Are we having fun yet?

Things he now has to do for himself:

Make the bed

Wash the dishes

Write a budget

Call friends

Pay taxes

Balance the checkbook

Go grocery shopping

Cook

Dust

Vacuum

Find a plumber (and an electrician)

Plan entertainment

Water the plants

What would you hate having to learn how to do, or do without, if the housekeeper your spouse wasn’t around anymore?

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REAL Renovations: Pots fit for a Tree

It takes a pretty ginormous container to pot up a tree. When ordering fruit trees this spring I was looking for dwarfing root stock (even mini-dwarfing if I could find it) because I had a plan in mind. Last week I posted about my newly built deck that I’ve installed to fill a section of my yard that has terrible soil. This week I want to share with you the planters that I have completed to sit on this deck and add interest to the corner of the border.

First, I located some food-grade (grain alcohol) barrels on craigslist. They were $20 a piece, though I’ve read online that some people have found them as cheap as $10 each. I then used a drill to make a hole roughly midway down the barrel (I did make some shorter and some taller planters as well by changing where I cut the barrels) and then stuck the blade of my jigsaw in the drilled hole and used it to cut the barrels in two.

Next I purchased some drip irrigation tubing and cut it to the length of the rim of each barrel-half, and then carefully split it down the center. This was difficult, and there were a number of almost-injuries, but I managed to complete it without sending myself to the emergency room, which is always nice. I then took the black irrigation tubing and shoved it onto the rims of the barrels, using it to create a more finished look.

After the rims were attached firmly (or sometimes less-than-firmly, as I’ve recently discovered) with industrial adhesive, I sanded the exterior white of the barrels a bit, drilled lots of holes for drainage, and broke out the nifty plastic-covering spray paint that swears it is durable enough for plastic, but really means it is durable enough for plastic that won’t ever be touched again. Ah well. It flakes and chips a little bit, but it isn’t terribly noticeable and I’ve stopped shuffling the pots around the deck now so it is less likely for scratches to appear. This would’ve been much better if the plastic of the barrels had started out the color I wanted them.

I used brown and burgundy spray paint, and the brown covered very nicely and opaquely. The burgundy left very noticeable spray and drip marks, but once I filled the planters with soil they became considerably less obvious. I put 2-3 inches of gravel in each barrel for drainage, and then used a mix of soil, composted manure, perlite and peat to create a light and moisture-retentive to create the perfect (I hope) environment for my new trees.

So now I find myself using my new deck to store the bareroot plants that I purchased and potted up (because I wasn’t quite ready for them). It is definitely cluttered, especially now that I am moving my rare strawberries and antique currants outside. Hopefully this week I will manage to get everything in the ground and in the greenhouse that belongs there and my deck will remain pleasantly bordered by my newly potted dwarf European plums and my English Morello cherry (as well as the fig trees that I already had in half barrels).

How do you upcycle in your garden?

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REAL Renovations: Tanglewood Farm has Plants on Deck!

Here at Tanglewood, I have plants wedged pretty much everywhere. They’re nearly all functional plants as well – plants that provide for us in one way or another, like fruit, vegetables, herbs and companion plants.

Since moving in here, roughly four years ago, I’ve been hard at work. Still, there has been one area that has proven impossible to garden in! There is a south-west facing corner of our house that had a nearly barren space for a border garden when we moved in. I planted all sorts of things there. Each year I’ve tried to plant something else that is easy to grow and low-management, and each year it has died. There’s not much for me to assume other than the soil must be atrocious. Since we are renting, I really don’t feel like it’s reasonable to test, pull out and replace the soil on an entire section of the house border, so I thought of an alternative.

Container gardening!

Of course, containers in the border always look just like that – containers sitting in a border garden that should otherwise be planted in lush border plants. So I solved that problem with another idea.

A Deck! I mean, how hard can a simple deck be to build?

It really wasn’t that hard. It cost me roughly $150 in lumber and hardware. I constructed a simple frame, staggered supports throughout, and covered the whole thing in cheap furring lumber.

After that, I actually decided to cut the ENTIRE THING IN HALF! (Mwahaha… I felt like a mad scientist!)

Why?

