The final snow before spring (fingers crossed)

We got lots of snow last night. Everything is silent and beautiful, but it's almost scary how much weight is in the trees around us. All the branches (and power lines) are much closer to the ground than usual. We heard an odd cracking/scraping sound early this morning before we got out of bed, and we suspect that it came from the branch in the picture below, which usually isn't hanging out on our balcony. We aren't sure yet if it's broken, but it doesn't look good. (On a positive note, look at the buds! Spring really is trying to arrive!)

I feel sorry for all the little trees that can't handle the heavy snow. They've been bowed a few times this winter and seem to have bounced back every time they thaw, so I hope they'll survive.

Winter this year is serious business. The day before we were supposed to move the house back in December, this area got about 10 inches of snow, and we've had plenty of snow off and on since then. Now that we're five days into spring, I hope the current snow storm will be the last til next December. By then, maybe we'll have figured out how to use the snow plow attachment for our little tractor -- although I don't really mind being snowed in here.

On a side note, I think the snow has really thrown off the local animals. We saw a big owl (we think a barred owl, which we've heard call before) outside our window in broad daylight, and four deer paraded right across the driveway this morning. And now someone's big dog just came wandering through the yard. He took care to pee right on our snow-buried daffodils before trotting off into the woods. Naturally, I only got a picture of the least interesting creature of the day.

Building a garden

Whenever the weather has given us a few unfrozen, dry days over the past month (rare), Mike and I have been preparing the garden. We started with a blank slate, the clearing left over from when someone tried to garden years and years ago. We’re thankful that they cleared out the trees for us, but I doubt they accomplished much beyond that. The ground is really dense, clay-like soil that doesn’t drain well. But we’re not daunted. The answer is creating raised beds, which is why we’re having to do so much work.

We start by marking out a 12×4-foot area that will become the raised bed. To loosen up the soil and do away with the grass and weeds growing there, we start by digging a 1-foot-deep trench the length of the bed, putting the soil off the side in chunks as intact as we can manage (so the topsoil structure doesn’t break up, which = damage). Then Mike takes a digging fork, like a pitchfork, and stabs it into the dirt at the bottom of the trench as many times as he can before he falls over from exhaustion. This breaks up the next 8 inches or so to help with drainage.

I come along behind him, laying down dry leaves in the trench, which will slowly break down and leave organic material in the soil (which is very good) as well as help water flow through, and topping it with a couple inches of “topsoil plus.” That’s a 50-50 blend of good topsoil and compost that we bought from a local garden supply center. We have a rather huge pile of it, as seen below.

Then it’s time to move to the next row, so we dig another 1-foot trench the length of the bed right next to the first row. Only this time the dirt we dig up gets placed in the previous row on top of the leaves and compost. The process repeats until the dirt from the original trench is placed on top of the final trench. Then we nail the boards in place around the bed, smooth the soil out over the whole bed, add another layer of topsoil plus, and add some fertilizer*. Even though we only add about a couple inches of new material, by digging and moving dirt that was already there we add some air to the mix (which is good because roots need oxygen), so we end up with a bed that’s about 4 or 5 inches taller than the ground where it started.

It’s preposterously tiring work. Each bed takes about 6 hours of hard labor. But in return for working very hard this year to set up the raised beds, we will get to do fairly minimal work every year hereafter. And we’ll be rewarded with better and better soil every year as the organic matter (compost, leaves, old plants from the year before, etc) builds up.

We finished our third bed this weekend, and we’re hoping to do at least seven more this year. Eventually we’d like to have 20 or more, which would give us room for a stupendous amount of homegrown produce.

*Mike would like me to note that for fertilizer we’re using an organic blend of ecofriendly nutrients. Using good fertilizer like this that won’t contaminate groundwater or poison the wildlife around us makes us both feel good, and making sure that you all know we’re using it makes him feel good.

Testing the waters of dog ownership

This is Ellie!

She isn't ours; we’re just watching her for 11 days while Mike’s sister is on spring break. She’s a puppy, which means she’s incredibly soft and cute, gives sweet little kisses, and loves to play. Unfortunately it also means that since last Wednesday she has gone to the bathroom on the floor eight times, spilled her water bowl four times, and torn one of my shirts when she jumped up on me. Yesterday I had to chase her down and wrestle away a dead mouse she found in the barn. She barks at the cats no matter how much they hiss and swipe at her, cries if she isn’t in the same room as us, and has us on a full schedule of walks, play, and constant vigilance.

 

Before Ellie came, we didn’t really have experience taking care of a dog. But I’ve always wanted one, and having one someday is an important detail in my daydreams about our future decades here at the homestead. I really love big dogs like Great Danes and Mastiffs (they’re like loyal horses that get to live in the house with you!), but out of practicality we’ll probably get a medium-sized mutt from the Humane Society someday. Of course I assume we’ll find a perfect dog that is youngish but never goes to the bathroom on the floor, knows how to greet people politely, doesn’t have separation anxiety, and only barks at strangers.

