seeds

This time last year I'd been poring over online seed catalogues of local vegetable seed vendors for at least a couple weeks, in time to buy seeds at the Guelph Organic Conference. This year, I didn't even set foot at the conference. And I hadn't given any thought to what seeds I might like to buy. I bought too many seeds to plant last year, so I'm hoping they're still viable and I'll give them a go this year.

But I'm not too sure just how big into gardening I'll go this year. I'm interested in building some raised beds in a sunny patch I noticed last fall here at home, but that's a lot of work, and I'm just not sure we're really up for it. I plan to continue the plots I have at the community garden, for sure, but I don't know if I want to start seeds myself again indoors, or just buy seedlings. I'm tempted to plant berrying shrubs along the only side of our house that gets afternoon sun, where there are just huge, ornamental grasses. But from where I am right now, that just seems like all too much work.

Maybe this will be my year of letting go and sinking in to what comes. We know the direction we want to forge, but we don't know how long it will take for things to shake down, and for the moment things are pretty peaceful as they are.

It could be five years before leave this house, in which case I'd like to make the raised beds and plant the shrubs to get as much learning in as we can. But it's possible it could be this year or next, in which case I'd rather not be leaving so much sweat equity. So I don't know. Maybe I'll put less effort into plans and more into actually doing whatever makes sense in the moment.

 

This was about an hour or so before I went out to lock up the chickens last night. When I went out in the full dark, the sky was bright with clouds and the snow muffled everything. It was balmy after so many -25C days and I found myself wishing I had more chores to do outside or perhaps in a place where I could see beyond the solid fences of my neighbours. As it was, I went out front and shovelled the driveway. Thankfully, the nearby neighbour with the snow blower didn't come out until this morning, so I got just the peace and bit of useful activity I was looking for.

dreams and stuff

I've been reading Callings: Finding and Following and Authentic Life by Gregg Levoy, for the third time. Because even after reading it twice, I still haven't sorted my life out. (I realize this is never a complete task, but I feel like I've been on the cusp of major life changes since the first time I read it in 2010 that are still unfolding). I'm going very slowly, mixing it with other books, sometimes just a paragraph or two at a time. I ponder these paragraphs, I sleep on them, and sometimes I dream about them.

Last week, I got to a section about dreamwork. It talks about how our unconscious mind is always a couple steps ahead of our conscious mind, and dreams can be a bridge between the two. Levoy says that sometimes the bridge is obvious, and he goes on to list a bunch of scenarios of waking life challenges and dreams that offer a pretty obvious response. I can't remember them all, except one: You're contemplating an impossible situation, and you dream that you can breathe underwater.

That night, I dreamed that we were at my parents' cottage by the lake. We were chatting with various people and the kids were playing and Youngest kept getting ever closer to the lake. We figured we'd just see what transpired, especially because if we run after him, he tends to run towards the very thing we want him to avoid. So we watched and he jumped in the link and immediately sank. I ran to the water and dove in. In the moment between my feet leaving the dock and my hands entering the water, I was aware that my shoes were still on and I worried they'd weigh me down. But I wasn't about to take the time to remove them.

I swam underwater and saw Youngest slowly sinking. I kept nearly reaching him but he kept sinking and getting further away from me. My breath was running out but there was no way I was going to take the time to get to the surface; he'd been under much longer than me already and I wasn't going to take any more time. And just at the most hopeless moment, I discovered I could breathe underwater.

"Aha!" I thought. "This is just like in the book." I woke up without having actually saved Youngest but with the knowledge that it was possible.

That was a few weeks ago and I haven't picked up the book since. I've been sinking into hibernation, escaping into tv shows after the kids go to bed or books or, for most recently, SouleMama's archive,  and avoiding walking to or from work. Ever since New Year's Eve, when my husband and I agreed to work towards moving to a farm, I've kind of shrunk from that vision. With the deep cold, I've started imagining the discomforts of living on a farm in this kind of cold. With the chickens here now, it doesn't take much imagination, as we're constantly changing their water and checking for eggs to catch them before they freeze. Anyways… I've been doubting. And hiding.