I did it because I have a number of “wimpy” potted trees (temperate-loving figs and some European plums, and whatnot) that need to be seriously sheltered during the winter. By carefully thinking through the way the deck needed to sit when finished, and the way I could use it to prop against the base of the house, packed with straw, over the winter wimpy-trees, I was able to figure out which boards to cut to make the deck stable when assembled, and yet modular and easy to deconstruct in the fall. We’ll see if it really works, next winter…

Anyway, after cutting it apart and sticking it back together, leveled on the cinder blocks, I installed 2×6″ boards along the edge to give it a nice finished look. The thing I love most about this project was that it is super easy to move if we should ever leave where we are currently living. That way, the poor landlady isn’t stuck with my deck and I get to take it with me.

So now I am awaiting my dwarf fruit tree order (it should arrive in two weeks – woo!) so that I can get to work on filling my deck with potted plants! Of course I may be able to leave a little space for a reading nook or a sunning spot for the dogs… I guess… (Or at least enough room to squeeze between pots and water everything!)

Have you ever had to come up with a creative way to fill an awkward space in your garden?

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My Current Currant Obsession

This spring has brought me so many new projects that I often get overwhelmed when choosing what to write about. I figured this morning I would share with you what I have planned for today.

Sometime back toward the beginning of the year, I was lucky enough to be shipped some plant material from a few very old varieties of currant bush (some of which are very rare). I received three varieties of white currant (White Versailles, White Dutch and White Imperial), and one pink currant (Gloire des Sablons). I had never rooted currants before, though I had attempted (and then forgotten about and killed) some gooseberries before, but these were so special to me that I became intensely vigilant about their care.

This week it has finally become time to pot them up and I have to admit that I look on them adoringly and get a little giggly-excited when I talk about them to people. They’re like my little babies! They went from dead-looking little twigs to well-rooted, sturdy young plants.

Have you ever rooted anything from the ribes family? It’s really very easy. They naturally root from their little buds (okay, I know the technical term for those buds is in my brain somewhere, but I’m totally blanking!) and will even produce additional roots when layered in the garden.

Basically, all you need for rooting cuttings of ribes is dormant plant material (if you live in the north, there may still be time to get some of this) and a lightweight soil that retains moisture, but also allows for drainage. I just used a peat and perlite based potting soil. You can add a rooting hormone if you really want to cover your bases, but I got wonderful results from just the twigs-in-dirt method.

There are several ways to do this, but this is what I used and I had a 96.9% success rate (yay math! That’s 31 out of 32 cuttings that rooted successfully!)

Clip your plant material into short stems, allowing 5-6 buds (nodes? is the word nodes?) per piece and leaving one healthy-looking node right near the base of the cutting.

Fill your containers with your soil. Some people do this in straight perlite, some in straight peat… I think this mix contains peat, compost, sand and perlite. It’s just the big bag of custom potting mix that my local mom-and-pop nursery sells. I kind of thought the peat would make it ever so slightly acidic, which is generally the preferred soil of currants.

Poke a hole in your moistened soil with a pen or stick or finger or something, but don’t use your cutting to do so; it could damage the nodes (I sure hope I have this word right). After poking the hole, insert the cutting so that only 2-3 nodes are showing above the soil. You don’t want to get too ambitious; the more nodes above the soil, the more stress the plant will have to endure in order to create leaves from those nodes, and the more work the new little baby-roots have to do, absorbing nutrients.

Try to back-fill your hole by inserting a pen/stick/finger into the soil elsewhere in the pot and maneuvering it so that the hole fills from the bottom first. This ensures that you won’t have a huge air gap in the soil around the plant material (like a mini dibbler). Also, make sure the soil is not compacted from doing this. It should be light and fluffy (think freshly sifted flour).

I opted to water mine from the bottom, so that there was always water available, but I also used one of those drainage inserts in the bottom of my tray. Most things that you read tell you to put a plastic bag over the cuttings, but it seemed like when I had the plastic bag on them the first two days I kept bumping it and disturbing the plant material, which I can only imagine didn’t help them form new roots. I eventually pulled the plastic and tried misting them once a day (or once every other day) until they began to form leaves.

The biggest thing with rooting cuttings is patience. You want to make sure you have roots forming, but to check by disturbing the cutting can be perilous for those new wittle baby roots. I simply waited and waited until I saw a sneaky little root poking out of one of the holes in the bottoms of the pots. The one cutting that I did disturb in an early attempt to check for roots is the only cutting that didn’t make it. Coincidence? Possibly.

