Freehold Update

It appears that the last stumbling block on our journey to purchase our new Freehold has been passed. Hooray! The house that we found in April, the house highly recommended by our realtor for a number of reasons, is probably going to officially be ours on Friday of next week. It's about time! I'm glad we managed to get this done by now, although I admit I wish very much that we'd gotten in with time to allow for a fall garden. Still, at least I have time now to prepare spots for the spring garden, and that's something!

The new house is sort of grey and blue, fairly pretty, and L-O-N-G. It started out as a small, two bedroom house back in the 40s, with a detached garage. Sometime in the 70s or so, the garage was attached to the main house via a breezeway of sorts which is insulated and also has 3 small bedrooms above it (the peaked windows you see in the picture there). The garage has a cement floor (it needs some work but is certainly usable immediately) and some insulation. There's a hallway between the garage and the house, providing a buffer space for those wanting to go out. Think of it as a sort of airlock.

The body of the house has office space, a living room, a "parlor" (or at least that's what we're calling it), a dining room, the two bedrooms, two full bathrooms, and a beautiful screened in porch. In the pictures, you can see that the grass is a bit overgrown, and that the bushes are sadly in need of trimming, but really it's not all that bad. The previous owners obviously loved it, and the upstairs bedrooms are all done in pine and cedar with built in dresser drawers, desks, and book shelves. It smells heavenly. We especially like the screened porch, because it will be a wonderful place for us to have friends over for dinner (the porch is actually larger than the dining room LOL). We will be able to eat without bugs, still be in the fresh air, and the kids can play and be loud in the yard without bothering us.

There isn't much of a backyard; it's basically a strip of land behind the house about 2 yards wide. It was previously (badly) fenced in for a dog, it appears, but we'll be taking down the fencing immediately. The front yard, on the other hand, is gorgeous. All the pictures you see are taken from the driveway, which is long and semi-circular, providing a perfect place for children to ride bicycles, run races, or do chalk drawings. Beyond the driveway there's another equally beautiful strip of grass and flower garden before you come to a strip of mature maple and fir trees, hiding us somewhat from the (very not busy) road beyond. Despite being "in town" instead of rural, this house has the feel of being very private, very separate. Behind the house is a 25 acre tract of land that has nothing on it but trees. We'll be checking with the owners, but it appears that local kids play there unhindered. There are enough maples on our property to allow me to make a good year's supply of maple syrup come spring thaw.

Because I no longer have a tractor with tiller, a full acre to play with, or the other people to work with me, I'll be creating a different type of garden on our Freehold. We'll still have our chickens (the one neighbor close enough to be bothered by them used to own her own chickens years ago and loves the idea of being able to see them), although I have to get new babies come spring. It'll be a full year before  I get to have fresh eggs again. Still, it gives us time to get a pretty little hen house put together.

A lot of my garden ideas are coming from an internet friend, the Thrifty Mama of Adventures of a Thrifty Mama on a Trailer Park Homestead. Instead of growing OUT I'll be growing UP. I'll be using raised beds, hopefully (and slowly, as these are expensive) using galvanized water troughs. The basic idea is that in using these, you water from the bottom rather than the top. This means there's much less evaporation, no worry about burning your precious plant leaves, and apparently much less in the weed department, too. You don't have to stoop to weed or pick, and it's more difficult (though never impossible LOL) for ground critters like squirrels or slugs to get into your veggies. Our whole family loves the look of these, and you can paint them any color. We'll be trying to buy one or two a year, and set them up. Until we get enough, I'll use traditional wood-bound raised beds and a modified "square foot garden" technique for close planting.

Because we have the long driveway, we're also going to be putting in several fruit trees along it. These will provide us with fruit, and also with shade and privacy. There's already one mature apple tree, although I need to do some rather severe trimming on it before spring comes. It's overgrown and a few of the suckers have become major branches that aren't really bearing well. The sad part is that the one branch that is providing LOTS of apples is going to have to come down because it's way too tall. We might not get many apples next year because of the severity of the pruning, but the tree will be much healthier for our love and care. We snagged one of the low hanging fruit for a taste test the other day (the apples are just coming ripe now) and the flavor is indescribable. It's tart and yet sweet, a yellow apple that I believe is a yellow delicious variety. Even the small ones on the tree this year can be used for making applesauce and pies, and I'm already thinking about Thanksgiving dinner with a fresh home baked apple pie on the table. YUM!

Where we are... where we're going!

The boytwin, learning science!

This truly has been a very wonderful summer, so far. Sis and the kids have spent much of their time at the beach, sometimes with me and sometimes on their own. We've been to a science museum in Springfield, MA where the kids got to see life size dinosaurs, live animals, and lots of stuff on geology and plate tectonics. The children have been very much children this summer. They've run around in bathing suits the vast majority of the time, and have gone into the house each night covered in bug bites and dust or mud depending on the weather. They've been exhausted and smiling and full of fresh air and sunshine!