The other night I dreamed about the book again. Youngest has been waking a lot through the nights recently and nursing lots. The other night was another restless night when I had lots of disjointed and jumbled dreams. But one bit stays with me. I discovered the book, Callings, in a dirty puddle of I don't know what, pretty much completely destroyed. And I felt terrible for forgetting it and letting it be destroyed by my neglect.

In my waking life, I feel a bit stuck and adrift. I feel powerless to change anything and like I'm not moving forward. But after the second dream I remember that we are moving forward. We're about to start a kitchen reno to repair all the brokenness of our kitchen so that when we're ready we can sell the house more easily. And in the spring and summer, we'll start to explore farm properties to figure out what we can afford and more clearly what part of the province we want to be in. This is all progress. Not as fast as I would like but patience has never been my strong suit. As Anya said on Buffy, "I tried being patient but it took too long!"

New Year

This blog began with a New Year’s resolution. So I feel an obligation to update my plans for the year. But the funny thing is that I don’t feel that same energy to pursue a goal or a theme over the year. I don’t know if it’s some kind of exhaustion catching up with me or an awareness that my intentions don’t always matter that much. We spent a number of days over the holidays with the kids watching way more tv than we’d prefer and adults reading or cooking. Maybe it started with the ice storm that kept us indoors for a couple of days, although we had power pretty much the whole time. Or maybe we just really needed a massive injection of down time.

I feel like I spent the second half of last year focused really intensively on a number of goals at the same time as I worked full time. At times I felt very exhausted and powered through – I submitted two grant applications for a photography project in early December and taught a photography workshop one evening every second week from September to December. And we designed and built a chicken coop and started caring for actual, real-life chickens and they're still alive and even laying eggs.

Last year, my goal was to connect more with people and I kicked off the year with a New Year’s Day drop-in gathering. When my husband lost his job in April and I started working full-time, I basically lost the tenuous friendships I’d been pursuing. They were with people in the homeschooling community or with other at-home parentswho generally get together during weekdays. I suppose I could have seen them on weekends, but the energy required to organize those kinds of things seemed beyond me. I have made an effort to connect with my colleagues during working hours, but I don’t have the energy to extend those connections much outside of work hours.

All that to say that I didn’t make the progress I wanted to on my goal last year, so I’m tempted to continue pursuing it this year. But I’m also not that excited by the prospect. I think my lack of progress is largely due to the current circumstances of my life (full-time day job, still-nursing toddler with food intolerances that make gatherings over food or around/after bedtimes difficult, extremely introverted husband, my own needs for alone time and making photographs… I’m sure the list goes on.) And maybe I just need to relax a bit and just sink into the things that life throws at me.

When I reflect on the last six months of 2013, I really feel like I was striving the whole time and refusing to let anything go to make space for the full-time work. But I think I’m ready to let some of my personal goals go, with the knowledge that over the next couple of years my husband and I have plans to work towards another lifestyle.

I think my New Year’s Eve this year may have been the best I’ve had in my life, and it came when I relinquished any expectations of a good time and yet retained a desire to mark the occasion in some way. So after we got the kids to bed, my husband and I just hung out. No screens, no smart phones, no Internet (well, not until after midnight when I resumed my binge watching of Once Upon A Time). We didn’t even listen to music. Usually we try to live stream some kind of faraway celebration so that I can be sure we celebrate at just the right moment, but this year I just didn’t care about getting that moment right.

Instead, we talked about The Future, something that does not come naturally to my husband. We talked about the kinds of things that give our lives meaning and the kind of life we want to shape in the future. It was rather amazing.

And my little nursing toddler toddled in around 11:45 pm asking for milk, just as we were wrapping up the big conversation, and he was still on the boob when we noticed the clock said 12:05, and that seemed just right too. Maybe what I need to learn is a little more surrendering and a little less goal orientation. I'll still keep moving towards my overarching goals, but none of the big ones is likely to be reached in 2014. And I think I'll just keep moving forward as seems right in the moment and see what opportunities unfold as I go.

