Tag Archives: Future Fantasy Farm

The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Country Livng

country living book

One of the few pleasure trips my husband and I have made since Felix was born was to Barnes & Noble for Brock’s birthday in May. While it was for his birthday, I came away with a pretty great find. (Don’t worry he found plenty of good stuff too.)

gardening country living book

The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Country Living was in the sale section at Barnes & Noble and was about 80% off. I picked it up and flipped through it while Brock and Felix were perusing books by Richard Feynman and Carl Sagan, and I was hooked right away.

This book is definitely an encyclopedia. It’s a quick reference to a lot of different things. Obviously, the craft section is my favorite. It tells you how to do all of the following fun things.

basketry country living book

candles country living book

soap making country living book

They also have small tutorials on knitting and spinning and beekeeping and gardening. There is a lot of practical advice too. There is a whole chapter on building furniture–which has kind of got me hankering to invest in some power tools.

There’s also this
main objective

and this

smoking fish country living book
(that’s fish in a smoker)

One of the most valuable sections in this book is the section on canning.
canning country living book

Buried in the middle of this encyclopedia is a 120 page book on canning, which pretty much makes the book worth the full cover price alone.

I love this book.

I like to flip through the pages for inspiration, because the photography is phenomenal, and the subject matter in dear to my country-loving heart. It’s one of those books that you’re glad when you have when you don’t have internet access.

Also, now I really want to try my hand at basketry. Anybody with me?

I want to be a pioneer when I grow up

gardenharvest06092014

Growing up, I read the Little House on the Prairie books about ten times in a row. I always wanted to be Laura Ingalls Wilder. Not only did I want to be a little bit more precocious and less shy than I was naturally, but I wanted to live like they lived. Maybe not so much in a dugout, but I wanted to live on a homestead. Strangely enough, I distinctly remember fantasizing as a child, how cool it would be to live in a log cabin and grow all my own food and have a milk cow. Obviously, I didn’t quite realize the amount of work that went into a lifestyle like that then, but I loved the idea of living without the inherent need for a lot of money.

I remember asking to plant a garden a lot as a kid. I convinced my dad once, when we were living in South Dakota. Of course, another distinct memory I have from summers in South Dakota is watching the thermometer outside the living room window for the second the temperature got to 75 so that we could go to the swimming pool. (This was my mother’s rule, which, after living in Kansas with our 100 degree summers, just seems downright cold for a swimming pool.) Out of everything we planted, I think we ended up with two crookneck squash that we ate fried. There wasn’t much gardening after that.

The past few years, I’ve attempted to chronicle our gardens on my blog–but container gardens are super easy. There was no weeding, very few pests, and all we had to do was hang the trellis from the roof of the balcony and keep everything pruned and watered; the container gardens were easy to ignore in real life and on the blog. This having a garden in the ground has been a lot of hard, but not unwelcome, work. Turns out, my childhood inclination to gardening was spot on. I like having dirt under my finger nails, I like the way I wake up sore after spending the day digging and pulling weeds (of course, after my recent pregnancy, I still feel like I am building my strength back up, so I am more sore than I would usually be.)

I have been thinking a lot about a few things that seem to keep coming together for me.

1. The power of the human body. Seven weeks ago I gave birth it the quickest and most powerful hour and a half of my life. I felt to strong in the moment, but since then, I feel like that one act took all of my strength. Like I mentioned above, just a normal amount of walking in a day makes me sore. I know I am still recovering, still balancing out my hormones, and because I am nursing, still giving the best of what I take in to my beautiful, and growing-at-lightning-speed child. Nevertheless, I have still managed to take care of our garden (not on my own, Brock is working right alongside me) and work a full time job. I like how powerful I feel after an afternoon of pulling weeds, and believe me our little city yard has some gnarly weeds. It inspires me to push my body further. For so many years I have been so worn out with just the day to day living, that going outside seemed too hard most of the time. Now, I am looking for excuses to go outside, to move, to lift, ever being conscious that I am still rebuilding my muscles–which doesn’t change the fact that I want to walk for miles and miles or ride my bike to the store instead of taking the car. It was like my mad-dash birthing experience woke up in me a sense of potential vigor of wanting to move for movement’s sake, and finally not because I felt pressure to lose weight.

2. Taking Care of the Place I live. Perhaps I have read one too many Barbara Kingsolver books, seen one too many science documentaries, and learned a little bit too much about permaculture, but I keep thinking of ways I can work with my environment instead of against it. This includes everything from how I garden to thinking about ways to minimize my time in my car, the amount of energy we use around the house, to making as much of my own food/clothes/household supplies I can myself, and what I can’t make, out of locally sourced materials. (This is a very lofty goal which I will never fully meet.)

