Spring magic

Most mornings at least one of the kids comes out help me with the chores. I milk and feed the goats while Aliana cares for her rabbits. Taking care of the chickens, though, usually falls to the earliest riser of the day. Heading out to the yard in the morning sun we all enjoy seeing the girls come flapping, hopping and running to eat their morning ration of cracked corn and kitchen scraps. As the days have lengthened the chance to do chicken duty has become a more and more powerful incentive to get out of bed. This is because the hens have a very good clock in their little chicken brains, and as we enjoy more and more daylight they lay more and more eggs. Another part of their bird instinct tells them to hide those eggs. So our dear girls lay their eggs all over the place!

This is where the children come in. After the girls have settled down for breakfast the kids take their baskets and have an egg hunt.

Yep, every morning. We have nice, neat little nesting boxes that we built, but the hens ignore those in favor of dark corners of the shed and inviting bushes. The first child who makes it outside in the morning has the best chance at finding the real prize- a green egg. Two of our dozen or so hens are Americaunas. They lay naturally green-shelled eggs. Ladybug and Siren are their names, and they are getting old for chickens, so the green eggs don't come as regularly as they used to. Therefore discovering a green egg has become a special event.

As we approached Easter this year we began to save up the green eggs, as well as the white ones. This year we are going to try using dyes made of natural materials to color the eggs. I found a list here:

http://www.lakewinds.com/store/Natural-Egg-Dye-Recipes-W4698C18760.aspx

I was also pleasantly surprised to find a list of natural dyeing materials in the magazine that our grocery store puts out. Here here!

Isidore reminded me that last year the Easter bunny left some muddy paw prints on the kitchen table when he ate the carrot we left out for him. I do hope he will be a little tidier this year. I wonder if he knows the kids have had so much practice hunting for eggs. He better hide them really well.

Brown shoes and pretty dresses

Elizabeth has been referred to as "the carbon-fiber girl". She possesses amazing strength (of will) but packs it into a very small package . She began speaking in full sentences about five minutes after she was born, but has remained rather small for her age. We have gradually become used to hearing her try to use sophisticated reason to argue for three year old goals like having a larger helping of chocolate pudding than her brother. Along with the iron will, the shortest member of our family makes up for her diminutive size with a well-developed sense of fashion. This is NOT something she has inherited from me. On the other hand, Patrick can make the whole family laugh when he asks one of the kids to get his brown shoes from the shelf. This chore can involve many trips to the shelf for the poor kid assigned to the job.

"No, not those. The other brown shoes."

He has many, many brown shoes.

This is actually how we keep the children in such good health; lots of fresh vegetables and running back and forth to the closet for dad.

Elizabeth recently gave up pants. There is no arguing with the will of a three year old girl when it comes to what she is going to wear. Dresses and skirts it is. And clickety-clackety shoes. She also changes outfits approximately seventy-eight times in each twenty-four hour period, along with her mood.

So, we have a running deal now. Mom or Dad puts up the cash for a new dress from time to time, and the curly haired one is required to model said frock in the studio before enjoying a meal involving ketchup or any recreation that exposes the pristine garment to dirt. After the clean dress is recorded she is free to get back to life and be a dirty little ragamuffin girl.

100 Foot Diet Challenge

I have decided to participate in an online challenge proposed by the gang at Path to Freedom. If you don't know who they are you should. They give me hope even on days when I can't bring myself to listen to the news because it's all so dismal. Click the link on the top left of this page to go to their site.



The challenge is called the 100 Foot Diet Challenge. Check it out here:



http://urbanhomestead.org/journal/2008/01/06/100-foot-diet-challenge-launch/



The idea is to grow a portion of our own food because having cheap food filling our grocery store shelves all the time depends on an infrastructure that isn't going to remain stable over the coming years. For an explanation of why I say that, see one of the other links at the top left of the page, Casaubon's Book. She writes far more eloquently than I do, and presents news and information about climate change, peak oil and the economy, as well as practical ways to deal with the changes ahead of us.


:: Guidelines ::


A meal must be comprised of food grown on your property or garden plot (literally or figuratively within - 100 feet - of your front or back door). If not from BACKYARD, then Locally produced (PTF’s addition)If not LOCALLY PRODUCED, then Organic.If not ORGANIC, then Family farm.If not FAMILY FARM, then Local business.If not a LOCAL BUSINESS, then Fair Trade.

I hope we will be eating at least one meal per week created from foods grown in our garden or barnyard. We could actually probably manage more than one, even this time of year. We have created a tradition in our family of sharing a special meal each Friday night. I am planning to try to make our Friday meals out of home-grown ingredients.

So... it's March, and in the garden right now we have some collards that are going to go to seed pretty soon, a few straggly leeks, some volunteer greens and assorted herbs. The chickens are laying six or seven eggs every day and our dear goat Joanna is blessing us with about a half a gallon of milk every day. That milk can be magically turned into yogurt, mozzarella or ricotta. In the freezer we have several packages of frozen home-raised goat and chicken. In the pantry we have home-raised chicken broth and canned chicken.

What wealth! Our family has been reading the Little House books aloud for more than a year now. We are making our way through the last one now. Have you read The Long Winter? It causes one to appreciate food in a new light. It should be required reading for picky eaters.