 

on money and stuff

I've been reading Ben Hewitt's blog for a while, ever since Shannon Hayes (author of Radical Homemakers, which kicked me off on the activities I try to document here) linked to it, probably late last spring. He has two unschooling boys, and I'm fascinated by his accounts of their life, which in many ways looks like my fantasy life -- except they have the actual skills to carry it off.

A couple of months ago, I finally asked my library to buy a copy of his latest book, Saved: How I Quit Worrying about Money and Became the Richest Guy in the World. In a lot of ways, it's exactly the kind of book I enjoy. Some parts memoir or personal anecdote, some parts historical examination and some parts inspiration. The most memorable part of the book, for me, was his examination of how money is made. I've been able to avoid debts other than our mortgage since 2008 and I remain committed to doing everything I can to avoid it going forward. I was already aware that money has no intrinsic value; you can't eat it or burn it to keep you warm (oh sure, you could burn paper money but it would take a lot to cook a whole meal). Its value comes solely from everyone agreeing that it has value. But did you know that money is essentially debt itself? When money is created, it's created by borrowing. 

The other part of the book I really enjoyed was how he and and his protagonist, Eric, acknowledge their privilege. I've been increasingly aware of how much privilege is involved in farming, especially if you can do it without debt. (Eric is not a farmer but he has tremendous skills for foraging and building things and clearly for making friends and building community -- all skills I am aware that I am decidedly lacking in right now.) I enjoyed Forrest Pritchard's book, Gaining Ground, as a fun sort of read, but I continually struggled with his unawareness of his privilege. He tells his story like a pulling up by the bootstraps kind of story, where he's pulling up his whole family with his hard work. I have no doubt he worked very hard and went without spending money for a long time. But he inherited a 300-acre farm full of old machinery and a beef herd already in place. The farm also had an unused home he lived in so he didn't need to leave with his parents. And when his grandfather's 50-year-old livestock trailer proved un-roadworthy, his dad bought him a new, albeit smaller one. Of course that doesn't take away from his commitment to pasture-based foods, the truth of his arguments for farmers' markets or the depth of his struggles and hard work. But as someone for whom the main barrier to pursuing a farming life is access to affordable land, it was at times hard to swallow.

So Hewitt's awareness of and gratitude for his privilege is refreshing. He owns his 40 acres and 2000 square-foot home without debt and he and his wife have huge skills (they built their house and their farm's infrastructure themselves) to produce most of their food themselves. Eric, who at the start of the book lives in a 96 square-foot cabin he built himself, earns $10,000 a year and regularly dumpster dives for food and other goods, is the first to count his privilege: he has the same ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation as most of the people in power and could easily find waged work if and when he needs to. He has tremendous skill for finding food, building relationships and making things. So many of us are blind to these privileges.

The funny thing about my response to the book is that it's actually helped me make peace with money. Before I read the book, I dreamed about a day when my family could live without any need for money. I wasn't sure I'd personally be able to make it reality, but I thought it was possible. But the fact that Hewitt and his wife produce so much of their own food (his kids are also avid hunters and forages) and he still earns about $35,000 a year, makes me realize that there's probably no point in trying to avoid money entirely. As he points out, money itself isn't the problem. "The problem is intent; the problem is how we use money, and what we expect of it." The problem is that our idea of money as security is only an illusion, and our focus on accumulating it serves to make us poorer in true wealth.

"Over the past century or so, perhaps longer, we have been taught that to rely on others is to be weak and incapable. The notion that we should depend on one another is almost antithetical to contemporary American expectations of autonomy and independence. But in truth it is that autonomy that exploits, and, irony of ironies, turns us all into dependents of the very arrangements that profess to offer independence. It exploits our resource base, because it depends on each of us owning the raw materials that enable us to shun one another. But even more profoundly, it exploits us, because it deprives us of the opportunity to experience the richness of interconnectedness and the meaningful relationships it gives rise to. By striving to achieve the American ideal of personal independence, we wind up not just independent but isolated." (p. 151)

Hewitt distinguishes between the unconscious and conscious economies as a way to point to true wealth. "I call our society's way of life the 'unconscious economy' and the way of life life I'm striving for the 'conscious economy' because I fervently believe that the only sane way forward -- indeed the only possible way forward -- is to become conscious of both our actions and our intent, and to understand the ramifications of each."

