Orchard dreams

This is the rough plan for my new orchard.



This is the area now, freshly bush-hogged. The red arrow points to

One lonely Ivanhoe blueberry, transplanted from NY.

Hey, ya gotta start somewhere!



Plumbing the depths

Every house we have ever owned has had plumbing  problems.

I have replaced toilets and faucets, unplugged drains and repaired septic lines.

At Woodchuck Acres, with pvc in one hand and a library how-to book in the other, I replumbed the entire bathroom.

So it is safe to say I am not inexperienced with plumbing.

At Lick Skillet, the kitchen faucet drips. The bathroom faucet leaks out of several places. And the pump comes on every time you flush the toilet.

Fine, I thought. I can fix that.

First reality check. Both shut-off valves under the bathroom sink were corroded shut. After soaking them in Liquid Plumber, I got one to move and the handle broke off of the other. Not a good start.

In the kitchen, one valve is fine, the other is currently bathed in LP and still won’t move.

I was doing so well, I decided to investigate the pressure tank.

[Sidebar for those of you who have never had well water. Often there is both a well pump and a pressure tank. The pump comes on and fills the pressure tank which is half compressed air and half water. The tank holds the water for household use and reduces the times the pump needs to run—this is a good thing, helps the pump last longer.]

Our Indiana pressure tank is under the house in the crawl space*. I don’t have experience with crawl spaces. I could die happy never having delved into a crawl space. But a trip into our crawl space was staring me in the face.

I put on my big girl bravery, grabbed a flashlight, and with Tom voicing encouragement, wiggled into the crawl space.

Besides dirt, cobwebs, tin cans and bottles and other trash, there sat the pressure tank, another rusted out tank, and what looked suspiciously like the well pump—not in the ground where I would expect it to be. The pipes ran hither and yon and trying to figure out what goes where is beyond my plumbing smarts. Especially in a creepy place with no room to maneuver, no light to see by, and one female amateur plumber with a weak grip and inadequate colorful vocabulary.

So it’s house plumbing 3, Cindy 0.

*This is tornado country, why the heck don’t we have a basement? Most of the houses I viewed didn’t have a basement. I refuse to believe people seek refuge from a storm in a crawl space!

First Week

In our first week at Lick Skillet, we:

Unpacked and set up the house. It’s still more like camping than housekeeping but it’s fine for now.

Mowed the lawn. Mowed it again.

Trimmed and removed dead branches; liberated a grape vine from giant pokeberry plants.

Made a start on reclaiming the beds around the foundation of the house—they are over-run with trumpetvine and mulched with gravel, a hard combination to work with.

Dug up and moved several pails worth of geodes. They were placed around poles and in garden beds to be “decorative” but they wreck havoc with the lawnmower.

Cleaned out the house gutters.

Unstuck one out of three frozen faucet shut-off valves (plumbing post coming soon!).

Replaced one wall switch and swapped out incandescent bulbs for cfls where possible.

Started a compost pile.

All of this was grunt work; not particularly fun but necessary.

 But then we strung a clothesline and this place is starting to look like our house!

Kitchen Treasure Hunt

There’s nothing like moving to shake up your well-trod habits.

At Woodchuck Acres, I could bake a pizza with my eyes shut. Flour, oil, salt stored here; bowl and measuring cups there; sauce, etc. here.

The Lick Skillet kitchen is larger, true, but there is less pantry space, some of the drawers need fixing, and there's an extra refrigerator hogging one wall. To clear out some boxes, we just shoved stuff where we could in a hurry. The tomato sauce is easy to spot in the picture but how about the flour, the spices, and where oh where did I put the cookie sheet?

Somehow we did locate the makings for our weekend pizza, but all bets are off for dinner tonight.

Oh well, it’s too hot to cook anyway.

Finally

Moving is equal parts exhaustion and confusion.

(Special thanks to our help--Chad and John and Dustin, couldn't have done it without you!)

