Picnic at the Farm

Last night we had our first meal at the farm.

Ethan wanted to drive the tractor from our house to the land so we could be more set up to start doing some work. He hooked up the hay rake to the tractor, took off, and we followed 45 minutes later. It was pretty good timing. He arrived about 5 minutes before we did.

Ethan raised the loader a bit, and then we all sat down for some sandwiches. Afterwards, we took a bit of a walk around the land. Caleb had a great time poking the ant hills, I enjoyed scouting out the blackberry and raspberry patches, and Hannah sang and held flowers while Ethan carried her.

It was a very enjoyable evening. The only thing I could have done without was all of the ticks that we flicked and picked off. Everyone had at least one left on them when we checked at home. I will gladly take a few ticks each evening, however, in order to be able to enjoy more evenings like we had.

Planting Pots at Work

Last week I pulled out some of my homemade newspaper planting pots from their tray. They are working great! As you can see in the picture, the roots are coming out of the side of the pots.

That is exactly what is supposed to happen with planting pots. It prevents the roots from becoming root bound - there is no reason to loosen up the roots, possibly damaging them, before planting the plants.

When I go to plant these, I will just stick planting pot and all into the garden. The roots will continue to grow out of the pot, and the newspaper will decompose in the soil.

I will definitely do this again next year!

Building News

Last week I mentioned that it was our rush week and that we were trying to turn in the papers for our loan. Unfortunately, we continued to have delays with the perk test and septic bid so I wasn't able to meet my goal. Even so, this week has been more relaxed. Pretty much it was just a wait to have things finalized on the contractors end.

We finally got the results in for our perk test. Not good. We have some nice thick clay 1 1/2 feet down. Instead of the $3200 system, we are now looking at an $8000 system. There will also be some extra expenses with moving the building a bit further from the road to make this system work.

Even though this is a bit more than we were wanting to fork out for the septic, I think it will be better in the long run. We had planned on just putting in a second septic system if we build a stick house down the road, with the purpose of keeping our costs down right now. But with this one costing so much, we are going to position it so that we can use it for the house if we end up building one.

Ethan was concerned about placing the septic system in this spot because it is in the middle of the pasture land. You can't drive or graze over a lateral septic system (the cheaper one), but you can graze and bale hay over a sand filtered system (the more expensive one.) With going the route that we are forced to go, we will have a septic system in the pasture area that can be driven over and grazed over and that can be used for a stick house down the road. So although the price seems discouraging now, it is probably the more beneficial route for the long term.

Finally, the news I've been waiting to share. Today I turned in 25 pages of pictures, drawings, bids, and material lists to the bank!!! I have been waiting to do this for a LONG time! We first set our eyes on this piece of land in January, and I have been setting aside housework since the beginning of February until now piecing this all together.

I can honestly say that this project has taken more planning and time than planning our wedding did. I had no clue how it would all fit together or even what needed to be fit together when we started. So I thank everyone for the prayers and encouragement that were sent to me! It was amazing to see how right when we thought we had hit a locked door in our project (which happened A LOT!), we found a window to crawl through to keep things going.

What now? Well, we wait for the appraisal for our construction loan, the land to be released between the two lenders, and then we can start building! I will be very relieved when we get the okay to build. Hopefully I will be posting construction photos in June. :)

Work Hard, Play Hard

I want our children to grow up knowing what it means to work hard. (I also want them to know how to have fun too, of course.) Yesterday, my 4 year old son made my day.

He was playing with Hannah in the living room, and he came to the kitchen where I was cleaning up after lunch. Here is our conversation:

Caleb: Mommy, you work all day just like Daddy works all day.

Me: Oh really? What kind of work do I do?

Caleb: You clean up and wash things.

For a stay at home mom, that was such a blessing to hear. A lot of times people hear about moms who stay at home and think they are lucky because they don't have to go to work. I take my job at home seriously though and believe I should work as hard at home as I expect my husband to at his job. I feel like it is a huge, sometimes overwhelming, responsibility (just like many other jobs) to teach children responsibility encompassed in love, be a constant support for my husband, keep the house in order, manage a budget, and complete the many other tasks that pop up with all of the other things outside of the home that go on too.

With all of the planning that I have done the last 3 months, I have felt like I have let the house slip a bit. And when I look around the rooms, I feel like I am not doing my work. (Although if I peek at our housing file folder I can see where all my time has gone!) So when my 4 year old acknowledged out of the blue that he thinks I work hard, it made my day!

Taking in the Strays

Across the street from us is a dear lady whom I've gotten to know over the last 4 years. She is 70 now, has always been single, and lives with her dog, Cookie, in a small, square stucco house that has been handed down through her family for generation.

She serves lunch at the school during the year and cleans houses and runs errands for "older ladies." When the sun is shining, she will often be found mowing her yard, even if it doesn't need mowing. She also sweeps the street by her curb, and last year she even found a ring worth a couple hundred dollars while she was sweeping. I have learned she enjoys "watching the neighborhood" too.

I am a big fan of building community and have gone over to say, "Hi" and visit since we moved here. Over the last year, she has started coming over to our place for various things.

Today, I heard a knock on my door. Outside was our neighbor lady. She thought that she should let me know what she had just observed.

Apparently, there was a crew from the city filling in potholes. She noticed that they had found a snapping turtle and were putting it into the tar where they were working. She wasn't really sure why they gave up their fun with the turtle, but when they did, they decided to deposit it in our front yard. She just wanted to let me know since she was afraid our two young kids would find it and get too close.

