farm dreaming

Garden update: mostly weeds

September 10, 2015 Marie Leave a Comment

Allow me to present the most pathetic garden in the history of gardens. Ok, exaggeration – obviously. But it’s pretty sad. The tomatoes didn’t get staked. The peppers didn’t even remotely make it. The bean trellis (which is home to beans that were never planted) is full of morning glory vines aka the vine of death and doom that we nearly had beaten back.

Overall, I’ve basically just been the worst person ever about keeping up with it this year.

Oh well. There’s always next year. And, with any luck, next year might be at a new place. IF I can get a freaking realtor to ever return my calls/emails. There’s this perfect property for sale with a sweet little 2 bedroom house on it. It needs work, but it’s perfect for what I’ve wanted, both in the amount of land and the size of home (which would require much purging, but would be totally worth it). It’ll probably be snatched up before we can even get ready to place an offer but I’m trying to not let that deter me.

Regardless, I’ve gotten a bit of motivation again and have been trying to buckle down and tighten up our spending. We have a new roof coming this month, which is draining a lot of our savings (hooray home ownership), so we need to not only replenish that but also start saving back for a down payment. It’s incredibly hard to find the kind of property I want, in the area I want, without spending a small fortune more than I’d like to. My only hope is to put enough of a down payment on a place that I can keep the mortgage low enough that I could work part time and farm part time (my ideal situation, honestly – I don’t want to take care of a house and a kid on top of acres of land and chickens and such while trying to work as much as I am now. That’s pretty much a recipe for a giant meltdown.) So who knows – maybe in a year or two I’ll finally be able to stop dreaming of a farm.

Rambling ahead.

September 6, 2015 Marie Leave a Comment

Here I sit on another Sunday. Another day wasted away at the computer. Working. And working. And some procrastinating. But, mostly, working.

Years and years ago I thought the internet was the Best Thing Ever. I loved working as a web designer. I loved going home to my very first apartment to sit on the internet more and chat with all my friends. I loved sitting there for hours on end listening to music and playing with different blog designs. It was the internet and it was full of possibilities and I couldn’t get enough of it.

But holy shit am I tired of it now. 8 hours a day, 4 days a week I spend at a job attached to a computer. If I’m not working on paying bills, or auditing something, I’m scanning and trolling the internet trying to make the hours go by faster. Going home isn’t the break you’d think, because home is really just the beginning of job #2, the design business, and that work needs done, too. And honestly, most nights I put it off. I come home, make dinner, play with my kid, and then sit on the couch with a beer and knitting, or I hide upstairs with my sewing machine. Which means weekends have to become work days. Might as well not even call it a weekend when you consider that the Mr is also working constantly on his laptop.

The internet used to be fun. Now I dread it. I dread the clickbait. The comments. The insane nutjob social media posts by people who clearly don’t understand how the world works or, at the very least, lack any kind of empathy to understand anyone outside of their own head. The hipsters who post photos up of their lives expecting us to believe they’re not meticulously crafting their image and that, yes, they really do hike to the top of Mt Whatever on a whim to have the most precious of picnics ever. Everything feels so fake, and it’s hard to determine anything that’s actually real anymore. Or at least it feels like that because there’s so much fake that gets more attention than the real – pretty much like the entire Republican party here in the US. There’s some real, reasonable ones I’m sure but they’re being drowned out by the idiots who are talking the loudest.

Anyway, I’m starting to ramble too much.

My point is… I don’t even know. That I’m tired of how much the Internet consumes my life, I guess?

I want a different life. I want the time and energy to focus on my garden. I don’t need a whole farm, though that would be lots of fun. I just want something else. Something more than hours and hours sitting at the computer. I want more baking, more crafting, more time traveling to meet internet friends in real life. More of a job that actually means something to me instead of just trying to get through my 8 hours and go home. I know, I know – there’s plenty of people out there who have done that. They’ve quit their jobs, bought their dream, etc. I don’t even begin to pretend to believe it’s all as shiny happy as they make it. You can voluntarily cut back on a lot of living expenses, and you can sell off a lot of your stuff, but that doesn’t mean you’ve magically found happiness or that what you tell the internet is actually real. For all we know, you could be eating out of a dumpster and begging friends to borrow their shower. I don’t want the drastic announcement that shocks the world around me and makes everyone what kind of drugs I’m on. I just want something more simple. To cut back on the bullshit, I guess, and get back to the dreams I had a few years ago. Before this baby came along, and with it the depression and the loneliness and the stress and lack of time. Back to my garden, my canning, my farm(ish) dreams.

