This winter

While Léo sleeps, I take a few moments to let you know about a few of the things we have been up to, in this beautiful snowy winter. 

1. First and foremost: enjoying Léo's presence, his personality, good nature, and his growing appetite!

Léo is 8 months! and he has 4 teeths :)

Visiting the Canadian cousins always makes us have a cold, but we are still in good spirits:)

hmmmm... sacred wild blueberries, yum!

Multi-flora rose taking over a tree

2. Removing the invasive plants on the homestead.  Every chance I get more than an hour outside, I spend it bush whacking through the heavy and often impenetrable thickets of multiflora rose, which over the years has taken over, completely cover and toppled over some areas of the native vegetation. To think that the government used to give this non-native plant for free to land owners to protect wildlife and soil erosion! This removal process has proven very meditative, slow, silent and oh-so-satisfying :)

Invasive multiflora rose thicket taking over

Take that you mean thorny plant!

It can take 3 to 6 mechanical removals per year for 2 to 4 years to eradicate the plant. ouf!

 I have been creating piles with the cuttings, placing them in the middle of the fields and soon we will be returning the 'waste' as valuable organic matter to enrich the soil :) through some awesome permaculture garden techniques that I have been slowly discovering while reading many a garden books in front of the fire (where I spend most ALL of my time), like the Edible Forest Landscape and Permaculture Garden.  Our favorite techniques at the moment include the Chicken Moat, German Mound, Tree garden and Grass into vegetables, and we hope to test them out this season and give you our feedback about which ones worked best here.

Our new farming and gardening library, beautiful wood piece found in the barn just last week!

 3. Building the greenhouse: It will have taken a year, but we are really almost done building our second-hand solarium/greenhouse. All of the glass panes are now in place, only a few triangular holes along the top of the wall remain to be sealed.

Adding the very last pane of glass

Just this morning, after the snow storm

Since there is no better time than today, we have set up a smaller temporary greenhouse in the house to accommodate our already germinating onions and such, until the official greenhouse is ready to receive them.

 4. Cleaning our tools.  A little bit of elbow grease, some steel wool and some linseed oil.  For this season, we plan to use the 'sand box' method which we just learned about in the book 'self-sufficient gardener'= a mix of sand and used oil that you dip your tools in every time you return them to the shed, cleans and sharpens them every time!

Cleaned and oiled

Still dirty

On a side note, Alex has also been doing quite a number on the entire barn, emptying it completely, vacuuming, cleaning, repairing, setting up his workshop, and we hope to be able this year to bring back the original barn door.  Just this paragraph wont give it justice, so we'll have to dedicate a post to it.

 

5. We played in the snow ;) With these constant snow storms we are loving the winter weather and enjoying more cross country outings than during last year's non-winter! 

Creating our own cross-country trails on the homestead

The snow just keeps coming :)

Snow shoeing at KLT's Holman Conservation Area

The snow was so deep at times, we were sinking to our waists

Léo taking a nap after a long walk (and me cutting more roses while he sleeps!)

We hope you are taking the time to enjoy the snow, the pure & fresh air, and letting yourself slow down a little bit in this most peaceful season. We cherish this time to reflect, dream and plan the season to come. Because spring is coming... soon enough.

We always love to share ideas and knowledge with like-minded people.  Please feel free to share comments, links or ideas with us about homesteading, gardening and sustainable lifestyles.

Until next time, be well.

Its begnning to look a lot like winter... ;)

Hourray! The first snow arrived yesterday and I was all smiles shoveling the front steps :)

It might not last very long because today its raining, but its always exciting to experience it again for the first time.

Alex has started chopping down more Norway Maples

 and splitting more firewood for next year

We have 15 overlapping glass panes left to install!

Lets be hopeful (and really idealistic!) that winter will give us a few more snow free, 40F days so we can continue to prepare the greenhouse... it's almost finished ;)

I have put all of our cherry and grape seeds in the freezer to mimic the winter dormancy period and actually speed it up, and next month they will be ready to start growing indoors, and who knows maybe in the greenhouse in the spring.  A little dreaming never hurt anybody!

We hope you are all enjoying the wintery blanket.

'Til next time, be well.

Léo is 6 months old:) 6 months of reusable diapers and loving it!

Last week Léo reached the half birthday mark :)  Totally on track with the developmental cues, he now is almost crawling, can shake the rattle on his own and finally knows how to put the nook the right way in his mouth by himself :0)! Yeh!


