them cleaned or repaired.
• If needed, have your air conditioner checked. Clean any debris and trim back plants to allow maximum airflow.
• Start clearing paths to wild berries and keep them accessable until harvests are done.

Animals:

• Consider weaning goats and sheep if necessary.
• It may not be to late to purchase chicks and other fowl from your local farmers co-op.
• Watch for hummingbirds to return. Be prepared with clean feeders and simple syrup (four parts water to one part sugar).
• Bees – make sure you can locate queens and that they are laying. Check for foul brood, varroa mites, and hive beetles. Is your honey coming in yet? Do you need to feed your bees? Watch for swarming.
• Look into stocking your ponds with fish now that the cold weather is gone.

Indoors:

• Change air filters and adjust thermostat a few degrees to save on electricity.
• Clean ceiling fan blades and shades.
• Invest in a good window/box fan.
• Get your furnace and water heater serviced
• If you don’t already have one, prepare an emergency kit with 3 days worth of supplies and locate your safe place for severe weather.
• Locate and organize your picnic gear – get out there and enjoy the beautiful Spring weather at a moment’s notice!

*****

What projects do you have lined up for this month?

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April planner, annual repost!

Our wonderful Jen at Unearthing This Life has been posting these great month-by-month planners for a few years. Just because she’s not writing here anymore doesn’t mean we stop the reposts!

I’ve been pretty productive this April– completely reconfigured the usage of my house to reflect the new reality of being in it alone. Lots of painting, moving and patching. The garden’s been a bit neglected through all this, but I’m hoping to get back on track. You can follow my garden progress at MyFolia.com/gardeners/Xan.

Here’s Jen’s April planner:

Gardening:

• Tilling garden beds where necessary to work in compost and get rid of weed seedlings
• Edging beds or digging the last of the new beds
• Add supports to garden beds for plants like tomatoes, peas, gourds, roses, peonies, and beans.
• Sowing outdoor hardy annuals
• Sow last of the peas, potatoes, and onions. Continue starting beets, lettuces, cabbages, radishes, and carrots.
• Planting rooted raspberry canes and strawberries
• Hardening off and planting of vegetable seedlings
• Plant any remaining saplings and transplants
• Rake around fruit trees to help with invasive bugs and/or treat for them. Use treatments only after flowers are gone.
• Questions about what to plant when? Go to Mother Earth News!

Outdoor house and yard Chores:

• Clean up fallen branches and sticks, nuts, and leaves.
• Hang bird/butterfly/bat-houses. If you’re not a beekeeper consider hanging a mason bee box. Set up bird baths and drinking holes for beneficial critters like bees.
• Tidy up gutters and look for winter damage.
• Bring out water hoses and setting up water barrels.
• Repair screens check caulking/insulation around windows and repair if necessary.
• MORELS!

Animals:

• Purchase/raise chicks
• Consider any expansions and rotations for this seasons’ critters.
• Repair fencing.
• Add supers to beehives. Check brood.

Indoors:

• Wash windows and curtains.
• Organize and collect glass canning jars.
• Clean out freezers and storage for this year’s crops.
• Plan simple, yet filling meals for lots of energy.

What will you be working on this month?

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What to do in January

I’ll be reposting Jen’s wonderful series on monthly chores and tasks throughout the year. Here’s January, originally posted on January 7, 2011 by Unearthing This Life.

So many of us are working our way toward a more self-sufficient lifestyle. With that in mind we here at NDiN wanted to share some general guidelines of what to plan for on a monthly basis. Whether you’re a gardener, a beekeeper, a forager, or you keep animals, hopefully our monthly guides will help you plan ahead for the month. Depending on your exact climate you may find you need to adjust your schedule depending on your region.

Now that Winter is officially here most of us will be spending a lot more time indoors. For those in the more Southern regions, outdoor work is manageable on warmer days. It’s a good time to focus on the indoors, keeping warm, and getting a jump on this year’s activities.

Indoors:

• Take down and store holiday ornaments and decorations.
• Update your address book from holiday cards and gift envelopes if you’ve saved them.
• Clean out your files in preparation for tax time. Rid yourself of out-of-date warranty cards (update if necessary) and manuals. Schedule service appointments for extended warranties.
• Clean out dryer vents with a wire hanger and vacuum cleaner. Wash mesh filters with soap and a scrub brush to allow for better air flow.
• When finding new homes for holiday gifts, clean out unused items and donate those in great shape to your favorite charity.
• It’s also a great time to photograph your belongings, room by room, for insurance purposes.
• Start planning your spring garden. Look at gardening catalogs, websites, and blogs (like us!) to get ideas for what to do this year and when. Purchase seeds by March to guarantee delivery and stock.
• Research and prepare for any animal purchases for the year.
• Keep a tray of water and spray bottle near indoor plants to adjust humidity levels, especially if you have central air. Running the heater can dry them out quickly and cover leaves with dust.

