Mother of all projects

I bought wine last night.

I can't emphasize enough how unusual this is. In fact, I can't remember ever buying wine before.

It's not that I'm against alcohol; I just can't stand the taste. I can't even swallow Nyquil.

So, me paying money for the stuff is a newsworthy event.

I don't like wine. But I do like wine vinegar.

I finally found Bragg's Vinegar in our grocery store. Bragg's is notable for not only being a wonderful apple cider vinegar but also being unfiltered, i.e. it contains the mother.

And then I found this gallon of wine which was discontinued and drastically reduced.

A-ha! A serendipitous turn of events means wine vinegar at a reasonable cost is mine. Or will be after a few months of me ignoring it while it does its thing.

I just poured a glug of Bragg's into the wine, covered it with cheesecloth (I learned the hard way to use REAL cheesecloth, not that wimpy stuff sold for cleaning. Otherwise, you'll be raising fruit flies with your vinegar), and set it aside. Simple, no attention or further steps. My kind of project; now if only I could find rabbit cages that would build themselves...

The Ant and the Grasshopper (and the flies and...)

Tom still carries this photo from Hawaii in his wallet



I have a love/hate relationship with insects. I even once considered becoming an entomologist.

I was in college, majoring in the –ologies: zoology, ecology, geology, dendrology, ichthyology, and entomology. I loved most of them (except ichthyology—ever dissect a thawed, past-eating stage, raw fish?). I found entomology particularly  fascinating; there are an estimated 6-10 million different species of insects on earth. All shapes and sizes and colors, adapted to all environments.

But I finally realized that most jobs for entomologists require figuring out ways to kill the very beings you spend your life studying. I switched my focus to plants.

The variety of insects still interests me. And between Woodchuck Acres and Skillet Farm, I think I’ve seen a fair portion of them. Every year seems to bring a new beetle, bug, or wasp to my attention.

My first insect revelation was at Cornell. I was working a summer job cleaning married student housing. I came from a fairly sheltered background, a home with a stay-at-home mother who gave dirt no quarter and I had never in my life seen a cockroach, alive or dead. One of the joys of that Cornell summer was opening freezer doors and having waterfalls of dead cockroaches cascade over you.

Then came a year in Hawaii. Understand, Tom and I are from the Northeast. The cockroaches I met in Ithaca were miniscule; we were flabbergasted at tropical roaches. Tom spent the year trying to kill them with Honolulu phonebooks dropped on their exoskeletons; I found 2x4’s worked better.

McDonough never lacked for entomological interest either. One year it was “friendly flies”. Large, buzzing bombers. There were so many that wash hung on the line was blackened by their bodies. They didn’t bite but persisted in flying around and around your head. Locals also called these “government flies”. Rumor was that the powers that be released them because they are natural enemies of the forest tent caterpillar. Our infestation did follow a year when the caterpillars had devastated area sugar bushes but I think the flies came on their own without government assistance.

Another year it was European hornets. Wasps and bees and hornets were common around the homestead and I generally follow a live and let live attitude, knowing them to be beneficial predators of garden pests. Until one day I opened the bedroom door to find thousands of large, colorful hornets pouring into the room through a hole in the ceiling. It was a scene out of a cheesy science fiction movie. A fully suited and armed exterminator took out two nests of the critters in the attic.

Our first day moving into our Indiana home we discovered giant--easily 2" long-- flies all over both porches. I have yet to identify them*; the internet installer called them horseflies but I’m not convinced**. These have since disappeared to be replaced for a few days by tiny flies; flies so small they found ways into the house even though we have built in screens.

Now every time we go outside to work we are surrounded by tiny, bee-like creatures. They don’t bite or even fly into your eyes or ears but land on bare skin. I was thinking sweat bees of some kind but they only have one set of wings. A little research and I discovered they are syrphid flies, commonly called hover or flower flies, supposedly great pollinators.

And I won’t even mention the carpenter ants in the pine tree, the katydid in the garage, the paper wasps in the newspaper tube, or the cicada on the clothesline.

Because I don’t want to bug my readers too much.

*Flies especially are hard to identify. Guidebook keys involve looking at the venation of their wings under magnification. Yeah, right, they HATE having their wings stared at.

**Most people I’ve talked to have a less than accurate knowledge of insects. I’ve heard references several times to “male mosquitoes”. Large, mosquito-like insects that don't sting flying out of the grass. I’m pretty sure people mean craneflies.

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!

John Boy?

Shelling peas on the front porch. I feel like I'm in a scene from the Waltons, minus the apron, rocking chair, and passel of kids.

Planning the homestead



Illustration: Dorling Kindersley


It used to drive me nuts. I'd pick up a country living book and there would be a plan for laying out your one or two acre homestead. A nice big square where everything fit wonderfully, never any obstructions (or septic field, well, or driveway for that matter), land raring to drown you in bounty.


Woodchuck Acres wasn't even close. The tax map showed a strange trapezoid shape; the boundaries were obviously laid out by a drunk surveyor after a night on the town. The west half of the property is a hill sloping up to a steep bank down to the creek; there's what we call our oubliette (an old dry well?), deep and dangerous and surrounded by poison ivy. The leach field meanders under some of the best soil, and a huge Norway spruce is plopped square in the middle of the property. These idiosyncrasies pale when you consider the soil isn't soil but rocks, the southern area is shaded almost constantly by the neighboring woods, and we're smack in the middle of an established deer path.


So I was convinced that the live-well-on-one-acre layouts were a snare to entice unwary rubes to buy books.


Then I found Lick Skillet and almost fell off of my chair when I saw the map. A square, a perfect square! Not only that, the land is flat--no hills, no drop-offs, no squishy spots. I haven't had the soil tested but at least two people have told me it sits on good valley soil and the one shady spot protects the house from the western sun but doesn't reach the garden. There are a few established plantings that I'll want to move and a tumbledown shed we'll eventually relocate but that's just fun stuff. I don't even think there's an oubliette.


I guess I owe those homestead planners an apology.

But talk about starting over--this is virtually a blank slate. I keep trying to draw up a plan for fruit trees and animal pens and herbs and I freeze. I think I have homestead writers block. Even committing to paper seems an impossible task and we're only talking about 3 acres. Imagine the panic if I had 40! I'm hyperventilating at the thought.

What would you do first if you could land on the place of your dreams? What's your first, second, and third step?