This post is about my love of cloth diapers.  Even before Léo was still a far away dream we knew how important it was to use cloth diapers and we weren't planning on throwing away precious resources (fiber and nutrients!) or our money into the landfill!  We told ourselves that one day we would lead by example and use them on our kids instead of disposables.  I used to advocate for them to mamas that would come into the Coop in Montreal, knowing the environmental benefits, but I had never tried them myself.  After 6 months of testing it out, I can say with certainty that it works, and that you can do it too, because it is so simple! 

Why is it important you ask?  Here are the stats:

• 95% of families in North America use disposable diapers and on average each of these babies generates more than a ton of garbage, just is diapers... That is a lot to ask of our landfills!
• Cost comparisons: You save a lot of money no matter how you look at it! Disposables can cost upwards of 1200$ a year (look to this budget blog for all the details... this family did its research!) for each child. Plus you cannot get hand-me-down disposable diapers... Cloth diapers on the other hand can be a large initial investment, minimum of about 400$ but they can be reused for the duration of the diapering need of your child so the cost of the second year is almost nothing, and they can even be passed down to others :) saving yourself and your friends and family members thousands of dollars.  And its the same thing with the reusable vs disposable wipes, or anything disposable for that matter, its always more expensive to keep buying more new 'one-use' items.  Just this point alone is enough to convince most people.  Ok, the cloth diapers wont last forever, but you will for sure save more than a thousand dollars per child if not more.

Just a few days old

at 4 months

• There are no chemicals, scents or dye in cloth diapers, so you know what is going on your baby's bum.  Also, when a cloth diaper is wet, it feels wet, so your baby will demand to be changed more often, usually making them potty trained faster and reducing the risk of diaper rash (from long exposure to moisture against their skin).

• Saving natural resources: I know this one is a debatable point... what is better? Using wood fibers and petroleum to make disposable diapers and then throwing right away in the garbage, or using cotton, bamboo, hemp, and then water, eco-soap and electricity for the washer (we air dry our diapers most of the time, either outside or over the wood stove)?  I prefer knowing that I am reusing the same fibers, not creating any more waste, spending a few pennies on eco-soap that wont harm the waterway my waste water gets sent to, and a few cents for using my front loading eco-washer, than knowing that I am using wood fibers and petroleum (a non renewable resource) to then throw it in the garbage approximately one hour later.

Drying Léo's diapers outside in the summer

• If you want to, you can even make them yourselves!  Its not that complicated if you are somewhat able to operate a sewing machine, here is a link to a free pattern. I am not that talented, nor did I have the time to start production with everything we were doing on the farm, but we were very fortunate to have at least three guardian angels in our lives who passed down their diapers to us, so our initial cost was barely anything , and we will do the same for others once we are done with them.  But even when parents buy their diapers new (some people prefer that) their budget will still come out in the positive. We weren't going to be picky! But I would encourage that if you do buy them new, try to favor diapers that are made locally, with a sustainable fiber (whether its organic cotton, hemp, bamboo or recycled polyester), the options are numerous.

Beyond these reasons, Alex and I find it quite easy to do.  We have the diapers all folded and ready to go in Léo's room, along with the reusable wipes that I made myself (forty of them for a total of 2$ of second hand soft towels cut into pieces), we have an impermeable bin in which we put the dirty diapers, and I wash them all 2 or 3 times a week.  We even take them with us on the road.  Ok, I can't pretend that it is as easy as disposable diapers, it does take a lot of time, doing the cleaning and folding, but then you just have to weigh what is more important to you, saving money and resources and the environment, or time :)  And what we keep reminding ourselves is, this only happens once and for a very short amount of time :) soon Léo will be a big boy and all the diapers will be forgotten...

Its always easier if you get them all ready to go in advance

If you have used cloth diapers and want to share your stories, or if you have a blog post about cloth diapers and want to share it, don't hesitate to write a comment! 

Til next time,

Be well.

Chicken update, overwintering, dry leaves and fiddle heads :)

Léo and I, collecting kindling for us and dry leaves for the chickens

This will be the first winter for most of our chickens, definitely the first winter for them as layers, and we are trying to put all of the eggs in our basket (haha!) and make sure our chickens are content, while still minimizing waste and spending.

While I was watching one of many chicken coop winterizing videos online, I realized that before there were wood shavings at the store, there was another material that was used to keep a chicken coop clean-er: dry leaves.  It's so simple, with the number of trees we have, and the quantity of leaves they shed, it would be silly of us not to use them.

The benefit of using the leaves in the coop, before composting them, is that the added chicken manure enriches your compost with nitrogen, and the chickens break up the leaves, increasing the turn over rate into compost.

So I started saving piles of leaves, before winter arrives, making sure they are dry and storing them in the barn where hopefully they will keep.  I changed all the chicken litter, and they loved their new leaf medium, it feels like being outside!