Outdoors/Garden/Wildlife:

• Keep fresh water available and free of ice for birds and wildlife.
• If you’ve already begun to put out birdseed continue to do so. They’re now relying on you as a food source.
• If you live in a climate with mild winters, this month may be a good time to dig new beds. You may also want to repair or build new composting bins to be prepared for this year’s cleanup.
• Keep driveways and walks free of snow and ice. Have shovels, plows, and salt/brine accessible and stocked.

Animal Husbandry:

• Early birthing will begin late next month for some of you. Make any preparations necessary to help mammas and babies along.
• Keep barns and other animal shelters clean to help prevent illness and discourage wild critters from nesting. Change hay often, keep tools cleaned up, and be sure to keep water free of ice.
• Put a light out for an extra two hours in the evening for your chickens. It will help keep their coop warm on colder evenings and promote more egg laying.

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Division of labor

It’s not so much “having it all” as it is “how’s it all going to get done.”

Because this is the problem. It all needs to get done– the child care, the cooking, the shopping, the sex, the yard and the garden. The commute and the job; the vacation and the “me time.”

Just because I’m a liberated woman, married to a liberated man, and raising liberated children doesn’t mean the world has somehow liberated itself from the need to eat and clean.

Hiring a cleaning lady and eating at restaurants doesn’t count. For one thing, it just reassigns the work; it doesn’t make it go away. For another, those options come with significant cost in both money and time.

What we have done as a society is to reassign, not just the work, but the value. We have decided that activities comprising housewifery are not valuable. And I’m not talking about the trope that we deeply honor traditional “choices.” I’m talking we literally place no value on it, as in “not included in the GDP” unless you pay cash money for it (i.e. cleaning ladies and restaurants, not that anyone who isn’t seeking a high level political appointment is actually declaring their cleaning lady’s income on their tax returns).

Labor is no longer, can no longer, be divided in industrial societies by gender. That horse has left the barn. So now it’s divided either socio-economically (there’s that cleaning lady again), or inefficiently, household by household. At my house I do all the cooking, and he does all the dish washing. At your house he does all the car pooling, and you do all the teacher conferences. Across the street, she mows the lawn, and he does the laundry.

Of course, if there is no “he” to go with the “she” (or vice versa), the division becomes more challenging still. If the head of that household is your cleaning lady it’s more complicated still, with a nice political guilt trip thrown in.

Well off women can catch a little break, as can families willing to sacrifice prosperity (i.e. double income) to living traditional gender divisions. Families whose income derives from a source other than wage labor–farmers, craftspeople, shopkeepers (the old fashioned kind, that own their shops), can find it easier to make sensible labor divisions, although I think in these families you’re still more likely than in the past to see him cooking and her feeding the livestock, or driving the tractor, or stocking the shelves.

Perhaps the culprit is not the loss of God in industrial lives, or the greed and hubris of feminists, or the lure of the double income or the need to do something with that PhD. Perhaps the culprit is time, specifically time that we spend in cars. Get rid of the commute, and the car pool, and the after school activities, and the remote far flung grocery stores, and it will be easier to divide our time among the labors that we need to live.

The labor will be divided, because the work has to be done. Maybe, if we did it a little closer to home, it would be easier.

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Waiting

January is a suspended month.  The poets describe the month as forlorn, though Hal Borland quips that “there are two seasonal diversions that can ease the bite of any winter.  One is the January thaw.  The other is the seed catalogues.”

This year we’re actually, oddly, waiting for winter, which seems reluctant to even start. The shrubs, also waiting, are confused and have started to bud. I’m waiting for my amaryllis to bloom, timed, for once, to properly bloom on my birthday next week, which is what I was shooting for. I planted winter greens this year, two types of arugula, and I wait for them to sprout and grow, wandering casually past the seed station several times a day to see if maybe they’ve gotten tired of waiting and have decided, instead, to suddenly be mature and ready to eat.  I planted basil too, and found a new marker to wait for–there’s a point at which they start to smell like basil.

