Backyard food and home repairs

I'm fascinated and awed by how quickly these tiny seeds transform into edible plants, right here in my backyard.  When you first put them in the soil, and water them, and wait with great expectancy for the first leaves to show, it seems it will take forever for them to become large enough to eat.  Now, I'm planning meals around what is growing the fastest and what needs harvested.  Just-picked chard and kale in the steamer basket last night tasted like heaven next to leftover fried chicken with rice.

In non-gardening news, this past week has been a little strange, starting with working the Drill Weekend at the squadron (welcome to the world of the Reserves - no, I'm still regular Navy, just working for them) which was capped off with a power outage on Sunday night, caused by a blown transformer in the cul-de-sac across from us.  Our next-door neighbors did not lose power so we ran an extension cord over to their outside outlet, to power the fridge, a fan, and Derril's beloved TV.  Yup, we watched TV by candlelight, a family joke from my childhood, as it makes no sense to be able to watch TV with the power our and candles lit for illumination, but this is suburbia, folks, and some people really need their entertainment fix.

I would have preferred to let the house stay quiet and play guitar out on the back patio.  I can live without television quite nicely, I find it to be more of an aggravation than a benefit.

So I had Monday off, to compensate for working both Saturday and Sunday, and the rest of the week flew by - tuesdaywednesdaythursday just like that.  Friday morning I woke up to the sound of water dripping in the guest bathroom, pouring from the ceiling from a ruptured connection up in the attic.  Oh, joy.  So up in the attic I went, scrambling the ladder and balancing on rafters to pick up the soaked handfuls of insulation, wring them out, mop up the water, make the repair.  I got it fixed by 10 am but called in with tales of woe anyway, not wanting to make the effort to drive in and then back for just a half day's work, and a little exhausted, to be honest, from the monkey-like exertion.  This is an option when you're the boss and the team clicks along quite well without you, thank goodness.

The plumbing leak brought up the urgency of tackling the re-work project, on the drawing board for two years now.  Derril wants to install a recirculating pump for the hot water, so we don't have to run so much water through the taps before the hot water arrives - the kitchen is a long way from the hot water heater - an excellent idea that will conserve lots of water and make life easier for the cook and chief bottlewasher.  Since the plumbing in this cheaply-built little tract home was just flexible PVC thrown across rafters in the attic, which is now starting to spring leaks and cause damage, the recirc project was to include a complete replacement of all the overhead water lines with copper - a feed and return loop for the hot water, and new copper for the cold supply. 

He's had all the parts and pieces on hand for two years now.  But I've been gone and my special gift for motivating a very couch-and-television oriented handyman was just not effective from half a world away.  That should change now, although it still ain't a bowl of cherries getting this guy to launch into a project. 

And part of that problem is, I think, that he won't take the time or effort to set things up to where the project goes easily.  The work we need to do in the house attic is a great example.  Right now the only way up there is through a small access panel in the hallway, using a ladder, and there is no flooring to speak of between the rafters so it's a balancing act, even though there's room to stand upright.  I've been wanting to install a pull-down stair like I put in the garage attic, so I can get up there and upgrade the insulation, and lay down some decking between the rafters to store things on.  I also want to put in an attic exhaust fan to reduce the heat build-up, as much to keep the house cool as to make it storage-friendly. 

Derril always insisted it wasn't necessary to put in a stair; too much work and all that.  But Friday's disaster turned into an opportunity for me to sell the idea, since I was up and down that ladder at least a dozen times, and found it quite arduous making the pipe repair with nothing but rafters to teeter on.  My ulterior motive is to make it easier for him to get up there and work.  This plumbing upgrade needs to get done, damnit.

Speaking of getting things done, it's mid-morning and I need to start rolling into my usual routine of cleaning, cooking, organizing and all that.  I'll end with some gratuitous vegetable shots; I can't help myself, I think they are beautiful...

 Tall top beets nearly ready to eat...

 Blue Lake Beans jumping up poles...

 Baby heirloom tomatoes...

 Snackin' good radishes

 And my favorite, luscious green chard!

Enjoy your Sunday, friends!

