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Gardens from scratch

We’ve just about got our two garden plots in shape and have started some planting.  Took a lot of tilling and it’s still not great.  With the clay soil it is either too wet and mucky or it’s dry with hard clay balls.  So going to need a lot of amendments, but we knew that.  I’m making semi-permanent raised rows, which should help with drainage and give us a place to focus our compost, manure and other nutrients.

Here’s a few shots of what we’re starting from.

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Slightly closer look at the rows.

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We’ve got three raised beds with row cover going now.

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It’s been really warm for the last week and plants are suddenly taking off.  I had to mow the lawn already.  The lettuce seems happy.  This is lettuce I started indoors in February or March.

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Here is a view of the front garden, which will mostly be perennial berries, asparagus, etc.  We’re using it this year for a few other things, like peas, pumpkins and potatoes.

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And one last shot of some peas that appear to be thriving despite the conditions.

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Post move update

As you might expect, life has been pretty busy since our move.  Fall went pretty quick and now we are already headed into winter, so work outside will slow down for awhile. Here are a few of the things we’ve been working on.

  • We put in an herb spiral.  I’ve always found the idea of these one of the most interesting and accessible permaculture concepts.  We have some rocks scattered around the property, so I was able to build this with a combination of repurposed bricks and rocks.
  • We had one little hoop in a raised bed for the fall.  Got quite a bit of lettuce and other greens out of it into November.  Also some radishes and Hakurai turnips.  The last part of November was fairly cold here, so not much is still growing now.  But there are also carrots and bunching onions that should come back and continue to grow in the spring theoretically.
  • Kristin is experimenting with the concept of a couple of “lasagna” plots, which is basically where you build up a raised bed using various materials (grass, straw/hay, food waste, chicken shavings/manure, spent beer mash, etc.)  It’s basically building a compost pile, letting it sit over the winter and early spring and then planting directly into it.  We have two of them going so far, both a standard 4’ x 8’ size that we settled on for raised beds. Makes it easy to use scrap dimensional lumber for frames and the hoops fit over them nicely.
  • We dug up another section in our back pasture and planted garlic.  Our tiller really struggled with getting anywhere with our dense pasture grass sod.  It took about 8-10 runs to break the ground into anything useable.  So we may need to get some sections of the properly plowed at least once to get certain things started, like asparagus, strawberries, etc.
  • I just planted a couple of hazelnut bushes from the Arbor Day Hazelnut Project. They are developing hybrid bushes that can grow in a much wider range of climates, hopefully over most of the US instead of mainly in a small area of the Pacific Northwest.  I also started our windbreak with 10 Norway Spruces from Arbor Day. Eventually I want to build up a substantial windbreak on the north and east sides of the house and along the lane, with a mix of evergreens and deciduous trees.
  • We did a bunch of efficiency work on the house, including blowing cellulose into the attic which was never done for some reason.  We also insulated the basement above grade for now as well as our bulkhead door, with the intent of eventually putting foam board on the entire set of walls in the basement.  This may not be necessary and foam board is pricey, so we’ll see how it goes.  The basement is already noticeably warmer. We would like to eventually put in another heat source, such as a pellet stove.  We have a fairly efficient oil furnace, but I don’t like having that as my only option and it’s certainly not the cheapest way to go for a house of this size.

This winter I hope to do a few small projects, including building a larger chicken coop using the principles in Fresh Air Poultry Houses.  We also still have some odds and ends to wrap up in the master bath, painting to finish in the upstairs and some electrical work to have done.  I hope to get some additional storage and a workbench/tool area set up in the basement, now that we have some of the insulating done.

I’ve ordered my first 4 apple trees for spring delivery and we’ll need to start thinking about strawberries, blueberries, asparagus, rhubarb and additional trees for windbreak to plant in the spring.  Plus our normal seed starting and the fun we always have looking though all our seed catalogs.  This year we’ll finally be able to grow some things we didn’t have room for in the past, such as sweet corn, melons, pumpkins and lots of other things.  Not sure we’ll get to all that in the first year, but we’ll do what we can like we do every year.

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2011: Year In Review, Part 3

We had signed up with one of the bigger Allied affiliates in Chicago to move us to Vermont.  They seemed to have pretty good reviews, although in doing research it just seems like very few people have great experiences with cross-country movers.  I saw several suggestions in moving forums to just “sell all your stuff” and buy it again in the new place.  I guess that might make sense if you are in your twenties, but we had spent years collecting books, beer-making equipment and other specialized stuff.  So I wasn’t going to do that.

Allied was supposed to move us on August 10th, a Wednesday.  They said they would give us exact details once they had a truck scheduled. As the day approached, I called to confirm and they said they still didn’t have the exact details.  Finally I called them the day before and they told me they hadn’t yet identified a truck or driver.  I asked them what we were supposed to do since we had a lot of different plans made around that date.  All they could tell us is that they were working on it.  Needless to say, I was not happy and asked them what the point was in scheduling 2 months in advance if this was the result.