When I was a young mother I used to wait for my children to sleep so I could get, something? done. I can’t remember anymore what that was I was trying to do. While I was waiting, they went and grew up. We wait each day for the sun to hang around a little longer,  as “imperceptible as the growth of a child.” I count the days until I can pull out the seed starting mix and plant the early crops, and then the tomatoes. But I won’t be satisfied after I’ve gotten there and done that; I’ll just start waiting again, to be able to take them outside and harden them off, and then to plant, and then to grow until the cycle comes around another time, with me, still waiting.

Gardeners and cooks spend a lot of time waiting. Waiting for the spring, for the sprout, for the fruit, for the harvest. Waiting for the bread to rise and the milk to scald, and the foam to settle. Waiting, even for the dishes to be washed or the table set.

I would have included a photo with this post, but I’m waiting for the camera to recharge.

As I write this, I’m waiting for a cake to bake. Getting impatient, I whipped the left over egg whites for meringue cookies, not thinking that they would need to sit for an hour, and then another hour while the oven cooled down. In the meantime, they slumped, and then separated, and I had to throw them out. I guess I should have waited.

What are you waiting for?

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Unexpected

Gardeners like to plan things. Despite the wild appearance of some gardens (ahem), and the tendency of plants to have their own ideas, we’re an orderly lot. We plant things in neat rows, or square foot grids. We weigh and measure, label and stack. We plan our days, and color-code our calendars. We map our vacations and set our alarms.

But the world is full of the unexpected. A broomcorn tassel emerging from a storm-damaged stem. A forgotten plant. Too many cucumbers. A missed turn that leads to an alpaca farm, or a wind farm, in the wilds of Illinois.

Or you might meet Mrs. Rice, the 94-year old proprietor of an enormous “antique mall” in Freeport, Illinois, encountered only because we were waiting out the rain, and hear about an Illinois farm girl going to “business school” in 1934, in the building that she now runs as a flea market-cum-museum.

Take the wrong turn every now and then. You never know where it will lead.

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On Moving

In my adult life I’ve moved seven times; two of those as a family with a child. Averaged out, that’s once every three years! Ugh. No wonder I despise the process so much. Each time I move, I dislike it more and more. (I say as I’m breaking from unpacking.) It seems as though we’ve got this thing figured out, though, and perhaps I can offer some advice to those of you that are planning on a move any time soon.

I’ve learned that it will always take longer than you plan, or want it to take to get everything moved and unpacked and in working order unless you downsize your belongings. We Americans like our Stuff, even those of us that don’t consider ourselves “Normal”. As soon as you plan to move, begin ridding yourself of excess. Reduce, recycle, or give it to someone to reuse (or if you’re a glutton for punishment, hold a yard sale). E-bay, Craig’s List, or Freecycle are some excellent alternatives to a yard sale or Goodwill – and I like them because it is a lot less stress than spending an entire week to set up and clean up a yard sale.

Avoid purchasing items for your new place until you’re moved in. Yes, you’ll want your new joint to be happening and functional the day you walk in. First of all, that’s a completely unacceptable expectation to put on anyone, even your own self. Second of all, why bother getting more stuff you’ll have to pack and transport when you probably have too much as it is?

Start gathering boxes, newspapers, and other packing material as soon as possible. These are items it seems you can never have enough of. Liquor stores, grocery stores, and farmer’s markets are all great places to look for boxes. Also, look for sales on packing tape and big permanent markers. Find a home for them and put them away every time you’re done with them so that you know where to find them the next time you start packing.

Do a little research of the area you’ll be moving to beforehand. Get contact information for utilities, locate grocery and hardware stores, arrange internet/cable/telephone start dates, and find a convenient restaurant or two to make things easy on yourself.

Keep tape, markers, scissors, box cutters, garbage bags, and newspaper available even when you’re UN-packing. Surely you’ll have second thoughts on a few items and need to repack them for storage.

Label. Label. LABEL! You will never remember what is in each box unless you only have five of them or have a photographic memory. Write clearly on the top and two adjacent sides of the box what is inside and a general idea of where they belong. You may also want to come up with a color code for especially fragile items. We used bits of blue painters tape on fragile boxes so that we knew at a glance which weren’t good boxes to play basketball, soccer, or football with.

Don’t stress about dusting or making things spotless before packing them. Dishes and glasses will inevitably get fingerprints on them when unwrapping, and you’ll want to wash any newspaper/box germs off your dishes, silverware, and cooking tools anyway. You never know what’s crawled on those boxes or papers.