So yesterday I ventured out and purchased a new stack of terra cotta pots, and today I will be introducing my little baby currant bushes to their new more spacious living quarters. Hopefully they’ll continue to grow and thrive and next year I can post about how wonderful it is to taste a currant that was first bred in the 17th century!

Have you started anything from cuttings for this season?

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Getting into full Spring Swing

Well, Tanglewood is aflutter with spring activities here in Michigan (though I hear we may get another bit of snow next week – at least it’ll kill the first mosquito swarms!)

In addition to our foster bottle lamb, new gardens and deck/planters, and looming bareroot orders and sheep fencing, we’ve just added six fluffy little peepers to our farm.

Say “Hi” to our new khaki Campbell ducklings!

It’s been a few years since we’ve had ducklings. I forgot they start off so small! Since we lost almost our entire flock of ducks to accidental-neighborial-poisoning last year and the only female left was kind of… neurologically strange afterwards, we decided to bring in some new genetics by ordering our ducklings from the local feed mill.

Of course after they arrived the first order of business was to snuggle them all, one-by-one.
(pictured: my main squeeze feat. duckling)

We decided to stick to khaki Campbells because they’re leaner and more upright than a lot of farm-ducks, so they produce finer meat, lighter-textured eggs and they’re better at mosquito and fly control because they’re more mobile than the more horizontally built farm ducks. My experience with Campbells has been great, though they do seem to be a bit more aggressive than other duck breeds. They’re easy to herd and they’re intelligent; they can even fly considerable distances, which means they are better at evading predators. Someone mentioned to me recently that they thought Campbells were produced by crossing back to wild mallards, rather than domestic mallards, and that might be why they are slightly smaller and more efficient than a lot of other modern farm duck breeds.

We are considering adding a couple of buff ducks, or maybe a Cayuga at some point, but who could resist these little peepers?

Are you adding to your “flock” this spring?

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Crème Brûlée: The Yolks on Them!

This morning I decided to finally work on my crème brûlée recipe… and wow was it yellow when it came out. I don’t mind a yellow custard. In fact, I prefer it because I know where my eggs come from.

So now I am currently reading a forum about crème brûlée variations and some people are actually saying that a yellowish custard is a sign of using food coloring or “bad eggs”! Um. What?

(I’m offended, can you tell?)

I’m sorry. My eggs were laid this morning, fresh as can be, by happy, healthy hens and my custard is Bright. Fricken. Yellow. It would be yellow if I used one egg or a dozen. That’s what fresh egg yolks are. Bright. Fricken. Yellow.

After some reading I discovered that eggs get their yellow yolks from the carotenoids in the chickens’ diet. Of course, some chicken feeds have additives of synthetic carotenoids, or even dyes (what?!) and in some cases these additives are what cause people to have allergies to modern eggs. Blerg.

So, because I know my chickens are fed all natural, local grain, I am happy to indulge. Eggs, cream, unbleached sugar and a dash of irish cream liqueur? Yes. Please.

(I apologize for not having an awesome photo of the crème brûlées after I caramelized the sugar on top… somehow they’d vanished before I got my camera back out!)

Do you prefer your crème brûlée to be pale cream colored, or is yellow acceptable/desirable?

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Sunday photos: Happy St. Paddy’s!

Time for some green I suppose!

***

I (Xan) haven’t dropped off the face of the earth, Not Dabbling evidence to the contrary. I’ve been swamped by a major life crisis (not ready to share in a blog post yet, but I will eventually), the usual “March madness” of my job (every deadline in fundraising happens between Feb 25 and March 15) and the Chicago Flower and Garden Show, where the Peterson Garden Project has a major exhibit.  So despite the grey outside, I’ve been seeing lots and lots of green and growing things, which will always put a smile on your face.

***

So, apart from the lovely green eggs my ameracaunas are laying these days, there just isn’t much green in my life! The world around us is sleeping in this year and I have yet to start my seeds. It’s almost like mother nature hit the snooze button at the beginning of March. Hopefully she’ll wake up soon! I’m getting desperate for some green!

Still, it is Saint Paddy’s day, so I’ll leave you with this:

Bailey’s Irish Cream crème brûlée! Did you know you can add a shot of Bailey’s to pretty much any crème brûlée recipe by simply removing a little tiny bit of the cream? Mmm… (For those of you who don’t like to drink, you can add Bailey’s Irish coffee creamer!) Enjoy!

***

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When DIY is the Only Thing A Girl Can Do

So I believe that Pinterest is evil… Like seriously evil. At least, for hyper-manic people like me it is.

