Category Archives: Gardens

weekending

One of our apples trees is blooming, full and frothy, it’s young twiggy branches positively over-whelmed with blossoms.  It’s mate has buds only just beginning to unfurl.  A bit of wool in every form, a good weekend!  Our neighbor watched 4/5 of the children so that Steve and I could celebrate our anniversary.  I somehow thought that we might be able to capture some of that feeling of deep relaxation that we cultivated while we were away last year…silly, silly girl that I am.  A whole series of events lead to me not even being dressed when our neighbor showed up, much less “prettied up” (that part never happened at all) and at that very moment, the baby spit up all over the outfit I had just managed to contort her wriggly self into.  Right.  I often try to channel that relaxed, earth-mama, go-with-the-flow vibe and maybe even sometimes succeed.  But I’m pretty sure there was a point during this particular day when I was chanting, “just try not to cry, just try not to cry” over and over again in my head.  I knitted a bit in the car to calm my nerves.  Which really only lasted a few minutes, because as it turns out this sweet little violet, who doesn’t care for the car, but will mostly tolerate it when she can see four sibling’s faces chatting with and soothing her, gets outright incensed when trapped in the torture device known as a car seat all by herself. Thus I ended up in the backseat of the van much of the time, in an effort to sooth tiny human rage.  Very romantic.  That’s not a fair or accurate assessment actually.  She was lonely and probably scared, poor darling.  And contrary to how this all sounds, I didn’t mind a bit that she needed me, nor did the papa.  It’s just a stark contrast to relaxed, laid back, carefree!  We really had a very nice time, it just took so much more effort, you know?  Everything, but everything does these days.  I can see how it might be really easy for some folks to get over-whelmed and caught up in the hard parts to the point of letting it all over-shadow the joyous parts.  I think of the people who look at large families with a gasp, a shudder and a shake of the head and figure that it would just tip their scales too much, everyone has their breaking point.  Mostly I think you just have to shake it off, laugh and move on, kind of like getting peed on for the second time that day….these things happen!

Is it totally wrong that I derive so much amusement from complete strangers reactions to our family?  It isn’t even our family that they are reacting to, just the idea of a certain number.  After Mairi was born I used to joke that having four kids is like sneezing in public, people say “God bless you” a lot…but that’s rarely what they actually mean.  It’s not “God bless you” as in may God’s blessings be upon you and your lovely family (except on rare occasion), but “God bless you” as in “heaven help you!  better you than I, you crazy woman!” followed by the speaker turning and high-tailing it out of our presence, lest I try to foist an extra kid off on them.  Also an inordinate number of people would bring up “that Duggar family” and ask if we knew about them.  After the third or fourth person to comment along these lines I finally had to go home and look them up, because no, I didn’t know.  Yup 4 kids, 19 kids, that’s pretty much the same thing…at least if you can’t do simple math.  Have you seen this really funny stand up bit on life with four children?  Hilarious.  I actually thought people’s reactions would be much worse with 5, but it seems to kind of leave them bewildered and speechless.

Some of the funniest interactions are when strangers glimpse me alone with just the babe and deem it prudent to warn me about the future.  “She may be cute now, but just you wait, heh, heh…” with a knowing shake of the head.  They really don’t know how to handle the conversation once they discover that she is our fifth child, from teenager on down, and that I still enjoy the company of each and every one of them.  Why is it that in our society it’s generally accepted that you are supposed to be at constant odds with your children as they age?  That is until they finally become adults and are therefore “reasonable” and (possibly) pleasant to be around again, or at least tolerable, at which point you are supposed to like them again.   So strange.

By
Gardens, Kids, Life, Mothering, Yarn Crafts
2 Replies

Around the Garden ~ May

The roses have since arrived and been settled in the ground.  That card makes me smile.  Though it still doesn’t beat my favorite piece of kid writing, a story I was once handed that concluded “thee and”.

For Mother’s Day Steve conscripted children to help in the garden under my direction.  I’ve been rather frustrated with my lack of ability to accomplish much out there this year.  It’s not so much just the baby, I’ve worked around that before, as my body’s inability to both carry her and work as well.  I can mostly manage one or the other, at least for short periods of time, but not both.  So for the day they were my hands for the most part (I did manage to sit and weed a bit) and together we accomplished quite a lot.  The front flower garden was a mess and now it’s all nice and tidy and ready for a thick coat of mulch.  This is a much more pleasant sight to come home to!