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Small is beautiful

Gardens don't have to be huge to make this gardener happy.

My little container garden brings me great joy every day, greeting me when I come home from work with fresh new leaves and subtle but measurable progress toward the goal of food from my backyard.  Sure, I'd like long rows of potatoes and green beans and a couple of dozen tomato plants for making sauce and salsa from, but considering it's been over two years since I've had anything growing at all, I'm delighted with this postage stamp garden.  It's in a temporary spot, to leave room for the fence rebuild project; I reused the containers from gardens past, coralled them in the sunniest part of the backyard, filled them with stockpiled soil and compost, and surrounded the whole shebang with electric poultry netting to deter the squirrels and vagabond coons and possums that wander up from the canyon.  It'll make a good chicken run when the laying hens get here, too.  I got most of it planted after we got back from Kentucky in early June, and it is working out well so far.

Just look at this gorgeous solar collector - a simple turnip leaf.  I see miniature chlorophyl factories hard at work turning sunshine into sugars and starches.  Yum.

I will always love my Red Russian kale.  Not only is it delicious, it's beautiful to look at.  These seeds were five years old, and every one of them germinated.  What a great vegetable, I could eat it every night, and will have to once it starts producing.

And the old standby, the amazing radish.  My husband's favorite raw vegetable, how fabulous is that.  Way healthier than a bowl of chips.  Easy to grow, insanely quick to reach eating size, incredibly delicious straight from the garden.  Sure, I wash them first.

An heirloom tomato plant grown two years ago on a trellis by the front door, left a fruit for a bird to eat, which dropped some seed on the other side of the sidewalk, which became a determined little volunteer plant while I wilted in the heat of Africa.  I pruned it and tied it up when I got back, and clipped off four sprouts, leaving them to root in a mason jar of water while we travelled to Kentucky to work on the farm.  Those four clippings are now very happy tomato plants, whose name I can't remember (but will look up on an old post when I have time); little striped bombs of tomato flavor are pollinating as we speak.  How cool is that.

Order out of chaos

Today is our 14th wedding anniversary.  The logic behind getting married on the 4th of July was to always have a party and fireworks on my anniversary, and a date that would be very difficult to forget.

Setting a memorable date worked.  The party and fireworks, not so much.  But that's ok.  Life goes in cycles, anyway; we don't need parties and fireworks as much now as before, and perhaps in a few years when we do need them, they'll be back.  I'm not sweating anything with this marriage.  It's as comfortable as an old pair of jeans for both of us, and we've got the rest of our lives to fiddle with the details.  You may not call physical intimacy a "detail," but believe me, after 5 long deployments and so many months and years spent apart, I am not surprised we have disconnected and don't expect to restore that piece of the puzzle immediately.  So I don't worry about it too much and don't make an issue of it and have hope and confidence that the fireworks will return, someday.  The Fourth of July will always be there for us.

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I am sitting in my favorite chair at the dining room table, at my laptop corner right next to the sliding glass doors looking out on the back patio and yard.  The sun has just broken through the morning clouds and the birds are tearing it up at the feeder, chomping and fluttering and calling like a pack of teenagers at the food court in the mall.  The hummers are buzzing back and forth between feeders and the flowers, doing their little territorial dogfights in mid-air.  The resident cottontail rabbit is over in the shade of the fence, munching on green grass.  It's quite entertaining, in a simple way, and especially gratifying to me, after having been so long without this special view.  I can't remember how many times I would be on the phone with Derril and hear the windchimes on the back patio, and miss it horribly.  So good to be back.

Yesterday I made good on my anniversary gift offer, to clean and organize the garage for the resident mechanic and collector of tools.  I call it making order out of chaos, and this time it wasn't quite as difficult as before, since my previous efforts gave the project good bones.  By that I mean, two Christmas' ago I built him four rolling tool carts with hinged lids that serve as worktables, and last year's birthday present was a big stainless steel rolling shelf from Graingers, so despite the fact that every inch of floor space was covered with tools and parts and whatnot, and the worktable surfaces were buried with the same, all the organization potential was still there, and all I had to do this time was uncover it.  

