Busy Hands Homestead

The sunshine last until late in the evening and greats us early in the morning.  We have been digging in the garden, running through the sprinkler, chasing our adolescent chickens and before I know it, the kids are up too late again and when I wake them up they are grumpy.  On morning like these I have a favorite breakfast recipe: puff pancakes .  I drag myself down the stairs, preheat the oven, melt the butter, mix the batter, and while the pancakes bake I wrestles kids out of pajamas, into clothes and comb sleep tangles out of hair.  When the timer beeps we have perfectly puffy pancakes.  The more often I have made these the more I have explored possible puff pancake combinations and the options are endless.  Here are my favorites: 1. Thin slices of  Apples and Brie added to the butter while the oven preheats.  The results are less puffy, but delicious with a drizzle of maple syrup.   2. A cu...

I have been pulling the green garden cart back and forth, back and forth, piled high with wood chips, loaded with rocks, and almost empty with just my helper in tow.  The raised bed is being dismantled and more garden beds dug.  The weekends are spent digging. The rocks pile up.  On weekdays I pull the cart back and forth, back and forth. The dump truck load of wood chips is shrinking one wagon load at a time. Covering spaces were grass was and hopefully will not be for a little while. I feel guilty for sending Ivory to school to sit inside when there is so much sun outside. Strong stems of rhubarb are standing along the front fence.  It seems that is was just yesterday that the first red and green hints of spring pushed through the soil and last years maple leaves.  It is spring, undeniably spring.   The mystery fruit tree, apricot we think, is blooming for the very first time, and we are present to witness.  ...

I don't consider myself to be an experienced gardener.   Every year is new and every year new lessons are learned.  This year cabbage, broccoli, Brussels sprouts and Jerusalem artichokes were new additions to my garden.   The cabbage needed more sun.  The broccoli provided us with a nice dense head of green followed with crisp little side shoots for the rest of the growing season.  The Brussels sprouts resulted in cheers when I served them to my kids.  And the Jerusalem artichokes - well they did great, but dominated the sad row of tomatoes I planted next to them.  While the sturdy stalks of the sunflowers reached preposterous heights, the tomatoes barely survived.   I know now to not plant anything close to these vigorous plants.  Rather than having the abundant harvest of tomatoes I had hoped for, beautiful fall bouquets brightened up our living space.  After a few light freezes, a serious cold snap was p...

At our house, this has been the summer of marinated salads.   The ingredients sourced from our garden: Sweet and Sour Cabbage Salad, Cucumber Salad, Green Bean Salad. Vegetables chopped and dressed and tucked into the empty spaces in the fridge to be eaten hours or sometimes a day or two later.   Now it is the beet's turn.   Bright and cheery, this salad is going to be tomorrow's lunch.   3 or 4 large beets, roasted, peeled and chilled 1 small onion, very thinly sliced 3 Tablespoons Olive Oil 1 Tablespoon White Vinegar basil, parsley (fresh, roughly chopped) and tarragon (I used dried) salt and pepper (to taste) Cut the beets in half and then the halves into wedges put into bowl and add the thinly sliced onion.   In a small bowl combine the olive oil, white vinegar, basil, parsley and tarragon.  Whisk to combine the olive oil and vinegar.  Pour over the beets.  Stir, or if your container seals, give it a good shake. Chill for...

Dinner is in the oven.  (By oven I mean the toaster oven I have had set up on the porch all summer to avoid heating up the kitchen when baking smaller items.)   We are having a zucchini dip that tastes similar to spinach artichoke dip and was a raving success with the whole family a few days ago.  So I am making it again.  The kids are at the park with Adam.  I am supposed to be working on this:  I am trying to finish this small quilt for Ivory's first day of school tomorrow. Between our morning WIC appointment and our dentist appointments this afternoon, I have been stitching the details onto the little girl walking a path of hearts to her home. My baby is going to school and I want her to know that my heart will be with her, wherever she may be. The little girl on the quilt is almost done. All she needs are eyes. Then the batting needs to be cut, the layers pinned and quilted and binding stitched all around the edges. Crazy, I ...

Cherry season is short and sweet. The majority of the seventy pounds of  cherries we picked are now stored in jars as brandied cherries, two kinds of cherry jam, frozen pie filling or simply pitted, bagged and frozen.  There are still plenty of cherries for Sylvan and Ivory to open the fridge door and pull out dark red cherries by the handful.   "Next week will be the last for cherries," the woman tells me at the farmers market info booth. Short and Sweet. I thank her and peruse the market booths. I am here for cucumbers - dark green and crisp cucumbers. Cucumbers that will be paired with cherries.  Savory and Sweet.   Sweet and Savory.   Straight from the garden mint, thyme, onions, peppers, lettuce...   and cherries.   Cherry and Cucumber Crostini  1 cup pitted and halved cherries 1/2 large cucumber, peeled, seeded and diced 1 small onion, finely chopped 1 handful of mint leaves, fine...