I didn’t take any pictures of the back gardens, but they are doing amazingly well.  Steve and the kids are working on building new beds, everything is spreading and growing, it’s glorious.  We had our first little asparagus harvest of the year, around the size of a bunch you might get at the store and so fabulously sweet, with the kind of flavor that you would never get at a store.

By
Gardens, Holidays, Kids, Our Home
1 Reply

Feeding Our Families: Planning, Planning, Planning

Swiss chard and leeks

Thumbprint Cookies- we used this recipe.  The recipe is only so-so, but it’s fun for each of the kids to be able to mix up their own batch.  We topped them with some of our mixed berry jam before baking and served them with home-made cashew milk.

This month I’m mostly trying to get back on track here; in the kitchen and in life, stepping out of that newborn haze and back into real hands-on, nitty-gritty Life.  I seem to have convinced myself that if I plan everything out just so and am meticulously organized, then everything will go smoothly at all times.  Ha!  As if meeting the physical, emotional, educational, nutritional, social, spiritual needs of 7 people on a daily basis, year in and year out, could possibly be effortless!  But there you have it.  This is the way my brain works sometimes.  The fact remains that it certainly can’t hurt to be a little more organized.  With that goal in mind, over the last couple of weeks I’ve been slowly (very slowly, I do everything slowly these days, hence my usual Monday post appearing mid-day on Thursday…) working on creating a master grocery list.  This is a document that I’m typing up of any and all items that we might buy on a semi-regular basis at various food stores.  The idea being that every week I can print a new one out, post it on the fridge and check off things as we run out.  Also having everything right in front of me will hopefully help with my constantly forgetting little odds and ends, resulting in extra shopping trips.  I will see all the possibilities right in front of me, and therefore (hopefully! fingers crossed!) be reminded.  And as a side benefit, poor Steve won’t have to try to interpret my hand writing, which isn’t the best to begin with and these days is mostly done on a book, balanced on my knee, while trying to contort around a nursing babe….a situation that is not likely to improve it’s quality.

My other project is to get back to meal planning.  Somehow I fell out of this habit and we were really so much better off when I was keeping up with a seasonal meal plan.  You can read more about my meal planning process here.  I’m also looking to update our breakfast menu for the season, but feeling rather uninspired on that front, so suggestions are welcome!  Thus far we’ve switched out our hot cereal for a lighter and cooler grain-free granola.

Also on my mind this month is getting the garden off to a good start.  The couple of photos above are from syrup making this year, because really that’s our very first harvest of the growing season.  It wasn’t the best year, between the strange weather and the timing.  We sugared off once at the very end of my pregnancy.  Seraphina’s first trip outside was to sit fireside during the day long process of evaporation.  Followed by one more somewhat disastrous attempt right before Easter.

The garden is coming along.  Largely thanks to the efforts of the older children.  Though something ate many of our starts, while they were still inside (!).  That was a completely new one for me.  I still have no idea what got to them.

Expect posts this week by:

 

By
Feeding Our Families, Food, Gardens, Housewifery
2 Replies

Spring

Bread birds ~ We used this recipe for the bread

It’s finally starting to feel a bit spring like here.  We’ve had some warm days.  Slowly, slowly, slowly there is a bit of work and a bit of growth happening in the garden.  The weekend before last we planted a couple of trees, including an apricot for Seraphina.  Steve brought home a whole tray of various violets and her brothers and sister planted them all beneath her tree in the warm spring sunshine.  It snowed two days later because that’s the way spring is here…give and take, back and forth, really almost right up until summer when the steady warm weather truly settles in.  The pansies and violas made a cluster of little snow mounds under her tree.  The patch of wild ginger that Galen and Mairi Rose planted didn’t fair well under the snow.

We hung swings in the front yard.  Just four of them for now, dangling from beams of wood, strung from tree to tree.  We did this once before, at our old house, the Easter that Galen was a baby.  Rosebud excitedly told me that all we need is a slide and it will be just like we have our own real playground.

It was all the rage to try to extract the treats from your Easter basket as though you were a horse.  This is perfectly reasonable behavior, yes?

We ended up with some strangely colored eggs this year.  We didn’t have our usual dye stuffs on hand so did some experimenting.  If anyone is looking to make grey eggs, we unwittingly discovered about 4 different options for you.