I'll tell you what I come up with for tomorrow's dinner!

Strawberries

We are blessed to have many friends and neighbors who work for the strawberry farms which surround us here. During berry season they share... a lot. I haven't bought strawberries in years, but we have a cupboard full of homemade strawberry jam. Years past I also sliced and froze bags of them for baking. This spring, though, I am anticipating living without refrigeration. By the end of the summer our family will be living on the mountain full time. So I bought a book called Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning: Traditional Techniques Using Salt, Oil, Sugar, Alcohol, Vinegar, Drying, Cold Storage, and Lactic Fermentation.
The simplicity of the ideas in it is astonishing. I read it as I sat at my kitchen table with Rory. She was reading something of her own, but every five minutes I interupted her with another exclamation that usually went something like, "No way! That's amazing, why don't I know that?" or "Why do we can food with heat again?"

My favorite recipe goes like this:

Ingredients
Blueberries
Honey

Instructions
Put blueberries in jars. Brush jar lids with honey. Screw lids on jars. Will keep 1-2 years.

Yep, you read that right. 1-2 years. There is similar recipe for tomatoes, which is one canned food I would be hard-pressed to cook (or live) without.

My ideas about what our pantry and our meals will be like when we are off-grid are still forming. This book has done a lot to broaden my thinking about how I will preserve and prepare food.

The Zoo

Last week our intrepid friend Donna took all three kids to the San Francisco Zoo. They all really wanted to see the newborn giraffe. Unfortunately the mother wouldn't nurse, so they weren't able to see the baby. As you can see in the pictures, though, our dear Aliana had a very special moment with daddy giraffe. She fed him several bananas with her hands, and then the handler suggested she try something a little different.

I must say I personally would not have said yes, but our tallest child is definately a friend of animalkind. Whenever a chicken needs to be caught for wing clipping or dinner she actually becomes a member of the flock. She bends over, uses her arms as wings and begins to speak chicken. I swear. She imitates their happy little clucks and peeps and assures them that she's just a slightly larger breed, and then just scoops one up by the feet and presents it to me proudly.

One morning several years ago I was brushing my teeth when Aliana appeared at the bathroom door with a quart size mason jar in her hand.

"Bellemere?" she said.

"What is it, sweetie?"

"Um, I have a wound."

"What happened?"

"A gopher bit me."

I swallowed my toothpaste and at that point noticed that there was actually a very large live rodent in the jar, and a lot of blood on Aliana'a other hand.

I took the jar from her, covered it with a heavy book and called Donna of the zoo trip, who's a nurse.

After the wound was cleaned and the gopher disposed of I was able to ask Aliana how exactly she came to have a gopher bite.

It turns out it was actually in my defense. Before you imagine a rabid gopher throwing himself against the front door, let me explain.

She was collecting interesting bugs in the vegetable garden and saw Mr. Gopher pop his near-sighted little head out of his hole. She immediately thought of how much I love my garden and the damage he might do. She decided the thing to do would be to pick up him up and stuff him in the jar she was holding to get him out of the garden. He didn't like the plan as much as she did, and he chomped her.

This is the detail that gets me: She didn't let go. She screamed and then continued to cram him the in jar.

Aliana, the girl who is often more animal than person.

Famous

Patrick is famous again. Isn't he cute? Nice sneakers, too.

Our small town paper is actually the smallest newspaper to ever be awarded a Pulitzer Prize. There, now you know.

Snip

We have opened a new photography studio downtown and yesterday we held our ribbon-cutting. The studio is very small, and we were expecting around 150 bodies to show up to help celebrate and schmooz. When I opened my eyes yesterday morning after a long, mostly sleepless night with a teething, sick three-year old I saw clouds and heard... rain. Rain?! No, we CANNOT have rain. It has been sunny for two weeks, our party is today and we cannot have rain.


I suggested calling a voodoo priestess. Patrick tried the party rental store instead and ordered some pop-up tents and an outdoor heater.

The sun and the clouds took turns teasing us all day, but by party time it was sunny and glorious. Patrick made a very short speech into which he somehow managed to work a John Lennon quote. We ran out of wine and had to get more, a very good sign that we had even more people show up than we had anticipated. There was only one spill inside the studio, not caused by an inebriated guest but by the aforementioned beautifully dressed but very cranky Elizabeth. She loved the oportunity to wear a brand new, really fancy dress and eat chocolate-covered strawberries, but she was not pleased to share her daddy with "too many people!".

Isidore played his guitar and enjoyed his new plaid shoes. Several of his friends brought their parents. Aliana asked me to buy her a dress for the evening. *gasp* She also tried out dress shoes for the first time, and pronounced them uncomfortable. To avoid, in her words, a constellation of blisters, she abandoned them halfway through the evening and just played on the grass like a sensible girl.

I hate parties, and usually hide or stay very busy with something. This time though, I actually found things to talk to people about and enjoyed myself. Hmmm, I must be getting older.

Clutter Busters

Clutter beware... as soon as they finish making faces.







The amazing thing is that these crowns actually work. There was an arguement over who got to take out the extra trash can at the shop today.

Spring is coming

Help with the laundry

Math in the afternoon