This continued for another day and they still had no ETA. I started researching just renting a truck myself after all, even though it was the last thing I wanted to do. I don’t love driving big vehicles, particularly not on a multi-day trip.  But it didn’t seem like there was any guarantee of when Allied would get their act together.  We had mostly done all our final packing and really didn’t have much left unpacked to even use for a few days.  I ended up calling Penske just to see if there was any possibility of getting something on short notice and it seemed like they might have something.  There were some advantages to moving ourselves, as there were certain things Allied wouldn’t move for us and it was going to be a tight fit getting all of them into our car.  Also, Allied wouldn’t be delivering our stuff for 7-14 days, so we would be in a new house with nothing except an air mattress and Kristin was pregnant.

Finally on Friday, I was stir-crazy and fed up with Allied, so we decided to move ahead with renting a truck and moving ourselves.  I canceled the Allied move, which fortunately didn’t end up costing us anything.  I called for some help from friends again and I picked up a truck on Saturday morning.  We got the storage unit emptied and the truck loaded by Saturday evening.  We headed out early Sunday for Kristin’s parent’s place in central PA.  This wasn’t the most direct route, but would give us a place to crash where the truck would be safe.  Most of the trip went fine, but we ran into heavy rain in PA and then had to go up over a mountain on interstate 81 where it was very foggy and there was roadwork going on. It was pretty scary and I was exhausted from driving the truck all day. We got behind a semi truck and took it slow.  There were spots with no guardrail and only one lane was open, so it was nerve-wracking.  We finally made it through and got on the last main road going to Pottsville, arriving around 10PM or so.

We took Monday off to rest and I actually did a little work that day.  We headed out again on Tuesday to go the rest of the way.  The trip went pretty well and we had good weather.  As we climbed a hill and crossed over into Vermont, the landscape stretched before us and it was such a lovely site I’m not ashamed to admit I shed a few tears.  It had taken so long to get to this point and we had a lot of obstacles.  The rest of the way was pretty easy, although the Vermont backroads had Kristin cringing as my back tires would edge off the side of the road.  No shoulders, just narrow roads beat up by the Vermont winters.  But we finally pulled up in front of the house I had rented and Kristin got to see it for the first time. I still had the truck for another day, so we took our time getting unloaded and hired a couple of local guys to get the heavy stuff.  It was money well spent after our long ordeal getting there.

This is a four part series, check out the other posts here:

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2011: Year In Review, Part 2

We had made arrangements to stay in Chicago with our friend Mark until August.  He rents a house in Wheaton.  We wanted to wrap up some work stuff, have time to spend with friends and figure out moving and housing logistics.  We moved everything out into storage in time for the first closing date.  We thought we had plenty of time (we were allowed to stay with Mark for 6 weeks by his landlords).  But after the closing date kept getting moved, we were starting to get tight on time.  Arrangements were made with Allied to move us, but they wanted an arm and a leg (almost $3K) to store our stuff from the end of June until we actually moved in August.  And then it turned out they had no trucks available in late June anyway.  Should have taken that as a sign…  So we ended up renting some trucks and moving stuff to a storage unit ourselves.  Around this time, Kristin’s dad had open heart surgery and she had to go to PA to be with the family, so I was doing a lot of the moving and packing by myself.  Fortunately we had a lot of good friends who pitched in and helped out.

We had decided to move to Vermont and I wanted to look for housing, but without an official “cleared to close” I was afraid to find a place or sign a lease.  I had to reschedule my flights twice before I could finally make it out to Vermont.  By the time we finally closed in the 3rd week of July, I only had a few weeks to find a place to live.  To make matters worse, the rental market in Vermont is fairly tight AND tends to be expensive, so the choices seemed a bit limited.  There is really no central web site for rental options either.  Armed with a list of options from Craigslist, I flew out to Vermont for a long weekend to try to find a place for us to live.  The first day or so didn’t go that well, but then things started picking up and I was able to make a series of appointments.  The only place that Kristin was really intrigued by turned out to be the place we landed, but it was a bit further out than I wanted and I wasn’t sure it was still available.

I was staying with a friend in Essex Junction and when I mentioned Bristol to him and his wife, they got excited and said how great a town it was and probably a good fit for us.  The house also had plenty of room, a garden and wood stove heat; all things we were excited about.  I contacted the owner and she did get back to me, but thought someone else was already very interested.  I found out later she was being very picky and not even getting back to many people, so in retrospect it is surprising I even heard back.  She was already showing the place on Friday, so she said I could come by after that.  When I got there, the other person had gotten sick and didn’t show up, so I was the only one to look at it.  I immediately connected with the place and probably would’ve rented it on the spot. Leslie (the landlord) wanted to chat for awhile and then wanted me to think about it and talk to Kristin.  I told her we were expecting and she was excited about the possibility of having a young family in the house again.