T minus 5

T minus 5 days and counting.

We are in the final days before moving. It's been a long year so far.

The idea of moving began back in December in casual conversation. The thought lodged in the brain, planted deep and dormant, waiting for the right conditions to germinate.

2012 provided nourishment--the possibility of gas drilling in our area, future changes in the arts community, the lure of family.

By late January the seed had sprouted and was pushing it's way above ground. Maps and lists and Internet searches provided moisture. Pre-approval for a mortgage was an unexpected burst of nutrients. February came and a whirlwind trip to Indiana gave warmth and sunshine and fertile ground for a new dream.

The embryo has grown roots, stems, and leaves. 

Time will tell if the harvest is fruit or poison ivy.  

Life is like an onion

I pulled my onion crop yesterday. They really needed to mature longer where they were planted but it was time for them to go.

Hmmmm...there's a lesson there somewhere.

More than just antioxidants!

“Simple,' Tummeler replied.' Blueberries is one of the great forces o'good in the world.'

How do you figure that?' said Charles.

Well,' said Tummeler, 'have you ever seen a troll, or a Wendigo, or,' he shuddered, 'a Shadow-Born ever eating a blueberry pie?'

No,' Charles admitted.

There y'go,' said Tummeler. It's cause they can't stand the goodness in it.'

― James A. Owen, Here, There Be Dragons

 

Horehound

Every spring for the past 5 years, I have tried to grow horehound from seed. And every year it failed to germinate.

Until this year.

From an entire packet of seeds, one plant came up. And it survived transplanting and is thriving in the herb garden.

I'm not sure why I was so determined to grow horehound. Possibly memories of the lozenges sucked as a child for sore throats, possibly the name (disappointedly derived from the Old English har--grey and hune--plant), maybe just the challenge of having another perennial that I managed to coax to life from a seed. 

Whatever the reason, I finally, in the year when I leave my garden in the middle of the growing season, have a horehound plant.

It's now in a pot. I hope it likes travel because it's being driven 750 miles to our new home, along with a few other herbs that I can't bear to leave.

Gardens to go. A little bit of the old life to start the new.

Fitting into my genes

Along with Howdy Doody, roller skates and the neighbor's talking crow, the background of my childhood included the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, fallout shelters, and air-raid drills. Yes, we really did prepare for a nuclear war while at school by kneeling in front of our lockers and holding our hands over our necks.

My mom decided the fruit cellar, a room off of the basement, was our safe room for disasters. Mom was too much of a pessimist to think even a well-built shelter would help us survive those Russian bombs so I don't think her preparations ever got farther than some bottles of water and jars of her chili sauce (Mom's chili sauce was never canned, just ladled into jars, so they represented danger of another kind).

My mother was a complex woman. She escaped a hardscrabble, abusive homelife by packing a suitcase, tying it closed with rope, and riding the train 20 miles south to the bright lights of Oneida, NY.

She and Dad were opposites. Dad was gregarious, easy going but with a quick temper. She was introverted, a worrier, and internalized her emotions. The one thing they did share was being short, a trait all of us kids inherited.

There are four of us siblings and I often wonder what we picked up from genes and what from environment. I've got my mom's eyes, straight hair, and thighs. I too am introverted and quiet and subject to mood swings.  But while she told of hiding in her bedroom when chicken killing time came, I've dispatched birds on my own and have no qualms about doing more. She liked beauty parlors and perfect nails, I don't feel right if there isn't dirt under mine. I'm her match in stretching the family budget but have never equaled her housekeeping.

My sisters and brother are also a mix of nature and nuture and as I get ready to move four states away from them all, I'm glad to have had them all in my life. My brother is the image of Dad and shares his vocabulary but is more openly loving with his family, my older sister has my Mom's classy style but is a real people person, baby sis seems to have gotten the best physical characteristics of both but surpasses us all in brains. I miss my parents but Mom and Dad live in us all and I hope their heritage lives on in our children.