Baby girl received a new Easter bonnet and such a rosy-posy, kissable little dumpling was she.  She has officially been sick more than half her life at this point.  Just a little cold really.  Unless you happen to be a very tiny person with a very tiny nose, in which case it’s a pretty big and overwhelmingly miserable thing.

Sunday was glorious, with the temperature hovering around 60.  I spent a lot of time trying to convince my children that this does not constitute “swelteringly hot” nor “scorching hot”, neither is it justification for a water fight to keep them from “dying of heat”.  They wholeheartedly disagree.  I’ll happily keep my sweater on, thank you.  After the egg hunt the Papa Bear and boys started up a game of wiffle ball, while Mairi made sand cakes, complete with real birthday candles, on the sidelines.  In between games they pitch to her and let her hit a good many balls before going back to their play.  My sister and I sat field-side; watching, knitting (both of us) and nursing (just me).  Her making an ascot with a pretty leaf pattern at the ends, me going back and forth between a cardigan for me and Elijah’s birthday sweater, depending on how free my hands were at the time.  Wiffle ball morphed into football, with Steve on his knees in the end zone, and teammate Galen jumping joyously into his arms.  After a very long while we decided to go for a walk, just to the edge of the woods, where the water was rushing and falling under and around the path and the kids settled in to game after game of “Pooh Sticks”, before heading home for dinner.

Our neighbor brought us over some beautiful Pysanky.

This blue and orange one was painted specifically with blessings for Seraphina in mind.

Wasn’t that a lovely gift?

By
baby things, celebrations and festivals, crafts, Gardens, Holidays, Kids, Life
3 Replies

maybe

Just maybe, spring might come eventually.  I’m starting to think it might be possible.  It feels like there has been a bit of a shift.  More light.  Thank goodness for the light!  Usually the grey of winter doesn’t really get to me, but this year, oh this year, it honestly felt oppressive.  I’m currently reading this book, with the optimistic hope that we’ll be hitting mud season ourselves soon.  Strange to be looking forward to mud and muck and constantly needing to mop.  But the fact is making the transition from heaps of snow to fields of flowers means a good bit of mud in-between.  So I say bring on the mud!  I’m not very far into the book, but it’s made me laugh several times already, that seems like a good sign.  As a side note: I’m looking to stock my nightstand with post-baby reading material, nothing too, too serious or too intense.  Any good book suggestions?

Other good signs; the sap is running!  We have quite a few trees tapped at this point, with buckets being emptied into barrels before bedtime each night.  And the birds….the birds are different now.  There are robins about.  Rosebud stood at the window scolding them last week for being silly enough to come out into the snow.  The occasional purple finch stops by our feeder.  The boys have reported hearing phoebes calling when they go out to chop wood.  Even the winter birds seem to be more active.  Last week we saw a pileated woodpecker, a barred owl and a bald eagle in a two day span.

Màiri and I have been working on some little embroidery projects.  Late in the afternoon, when I need to put my feet up for a bit, we sit side by side and stitch away.

By
crafts, Gardens, Homeschooling, Housewifery, Kids, Life, Yarn Crafts
4 Replies

cranberry

We grew cranberries for the first time this year.  Eight plants installed to grow and spread as a ground cover for our high bush blueberries.  Those are the plants on the porch, early in spring.  Now they are buried in snow.  Such pretty little things!  Their leaves turn burgundy in the cold.  We froze the ones we harvested to use, with supplementation, for our Thanksgiving cranberry sauce.  It was just a small harvest this year, but in years to come I look forward to baking cranberry bread and experimenting with adding some to batches of applesauce and many other culinary delights.  I’m thinking of adding lingonberries to that bed, as they have similar growing requirements and at their mature height they would fall right between the cranberries and blueberries.

Knitting in Cranberry, Knitpicks Wool of the Andes.  Adaptation, with cuffs knit to longie length.  And the Puerperium Cardigan by Kelly Brooker.  The cardigan, as written, is supposed to fit for the first 6 weeks or so, for babies weighing 7-9 lbs.  As half my babies so far have been bigger then that at birth and all have been 10 lbs by 2 weeks, that didn’t seem terribly practical for us!  I went with a heavier yarn and larger needles to hopefully get a “newborn” fit by our standards, I guess we’ll see!

