Planning for Spring

Posted on January 13, 2013 by seedybeans

It is still frigid outside, but folks remember this IS a GOOD THING. The longer that snow stays on the ground the better off we will all be come spring, and all the more thankful!! All this cold just gives us more time to sip tea & dream our abundant garden plots to life.

I have been at this gardening thing for long enough, that the planning is kind of second nature, but how to share it is always a challenging task. I teach gardening here and there and everyone asks every year– What do I plant when? It is actually a harder question to answer than some might like because, well it depends…on the weather that year, on what your garden is like, on when you want to harvest, how much space you have…on pretty much everything… But I finally bit the bullet and just made a rough draft of a calendar for my students and friends to follow. I aligned my gardening experience here in the high desert and all that I have learned along the way with my favorite guidance from the stars to create an easy to use guide to chart the course of our gardens this year. So folks here it is– Thanks to snapfish and lots of photos taken over the years, I am pretty pleased with it I must say. It is mostly useful for folks gardening in zone 6 but if anybody wants one, I could have more made, just let me know– good price for you!!

Starting the new year right

Posted on January 9, 2013 by seedybeans

Or at least we are attempting to….

Juicing Carrots, Beets and Ginger for a little mid winter zing. Oh and did you notice the magazine I used as coaster? Yep, these very hands made the cover of the Spring SFCC (Santa Fe Community College) Continuing Ed course catalog. I have been helping them start a garden there that will produce food for their student run cafe!! So cool! Friday will be our first harvest ever, I am anticipating a couple of lbs of Spinach, some Parsley and maybe some Chard if we get lucky. I am not officially teaching in the garden this spring…but some of my cohorts are and their classes look great. Check out Botany for Gardeners by Scott Voorhies or Amanda Bramble’s intro to Permaculture.

Jangy and I started on cleaning my bags and bags of seeds yesterday in the greenhouse..let’s just say seed cleaning with a 20 month old is…interesting. But we got a bunch lettuce seeds and they went right back into a flat sown on the first Leaf Day of the Year!! (the 7th) along with some spinach and sprouts– indoors of course.

We also got to work on trying to de-ice my little hooped lettuce beds. I am sure they are alright under there, snow is a pretty good insulator…..

But I simply can’t reach them to harvest. I put a few layers of plastic, one black, one clear. I am hoping with a few of these warmer days and some greenhouse action they will open for me. This what they looked like on Christmas…

Hang on little guys, I will eat you up soon!!( or I could just wait and let them grow even more, but they look so good don’t they).

I am also trying to post a bunch of new jewelry on my Etsy page

Oh and attempting to ritualize an awesome yoga class into my life…..Here’s to a new start and good intentions! What are you sprouting up this year?

Practice Resurrection

Posted on January 1, 2013 by seedybeans

On the first day of this promising year, my heart is both heavy and hopeful; a long growthful year gone by and the new dawn that sings to me in my dreams, full of promise. Warm, well and rested I am quiet today, but the sky gifted me with this glory, and Wendell Berry, the truest poet of our times, gifted me with the words to express my inner whispers.

“When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
― Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community

“So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute…Give your approval to all you cannot understand…Ask the questions that have no answers. Put your faith in two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years…Laugh. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts….Practice resurrection.”
― Wendell Berry, The Country of Marriage

Happy New Year to all. May we all practice our own resurrection and may the world come with us.

Garden Cottage Studio Craft Shack!!

Posted on December 10, 2012 by seedybeans

This is really a dream come true! Humble as it is, a 8×8 Pallet and Mud shack….it changed my whole life and for this I must thank my wonderful husband and his crafty hands– Thanks Joel!!

Garden cottage in evening light

You see it all started last March 2011…Baby was on his way and we needed to turn the studio/storage room into kids room….So while I sat, very pregnant watching…Joel built us this little number from some old pallets picked up behind the hardware store, some mud and straw (instead of a baby shower we had a cob party!! Thanks Everyone) insulted the roof with packing peanuts, (that thrifty guy), and finished it off with a marvelous over hanging roof that added outside storage and of course shade, nothing says loving like a porch!!