I enjoy putting tools back where they belong, being a lifetime member of the obsessive-compulsive society, and along with a good shop-vac attack on the dirt, cobwebs and spider crumbs (you know, that crumbly stuff they leave on the floor - what is that?) throughout, the garage is now a place to get some work done, instead of looking like the scene of a recent tornado.  He appreciates it, though he won't admit it without prompting.  It is actually more for me than for him, as I can't stand going out there when it's all jumbled and piled with tools used and remnants of projects that should have been long put away, and if I don't keep his workspace clean, he invades mine - the table saw, the outfeed table, my workbench.  So we both win.

Off to get a shower and make an early trip to the store for dinner ingredients and an anniversary card.  We're simple folks.  We talked about going out to a nice restaurant for the occasion, but we couldn't think of any good restaurants in the neighborhood, and I love to cook, so I mentioned meatloaf and scalloped potatoes and 60-minute dinner rolls, and his eyes lit up.  So I'll make us a nice meal, clean off the dining-room table and set it with the nice plates, light a few candles and turn on some smooth jazz, and we'll have a great time.  Sprawl on the couch for a movie later, call it a wrap.  Comfortable as an old pair of jeans, I tell you.

Have a Happy Fourth, y'all.

Getting back to posting

The year I spent in Africa is a speck in my rear-view mirror by now.

The only thoughts I have of that place are for the dear friend I left there.  JohneyB and I were constant and devoted companions, lucky to have found each other.  He is getting his little crew of Tennessee National Guardsmen welldrillers ready to redeploy back to the States at the end of this month.  I'll celebrate their departure with them from here.

I took over a month off after returning home, incorporating a farm visit and a week of horselogging school sandwiched in between recovery days at home, spent slowly getting my familiar universe back to order.  Now I am back at work, checked in to a new aircraft squadron, my last job in the Navy before my final transition to grass farmer  in November 2011.

Many times these past few weeks I wished I had kept this online journal open to capture the flow of events at this watershed of my life.  But my discipline to write was insufficient and I allowed it all to rush by me, undocumented.  I vow to change that.  My format will likely change to aid my intentions, becoming more event log than essay.  Whatever it takes, I say, to get back to posting.

With a nest of baby house wrens on my back patio, how cool is that.  I hung this birdhouse up on the back edge of the patio cover nearly two years ago, and something started a nest in it once but never moved in.  This year we've got the bug patrol team in residence and I'm enjoying the show immensely.  Both mom and dad spend the entire day flying back and forth with insects, caterpillars and spiders, about one feeding per minute - you can imagine the numbers of bugs they're consuming!

All you bird lovers out there would laugh if you knew how long it took me to identify these little birds.  They move so fast, I had a hard time distinguishing their markings.  Went through the bird books many times, to no avail.  It was the long curved bill that finally clinched it, though - bushtit was my first guess but the bill is just too short.  So, house wrens they are.  A flock of them hangs out in the neighborhood all year round, flitting from bush to bush hunting bugs and chattering like a bunch of teenage girls going to the movies.  I hope this little family settles in to stay, their bug-munching will be greatly appreciated.

So, I'm back home at last, and very happy to be here.  The front yard was a jungle of weeds and overgrown everything but a day spent on hands and knees with weeding knife and pruners has restored it to full Spring glory... gazanias and blanketflowers are blooming cheerfully, and the golden yarrow is just starting to set flowers next to the volunteer borage; the combination of blue and yellow is absolutely my favorite.  Fruit trees all look a little stressed - lacking deep water perhaps, they have not leafed out completely and the fruit set is meager this year.  They missed the gardener being here, that is certain. 

Stress of travel or something has given me a minor head cold that I hope I can shrug off before it escalates and drops into my chest.  We travel next week Tuesday to the Farm in Kentucky; I certainly don't need to be sick for that.  Guzzling liquid vitamin C and getting lots of sleep at night, let's hope that does the trick.

Last night's dinner:  crockpot beef and vegetable soup, fresh cornbread and a lovely cabernet the neighbors brought over for my birthday.  The soup was delicious.  I have sorely missed eating real food, made from scratch.

Many thanks to all for your welcome home comments - it is so good to be back!