A lot of people can use Pinterest and just walk away. They go “Oh, look at this new idea, how cool! I’m sure I’ll find time to do this eventually!” and then within minutes it is pinned, filed away for a rainy day and left to accumulate dust for a while, until eventually they get around to pulling it out, budgeting for it, setting aside time for it and working on and completing it.

Or, they are even more rational and they go “Oh, look at this new idea, how cool! Wish I had the time to do this!” and they pin it at look at it a few more times before forgetting about it.

I, however, am never still. This is a trait that I seem to have picked up from both of my parents, seemingly amplified by their combining genetics. While showing Pinterest to my mother this past week (now that I think about it, I may have created a monster by introducing her to the site…) I stumbled across a photo:

This photo, which has unfortunately been cached on Pinterest so I have no idea how to find out where it came from, sparked something deeeeep inside me. That something was a complex feeling of inspiration, restlessness and intense desire.

Now, my kitchen is nothing like the one pictured here, but the thing that struck me most were the open shelves on the cabinetry. Cooooooool… So I found myself pinteresting things like: “kitchen open shelves” and “DIY kitchen cabinets” which led to things like “DIY kitchen counters” and “paint kitchen counters” and even “DIY kitchen lighting”!

Oh boy.

So without a real plan, or much of a budget, I launched in. I tore off the cabinet doors and started ripping off hinges and tearing out contact paper…

This was my kitchen counter and cabinets before the madness began…

Here are two early in-progress shots…

And here is where things have finally started to come together. I still have even more planned, and I’m sure I’ll post some more photos as soon as I can get to it, but less than $200 later and only probably about 8 hours of work into it this is what I have!

Now, are there other DIYers or wanna-be DIYers out there who would be interested in a series on how I did the cabinets and how I plan to do the counter? I’m never sure how much folks enjoy reading the DIY posts, but I am happy to go over the tools and the work and plans that went into this to share what I’ve done.

Have you ever taken a wild idea from Pinterest (or a similar site) and just run with it? Were you happy with your results?

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A Little Change to Brighten the Doldrums

Oh my gosh is anybody as stir-crazy as I am? If I’m not trudging through snow, I’m slogging through mud or slipping on ice. I know I shouldn’t complain but I feel like outdoors I just can’t get anywhere, and as a result I am sore and crabby and not getting anywhere indoors either. It hasn’t been a terrible winter here in Michigan, but one certainly can become bored and sluggish easily!

One of my favorite ways to beat the winter doldrums is to rearrange something small in my home. I love to find an area of my home that I am unhappy with, such as the corner of our bedroom where I had previous stacked some large bins to later be moved to storage. They hadn’t ever made it to storage however. They just sat there and sat there, cluttering our bedroom. So this was the corner that I decided needed a change.

To get started, I took a short, metal, utilitarian table and turned it on it’s side, placing two wooden boards across the legs to create a small writing space. From there I grabbed an old shelf from storage (discovered when moving the bins!) as well as a writing lamp, and made myself a “nook” in the bedroom.

Obviously in order to begin working on the cluttered corner I needed to actually move the bins to storage, and before I knew I found I was tidying and rearranging various things across the house with a sort of organic, natural progression.

Little tasks that involve creativity are the perfect way to jump-start into your list of drab and dull tasks. They provide a pleasant way to get into those things that you’ve been putting off, too. In order to set up my little writing nook I had to move the storage bins, fix a chair, pick up the stacks of books from around the room and scrub the floor beneath the storage bins… of course these tasks then lead to sweeping and scrubbing of the entire bedroom floor, vacuuming the carpets (again), setting up a bookshelf by the bed, sorting through my antique sewing items, folding blankets that had been forgotten about in the laundry and ultimately tearing out the carpet and foam on the staircase and scrubbing the hardwood stairs beneath… Crazy? Well, yes… but these were all things that I needed to finish and had procrastinated so terribly that I had convinced myself they were unnecessary.

By providing myself that little bit of creative outlet in my redecorating, I managed to pull off completing tasks I never thought I’d get around to.

Do you ever rearrange or redecorate to inspire winter-time motivation? What else do you use to inspire motivation during the winter doldrums?

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Fashion Doesn’t Matter; Layer Up!

