Peacock Orchard

Indoor seed starting once again.

This years seed starting is a bit different form last years. For one it’s more low key than last years flurry of excessive seed planting. My set up is a bit different too.

Last year I planted in egg cartons, then moved to toilet paper tubes and then to plastic cups. This year I planted the big things right into the plastic cups and saved the toilet paper rolls for the thinner plants, like the leeks.

This year I’m starting in the fish tank as well. Last year the plants ended up there as I ran out of window space. Now that I know it’s a great space to start seedlings I’ve set them up straight away in it. The tank is also in the basement now, as the wall it used to sit against is now gone.

Fancy set up. Ancient fish tank, fluorescent lights, card table. Whoo boy! Works though.

Few pics of the planting session:

I suspect there is more dirt on the floor than in the cups, but they had fun.

I can’t remember if I shared my seed saving method last year. Well here it is. Coffee filters with pen. That pen didn’t stay very well. For the most part I’m guessing. This one is clearly “drought tolerant tomato”. These seeds are from the tomato I never watered. It made great sauce and I’m growing it again to see if it’s just as successful.

Lovely cups all labeled and nestled in their home.

Nothing germinated yet. Frankly I’m rather interested to see if any of the seeds I saved will germinate. It’s my first real attempt at it after all.

Stay tuned!

Mini-Kraters and Swales handling winter melt

The temperatures are rising and our snow drifts are slowly melting. Snow harvesting was a wild success this year. If you’ve followed any previous posts than you know that the snow is a problem for our driveway but the melt is the real nightmare. Our driveway and road turn into a mud pit. So last summer we trenched with our new excavator and the results have been amazing!

That is one fabulously dry road!

The trenches are full and the area immediately around them is saturated, but the driveway has been maintained fabulously. So far. We’ll let you know if I’m still confident about our earth works after a heavy rain.

All of the water kept off the driveway is then trenched to various places. Our swales receive most of it but we also have some retention ponds that get rather full.

The swales harvested a tremendous amount of snow and that’s melting off right now.

The harvested snow was wonderful for both insulating our fruit trees and now for watering them. The ground around the swales is amazingly saturated.

The kraters (some more than others) are still really full of snow. About 1-2′.

They are holding strong and I couldn’t be more pleased with our decision to dig them!

A downside of such heavy snow harvest is that the trees can be covered quite far up the trunk. We’ve suffered quite a bit of rabbit loss. My best, hardiest fruit tree was attacked. I tried to Dr. it but who knows if it will pull through the damage.

Doctor’d apple tree

Osage orange poking out of snow.

Blackberry. I covered them heavily this year as last year they were all entirely eaten away.

As always children running about with moisture inevitably ends with really wet children. I was taking a picture of the gorgeous ice designs in our trench when Son decided to go ice skating and…… well he learned to check the ice thickness before clambering on.

How to deal with challenges when remodeling

Drink. Ha! Post over.

No, no, I partially kid.

It seems when removing walls you should expect the unexpected. Random wires. Random water lines. Etc. Etc. I prefer to hope for the best myself. The plan for the kitchen was to remove the wall that separated the kitchen from the rest of the house. We have these pillars there. The one on the opposite side of the house is load bearing. We assumed the matching pillar would be the same. Turns out the pillar is hollow. Aesthetic only.

The wall, however, load bearing. What a depressing discovery. I lost a lot of steam when I pried the dry wall off that obviously load bearing section of wall. We thought we may be able to move it into the pillar as planned but then I found another small section of load bearing wall on the other side of the pillar.

That wall is not coming down. Plans must be modified. There are cabinets on that wall already. Now we might as well leave them and expand them into an L. I really want a counter height sitting area so the kids can be with me while I’m doing kitchen stuff. I was also hugely looking forward to expanding the aisle between the cabinets and island. With the kids on stools and ladders helping, and dogs hanging out in the hopes of dropped food, there is no space to move around in our current kitchen. So, on top of the new L’d section of cabinets I’m going to remove our hideous current island and build a thinner wood island in it’s place. I now also have to patch up all the holes in the side of the wall I’d removed. That drywall would have been removed anyway, as electrical had to be changed, but I would have done smaller sections if I’d known I’d have to patch them back up.

I’ve lost so much steam over this discovery it’s been less exciting to continue. Still, the part of the wall that can be removed, is gone, and it’s glorious!

Before

After

Current plans are to strip and paint the remaining cabinets. Build a new island and remove old one. Tile the floor (laminate sucks!). Nap, possibly forever.