Ivory opened the door and beamed at me: "It is a beautiful day!" And it was.  After a wonderful Father's Day breakfast at the Riverside Cafe the remainder of our day was filled with: Random little chores around the yard.  Commencing the construction of a custom coffee table.  A few random chores around the clay studio.   A beautiful day indeed!

Three plant starts are now nestled in dirt, packed in burlap bags, lined up on top of our chicken coop.   Sixteen five gallon buckets in, I started feeling crazy. Lugging the sixteenth bucket up the ladder I start worrying that I will not finish before the kids wake up from their naps and that this whole idea is more trouble than it is worth.  A total of twenty two buckets later, Ivory is up, Sylvan is still sleeping and three green, I-should-have-planted-them-last-week starts are sunk into the dirt.  I hope this works.  I visualize the plants growing, cascading down the walls of the coop, keeping the interior of the coop cool while growing big fat heavy fruits....  but this isn't a story of making the most of the space on a city lot, or about one of the many uses of burlap bags, but about the seeds I hope will flourish in this space.  Years ago - pre-children, pre-marriage and even pre-engagement - Adam, my future in-laws and I atte...

I bend down, look into the fridge. I close it and step out the back door. I scan the garden beds - back to the fridge. It is June and I am in love with this time of the year. The meal planning gets looser...  instead of having solid shopping lists and a specific plans for each and every item purchased, I step into the garden and ask: "What are we having for dinner?" The truth is, that even though it is June, there are not many things to harvest. There are radishes (and their greens. delicious!), spinach, sprigs of dill, almost ripe strawberries and a mounding rhubarb plant.  All other plants are still tiny - promising more later in the summer. I snip Spinach leaves. They mound up in my basket. I snip a few sprigs of dill. We are having Pacific Rockfish for dinner and these garden additions will be perfect. I look down at my pan and realize that this is the first of  this year's dinners that has a substantial garden contribution.  Sure, I have been usi...

L is for Leek S is for Strawberries  I spent the early morning hours painting.  I started the project when Ivory was about 6 months old. By started I mean that I purchased a set of wooden letters and a box to store them in.  I had enough foresight to include enough letters to spell Mama, Papa and Sylvan.  I knew then that if our future included a little boy, he would be named Sylvan.  Since then I have managed to sand all the letters and paint a few. Each letter features a fruit, vegetable or herb that starts with that sound.   I hope to finish painting all the letters before Ivory learns to read... and that is a skill she could master at any moment. C is for Carrot E is for Eggplant D is for Dandelion

I remember from one of my college classes that the highest biodiversity is found on the edges of bio-systems - tide pools, the soil surface, where the forest meets a meadow.  We are living an edge, the undulating line between winter and spring, warm brilliant sunshine followed by flurries of snow, and it is filled with activity.  When we can, I try not to leave the neighborhood or even our yard and we just stay put.  The car stays in the driveway.  Bikes, helmets, toy trucks and shovels are pulled out and we play and we dig. We move rocks.  We tuck away seeds.   We dream of flowers, and because we are to impatient for our plants to grow, we make our own. We raid the recycling bin. We paint, we cut, we fold, we glue and we sort through the buttons for just the right colors and sizes.  We hang our final project, a colorful paper and cardboard wreath on the front door - to welcome home Adam from his field work, to we...

I remember staring at my daughter, when she was still tiny, red and wrinkled, thinking about this marvelous miracle of life.  Holding her, it dawned on me that, I was also cradling my grand children in my arms as her infant body already contains fully formed egg cells. While I have always made an effort to eat healthy and exercise, this realization has sent me on the additional mission to try and avoid products that contain potential endocrine disruptors and mutagens. Our house hold isn't completely devoid of plastic, all organic or full of eco-cleaning products.  The lists of complex ingredients on the back of bottles gave me headaches.  Trying to remember what was good, all right and bad while actually examining a product in the store was beyond me.  Many of the products I felt confident purchasing were beyond or financial ability, so I took a different approach.  There is simply a long list of products I don't buy.  I don't buy commercial s...

Lately our weekends have been functioning on a divide and conquer mantra.  So while Adam cleaned up breakfast and started his to do list in the shop Ivory, Sylvan and I dug out our rain boots and pulled them on.  We're on our way to the Saturday Farmer's Market.  I'm off to get the usual - breakfast sausage from the pork guy, and the seasonal - pears, apples, leeks and Jerusalem artichokes. Ivory and Sylvan and their babies buckle up in the chariot and I start peddling down town.  I pass the four loads of laundry I hung up the day before.   Of course it rained.   I hung up four loads of laundry.   After this summer, it is hard to remember that there is weather.  Rain?  It rains?  I touch a few in passing and am surprised.  They feel almost dry in spite of the early morning shower.  A damp haze hangs over the street, but it is sunny and quiet.  A perfect autumn morning. We weave our wa...