A quick rinse through the hot cycle of the dishwasher may be good enough to get some of those prints off. If you’re worried about germs, you can use some mild detergent in the machine, or quickly wash them in the sink.

Put your toiletries in a carry-on bag so you don’t have to search for them when you’re bedding down for the first night. It’s an awful pain to have to dig through boxes to find saline solution so you can take out your contacts. Even worse, fumbling around for your glasses once you’ve taken your contacts out!

Make sure that you have enough clean clothes to get you through the move and a day beyond. A washer and dryer will probably be one of the first things you hook up if you own them, and keeping a load or two running while you’re unpacking and cleaning is almost painless.

…however it’s a good idea to wash all your towels, bedclothes, and curtains to have them ready to hang or put away as soon as they’re unpacked. I put mine in large garbage bags for easy transport, then reuse the garbage bags for clean up in the new place.

Prepare food in a crockpot, cook a roast in the oven, or even (gasp) order out if it helps you stay sane. There’s no reason to cook big meals, bake breads, or go over the top if it’s going to add to your workload. Think of simple meals that you can make at home to save money, perhaps eggs with mushrooms and kale in tortillas topped with hot sauce and sour cream; an easy salad with sliced leftover roasted chicken; or even a bowl of oatmeal with nuts, fruit, and cream. And keep healthy snacks available! You’ll most likely be using up more calories than normal, so keep your energy levels in check. (Don’t fail like me and fill up on junk and completely crash when everyone is counting on you….)

Use up all of those disposable plates and cutlery you’ve been hording because you’d otherwise feel guilty having thrown them away.

Arrange tools like screwdrivers, wrenches, drills, and hammers in a small carry-on bag so that you don’t have to dig for them when you need them. Don’t forget any hardware you may need.

Keep cleaning supplies nearby all the time! You will drop something. Something will spill. Food will spoil. Your child will dump her drink in the backseat of the car during a poorly-timed trek through rush hour traffic in a major city. The Gods of Moving say it must be so. Keep rags, towels, a broom and dustpan, mop and bucket, trash bags, and some simple cleaners around for basic cleanup.

Don’t forget to spend time with those kids when you can so that they’re feelings don’t get completely crushed when you scold them for dumping said drink in the car during your poorly-timed trek. Remember that time spent with your loved ones is also supposed to be relaxing for you.

Ask, pay, or bribe friends and family to help you early on. Remind them (although not obsessively) when they’re expected. It’s considered excellent manners to feed people and even provide cold beverages!

Take time out to celebrate, relax, and just be with the people you’ll be leaving behind. Goodbyes are difficult, especially in these times of email, Twitter, and Facebook when short statements are the norm. Say what you feel, and keep in touch.

Finally, remember that you’re not perfect. Be realistic with your expectations concerning your time, finances, and energy, and do the same for those that are along with you for this crazy ride.

Jennifer can be found blarging at Unearthing This Life and on Twitter as @unearthingthis1.

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Hi there…

Why hello! I am Emily’s husband, Jeremy.  You might’ve seen pictures of me doing various farmy type stuff.  I like to be very supportive towards any and all of Emily’s flora and fauna vices.  I love animals and I like to eat vegetables, but I’m really whiny when it comes to physical labor. I’m really appreciative that Emily puts up with it.

I draw for a living, which is easier to do from the inside of a house, so about 94.78% of everything Emily posts about is all her.  I know it bums her out a little and she covers it up really well.  When she does tap me on the shoulder and say “I need you outside” I drop my brush and try not to be a poop head.  I do love the out-of-doors and we do make several camping trips throughout the summer.  The things I love to draw the most are organic in nature and are influenced by artists like Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Walter Crane, and Winsor McKay to name a few.

I, myself, like to be a bit creative in the kitchen [not as successfully as Emily] and I appreciate her exotic layering of different flavors to entice the palette.  I do the majority of the cooking though and usually that means a meal that is less thought out and quicker in prep time.  Emily is outrageously good at preparing special suppers and the like, when she has a goal in mind. She’s getting a lot better with multi-tasking several dishes at the same time too, but she sure can fill up an empty sink with dirty dishes afterward! HahAAaa!

I never saw myself as a farmer when I was little, I’ve known I wanted to be an artist since I was like 6 or something, but I did not see this coming.  Still, I help put the critters out and feed them, and then put them up for the night. It’s not really that hard.  I’ve promised Emily an hour a day to help her in the garden when she needs me.  I know that doesn’t really sound like much but it takes a lot of time to do what I do so that I can pull my weight with bills and things.