Here are a few pics of the wall removal, just for fun.

This part of the wall was never to be removed but I did have to remove the drywall so we could change the dinning room light switch from the wall that I removed to this. Thankfully the wire went over to this wall anyway so it was a simple fix, for my father. I claim to have done 0 of the electrical work here. My father is amazing!

Vintage Chick Feeder as herb garden

I’m so excited to have found this piece in an antique store recently. It is going to look amazing on the new island, or the table. I have options. I’ve started the herb seeds in it today. I’m interested to see how good I am at growing them indoors. I’m usually a pretty big failure at it. Anyway, take a look and keep an eye out for this amazing piece. Would make a great organizational tray, drink caddy, etc, etc.

A simple organizational upgrade

The item that kicked off our kitchen renovation was a simple coat rack. Simple but life changing. Our garage enters into our laundry room. We have a front door but it is literally never used, ever. Everyone comes in through the garage. We had no closet there. We had nothing in the area that would work as one either. Coats were taken off and thrown onto the dining table. I HATED it. So I ripped down a wall, planked a lot, started going crazy and made coat and shoe storage. Life changing! It’s not very nice looking though. We have a rather large variety of stuff to keep there. Farm coats, pants, gloves, boots and going out in public coats and shoes. It was getting stuffed. I was getting annoyed again. Luckily we have a wall in the laundry room that is used for nothing. The bathroom door opens onto it so you can’t store anything there without blocking the door. Anything, that is, but coats.

Since I’m TERRIBLE at discovering where studs are I simply mimicked the style of our current coat rack and cut two 2×4’s to length, stained them and screwed them up, a lot. Then the same style hooks were added with the exception of a coat rack we already had that had been falling off the wall for years and holding our ironing board. That got screwed onto the 2×4’s and is still holding our ironing board.

Took no time at all if you don’t count stain drying time. Stud 2×4’s are cheap and the hooks I’d bought were around $3. So I’d say this was one of those under $10 projects.

Ah I shouldn’t say that as I bought a bucket to hold our hats and mittens, which were out of control with everything else. That was $12.99,

Anyway, few pics. Nothing big. Well it’s pretty big for me. I like having the extra storage space. For 4 people we seem to have the clutter of 20.

Oh and in case you are wondering, kitchen is a bit different now. The living room too. That’s what happens when you whack a hole in the wall. I like whacking holes in the walls! Kids do too!!

3 people can knock a pretty darn big hole in the wall pretty quickly.

Life, as it has become

Staying home has been different. I have so much more time for projects and yet…not. Kids have a funny way of doing that.

I’m doing things I haven’t before as a mother. I’m not used to making their breakfasts or their lunches during the week. Of course I had enough requests for bacon and eggs today that sometimes they’re rather indistinguishable. Home made chicken and french fries is always a hit. Today it was picnic on the floor lunch. This always ends up torturing our giant dogs who sit a respectable distance and wait for the kids to abandon their plates. Oh how many tears have been shed over abandoned plates being consumed by ravenous canines.

I am often lost on how to occupy them as well. I’m anti-electronics, which limits my winter time options. Luckily we have an unfinished basement. Unluckily the spiders loved our unfinished basement. So we fumigated. It did a pretty decent job. Now I’ve simply had to clean up all of the stuff we’ve left down there. It appears that whenever we had something I didn’t know what to do with, I simply put it in the basement. Procrastination is my thing. Things are cleaning up nicely and the kids have all of the things they’d not normally be able to play with in the winter. We have bikes, scooters, roller skates and some large plastic tractors down there. We also moved 1/3 of their toys down there. It’s been a great place for us to go and work off some of this winter time energy.

I’m also trying out this whole kids crafts thing. They’ve finger painted (whole body painted is more accurate) on a tarp in the living room whilst I mudded the new drywall. We’ve done pipe cleaner building. Ok, ok, I’ve built things with pipe cleaners and the demands were pretty ridiculous. They each have their own boxes of personal supplies: pencils, glue, scissors, etc. Things are going pretty well.

Still, I’m struggling. They want TV. It’s blizzarding. I’m out of occupying ideas. I guess one show won’t kill them, or me.

Speaking of me, well I might just drive my poor husband batty. He came home one day to find our bedroom furniture in the burn pit. I did some re-arranging to say the least. Every day he comes home and something is different. Walls are missing, walls have appeared, stuff is in different places, I’ve got a new project. Building trains with the kids had me close to the windows and….

I think I have an idea about what to do with one really tall one. Now to get the right plants and some planters and and…..sigh. Help us!