I left to go look at another place, but that only reinforced how much closer this place was to what we wanted. Kristin was all for it, so I called Leslie back that evening.  She agreed to rent us the place and I drove down on Saturday to finish the deal. We hung out most of the afternoon and worked on a lease together. Vermont is very much a “handshake deal” kind of place, particularly in the rural areas.  I got to meet her husband Jim and we immediately hit it off.  He was excited to talk about all my farming research and ideas.  We share a lot of common interests in doing things “the old way”.  Every time we get together the discussions are always interesting.

So I was able to leave Vermont with a great place rented, some new landlords who also seemed to be fast friends and an excitement to finally move.  But we still had to make that happen and there was going to be one more hiccup on our road to Vermont.

This is a four part series, check out the other posts here:

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2011: Year In Review, Part 1

2011 turned out to be a very interesting year, full of twists and turns and lots of changes.  We started the year with our condo still on the market after about a year and a half.  Showings had nearly dried up.  Nothing was moving.  We had been wanting to start a family, but were hoping to wait until after we moved on from Chicago.  At this point, since it was hard to tell whether our house would sell anytime soon (and we weren’t getting any younger), we started to think maybe we should at least start trying.

We found out in April that Kristin was pregnant, right around the time showings started to pick up again.  We had dropped the price yet again, just desperate to get out of Chicago.  We finally got our first offer in early May and it was a bit of a kick in the teeth.  But we started negotiation and eventually got to a contract we could live with.  Unfortunately that was just the beginning of the process.

Our buyer wanted to do an FHA loan, as the majority of people are doing right now with credit so tight.  Our building was not already approved, so we embarked on the process of getting that done.  I’m not sure if this is the FHA in general or our contact in particular, but I’ve never seen such an incompetent bureaucracy in my life.  We gave them an initial set of documents and it took them almost a month to get back to us and tell us half of the stuff was incomplete or wrong.  By this time we were only a few weeks out from our scheduled closing on June 24th.  We tried to get the documents completed, but we would give them one thing and then they needed something else.  Don’t’ these people use any sort of workflow or checklist?  It was ridiculous.  It’s a wonder people don’t just give up.  If the government wants to know why the real estate market isn’t recovering, the FHA would be a good start as part of the problem.  Anyway, we missed our first closing date and eventually got everything worked out, but it took another 3 weeks.  We were finally able to close on July 19th, almost a month later than originally scheduled.  Fortunately the closing itself went smoothly and we were finally officially homeless (and debt-free).

This is a four part series, check out the other posts here:

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Life Changes

Well, 2011 is shaping up to be a big year for Kristin and I.  Some of you know and some of you don’t that we have been interested in quite awhile in moving somewhere back east and eventually buying some land.  There are certainly things about the city we still enjoy very much, but over the past couple of years we’ve become increasingly dissatisfied with life here in Chicago.  Part of it is just the politics, lack of room and cost of living.  But mostly we are finding that all the stuff we like to do keeps going back to having land and space to spread out.  All of our hobbies take up room, including homebrewing, baking, canning and preserving, music and gardening.  And our interest in food, particularly the sustainable, grow it yourself kind requires land.  Neither of us are Midwesterners and we wouldn’t be in the Midwest other than Chicago.

So over the past 4-5 years, we’ve been doing lots of research on farming, animals, gardening and places to live.  We’ve visited quite a number of farms, including a lot of dairy goat farms and cheese operations.  We decided to put our condo on the market almost 2 years ago, realizing the timing sucked, but not realizing how bad.  We finally got a buyer in May of this year and after a long ordeal involving FHA approval and various other issues we were able to close on the sale of our condo last week.

Initially we had thought about taking a year and traveling/interning in various places before settling down, but since our condo took so long to sell we decided against that.  We had visited and considered various places, but the one that kept coming up to the top of the list was Vermont.  I think there are a variety of reasons.  One, it is one of the most food oriented states around, with lots of CSAs, cheese-makers, food co-ops and opportunities to buy local food.  Not to mention still proudly holding the title of most brew pubs per capita of any state.  We like that it’s fairly sparsely populated, with a lot of areas that are still relatively undeveloped and a dedication to green spaces and wilderness areas.  A big reason is that the state is just absolutely stunning, with an amazing mix of mountains, gently-rolling hills, forest, pastures and lakes and rivers.  And we also find the progressive politics to be a better fit for us than the corruption and ineffectiveness that is Illinois politics.

So in August we are moving to Vermont.  We’ll be renting a house in Bristol with a garden, wood stove, and plenty of storage, among other cool things.  Bristol is one of those quintessential Vermont villages.  It’s located about 30-40 minutes south of Burlington and about 15 minutes from Middlebury.  Our landlords are part-time farmers about 10 minutes south and I’ve already been enjoying getting to know them.

More to come later.  I’m hoping this move and the chance to do a lot of things we’ve been dying to do will spark more frequent updates to this blog.  But we’ll also be very busy for awhile, so feel free to ping me and ask how we are doing.