Sis, clowning around.

There has been a lot of paperwork to do in regards to our (hopefully) new home. We've made a bid on a place which is a bit farther away from church and sis's work than we wanted, but is much closer to where Gray can work and also right on a nice, local beach. It's "in town" but fairly private because of the layout of the land. It's a LOT smaller than we wanted (less than an acre), but I am taking heed of the inspiration gathered from other bloggers (you know who you all are!) who garden and feed their families on much smaller lots. There's room for fruit trees and raised beds, and that's what counts, right?

The author, hard at work...

It's our hope to be moved in and settled by August 15th, which may be hoping for too much, but what the heck. If you shoot for the moon, at least if you miss you'll fall among the stars! Time is pretty crunched, but we're trying to be ready for anything. I'm at the parsonage, but sis and Gray are still at the old house, and they have to be out by August 1st. This could cause some minor havoc, but we're managing. We really hope that timing will work itself out and everything will come together seamlessly. Of course we're also preparing for the worst. There's no sense setting ourselves up for failure, after all!

The backhoe at work.

In the process of preparing to move our things to a new home, we're also preparing to store certain things for an unknown length of time. Since we don't know for sure what our moving date will be (or even whether we will get this house... it's still a guessing game!), we're preparing a site on our friends' land to hold one of those temporary garage shelters. Into this we will place all our boxed goods, minus the few things we need to survive until we move in. The start of this process is once again using the handy backhoe to clear and level a place. This has, as you can see, included moving some rather large stumps out of our way...

Moving debris out of the way.

Thank heavens Gray is well versed in using his big boy toy by now. He's gotten to the point where stumps like the one pictured above come popping out of the ground seemingly without any work on his part. He's taken out a couple of stumps that literally caused the backhoe to tip backwards, its front (steering) wheels completely off the ground by two or more feet! Luckily, he's pretty good at recovering from such things. With his capable hands at the controls, the big field of messy sticks and stumps left behind by messy loggers has become a clear and mostly level spot with a gravel road leading right to it, one which our van and any truck can navigate with ease. Now we just have to put gravel onto our "foundation" and level it, and we'll be ready to install our shelter and move our things!

So much is going on, but almost all of it is up in the air right now. Our first tomato is growing, and I'm hopeful we might actually get a few from our potted "garden". Only a handful of peppers and the potted tomatoes survived, unfortunately, so that's our whole harvest for this summer. I'm disappointed, but I'm also looking at this as an opportunity to spent the autumn and winter preparing for a well-planned and laid out garden next spring and summer.

I'll leave you with this wonderful video of our girltwin, learning how to use the great big backhoe!

Pretty pots, all in a row...

Well, several rows, actually. Those are my beautiful tomato seedlings! There are two varieties here. In the red containers are Bloody Butcher tomatoes, which are my meaty ones for sandwiches. They're an organic heirloom variety, but one that has continued being produced up to the present day by local farmers (and, I assume, those around the country). There are 12 pots of these, 8 in red pots and 4 in blue because I had overflow. In the green pots (and remaining blue pots) are my San Marzano paste tomatoes, an indeterminate variety which produces a lot of medium meaty fruits for sauces and canning. There are 12 of these, as well, thinned from as many as 3 seedlings in the cell to the one strongest. I'm very pleased with how well these came up, because I used no artificial light and no heat at all. I just stuck 'em in the window and prayed a lot. Apparently that works!

How do I know it works? Because these perky li'l guys are the thinnings. Yes, I managed to thin them out with roots intact in almost every case. Friends of ours didn't get a chance to plant seedlings this year (they're in the moving frenzy as well) and so I said if I managed to get any thinnings I would give them the best. Well, I got 12 Bloody Butcher thinnings and 4 paste thinnings, all of which seem to have survived the transplant. I put them into this black container because I thought it might be a better thing to hold them until they're picked up (black holds the heat and it also is high enough to keep the worst of the VERY strong wind off them). All in all, I'm very pleased with my work today.

My iceberg lettuce needs to be in the ground, too, as it's overgrown and wilty in its little cells. I found an old used milk carton (big plastic thing with holes on all sides and the bottom) that I hope to transform into the lettuce bed. The idea is to put a plastic garbage bag in the box, then fill it full of dirt. I'll poke holes in the bag through the carton's holes, about an inch above ground level, to allow drainage of the dirt but also allow a space for water pooling down below, to encourage root growth and combat container-dry-out. I'm thinking the container I found (which isn't a traditional square one but a rectangular one) will probably house all 8 lettuces that survived without any problems. We'll see!