He quotes from Charles Eisenstein's Sacred Economics, which I think I must read: "To give and receive, to owe and be owed, to depend on others and be depended upon -- this is being fully alive. To neither give nor receive, but to pay for everything; to never depend on any one, but to be financially independent; to not be bound to a community or place, but to be mobile … such is the illusory paradise of the discrete and separate self."

There are parts of the book and Hewitt's style that I find myself reacting to. As a plain language champion, I can't ignore that his sentences are often unnecessarily complex and long, getting in the way of his message. And his old-timey style is occasionally intrusive and distracting. And as someone for whom social media is often my only connection to people, I reacted to his dismissal of it and other new technology that I use as something we've been duped into. As much as I'd like it to be otherwise, for a number of reasons, at the moment I just don't have the time or energy resources to be reaching out to my neighbours and local friends.

But overall, it's definitely worth the read. I recommend it. And I also recommend Hewitt's blog. 

exhaustion

I spoke too soon. Ever since we started building the chicken coop, which is still unfinished although we've been making steady progress, life has felt awfully overwhelming. I'm not sure the coop is to blame. Work has blown up, in a way that I can't even blog about. I started teaching a 12-week photography class last weekend, and I took on a small freelance gig, in the hopes that it could be the start of a different sort of paid work.

The problem with trying to create change in your life is that it orients you to the future, which can make the present more difficult and harder to enjoy. But I'm working on it.

In the meantime, the coop is coming along. I now know to budget at least double the money and triple the time you think something will take if you're doing something for the first time. Also, maybe start in the spring if it's an outdoor project. Because if you have to paint, you need the nights to stay above 10C.

The work on the coop has become considerably less satisfying than the initial burst when, within hours, we went from nothing to a floor and four walls and rafters. Now we have to figure out details and solve problems we didn't anticipate. It took my husband ages to cover the ventilation areas with chicken wire to prevent predator attacks. We've done a lot of the detail work now. We still have a few areas of the coop to cover in chicken wire and then comes the worst job ever. Fencing in the run by digging the chicken wire down a foot deep into the earth. I am NOT looking forward to that. In the meantime, here are some pictures of our progress so far.



That is a whole lotta staples my husband nailed in. His hands were bloody by the time he was done.

 

a chicken coop!

It's funny how a decision can be both relatively spur of the moment and a long, long time coming. I've been pitching the idea of our own backyard hens to my husband for many months now. For many months, he has resisted, citing the work required and the smell. When he came on board the farm fantasy train, though, I wanted to start moving forward. We are growing vegetables in a community garden and we're learning, but there are two very limiting factors to really getting into it: the space available is limited there (although VERY generous by community garden standards) and it's not at home, which makes it difficult to spend as much time and attention there as I'd like to. The next obvious step would be to start growing food at home, and while our yard is very big, it is shady all over and, also, already landscaped. The previous owners were huge gardeners. It's possible I could find a few spots for some leafy greens, but that's probably it, and that's not enough to motivate me.

What we can do in our yard is have chickens and see how we like that. It would probably be a good idea to get some sense of whether we even like caring for them before we do something crazy like buy a farm. So last weekend we decided to just get chickens this fall. I know of a local breeder with heritage breed pullets (I'll tell you all about him after we've supplied ourselves... sorry) that he's willing to sell at the moment, so we needed to move quickly on a coop.

Our first impulse was to buy one ready-made, but I thought back to my 2012 resolution, and we thought about how much Husband and Eldest have been enjoying making neat stuff, and it seemed like a great time to learn something about carpentry and have some fun with creating our own design. It happens that my dad is a whizz at building. He built my family's cottage all by himself, and both his dad and his grandfather were carpenters. And it happened that my parents were unusually available this long weekend to help build it.

So we've spent the last week obsessively learning about what chickens actually need in their dwellings. All week I wasn't sure we'd actually go through with it, but my dad had set a challenge: have all the materials and design done by the time he arrived Saturday morning. We had a concept figured out and bought a bunch of materials but there were still a lot of details to be worked out based on what actually works with the materials, things that we really needed my dad's input on.