I reeeeeaaally enjoy living where we live right now and hopefully we will be here for a while.  You should see the gardens Emily has sweated over; they are really beautiful.  She has an incredible stamina for working outside, I know I couldn’t do that.  But then again I sit at a drawing table for 10 hours a day.

When Emily and I first met she knew me as that art snob that worked at the art store and she totally had a crush on me.  I remember seeing a really pretty girl that I thought was out of my league.  Then, a year later I eavesdropped on a conversation between her and a coworker of mine about Terry Gilliam and I had to put my two cents in about his brilliance and that’s how the ball started rolling.  I think the thing that really cinched it was our mutual love of childrens’ books.

While she is trying her best to become the next Tasha Tudor I am working hard to be somewhat of an Arthur Rackham with the line work of Gustave Dore.  Now when Emily posts pictures she usually does really nice photos of her gardens or the animals or something she conjured in the kitchen; I don’t really do so much of that.  Soooooo I will put up some of the stuff I dabble in. So here you go.  Hope you like it and can sympathize with why I spend so much of my time avoiding going outside.

I too have my own blog. I am not as efficient as Emily at loading it with good stuff on a regular schedule but you can see more of what I do, while Emily is earning her callouses outside.  You can visit me at jeremybastian.blogspot.com.  Thank you all for taking the time.

-Jeremy

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Spending time

Leisure as a civic pursuit is old– even ancient archeological sites reveal public parks, sports arenas, and performance venues. Closer to modern times, reducing the wage commitment for working people was a huge, important and vital fight in reclaiming human dignity from the excesses of the industrial revolution.

For so-called working families, the work didn’t really stop; it just became the kind of domestic work we talk about here at Not Dabbling. For the new middle class of professional/brain workers, the hard-fought “leisure” time was spent in family pursuits from the worthy to the frivolous–reading both solitary or out loud, in places of worship, or public parks. Playing team sports, or working around the home or the farm.

And then someone figured out that if society could fill our paid hours with ways for us to make money, it could fill our unpaid hours with ways for us to spend it. They realized that not involving “working” families in “middle class” pursuits was leaving a giant bank account unturned. So the model has turned from “family time” to “spending time,” literally, as we spend our money to fill our time. Now, like everything else, it’s mildly suspicious to engage in leisure activities that are productive and creative rather than solitary and consumptive, giving us the modern phenomenon of family time where no one in the family is actually communicating with anyone else in the family.

I think about this because a lot of my “leisure” time is spent gardening, sewing, cooking, blogging, (and now, making cleaning products).  When I tell people about this, the near-universal response is awestruck (sometimes patronizing) admiration, followed by the statement “where do you find the time” or “well, that’s great, but I don’t have the time for that.”

Modern middle class wage work tends to be narrow and specialized, task-oriented and confined, both literally and figuratively. We carry that training into our leisure, so that we seek time-defined, stationary activities like movies, or single-tasks like video games. Our days are spent staring at a screen, and now our leisure time is, too. We buy our leisure these days, and forget that real leisure can be “work”-creative, productive activities infused with meaning, grace and ritual. It can give you what leisure is supposed to give you–respite from the grind.

The people who are telling me that they don’t have time to change their lives for the better have swallowed the leisure shiboleth whole–

It isn’t leisure if you aren’t consuming something.

We’ve been convinced that idle consumption, especially consumption that costs us money, is the only thing that counts as leisure. The people who don’t understand where I find the time aren’t looking. So where do you find the time?

Stop time shifting
If you can’t watch it in its regular broadcast slot, don’t watch it. You will be amazed at the hours this saves. You’ll just have to live with your guilt when that really good show gets cancelled because no one watched it.

Get rid of cable
A lot of the TV we don’t watch is because we don’t have cable so our choices are limited, and also our reception is terrible, making TV annoying. If you really can’t bear to miss those cable shows, there’s always Netflix, Hulu, and Xfinity (except you’ve stopped time shifting!).

Rethink leisure
Spend your time making something instead of just consuming something. Even making household needs like a garden or food or cleaning products is incredibly satisfying. Do it with a friend or spouse or offspring and it’s even better. Stop the poisonous idea that if Madison Avenue hasn’t defined it as “fun” it’s not a proper use of non-wage hours.