This photo was taken of the same spot a few years earlier. Where the Cottage now stands was an outdoor shower over the well house

Now, almost two years later, on this cold winter day, I sit snug in this perfect little space creating like I was born to do. Gems hang in the winter light among pattern books, sewing machine, yarn, and all kinds of materials to weave together into something beautiful, someday. My challenge is pacing my creative self, knowing in time it will all get made, and tearing myself away when life…or my toddler need tending. I just feel so grateful for this space, quite, calm, focused, a sanctuary for my spirit to rest and my hands to run wild.

New Jewelry for Next weekends Holiday Craft Show

Because my husband is a crafty genius himself, I thought I would share the making of this little craft shack, and a few of Joel’s words about the process.

When my wife and I were expecting a baby, and my shop was too full of stuff to work in, we decided to build a shed on top of the concrete slab roof of the well house. We’d been using it as root cellar for a couple of years and also needed a pantry and a place for the used sunfrost freezer we’d bought. Our goal was to build an attractive (it is right outside our living room window) temperature-stable, weather tight structure using as much waste material as possible. It also turned out as a good way to use up scrap wood cluttering the yard.

You can see the concrete slab over the well house is the floor, and the pallets being placed together as the frame

I decided to do a modern twist on the traditional jacal technique of Northern New Mexico. Upright posts are set in the ground and the whole thing is plastered over with mud. Instead we used wooden pallets and filled and plastered them with strawy mud. Using four portland cement pallets (very strong), a 4’x 8’ “ pallet for plywood, five pallets from a cabinet shop, and miscellaneous pallets from behind the hardware store, I pieced together the walls. First redwood 2 x 4 plates were screwed to the concrete slab using tapcon screws. The pallets were attached with scrap pieces of 2×4 screwed flat to the plate that keyed into the voids in the pallets. Short pieces of scrap 2x 4 also tied the pallets to one another.

Door came from Habitat for Humanity restore and because we already had it, Joel build the doorway to fit it…it is a lot harder going the other way around.

The south wall went up first because it was against the neighbor’s fence. It was sheathed with T 111 before being stood-up. The front wall included some straight lumber for framing out the door and window openings. A 2” x 8” ridge joist resting on upright members in the wall pallets carried the four cabinet shop pallets. The OSB on these pallets serves as the ceiling, the 2×4’s the roof joists, and the one-by skids are the nailers for the metal roof. The inside was sheathed with 1/8^thinch pine plywood and the south wall and ceiling insulated with packing peanuts.

Roof framed for extra over hang

The pallets were filled with a straw-rich cob mixture using dirt dug in the yard. This was all plastered over with the same strawy mud mix. The straw bridges the wood members and the wood members act like wood lathe to hold the cob in place.

Strawy Mud stuck in the walls

The whole thing then got plastered over with earth plaster. The final coat was an aliz of Carle Crews’ recipe (see her book Clay Culture).

Final coat of clay plaster

Using a pallet base, a floor of douglas fir seconds was installed along with a ladder and trap door to make the root cellar more accessible. The building including electrical cost about $500 mostly for metal roofing. Many have said that would be a great extra bedroom. The big front and side overhangs make the building.- Joel Glanzberg

All Done, Pretty as a picture!!

Oh what a difference just a little shack of one’s own can make It has already taken on so many forms, a storage shed, a herb drying/potting shed, a studio space for me to make jewelry, sew and knit, a writing studio for Joel’s New book….and hopefully some day we will..Have an outdoor kitchen under it’s eves, grow mushrooms in the root cellar, use it as a bedroom for our son when he turns into a teenager… and who knows what else the future will hold for this 8×8 shack of love.

West side storage for bikes & garden tools, love that over hang

Storage

And of course the freezer with the trap door to well house/root cellar

Stocking up space

Grilling out front

Outdoor living

Creative space

Garden cottage, looks like it has always been there, tucked away in the garden

Our Daily Bread

Posted on December 1, 2012 by seedybeans

Mmmmm, Nothing like warm fresh bread on a Saturday morning in December. With butter and Jam, oh baby, so darn good!! I know a lot of people don’t eat Gluten these days, but Sourdough actually pre-digests wheat so it is easier for us to stomach, according to this article in Weston Price’s Nourishing Traditions.