I have also now turned the 60w red light bulb back on to keep them a little warmer, and hopefully soon I'll have a little radio out there to play them some classical music.

Léo and I, on one of our many outings; Mr. Serious here keeps us all in check :)

I was so excited the other day when Alex and I were preparing the back forty for the potential arrival of our sheep next spring, when I noticed a big patch of ostrich fern!  Last week I found the Oyster mushrooms in the front, and now fiddleheads in the back.  More reasons to already get excited about spring!

Our dried oyster mushrooms

The spore-bearing frond, the dead give-away of the Ostrich Fern

Til next time, be well.
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Apple Cemetary or Hidden Cider Mecca!?!

Younger fruit trees closer to the house

When we first arrived on the Homestead we were so psyched to be moving to an orchard!  We also thought that many of the apple trees were dying, or dead, rightly so because they hadn't been pruned in years and had been overgrown by Norway Maples.  Although we were thrilled to have them and had high hopes that we would be able to graft them onto new rootstocks before they past, we didn't give the actual standing trees a chance.  Boy were we wrong!

I mean, wouldn't you think that this tree's days are numbered?!

Among the many people that we have received so far on the Homestead, we were lucky to have the visit of Mr. John Bunker a few weeks ago. For those who have not yet heard the name, Mr Bunker is the leading pomologist for FEDCO and he is quite interested in Maine apple varieties, looking to find orchards that still have some of the old varieties that the settlers grew.

Mr. John Bunker with one of our supposed Russett apples, Alex's favorite

Since we have an orchard, and a really old one at that, we thought we should invite Mr. Bunker over and set out to identify our apples.  It turns out we have a hidden treasure!  So far we haven't identified many of the trees but we know that we have multiple different varieties, apples, crab apples, yellows, greens and reds, early ones and over wintering ones. Red Astrakhans, McIntoch, Snow, Russetts, Bell Flowers, Northern Spy and Cortlands are among the varieties that the previous owner remembers.  And Mr. Bunker said that our crab apples (of which we had no idea what we were going to do with) are the perfect kinds of apples for cider. hmmmmmmmmmm cider.

My very favorite, it doesn't look like much but it's delicious!... a yellow apple with red dots, still don't know what it is

Last November, I was very excited to figure out if any of the apple trees were going to fruit over the coming season.  This November, I am excited anew, to elucidate the mystery of the apple orchard and get ready for our first official holistic apple orchard crop... with high hopes once again, that we will be able to successfully use organic means to reduce worms and diseases.

Its pretty incredible to me that most of these trees are still alive and bearing fruit.  Now our job is to nurture them, back to full production.

Ok, a few of them are really gone...

an old apple surrounded by Norway Maples... for now :)

 

Yet another yellow with red dots

Lastly, we have added a little 'gadget' on the right hand side that now enables you to follow the blog by email.  If you want to be notified when we post a new entry, then sign up.

Til next time, be well.

The greenhouse will be up and fonctional by winter!

Things seem to happen slowly but steadily as the fall season gives way to colder and colder weather.  It snowed for the first time today in our part of Maine.  In the last week we have managed to plant the garlic, onions and radishes already for next spring and covered them with a nice layer of dry leaves (we'll never have to buy mulch or wood shaving for the chicken litter, with the amount of leaves we have on this property), saved enough dry leaves for the chickens and most importantly of all...

before... putting in the ditches

after! Finally starting to take shape :)

We have begun to finish building the greenhouse.  Now that Alex has dug out the drainage system in and around the structure and we have put down enough garvel, we have started putting up the old and beautiful storm windows of the house as the back and side walls of the structure and started adding the finishing cedar planks and insulation to the front wall.  By the end of this week we should hopefully :) be done.

Look at those floor to ceiling storm windows, amazing!

Its going to be amazing!!!  As you can see there are barrels inside already.  Some of them will be used as passive solar heat sinks and other as rain barrels to collect the rain water from our roof. Our plan is also to route the dryer exhaust into the greenhouse so that when and if we use the dryer in the winter and spring, it will help to increase the heat and humidity inside the greenhouse.  One machine's waste heat will be our baby plants treasure I'm sure :)

True story: today, Léo and I took a walk around the property and we found a plethora of wild Oyster mushrooms growing on a dead tree. I have already quickly processed them into a yummy mushroom soup and dried the rest for later. yey wild foraging 2 minutes from our front steps!

Til next time,
Be well (and vote!)


P.S.: Remember remember the fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder, treason 
Should ever be forgot...
           - it was on this day in 1605 that Guy Fawkes
             tried to blow up the british parliament