I discovered that I really enjoy building stuff when I can learn from someone who knows what they're doing. Because my dad is a MACHINE, we made such fast progress that I stayed really motivated. Over two days, we were able to go from this:


to this:


I think my favourite part is that we're using windows we found in our shed. The run will be fenced and roofed as well. I'll go into more detail about our design when it's done.

In the meantime, I will say that I had a great time this weekend. We were all working together on a common goal, and it felt great. Eldest was Grandpa's assistant and loved it. Husband did a lot of childcare and heavy labour while I learned from my dad about how to drill screws in, hammer nails (this wasn't actually the first time he taught me that, but I needed a refresher), and generally asked why every time he quickly figured out an angle or did something apparently without thinking. I used power saws for the first time ever and at the moment I'm feeling reasonably confident about finishing off the rest of the coop. Except for digging the trench to bury the chicken wire al around the perimeter of the coop and run. Our neighbourhood offers such a variety of animals who would love a chicken dinner, I feel like we really need to do our due diligence with predator protection. (Our friend lost most of her flock a year or so ago in a single night to some predator.)

I think working on a joint project is a really good way to connect with my dad. He told me about how he spent a whole summer helping his grandpa build his last house. He was 10 and his grandpa was 80. His grandfather built the whole house, stairs, cabinets, roof and all, using only hand tools and he could figure out everything with the tables on his square whereas my dad had to place each rafter to figure out the bits to cut out. His grandfather's saws were so sharp, he could saw through a 2x4 in three strokes, and every night he went down to his basement to sharpen all the saws he'd used that day. What an amazing experience that summer must have been for my dad.

It was really an amazing and beautiful weekend, working together with three generations. More than once, I thought, "I could get used to this." I even made this zucchini plum chutney, and even though the author said it was better after some time, we tested it today and it was delicious and a gorgeous, well... plum colour. Which is wonderful news because I have a LOT of zucchini to use up. I plan to try it with rhubarb as well.

life and stuff

So we're a few months into the new regime, of me working full-time, a couple of kilometers from home. I'm afraid to say it, but I think we all agree that life is pretty good. Of course I'm having to pick and choose how I spend my time outside work, and the kids miss spending as much time with me as they used to. But there are some very good things about life at the moment.

I swear my husband is happier. He's slower to commit to that declaration, fearing that it's just the novelty of change. But he has more energy, he laughs more easily and he snaps less at the kids. He really loves being outside for most of the day, and they've really been enjoying the summer. He and Eldest have gotten up to some really cool things. They built an insect hotel (it just needs some roofing), a rustic sailboat, and a cardboard airplane (this may still be in the works, but I think they decided it just wouldn't fly. They've bought balsa gliders and other storebought flying things. One got caught in the wind, did a 180 and landed high in some trees, irretrievable. My parents brought an awesome hawk kite home from China a couple of years ago, and we've been too afraid to fly it. But after seeing some kite flyers a few weeks ago, they were inspired to go kite flying, and the hawk kite was amazing. They've discovered the National Film Board of Canada's website and have watched a whole bunch of animations by Norman McLaren, among other nature and geography documentaries.

They all come to visit me at lunch, and I nurse Youngest and get to connect with what they've done and what they're planning for the rest of the day. I ride my bike or walk most days, or they give me a ride if I'm feeling cruddy or if the weather is cruddy. Life is much easier with Husband at home and Eldest homeschooling than when we were both working, Husband out of town, and Eldest was in daycare. In the morning, it's only me who has to get out the door at a certain time. I think this is pretty dreamy.

Husband does a lot more cooking, and we've discovered he does amazing things with meat. In late May, we got a quarter of a grassfed beef. We lost some of it in a freezer malfunction, but still have a lot left, and he's been learning to cook the new cuts with aplomb. He makes the gluten-free muffins and granola I used to make, so Youngest and I can have snacks. He hasn't yet taken over the broth-making, although we haven't done much over the summer because I haven't wanted to heat up the house. I wonder if he will in the cooler weather.

All in all, life feels pretty sweet for the most part. Of course, I could do without some of the office politics stuff, but I work with some wonderful people who make me feel like a good person, and I enjoy the thinking and writing aspect of the job. I just wish it didn't take up so much time.

