a cool gardening tip

Our organic farming, permaculture expert friend Ande recently gave us this gardening tip that was such an easy and wonderful idea, I had to share.

If you've planted any trees before, then you know what a large hole must be dug for all its roots to be gently placed and spread apart inside. The general rule, I believe, is to dig twice as wide as you dig deep. My rule is to dig twice as wide or a foot larger diameter than the existing roots when spread out gently - whichever is larger.

When you're finished, you have a nice big dirt spot that is quite easy to distinguish from the surrounding grassy area. But within no time at all, it becomes a weed patch.

Ande says that he plants shade-tolerant perennial herb seeds around the base of new trees when he puts the tree in. Then, he surrounds them with some sort of fencing to protect the tree (and the herbs, by proxy) while it's little. This means that as the tree matures, so does the herb garden. In the end, there is no weeding to be done around the tree and you have useful plants under there to boot.

We are planting many, many trees this year. Some have been given to us, some we will order to add to our budding orchard, and some we will transplant from the woods. I'll also be ordering many, many perennial seeds and flowers of different varieties to plant around each tree.

back to basics

Although the January cold, wet, unrelenting grey is driving me more mad on many levels this year, there is also a certain rhythm to our days developing here which is a welcome respite from the constant chaotic and unpredictable running we did in the city.

Jeff and I looked over our (lack of) finances yesterday and realized we needed to make some lifestyle changes again. It's so easy to justify buying things at Christmas time - even on a credit card, which is usually a no-no in our home - that I usually end up running up a credit bill that is twice as much as I spent on gifts. When I'm in Target, for example, buying something I "have to get" for so and so, and pulling out the credit card to do so, I'll just go ahead and throw on the snacks we chose for ourselves, the snow boots for Sassy, and the high chair we need for Magpie.

Then January comes and I shake my head again. Why did I do that? Why did I let that happen?

So now the credit cards are coming back out of the wallet where they'd made their home during December, and I'm on a spending diet again. Part of this means staying home more and using less gas. One trip to a major hub here requires about a third a tank of gas - going into the city requires over half a tank. These kind of expenses add up quickly, especially since Jeff and I use our errand-running time to also have quiet time alone. This means we don't usually go out as a family, all of us noisily throwing around ideas in our very small car, each one trying to be heard over the other. Jeff and I both being the introverts we are, we'd much rather go alone, listen to music, and regroup by the time we get back home so we can walk back in the house with a smile instead of a headache.

Since I can't go out and spend money on various classes and supplemental activities for Sassy, I joined the time4learning program instead. It's a terribly goofy name for a quality web-based homeschooling curriculum where children learn different skills through hundreds of online interactive lessons and activities. (I don't get any money for talking about this by the way. I like for my blog opinion to have credence, not dollars!) I have to say, based on our first week, that it's the answer we've been looking for. She does between two and four activities a day, and they each take about 15-20 minutes. They are laid out on the site in order of which skill set should come next according to her current age, grade level, and existing skills.

She loves doing these kind of online activities, and with one baby in the house and another looming, I can overcome my Luddite tendencies as a teacher to recognize the value of outsourcing part of her learning to the computer right now.

In particular, her interest in reading is improving. Although I've always been an avid reader, I wasn't enjoying teaching reading to Sassy. Math is more her thing, and reading came as more of a challenge to her. I just wasn't enjoying teaching something that she didn't seem to be "getting" when it came so naturally to me. I even considered hiring a tutor to teach her how to read. (Pathetic. She's in first grade.)

I knew that part of the problem was probably that neither I nor her dad were being impartial enough while teaching her, because we were frustrated that she wasn't getting it more quickly. Enter computer program - nothing if not impartial. Since we've only used it for a week, I can't gauge her level of improvement yet, but she's doing the activities without complaining and that's a great sign.

We pay $20/month for the service and it keeps records of her completed activities for me. I'm finally confident that I'm not going to forget to introduce her to something essential, just because it wasn't on my radar, like say....metric measurement, or calendar skills, or how to tell a mammal from a reptile, or any number of things that I take for granted because I just know them.

Having this "school" to complete each morning has given our days the structure and rhythm they've been missing. She has different limitations on weekdays versus weekends. She's not allowed to watch television programs on weekdays until 4:00, for example. She has to complete certain core lessons that I put on the refrigerator and we check off until she's finished. After that, she has choices of what sorts of things she wants to do. The choices include just about everything except watch television until 4:00, but she likes to hear choices. So I tell her she can listen to a book on CD, play a game at pbskids, help me with whatever I'm doing, or play with her toys - inside or outside.