I will keep my feelings to myself about what I think of the road crew sticking a large snapping turtle in hot asphalt and then dropping it in our yard, but why they dropped the turtle in our yard, I really don't know. There is a really nice railroad ditch with a dry run not 50 feet from where they dropped it. Our neighbor lady, however, watched the turtle from her porch and said that it eventually made it's way to the ditch on it's own.

This did get me thinking though. With moving to the country, it is time for us to prepare for the stray cats and dogs to appear in our ditch. Hopefully there won't be any more snapping turtles dropped off though.

New Bibs for Hannah

About a year ago I made two bibs for Caleb. The bibs that he had just weren't keeping up with his power-eating. I really liked the pockets that some of his smaller bibs had, so I used them to help design his new ones.

Here's a picture of the store bought bib and the bib I made.
When I first made Caleb's bibs, Hannah could still use the smaller bibs. Over the last year, however, she has become a little more independent with her eating. Because of this, she ended up needing a larger bib as well and has been using Caleb's bibs.

After washing the two homemade bibs after every meal and then hearing how they were wet and cold at the next meal, I decided that maybe I should make some bibs for Hannah. Ethan was gone for the weekend when I took on this project, so I decided to spend a little extra time with it and take some pictures of the process.

I started off by using the same newspaper patterns that I had made to make Caleb's bibs. I traced the pattern onto a heavy piece of upholstery type plastic that I bought in the Walmart fabric department.
Next, I cut out the plastic to the same size as the red canvas fabric shown. I then pinned them together on the outside of the bib so the bib won't have holes in it.
After the two pieces were pinned together, I sewed them together with the surger following the outside line on the bib.
If you have a serger, you don't have to do any cutting. I just followed the lines I had drawn while sewing. The serger does the cutting for you, and you don't even have to pull pins if they are on the outside. If you don't have a serger, you will need to cut out the pieces and then sew around the outside. You will also have to pin on the very edge of the bib itself. The binding will cover the holes made.

After the perimeter of the bib was serged, I serged down the neck line and into the opening, with the serger doing the cutting. Next, I serged around the circular neck opening, and again the serger cut out the circle. Lastly, I surged up the final part of the neck opening. (Although this picture has a scissors in it, it was just used for weight for the photo. The machine did all of the cutting.)
Here is a picture with the serging completed on both bibs.
Next step . . . the binding. I cut strips of fabric 2 inches wide. (2 1/4 inches to 2 1/2 inches probably would have worked better.)

I then cut strips of plastic about 5 inches tall and 4 inches wider than the width of the bottom of the bib. I bound the top side of these with my binding. These will be the food catchers. I thought about showing the steps I used to put on binding, but I think that would have to be a post all in itself. If you aren't sure how to do binding, here is a good tutorial.
Here is a picture of the plastic strips in relation to the bibs. Once the binding was on the plastic strips, I pinned them in place on the bib, placing the pins on the very outer edge of the bib where the binding would cover the holes. When I pinned the strips in place, I puckered them out about an inch to allow for an open pocket that would catch falling food. If the strip isn't puckered, it will stick to the bib and the pocket will not work well. I then surged around the pocket, again, letting the machine do the cutting.
After the pockets were sewn in place, I finished up the binding around the outside of the bibs. Here is that binding tutorial again.
To finish off the bibs, I added 3 snaps. I like to use 3 to make the neck adjustable. The snaps that I used are set with a hammer and a plastic snap setting tool, which comes with the snaps that I bought at Walmart.
And here are the completed bibs. They are not perfect, but I wasn't too concerned about keeping things even. It cost me around $3 to make both of them and took a little under 2 hours.
As far as time/cost savings, I am happy with the price, but they take me a bit longer to make than I would like. Even so, I haven't found anything similar in size and quality that I could buy, and if I did it would probably be more than I would want to pay anyway. So, I guess the time and cost in this project is well worth keeping food and stains off of clothes.

Sweet Potatoes :: Week 7 1/2

I have finally had a chance to take a picture of my sweet potatoes. This week I decided to snap off the shoots and get them started on rooting.

I was told by the resident sweet potato expert to put them in water to get them to root. Then, when it is time to put them outside, separate them out and plug them into the garden.

Well, I deviated a bit from his advice, not that I thought that I knew better. I was just a little unsure of how to make it work right. My concern was that the shoots would slip into the water, and I couldn't think of anything that I could divide them up with to keep them standing.

So I just did what I did last year. I took the shoots and poked them right into moist soil. I had a few of my newspaper planting pots left, so I utilized what I could of those. For my remaining shoots, I just used the bottom of a milk jug container filled with soil. I'm not sure what the difference is in how fast they root with water vs. soil, but this works fine. You can even put your shoots directly into the garden this way if you run out of starting time. (Just be sure to keep them well watered and maybe put a milk jug greenhouse over them to keep warmth and moisture in.)

I think that my updates on sweet potatoes won't be as frequent now that they are in the soil. If there are any big changes or if I do anything different, I'll post about it. If you don't see anything for a week or two, however, just assume they are growing in their planters. (Which, by the way, are by a grow light at night and out on the deck when the day is sunny.)

I hope everyone else's are doing well. Feel free to drop any questions, and I'll do my best to answer.