3. I want to raise livestock. It’s no secret that I want to someday have sheep–but it’s not just because I want the wool. I genuinely like the creatures: I find the smell of lanolin heavenly, and they mow the lawn for you. Also, wool is possibly one of my favorite things. But it’s not just sheep I want to raise, I want a whole menagerie. One time, when visiting a nearby organic farm that raised vegetables and sheep, I was speaking with the shepherd’s husband, and he said something along the lines of how he was glad his wife only wanted sheep. He didn’t want to have a farm girl who just collected animals on his hands. All I could think was, why not? Each animal has a job the farm, even if your only exposure to farm life is Charlotte’s Web, you know that. I want chickens and ducks and geese and sheep and goats and bees and a cow–maybe a pig or two, a donkey, a couple dogs, some cats, who knows–preferably not a rat, but I’m sure there will be at least one. The bottom line is that I would like to live on a little homestead farm, and write about all animal shenanigans that ensue.

I am not entirely sure what all of this means for my family just yet. Finances dictate that we are determined city dwellers unless an amazing deal on a farmhouse turns up next when our lease is up next year. (Otherwise, we’ll just see how far we can stretch our little yard in terms of producing food.) You can expect some of these themes to start showing up here just a bit more–which I feel is consistent with the subtitle of this blog: the pursuit of a handmade lifestyle. Plus, there’s no denying that Laura Ingalls Wilder was pretty damn cool. I can still want to be her when I grow up.

Undyed Stuff

My work tends to get the most attention when it’s bright and loud and saturated with color. I know in most cases, that’s what the Tiny Dino Studios brand is known for. I also happen to really love working with natural fibers and fibers from different breeds. Knowing there different fleece characteristics across different breeds and then actually exploring some of those differences for myself are two very different things.

I have my comfort zone wools for spinning, Falkland in any form, and Merino I like, but as long as it’s not top (because I am picky.) Alpaca is fun and different. And just generic American Wool is fun and durable and soft. This is what I spin most often because it’s what the people around me produce or sell, so it’s easy to come by. But I have been trying to branch out a bit.

I’ve been working through some Cormo, which is lovely to spin. It’s soft, but not so soft it doesn’t have any durability. It’s my favorite parts of Corriedale with the best parts of Merino thrown in. Then, I received my Tunis roving back from the mill. Tunis is a little coarser, and you can feel the difference between a mediumwool sheep and a finewool sheep when you hold a skein of Cormo in one hand and a skein of Tunis in the other. And yet, they are both soft. Perhaps it’s just the way I spun it (worsted, chain-plied, heavy fingering weight) but I can hold it up to my neck and it doesn’t prickle. And though it has less crimp than the Cormo, the Tunis feels distinctly springy–like it’s got the energy to paint the town red while the Cormo wants to eat bon-bons while reclining on a silk settee.

The color is vastly different as well. Tunis is known as a red sheep, and while the wool is not actually red, it has a peachy, kind of antiqued white color to it.

Tunis_Handspun_Yarn
It’s hard to see on it’s own. In this photo (which is too bright, I will give you) the skein just kind of looks to me like a skein of springy undyed wool.

But when you sit it next to the Cormo, you can really see the difference.
Tunis_next_to_cormo
The Tunis is on the left. The Cormo is on the right. Please study carefully, there will be an exam.

Then, I received this in the mail yesterday:
Rambouillet_Lock

That is a lock of Rambouillet. I purchased a 10 oz bag on Etsy last week and it is gorgeous. As you can tell from the veg matter in the photo, this lock is unwashed–unwashed! Look how gorgeously white and crimpy that is! I am very excited. This is possibly the softest lock I have held in my hand ever. And the locks were so beautiful, I couldn’t quite bring myself to break them up by throwing them in a big tub to soak.

washingwool
To keep the lock integrity as much as possible, I am using the Yarn Harlot’s method for stove top wool washing.

Updates when it’s clean!

Vegetables, etc.

Though I have had the garden planted for a few days, yesterday we finally got the balcony organized so all the plants received their optimum levels of sunlight.

All of the Earth Boxes are up front with tomatoes, eggplant, zucchini, and cucumber. Then we have basil, rosemary, oregano, and mint spread around the balcony in pots (and a bunch of mini basils that need to be repotted asap).
When you buy an Earth Box, it comes with plastic mulching covers that fit over the box. Last year, we used these, but the holes we had to cut in them to get them over our seedlings still left room for squirrels to dig at our roots and pigeons to root around in the dirt after the squirrels had gone. This year, instead of investing in new covers, I went ahead and planted to boxes as per usual, then Brock duct taped trash bags over them. It seems to be working so far, as all of our plants have doubled in size (and it was a lot cheaper!) And yes, those are old vitamin jars over the watering tube–to help prevent evaporation.

I am overwhelmed with joy every time I check in on my potato bags.

I can’t wait for new potatoes!

Today’s garden tasks include:
Repotting tiny basil seedlings
Adding more dirt to my runaway potatoes
Harvesting some of the giant rosemary plant for drying and then repotting it to promote growth

And just for fun, a look at what I can’t grow.

All of this (except the big chopped onion, which came from the grocery store) was out of last week’s veggie bag. Carrots, peas, turnips, radishes, and green onion all went into last night’s dinner. (The turnips are really good this year!)

Some day, I will grow all of these too.