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.