Supporting handmade (and small ag)

August 17, 2015 Marie Leave a Comment

Today I bought a new key chain that’s a bit more than just a key chain. It’s handmade by the son of a friend, and he’s been making and selling them to raise money to pay for a chicken coop. He sewed the ribbon onto the thick strap material and pieced together the metal parts himself. This is the kind of thing I can get behind as a girl wishing for a farm – not just a kid doing chores to save up money, but a kid being an active little entrepreneur with a chicken coop for his goal. $5 is, frankly, too little a price to pay for this cause and I might just send him a card with extra money because I do so love what he’s doing.

Here a cheep, there a cheep

May 5, 2014 Marie Leave a Comment

The next best thing to having chickens of your own? Your parents getting chickens, letting you pick out a breed you want, and letting you have one all to yourself to name (which may turn out to be a bad thing when we figure out which ones the roosters are – instead of Mother Clucker laying me eggs I might be eating Cluck Norris). My parents have been building a chicken coop for a while now, but yesterday they finally brought home chicks from the local farm store to raise while they put the finishing touches on it. Of course this farm-life dreamer had to immediately go over there and see them!

I somewhat randomly picked out a Silver Laced Wyandotte and we quickly became friends – or at least I’m choosing to believe we did given how quickly it calmed in my hand and then nestled up against my chest on my shirt. There’s something quite heartwarming about it to this wannabe farm girl, though my husband was less amused. He grew up with chickens as a kid but they didn’t really handle them or treat them as pets so I’m afraid he finds my excitement over chickens a bit ridiculous. But how can you not love the little chicks?!

Here’s hoping I end up with a hen and not a rooster :)

End-of-season garden thoughts

October 28, 2013 Marie Leave a Comment

A good homesteader I am not. I like to say that every year we get a little bit better at this, but truth be told I’m not sure we’re getting better so much as we improve one thing and neglect another.

I canned blueberry jam this year, and a single batch of salsa (which tastes far more tomato-y than like salsa so it was quite disappointing). A lot of peppers and tomatoes and eggplant went to waste, and I feel horrible about it. I should do better. No, I can do better. I’m better than this. None of this food should be going to waste, and I know my depression-era grandmother would probably be upset by our waste if she was around to see it.

I like to tell myself that I’d do better if this was my full-time job. When I imagine having a farm of my own and trying to be self sufficient-ish, I don’t imagine having another job to go to for 9 hours out of my day. I imagine a farm being my job. Tending a garden and the animals, preserving things as much as I can… And truth be told, coming home from a day of work only to have to do more work to tend a garden is not ideal. Should I suck it up and do it anyway because it’s what I want for my life? Probably. Does the lure of snuggling up on the couch with knitting sound better? Of course it does.

We did things so much better this year than last year. We built raised beds so we had defined, contained planting areas. We bought compost for the beds (100% worth it). We laid newspaper down in the walkways in between the beds to combat the red-root pigweed we’ve been fighting for several years. We mulched. We staked and trellised. We watered and nurtured.

And then, when it came to harvest, we failed. It wasn’t entirely our fault – despite the compost correcting issues with the tomatoes from previous years, we still had issues with them rotting on the vine before we could get to them. We have some invasive morning glory vines that have crept their way into the bed we used for radishes and beets. My long, skinny eggplant never took off and I resorted to a store-bought purple variety despite my better judgement (I’m the only one who eats eggplant so the big ones go to waste regardless of whether I buy or grow it). Powdery mildew made its way from the cucumbers to the zucchini and then to the acorn squash. Critters munched on some of my acorn squash and the one watermelon we had growing. Despite all this, I still feel like the biggest failure lies solely with us. If I had just worked harder, paid better attention, knew more, did something differently, etc.

It’s funny how I’m so full of excitement and hope in the Spring, and by Fall I’m full of disappointment. There are people out there who make it all seem so… easy. So rewarding. Beautiful gardens and beautiful veggies, and blog posts on harvests and what they’re eating from the garden today and whatnot. And I’m so… disorganized. Forgetful. And, sometimes, in too much physical pain to function, let alone tackle weeding, or hours at the stove canning or cooking. But such is life – we all have our triumphs and downfalls, and we all spend our time how we see fit. Every year I’ve tried to do better, and every year I’ll continue to try to do better. I’m still growing and learning and doing. And I suppose that’s what is most important.