I've been harbouring a farm fantasy ever since I read Radical Homemakers and realized that there could be a different way to have a farm than the way my parents did. Although I have moments where I think, maybe we could just keep things as they are, the fantasy isn't really abating. Now that Husband is experiencing the joy of life at home without a lot of external schedules (some days anyways), he's seeing the value of my vision, and I think he's finally on board with the farm fantasy. This is a very good thing.

Obviously, with us having no real skills (other than my years of horse shit-shovelling experience), it's at least a year or two out. And in the meantime, the community garden experience offers good learning. We're also going to get chickens this fall, to see how we like having them. If/when we get a farm, I think I'd like to start with chickens, provided we enjoy working with them.

I keep reading and watching memoirs and shows about urban folks moving to the country to grow their own food, and there's one major gap in their stories. Nobody talks about the money, about how you finance this dream without debt, especially when you have children you need to feed, shelter and clothe and who can't earn their keep just yet. In our area, you can't even get an acre with a house for much less than half a million dollars. So I'm pretty sure the farm dream requires moving some distance away.

I remember when we were debating whether to try homeschooling with Eldest, we noticed that it's very hard to make a decision to try something that could be better or worse, when your current situation is ok. It's much easier to try something new when everything sucks. You don't have anything to lose. But if things are ok, even nice, you stand to lose a lot. Especially if it involves moving across the province to a place where you don't know anyone.

Last fall I went to a parenting workshop with Ingrid Bauer. And she said, "This is sweet. And yet I want to reach for something sweeter." That's where I'm at, I think.

As sweet as life is at the moment, I don't want to sit at a desk for eight hours a day. I think three or maybe four hours, maybe every other day, would be perfect. I'm not the kind of person who goes outside for the sake of going outside in the winter. But if I have animals to feed, I'll enjoy it when I have to. I enjoy the forced observation of the garden and feeling my body move. I want more of all that.  I'm hoping to blog more about this process of learning and transformation, but that just seems to get squeezed out. If I'm honest, it probably doesn't help that this space doesn't answer back.

maple moon

It's about the right time to start tapping maple trees, I think. The days are creeping slightly above freezing and the nights dip back below. But I don't think we're going to tap our Norways this year. There are so many other things I want to learn and do, I just don't know if it's worth my time this year, especially since I have now developed such a taste for maple syrup, we're consuming about a litre of the stuff every month. (It's not just for pancakes here. Yogurt with homemade granola and maple syrup is my very favourite afternoon snack - especially with Saugeen Country Yogurt - and maple syrup is my favourite topping for oatmeal too.) I'm quite certain the trees in our yard couldn't even make enough for us to last a month.

I have been stuck on quite the farm fantasy lately, although it's lessened a bit recently. But every time I engage in my usual Friday night MLS fantasizing (pathetic, I know), I discover that a couple of acres and a barn is not enough to satisfy my fantasy. I want acres of pasture and hay, a big old barn and other old outbuildings, and a good woodlot and maple bush. And a house with a root cellar AND a pantry with a window. You get the idea.

Maple syrup is rather expensive, especially compared to refined sugar, but it's local and possibly uses less resources than shipping and refining sugar. That said, it uses a lot of energy to boil the sap down. A book I picked up in my thrift store obsession, The Sugar Bush Connection, says it takes a pile of wood that's 8 feet by 4 feet by 4 feet to boil 250 gallons of sap into 5 gallons of syrup. Another pile half as big is used to turn the syrup into hard brown sugar.

I would love to eventually cut out refined sugar and use only maple syrup and honey. Obviously, that would be expensive. Unless we could supply all of our own. If I had enough maple trees and the space to cook it down outside, I would be totally motivated. I think. But I don't have that, and I'm not right now.

Eldest really wants to throw a party or festival. So we're thinking of having some kind of maple celebration. I suspect this will be yet another idea that never makes it to fruition, but wouldn't it be fun to make a bunch of maple yummies and have some friends over to taste them? Or better yet, maybe we could make it a potluck and people could choose what mapley goodness to bring.