Let the kids play
Can we stop with the soccer leagues and just send the kids to the park? If I hear one more parent tell me that “it’s too dangerous to send Suzy to the park in my low crime, racially homogenous, traffic-free neighborhood” I will lose it. Now that we’ve locked ourselves into this 24-hour cycle of scheduling, we’re forcing it on our children as well. I have a four year old skating student who has 3 to 5 hours of classes A DAY outside of preschool, including on the weekends. This is where all of mom’s time goes. Plus, we’re teaching the kids that if it isn’t organized by some outside entity, it can’t be done.

Find the leisure in every day
Stop working during the commute. Turn the cell phone and the news off. Put the computer away (if you’re a train commuter, that is. If you commute in the car, this is a no-brainer). Read a book (um, on the train) or listen to your favorite band or classical music, NOT the radio- give yourself a break from the ads. This is in fact leisure time–I used to love my hourlong commute on the train, because it was time when I had permission to do nothing. Stop working through lunch. If you concede all of your day–from stepping out the door in the morning to stumbling back through it at night–to your boss, then you really are a “wage slave.”

I like to be lazy as much as the next person. I still spend several hours a week watching tv or movies (probably with that unflattering, slack jawed, glazed eye expression that you get), or going out with my husband or kids, or sitting around talking. I go shopping with my daughter for fun. But I also spend a lot of time writing, and cooking and gardening. I don’t spend a lot of time, well, spending.

So what do I want you to do?

Stop “spending” your time. Start living it.

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May Planner – Redux

So many of us are working our way toward a more self-sufficient lifestyle. With that in mind we wanted to share some general guidelines of what to plan for on a monthly basis. Whether you’re a gardener, a beekeeper, a forager, or you keep animals, hopefully our monthly guides will help you plan ahead for the month. Depending on your exact climate you may find you need to adjust your schedule plus or minus two weeks or more.

Gardening:

• Skip trimming shrubbery if you notice any nesting. Let those birds have some solitude!
• Plant annuals if you’re safe from frosts and trim back perennials if needed in warmer zones. Better yet, plant NATIVES!
• Continue to transplant tomatoes, peppers, cucurbits and other warm weather crops.
• Tidy up bulb foliage if it begins to die back.
• Allow columbine, foxgloves, and other self-seeders to go to seed and collect some for next year.
• Trim back blooms on roses and day lilies to promote re-blooming.
• Keep shears and trimmers clean and available for deadheading and pruning. Use rubbing alcohol to sterilize and linseed oil to grease joints/keep from rusting.
• Give your (cold) compost a good turn, and start turning it at least once every two weeks to keep it active.

Outdoors/Yard:

• Set up and clean bird baths.
• Clean Patio Furniture with baking soda and water or castille soap.
• Clean grill.
• Repair/purchase water hoses and fixtures. If appropriate, make sure water barrel systems are in good repair and have no algae buildup.
• Make sure gutters are draining properly by watching them during a heavy rain. If there’s any overflow or tipping, you may need to have them cleaned or repaired.
• If needed, have your air conditioner checked. Clean any debris and trim back plants to allow maximum airflow.
• Start clearing paths to wild berries and keep them accessible until harvests are done.

Animals:

• Consider weaning goats and sheep if necessary.
• It may not be to late to purchase chicks and other fowl from your local farmers co-op.
• Watch for hummingbirds to return. Be prepared with clean feeders and simple syrup (four parts water to one part sugar).
• Bees – make sure you can locate queens and that they are laying. Check for foul brood, varroa mites, and hive beetles. Is your honey coming in yet? Do you need to feed your bees? Watch for swarming.
• Look into stocking your ponds with fish now that the cold weather is gone.

Indoors:

• Change air filters and adjust thermostat a few degrees to save on electricity.
• Clean ceiling fan blades and shades.
• Invest in a good window/box fan.
• If you don’t already have one, prepare an emergency kit with 3 days worth of supplies and locate your safe place for severe weather.
• Locate and organize your picnic gear – get out there and enjoy the beautiful Spring weather at a moment’s notice!
• Keep an eye on our blog for ideas for REAL spring cleaning advice and cleaning recipes.

Misc.:

• It may not be too late in the season to find a local CSA or raw milk share if it’s legal in your state.
• If you haven’t already done so, start planning those summer vacations or projects!
• Thinking farther into the future? Start stocking up on canning jars, lids, and baskets for holiday gifts.

*****

What projects do you have lined up for this month?

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