The zucchini are doing very well in their new pots. I've watered them a few times and they're perky and green and growing. I'd like to get them in the ground soon, but until we move, they'll have to wait in their pots. In the mini greenhouse, I have cucumbers left (only five made it) and green peppers which are only just now starting to come up.

What I want to do with the cukes and peppers is to put them into a children's wading pool and grow them there. The idea is to get a used kid's pool, make holes about 2 inches up from the bottom along the sides, and fill it with decent quality dirt (we have access to well rotted and composted manure). Then you plant the cukes down the center and we put one of our metal frames over them (so they can grow up) and plant the peppers in the two halves of the pool on either side.

I've seen a few gardens online done this way, and it intrigues me. People grow tomatoes, zucchini, peppers, flowers, beans, and all other manner of vegetables in these pools, and often you can get them for free when people's kids outgrow them or they get a little crack (which we don't mind!). For people who don't have good ground, or for roof top gardens in cities, this is a great answer to garden space. I like it for this year because, with my broken ankle, I'm not going to be able to walk around a whole garden. However, if I have a couple of milk cartons, a few pots, and a wading pool to tend to just outside the kitchen door, I should be able to take care of things largely on my own.

The other thing I want to do is make one of these hanging herb containers. Basically you take a dollar store shoe holder and fill the pockets with soil, then plop in your herbs. I've seen a few YouTube videos on this technique, and it seems both fun and practical for someone who can't be going all over creation to snip herbs.

In a lot of ways, moving to this new house makes me feel like we're taking a step back. After all, this is the third summer, the year when the strawberries at our current house are ready to eat. And this is the year that my asparagus is edible, too, after 2 summers of hard labor and care of it. Instead of us eating them, our roomies will get to reap the rewards of my hard labors, and it stings a bit. I'll be back to square one, making a brand new strawberry bed and a brand new asparagus bed, which we won't get to touch for another 2 years. Maybe even three years, if I can't get them into the ground before mid-June.

Still, we're moving to a house that is much better suited to us. There's more room for everyone (and less people to share it!), and there's space for activities. There isn't as much land, but there's enough room for a garden and orchard to keep us fed, as well as a bit more for chickens and some animals. The house is in better condition than this one, and the few problems are being fixed by contractors before we even move in. We'll have no repair worries for years, maybe never if we pay attention to upkeep well enough. It has two barns, a couple of mature fruit trees already there, and lots of woods. It's on a country road, gravel in type, and so we never have to worry about cars going fast (we're in the middle of a long gravel and dirt road, so anyone going 'fast' would lose their transmission before they reached us lol). There are lots of other kids around, and a YMCA camp within walking distance. There's a local lake, fishing holes, town festivals, and best of all, we have friends who already live in the area.

Sometimes it's three steps forward, two back. This is our moment for "two back" but I know the three forward are coming. We just have to be patient!

Day One - Exodus

No, not a religious title. Well, not Biblical anyhow. We're moving to a new place within the next four months, and with luck it'll be the place I posted about previously. Keep your thoughts on the gods for us, please.

Lately, we received notice from our realtor that we need to prepare the house we're currently in to be assessed. Now you might not think that's such a difficult thing. However, what if other people living in the house are not helpful? What if, in fact, they seem to be doing things that go counter to the cleanliness aspect? What if they're actually doing stuff that appears to be detrimental?

Yes, well... I have a lot of work to do. Sis works full time. Gray is working full time currently, though he's working from home and taking what time he can to schlep boxes for me. I'm the only one left. I'm beginning to see a pattern here... I find us a new house, then do a lot of the packing because I'm the one home (not an unreasonable thing, really), and then I do most of the unpacking because I'm the one home. The problem isn't that I am doing these things... it's the assumption on other people's parts that really gets me. If someone had just said, "Hey Ally, we have to get this done quick. You're great at this stuff - please help get it all done in time?" I could have handled that. I just sort of resent the assumption.

Even that, though, would be alright I suppose. I expected to be doing most of the packing, both because I'm home and because I'm pretty good at it. The problem is that a) I'm sick and on antibiotics that leave me feeling like dog puckies, and b) I have about 10 days, tops, to get it done.

Yeah.

I figured I'd aim for a room a day. I just have to get "most things" packed, not everything. Day to day use items like toothbrushes and clothing and well-loved children's toys are allowed to be left unpacked. But I have to get the rest of it done in a little more than a week... plus clean the house. Without the positive appraisal, we're stuck here, and have basically been told that the other half of the financial partnership is not only willing but *has plans* to abandon ship and leave us here, ruining their own credit but doing so in order to also ruin ours.

Yeah.

It's been a long day. I'm pretty messed up physically and emotionally right now. I think I'll go have a minor breakdown.