So, I say, “Bread and butter– yes please!!”

One of my fist loaves in my terra cotta chicken pot

As anyone who has ever tried to bake their own bread knows, it truly is an art. There are books after book published on the simple art of bread, centuries of experienced bakers with more than enough information to share. In my quest I read, I went to a workshop at a friends, I watched numerous U tube video (some very odd!!)….But I must say– there is nothing like practice to teach the hands what they need to know.

You see, bread baking has been part of my daily practice for a year or two– a brief time really, but after hundreds of loaves, I have honed in and refined it to a place I am very happy with. I won’t say it is perfect, or the one true way. In fact everyone I know who makes bread makes it a just a little different from one another. That is the beautiful essence of homemade – you can taste everyone’s soul in their food, craft, home… What ever it may be, it can’t be mass-produced, as it has a life of it’s own as individual as it’s maker, which to me, makes it REAL & wonderful…
But I will say, in this bread baking practice in the high desert, I have learned some tricks of this art of flour, water and a few lively critters and have pleased a few folks along the way with a warm slice of bread, so this one is for you my friends & family, who love my bread and want to know the secrets, here you go, bake away and be sure to tell me what you learn along your journey, remember every loaf is different!

Fresh bread mmmmm

Sourdough Bread Recipe- Made with a Kitchen Aid mixer

Dry Ingredients

3 Cups Flour- (I like 1 Cup Whole Wheat 1 Cup White and 1 Cup Rye)or

(1.5 Cups Whole Wheat and 1.5 cups White)

2 tsp Salt- (or more if you like)

Wet Ingredients

1 Cup Starter

1 Cup Water

Mix flour and salt in the mixer with bread hook. In a glass measuring cup mix starter and water with a spoon until blended well, much like the consistency of thick cream.

My sourdough starter is a bit goppy & sticky creating long strands as I pour

Turn on mixer on low and slowly pour in wet into dry. Run the mixer until the dough is mixed well, it will be a bit sticky, but should come away from the sides of the bowl.

Not a great picture, but you can kind of see how the dough comes away from the bowl, but sticks a bit to the dough hook

Take off dough hook and cover dough in bowl with a plastic bag and let sit over night.

Plastic over the mixing bowl and let sit over night

In the morning (or 12 hours later) preheat oven to 500 with the baking vessel inside (I use a terra-cotta chicken pot, but anything should work that has a lid).

Flour hands and remove sticky dough from bowl, scraping the dough off the sides, make ball, tossing only a few times between your hands and lay on a floured towel and wrap loosely while oven is preheating (My oven takes about 30 minutes to get that hot).

When your oven is at 500, take out the hot pot. Open towel and place dough ball in the hot vessel, note dough will be mushy, so move quickly, just placing it in the vessel as gently as you can. You can score the bread a few times with a knife if you like.

Cover vessel and bake bread for 30 min at 500. At 30 min remove lid and bake for another 10-15 min ( brown to your liking). When done, remove bread from vessel and cool on a rack. Wait at least 30 min before slicing into, slathering with butter and devouring it will be worth the wait!!

So that is it– Try it and if you need starter I can share.

One nice thing about using the chicken pot is that is has these lines on the bottom which adds grip when slicing

Transitions

Posted on November 25, 2012 by seedybeans

I have heard before that during the solstices’ & the equinoxes’ is when the universal energies are at their most extremes, and thus can be intense times for us humans. Though this may be true for many, tracking myself and my own rhythms, especially in these self-aware times of staying at home & mothering a baby, I have noticed that it is actually the in-between-times that seem to be the trickiest for me. Usually the transitions out of one season and into the next usually fall between the heighten times of Equinox and Solstice and it is these transitions that take me a while to adjust to, especially this one right here– Autumn to winter.

The first fallen leaf

I have a hard time letting go of the garden, the long days of fresh air and sunshine, harvesting, weighing, and eating fresh picked produce and of course those delicious baby bare feet. Don’t get me wrong, I love our nights by the fire, cozy flannel sheets, sweaters and soups and slippers as much as the next girl, but something about the cold sneaking in and the harvest being down truly gets me down. All the ghouls and goblins come out, the veil between the living and the gone are thin…I don’t know I guess the darkness just makes me feel, well dark.