But now we’re thinking of waiting a year or few before looking for our own dog. Ellie is a LOT more work than I expected. I love going outside, but taking her out 10 to 12 times a day (and sometimes at 3 in the morning) kind of takes the shine off. She makes it really hard to get more than 15 minutes of work done at a time, and during the first few days I wanted to throw her out the window once or twice.

But then she does adorable things like run to greet me every time I call her and curl up at my feet when I sit down, so I forgive most of the puppy antics. She plays fetch with sticks really well, too. And when we can be outside with her and let her run around freely for a few hours, she does well because she’s too tired to get into trouble when we go inside, so we’ve had some good days. I won’t be all that sorry to see her go, but I hope she still remembers and loves me when we meet at family gatherings.

A second chance at life for the boat house

A little bird reminded me that I need to give an update on the boat house. We don't know how old it is, but someone put a lot of care into building it. It's in the corner of our property near an old broken pier, and it came equipped with oars and life jackets.

But there's no boat, and we have no plans to get one, because there's no water. Years ago, one of the borders of our property was Smith Lake, which was bordered by about five homes. We deduce from the oars and pier and a few pictures we've seen that it was really beautiful and fun to be on the lake. Unfortunately, due to a weak dam at the other end of the lake and the reluctance of the neighborhood to spend hundreds of thousands of the dollars to fix it, the lake had to be lowered. We can see it sparkling in the distance, but we don't get to enjoy it. It must have been really depressing for the people living here to suddenly have no lake. But at least it made the house a lot cheaper for us to buy.

So we have this useless building. We're getting chicks in April and need to build them a coop, and Mike's stepdad suggested that it would be a piece of cake to tow the boat house to the location we prefer and house the chickens in that. We were excited about putting it to use and saving $$ on the coop, but we were also skeptical, as the move would involve a very steep hill of maybe 20 vertical feet and a distance of about 200 yards.

Well, it's not to be. Upon closer inspection, it seems that the wood of the boat house is starting to rot. It would likely fall to pieces if we tried to move it, and even if it survived, it wouldn't be a very good chicken home. It's kind of a relief to me, though, because it hasn't been used in ages and the mice have taken over. One quick read of the Center on Disease Control's page about cleaning up rodent droppings had me reluctant to even go inside, let alone get to work chasing out the mice, cleaning up their nests and poo, and disposing of the dead mouse. (Mike's been referring to him as "our DJ friend" in reference to Deadmau5.) I guess someday when the boat house is a real eyesore we'll demolish it, but for now the mouse dance party will continue down at the dry lake. 

When a tree falls in the woods

One of the features of this property and area that sold us is the trees. Whereas most of central Indiana has been cleared farm land for generations, we're in a nice forest of mature trees. We haven't identified most of them yet (kind of hard to do when all you can see is the bark in winter), but there's definitely a lot of oak, maple, and hickory. They're beautiful, they make the house and yard more private, they bring lots of wildlife within view, they provide a windbreak, they will save us a ton on cooling costs in the summer, they make the air cleaner, and they give us firewood, so it's a pretty sweet deal all around. We estimate that many of the trees on our property are about 100 feet tall, which is a crazy height when you're used to seeing little 20-foot trees that the city planted between the streets and the sidewalks.

But one of the not-so-good features of this property is that it's almost entirely wooded, which is a problem when you hope to grow all your own produce. Our best bet for a large garden is an area that was cleared two owners ago. It's big enough, but it still has trees on all sides, and the man we bought the house from scoffed at the idea of doing a garden there because of the shade. I took the following pictures in mid morning in February, so the shadows are longer than they will be in midday in the growing season. But of course there are no leaves here casting shade, either.

So as much as killing trees pains us -- and the cost is pretty painful, too -- we had to get three trees taken down. We picked out the ones that cast the worst shade, which unfortunately were pretty close to the power lines running up the driveway. After many debates on the safety (or lack thereof) and practicality (or lack thereof) of Mike taking them down himself, we opted for a professional tree service. 

The crew was incredibly fast, even when they dropped a huge piece of the trunk right onto the power lines, snapped them off, and had to take a long break while the power company came out to fix it. We were all extremely lucky that no one got hurt and nothing really hard to fix got broken (like the power poles), but Mike said it didn't help my argument about using a professional service being way safer than going it alone.

When we weren't being concerned and annoyed about the power lines, we were mostly feeling sad. These trees were about 60 years old, and it sucks to be responsible for ending that life. They were growing there before our house (or any of the houses in the area) was even built. We're still sad about it, actually. But it was a necessary evil. If we can't have a big garden here, we'll have to move. And we really, really don't want to move.

At the end of the day, we were left with a very large pile of logs and branches to deal with. I wish a person was in this picture to provide some scale, because this is seriously a lot of wood. We haven't bought a chainsaw yet because 1) we have to research which one to get, 2) the sufficiently powerful ones cost hundreds of dollars and I just quit my job, and 3) they scare me and I'm putting it off.

But eventually we'll get one and make lots and lots of firewood. Since our woodburning stove is so awesome (that's another blog post), we'll be able to avoid using the furnace most of the winter, savings gobs of electricity. And that will make me feel a little less guilty, like it all comes to good in the end. What a hippie.