Many of my riding students really know how to really layer for the weather and it makes me proud. This is the product of years and years of lecturing, commanding and even bribing them to dress correctly for the weather. For some reason (I blame the commercial horseback riding industry and it’s skinny-legged models showing off the “latest thing” in equestrian fashion) whenever I get a new student they are absolutely convinced that they need to look the part year-round. The latest fashion and leather riding boots don’t do much to keep out the chill!

It will be a chilly 28ºF and inevitably a new student will show up in a single pair of stretchy leggings and maybe a hooded sweatshirt and a vest. Congratulations! You look great! You look like the damnable models in all of the catalogues. However, you’re not going to last five minutes in the cold, let alone the hour and thirty minutes required to complete a horseback riding lesson and put your horse back in the field.

This year I have picked up lots of new students. In fact, I’m not sure what’s going on with the economy (maybe people are just stir crazy) but this is the first winter, ever, that I’ve had so many new faces. I usually lose students for the winter because of the cold, but I decided with the influx of newbies I would find incentive for them to layer up and stay warm, which in turn keeps them riding through the most frigid months. Howso?

Good ol’ fashioned bribery!

I have started a contest with my students to see who can wear more layers than I do on a daily basis. If my students out-do me, they win five horse treats for their horses. On the most base level, this convinces my students to wear lots and lots of layers, but what it seems to have actually done is encourage them to want to understand how layering keeps them warm. Once they understand how layering works, they wear as many layers as they can stand and they stop complaining (thus, continuing to ride through the coldest of months). I mean, come ON. When I layer up to go outside, it’s often to spend 8-10 hours in the cold at a time, so it takes some serious layers to make it through the day.

My daily layers often consist of some or all of the following…

On the top: A camisole tank top, a layer of under-armor if it’s really cold, a t-shirt or two, a fleece layer, two or three wool sweaters, a hooded sweatshirt, a wool jacket and down vest if I’m riding or a down shin-length coat if I’ll be standing around a lot, and two pairs of gloves – one on my hands and one tucked into my layers to warm up so I can switch them out (and handwarmers if it’s really bad out). I top my head off with a knit cap or two, and sometimes a scarf wrapped babushka-style over that.

On the bottom: fleece leggings, wool long underwear, winter riding breeches, summer riding breeches, and sometimes a pair of insulated bibs if it’s really bad. I then wear wool (and ONLY wool) socks and either rubber boots or insulated boots – both of which are big enough for me to wiggle my toes in because that movement allows for air-based insulation.

Layering isn’t about fashion… as made obvious by this photo.

A lot of times students will complain that they’re wearing three pairs of socks but their toes are still cold. This is generally because they only have one layer covering their legs. Honestly, the key to layering (without spending a gajillion dollars on the latest ski equipment) is creating space for air to get caught as it escapes your body. The more layers you are wearing, the more warm air will get trapped around your body. If you are layered around your core, this means your blood stays warm as it is pumped into your arms and legs. If you are layered around your arms and legs as well, this means your blood stays warm as it is pumped into your hands and feet. The goal should be to keep yourself insulated pretty much everywhere, so the blood doesn’t have time to cool as it travels around your body.

Of course, wind can be another challenge. If it’s windy I try to top everything off with a wind-proof layer. Wool is fantastic for rainy days as it continues to insulate even if it gets damp, but when the wind picks up it will blow right through even the tightest knit wool.

In my case, enter the BIG POOFY COAT. My big poofy down coat has a collar that I can pull up technically over my eyes. It has a huge overlap so the wind can’t sneak in at the zipper and, as long as I’m wearing a decent hat, it does an amazing job at topping off the layers so that I can go to the horse farm and feed my horses in sub-zero wind-chills. Plus, it’s pretty sweet to look at! (I often refer to it as wearing my bed to work.)

Honestly, none of these layers cost me a whole lot. Some of the wool sweaters are thift-store finds, and some are old sweaters that are too grody to wear out anymore. They’re specifically for layering so it doesn’t matter what they look like. One of my sweaters has a huge burn down the arm from where I underestimated the temperature of our woodstove one evening, but nobody (except you) will ever know it because it’s buried under four other layers. The poofy coat was an awesome find at an outlet store for $50 (I think Old Navy). I have found that the quantity of down doesn’t make a huge difference if you’re planning to layer up anyway; it’s the wind-resistance that makes the coat valuable as a top layer.

Do you spend much time out-of-doors in sub-freezing temperatures? If so, how do you cope with the cold?

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