Even the garden has gone under cover for the winter

A dear friend reminded me this fall, ‘as the leaves fall they are just reminding us to let it all go’. Ah what a sigh of relief, but clearly that was hard for me to let go somehow this season. I thrive in summer, my garden being my time-keeper, my guide, my boss really. Staying at home this year was a wonderful thing for me and my little family, but I will be the first to admit, I was an intense transition from being a woman of the world, to a woman of the home. My life changed so much and there was a lot of internal rearranging that was in order, and frankly still is. I am learning to let the rhythms of nature guide me completely and let go of all the 9 to 5, which is truly a beautiful liberation, but an adjustment none the less. Some how though, in the summer things seemed to flow more naturally. I did not worry myself too much with who I was, I was too busy being who I am, a grower of life in all forms. Yes, I know, dormancy is a part of the life cycle, the wise old mother earth knows this well; in winter she rests, restores, renews….and this I will indeed, it is just settling into that without recoiling is my challenge.

Winter- by Alphonse Mucha

My mother reminds me every year since I was a child, ‘you always get sick in the fall’, and yes mom, I do. She is right, though I may have not ever really noticed or wanted to admit it, I do get sick every year when the leaves all fall and chilly nights come in, I get ill of body & heart. When I can no longer play outside and must be indoors more than I would like, the sniffles find me and take me down, sometimes kicking, sometimes happy to be put to rest. Now that I have a family of my own, the same pattern continues, but now with the three of us sniffling it is no fun at all… but we are learning, taking turns in hot baths and making tea time a mandatory time of day.

Another transition that we are settling into is the baby to toddler transition; delighting in the walking, talking, laughing, playing, kissing hugging and feeling a little less enthused about the hitting, throwing, refusing and temper tantruming, yep all the glory of the 18 month mark.

I realize that all these shifts would of course contribute to a rough patch. I hope knowing this time of year transitions are hard for me (us) will help me receive them a bit more gracefully in the future. Maybe prepare better, boosting the immune systems and inner sunshine, or maybe just softening to it, allowing myself to be more graceful, receptive and forgiving of the inner darkness that takes it’s turn to shine. Either way, I can finally feel an acceptance, an internal surrender finally to the season of sleep, solitude, darkness, quiet, reflection, inward journeying as well as great creativity.

Ah, the sweet sound of clicking knitting needles, music to my ears

I see why we now sit at this time of year and align our darkness with our deepest gratitude, shedding light on what gives us life and joy helps us re-orient our habits and minds. It is now the season to praise the light in us as it slips from the sky. A time to remember, rekindle and recreate that sunshine that has blessed us so generously throughout the year and now shed it from the inside out. So this is just my way of saying hello winter, Hello darkness, hello shadows and sweaters and soup. Welcome, I accept your teachings, I am grateful and I will stop moping and step up and shine my inner light just for you.

Let the light shine from inside

The Tomato Report

Posted on October 1, 2012 by seedybeans

As the first frost looms around us, threatening to nip my tender garden with it’s frigid fingers any night now…..and I am having a hard time letting go. You may already know, my tomatoes are overly doted upon, but to me everything I have given them has been worth it. It all started way back in January you see, sowing those baby seeds, a bit early maybe, but I just couldn’t wait. I watering and pinching back flowers,

fertigating and tending to their care daily, and they grew and grew and grew

Until it was time to harden them off and send them out into the great wide world

Where a ceremonial garden once grew

…we rearranged things a bit to accomodate our growing family of vegetables.

Wheel burrow upon wheel burrow of yummy Soilutions compost, bags and bags and bags of my neighbors leaves,

rototilling,

hand digging, fluffing, shaping of soil into beds…..

drip tape irrigation,

Finally planting them loving into the well prepped earth

Mulching like crazy

Even laying tiles in the paths for solar/rain collection as well as for walking…excessive maybe, but I had them laying around

staking,

tying & pruning & training

And of course the waiting……

And then one fine, late July day, they started to come on.. pound by pound….

…..by pound

Well paced, but incredibly abundant!!

And boy were they good! It was all worth it!