By
baby things, Food, Gardens, Yarn Crafts
2 Replies

around here

Lately I’ve been wishing that someone would come along to write blog posts for me.  I’d tell them what to say and all, they would just have to be the one to come up with the time/energy to actually put it all together.  There are so many things that I love about sharing in this space.  Really the only drawback at all is finding the time to actually do it.  And then sometimes feeling guilty about it or like I’m falling behind because I haven’t, which is just silly… but it still happens.

This week we’ve put aside our regular homeschooling work, apart from the usual early morning math practice, to work on a Martinmas play, get a bunch of food put by once and for all, attempt to put the garden to bed, and settle children in with some new handwork projects, involving new skills all around.  I thought it would be very leisurely and pleasant, it seemed so in my head, but instead the week has gone by in something of a blur.

It seems very much like November here.  There is no other way to describe it.  People look out of the windows or step into the garden and turn to each other saying, “It really does look like November”.

I’ve hired Iain and Elijah for a stone masonry project out in the garden.  It’s coming along beautifully and is making me think that there is a whole new world of possibilities for our landscape, so long as these boys are willing.  So far they’ve been not just willing, but extremely eager.

Today I ordered yarn for birthday sweaters for my 3 winter babies.  Next will be fabric for Christmas pajamas.  Let the season of crafting begin!

By
Gardens, Homeschooling, Kids, Life, Our Home, Yarn Crafts
2 Replies

gathering in

Some of these pictures are current and some are many months old, showing the season’s progress.

The garlic came in months ago and hung in our pantry to dry.  I finally brought it down, trimmed it, cleaned up the heads and sorted the bulbs for eating from the ones for planting.  We’re hoping to grow around 80 heads next year ::fingers crossed!::.

It seems like it took forever to finally have enough ripe tomatoes to make our first batch of sauce.  We grew over a hundred pounds of tomatoes this year and almost none of them actually ripened on the vine.

I usually dry herbs throughout the summer season, a little bit here and there.  I didn’t this year.  Many of my usual garden chores were neglected this year.  Now I’m bringing in huge bunches to dry all at once.

The sunflowers have come in slowly, one by one, sometimes in little clumps.  What started as the tiny little bundle of seed heads drying on my dining room wall (pictured above) now extends nearly to the floor.  There will be some seeds for us and some for our bird friends, hopefully with plenty left over to plant in the spring.

Last week was a very long one and clearly blogging wasn’t much of a priority for me.  This weekend we were at home.  The weekend was busy as well, but in an entirely different way.  Something of a reclaiming of the space and our life in it.  I put up 11 pints of green tomato chutney, a batch of apple sauce and 3 trays of roasted tomatoes (all of which were ripened on window sills!).  We’re loving roasted tomatoes lately.  Such a lovely way to preserve not just your tomatoes, but the garlic and fresh herbs from the garden as well.  I’m using fresh herbs all the time now.  All too soon they will be buried under the snow!  We completed a few projects around the house and started others.  Elijah invented an interesting new way of storing our apples.  We gathered in all of the delicate produce still about; the last of the beans, tomatoes, zucchini, basil, baskets and baskets full, as next week is supposed to be a very cold one and none of it would survive.

Yes, we’re settling back in to our normal rhythms.  It feels good to be home.

By
Food, Gardens, Herbs, Housewifery, Kids, Life
3 Replies

Autumnal





one of Boobie’s many, many birthday parties








There are fires many mornings now, to take the chill off and occasionally in the evening as well.  It’s rare the night that the windows can stay open, even a little bit.  Everyone keeps talking about the slow quiet days of autumn, with images of quietly knitting by the fire, long hours spend reading aloud, peaceful walks through the woods.  Somehow that doesn’t seem to be our reality just now.  Some days I try to plan for those things, but it never seems to actually pan out.  Too many other, “important” things to do.  Maybe as we settle further into the season.

All of my window sills are full of green tomatoes.  Not just a few like in the picture above, taken last week, but overflowing.  A large section of our plants succumbed to late blight and had to be pulled to keep the disease from spreading.  We salvaged what we could from them.  The plants on the other side of the garden seem alright for the time being, though they are not long for this world anyhow.  We’ve had several threats of frost already, it’s only a matter of time before a hard killing frost settles on everything.

  High winds bent and broke many of our sunflowers, so we get to enjoy them inside, in a vase, for a bit.

Lots of indoor endeavors underway at the moment.  I might wish for a few less in fact, as I’d like to enjoy this season before it passes into one of bitter cold.  But such is life!

By
Food, Gardens, Kids, Life, Yarn Crafts
4 Replies