I love this structure. Not too much. Not too little.

She also has two predictable chores that are hers. The first is to put the laundry from the washer into the dryer and the other is to empty the dishwasher onto the table and stack the dishes into similar piles.

Not too much. Not too little.

Really, the post-Christmas financial concerns have made us step up some of our self-sufficiency plans. Jeff has started building us a shelter for a dairy goat and a sheep. Eliminating a monthly milk bill and a weekly trip to get said milk 60 miles away would be a welcome change.

Sadly, we are forced to sell our older van we wanted for vacations, and sadly, I'm forced to cart two (three in June?) children in a Kia Spectra sedan, but while the vans look lovely and roomy, it's more helpful for me to consider my basic needs for a vehicle. They are: it gets reliably from Point A to Point B and doesn't cost me much money to maintain. The Kia fits those basic needs for now. Sometimes I look at it on a continuum: a nice, posh, brand-new Honda Odyssey would be my first choice in our "ride." A horse and carriage would be first-choice in how much I want to pay for transportation. The Kia is somewhere in the middle.

We're planning to do some maple sugaring this year. We have so many maples on our property. If we wanted to tap them all, I'd have to spend over $50 in commercial maple spouts. I'd rather spend that $50 (if I spend it at all) on a huge outdoor boiling pot, so I'm looking at some handmade options made from elderberry limbs. Since I hate just sitting watching television programs and doing nothing productive while I'm sitting there, I thought perhaps the elderberry spouts might be a good idle time activity.

We're trying to keep our food bill as low as possible, so I'm sort of falling back to Nourishing Traditions habits, trying to get the most nutrition out of simple staples.

All in all, we're trucking along, tying to keep from getting too blue in all the grey.

Here are some recent pictures, but I have many new pics that will have to come later. At Maggie's first birthday party, we accidentally left our DSLR at Nana's house. AGHH!!! So, I can't post any pictures of her first birthday or any pictures taken in the past two weeks really. AGH!

Maggie is one!



Modern Grandpa



Our dogs' toy
We joke about the number of once-living things our dogs scavenge from the woods and the neighboring fields that end up scattered across our lawn. And we joke about our mindset with them - how much it's changed since we were in the suburbs. Case in point: here is the third deerskin they've drug up from who-knows-where to toss around and take turns chewing on. Had we looked out our back door of our little suburban home to find a deer skin in our backyard, let me tell you I would have freaked out, convinced that teenage kids around me were dabbling in something terrible and evil and were surely out to get our family. (Yes, you may laugh.)

Here, I drive home & get out of the car to find my dog gnawing on a random deer leg with fur and hoof still attached, and I shake my head and laugh while I pat her head.

Things change.

library day

We had our first Mommy-Sassy day today since our Magpie was born. We headed to town to visit the library, the chocolate shop, the nature shop & the coffee shop. Before we left, I thought it would be fun to pull up an activity we could do at the library together. I was looking for something that helped teach specific library skills, remembering those field trip days we would take in grade school, visiting the library, learning about the Dewey Decimal system, browsing through card catalogs. Although the process has changed since information was stored digitally, the same filing system still exists and deserves some explanation.

How pleased I was to discover a 9-lesson curriculum just for K-2 children, focused on the same library skills I wanted to share with her. An elementary school in Stanton, KY publishes this library skills curriculum online.

We decided to start with the lesson on learning how books are filed alphabetically by the author's last name, using the Easy Books in the children's department as an example.

The published lesson plan had us start by reading the book Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes - one of our favorites - but they were all checked out.

So we read two other Henkes books and two books of Sassy's choice. Then we sat at one of the little tables where they already had coloring sheets and crayons set up. I told her she could either color one of the pre-printed sheets or just use the back of the page to draw whatever she wanted.

She did both.



We folded the sheet in half and she wrote her first and last name near the "spine." Since the books on our library shelf were labeled with the first two letters of the author's last name, we wrote the first two letters of Sassy's last name at the bottom of her book to remind her what to look for. Then, we filed her "book" on the shelf where it would go alphabetically.



She asked if we could just leave it there. "Sure!" I said. Then we laughed conspiratorially, like we were doing something so subversive.

She played computer games for another half hour or so, while I talked to the children's librarian who, I found out, was part of the LLL group nearest me. As we left, I asked Sassy to let me take a picture with her by her newly filed library "book." She was so afraid that the librarian would realize we were breaking the rules - since we had filed it there - that she had to sneak it out with her. I was amused, so I played along like I had no idea she was taking it with her. When we got out the door, we laughed like sneaky cohorts again.