There were a few problems of course, like blossom end rot

And some serious cracking

But I still ate them of course

and sauced and roasted and stewed them —

125lbs pounds of ripe gorgeous tomatoes to date, and at the looks of things I might still be in for plenty more.

You see, my husband decided he could whip a little hoop house over them to protect them from frost and help them ripen.

I thought he was crazy at first,I mean they are over 6 feet high by now… but of course, whip on up he did.

With 8 cattle panels, contractors plastic

an old post from a stop sign & some scrap lumber made into a ridge pole, some bailing wire and some of those cool paper fastener things….

Amounting to about $275 and 2 afternoons… we got ourselves and hothouse baby!!

And hot it is, steaming in fact, so much the tomatoes were sweating and my camera was clouding up.

It is all an experiment of course, I have no idea how it will all end, but I do know it sure was tasty fun and I will let you know when they finally fade,

but for now….no frosty nights for these girls!

All Prepped up and ready to Sow!

Posted on October 1, 2012 by seedybeans

This watery full moon in Pisces brought me back to the garden, knowing it would be one of my last chances to plant fall greens, I went at it with great gusto. Though not a great time to harvest roots, I simply had to make room in the garden for greens so I dug up a potato row, planted around St. Patty’s Day. It was a beautiful harvest, perfectly rain moisten soil, cool air and sunshine on my back, baby and daddy sleeping and just me and the mother earth..and 16lbs of perfect plump taters…

After I dug, I sprinkled a nice layer of compost I had stashed from this spring onto the bed

And then the Zen art of raking a bed, brought me back to my days at CASFS, where I studied gardening as a fine art. We would spend what seemed like hours, leveling and raking the beds, so they were perfect plane and the very finest of tilths.

The finer and fluffier the bed is, the easier it is for those tiny seeds to nestle in and take root.

Then I laid down the drip tape and made little furrows along it for my seeds

Tucking in so tenderly the last lettuce of the season

Ahh.. nothing like the joy of seeds well sown. I covered them with a thin layer of straw so the birds wouldn’t get them too quickly, and of course to keep the freshly raked soil nice and moist and warm. I also placed 19 gauge wire hoops over it, for when I cover them with row cover when the cold does come..and they act as a good baby deterrent too, though he was not too happy about not being able to walk on my perfect bed..

Ok big watery harvest moon, rain down and let’s get one more salad crop out of this season.

Happy Harvest Moon

Posted on September 29, 2012 by seedybeans

Thus subtle shift in light, the slight tilt of this precious world seems to have changed everything in me and all around me. The exhale at the end of our days are luminous and splendid

And first light, direct and perfectly focused through our east facing window, awakens me. Shining directly on our family alter, these rays bring me to each day with a reminder to be present with what I hold so dear.

The garden continues bestowing us with her generosity,

Reminding us of the deep nourishment of beauty so needed as we let go into this senescent season

And as the darkness comes, how important it will be to bring that beauty inside us for the long winter

The comfort of homegrown food warms us deeply as we eat together and share now three years of marriage under this bright, abundant moon.

We are blessed, so grateful and so humbly grown by yet another cycle around the sun, with the moon and all the power of the stars.

Happy Harvest Moon.

Sleeping in the Forest

Posted on September 17, 2012 by seedybeans

The morning light shifts notably these mornings….And I feel it in me when I rise

I too am shifting, down, into a lower gear, softly falling to the earth as the golden leaves to the ground

I exhale and release gratefully into this time of letting go.

The one last gift I longed for from summer was a family camping night and some forest herb gathering

and so it was, cozy under bright stars, waking to frost on the logs we leaned into by fire light the night before.

I now feel a season complete, having been so generous with us, I feel so happy for the return of the season of internal times and retreat

As I slept in the forest this weekend, This poem kept coming to me, one of my very favorites, reminding me that what truly sets me straight is being outside, being in nature and being nurtured by her.

Sleeping in the Forest

I thought the earth

remembered me, she

took me back so tenderly, arranging

her dark skirts, her pockets

full of lichens and seeds. I slept

as never before, a stone

on the riverbed, nothing

between me and the white fire of the stars

but my thoughts, and they floated

light as moths among the branches

of the perfect trees, All night