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I’m up and around early every morning. I enjoy watching the sunrise and soaking up that amazingly nutritious sunlight. I let out the chickens and make tea so I can sit and relax on the front porch listening to the birds and watching the sun peek through the trees. Kaleb was up early today, too. And went right to carving a walking staff. I love seeing him jump right to nature as he rises. This is one of the reasons why we wanted to move to property like this. To get away from the craziness of the electronics. More on that later.
I’ve been hankering to get the garden started. We have been working a bit on soil amendment as it didn’t look so great. Mostly clay. After turning the beds with poop and organic matter, I couldn’t wait any longer. A quick trip to the garden store and bam! It has begun! Nick spent a good part of the day making trellises for my beans, cucumber, and tomatoes. We also put in spinach, rainbow chard, and basil. Today I will plant zucchini, watermelons, Hubbard squash, and the famous carving pumpkins for the kiddos. We grew our own last year and the kids swear we will never buy pumpkins to carve again, it was so much fun for them to grow their own and watch it! The soil will grow healthier with time. But you’ve got to start somewhere. I’ve been reminiscing of our incredible food Forest we grew at our old old house in Canby back in the day before moving to Oregon City. It was abundant and we had more than we could eat. I miss that! Time to start recreating my food Forest on a larger scale! Here’s to an abundant year in the garden!
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I’m tired of emptying boxes and organizing my stupid things. Why do we have so many things still? I’ve already started a donate pile. It’s grown to two full boxes now. Funny how I’m unpacking and getting rid of stuff. Should have just gotten rid of it before we moved. And why the heck do we have so many things??? I can't get over how material shit has taken over our lives and we seem to pretend that our lives depend on it....or that we need it all.... Anyway, I’m sitting out on the porch watching the chickens and feeling the need to start planning and making lists. I got out the garden planner notebook and my essentials for starting a nice veggie garden in this area. Oh, and if you’ve never seen this Clyde’s Garden Planner, it’s so supercool. Clyde has put a LOT of time and effort into making this handy dandy little chart. It is super cool. This great New York veggies book is amazing. It is actually listed by season and what to do each season. SO helpful. Actually, the Homestead Planner is set up like that, too. The Backyard Homestead books are actually written for half acre lots. But the information is invaluable and easy to understand. It feels good to get my head in the game and start thinking and planning for what we want to do with this property.  I love having chickens. They are so fascinating to watch and learn from. My favorite thing is getting up at dawn every morning to let them out to scratch and roam and watch them shake off the night and greet the day.
So far I think we only have one rooster. They are now about 10 or 11 weeks old, I think. There is one rooster working on his crow. It’s pretty funny to hear him practice. Not much of a crow yet. But he will get there. He makes me laugh. Why have chickens? Well, we eat a LOT of eggs. I love to bake paleo style which also uses a lot of eggs. AND, the best reason EVER to have chickens is that they are amazing composers. Do you ever think about how your garbage smells so bad from throwing away all those food scraps? And those nasty scented garbage bags they have now on the market are incredibly horrible for your health. We have always composted all our food scraps. And we have had the amazing soil and gardens in the past to prove it. But the best compost is the one made by these little dinosaur scratching machines. They scratch, peck, and poop along all day to make the BEST garden matter. And once again, we don't have to throw away ANY food scraps. That means that we can use the biodegradable garbage bags that are actually compostable and won't sit in the landfill for eternity creating off gasses and polluting the environment. Mowing, moving poop to the garden, unpacking boxes, organizing and re-organizing the kitchen cabinets to our liking... I took a break today. A day off of constant doing and went to the Cazenovia Farmer’s Market to see how cute it was. And it was darn cute. Loved seeing all the local vendors. I am on the look out for some dairy goat kids. And it just so happens there was a dairy goat farm there selling their magnificent cheese. I hope they are kidding soon! I came home from the market to find out that we now have a pet toad! So let’s start with the good news: The moving van arrived and most of our stuff is HERE! Yay!!
And the bad news? Well, MOST of our stuff is here. That’s right, we have a good start on our belongings and are excited to have what we have. But it seems that the idiot company in Oregon still has the rest of our shit. It is a mess. A huge mess. The fact that half of our shipment is missing has nothing to do with the lack of CDL drivers. It has completely to do with inconsiderate stupid people not doing their job! I got mad yesterday. Real mad. That doesn’t happen all that often. But I kinda got all “Mama Bear” with the guy who should have dealt with this weeks ago. I might have thrown a few non-civil words around during our phone conversation. You could imagine the look on my face when the Baby Grand Piano was missing. Or the 6 Kayaks. Or the push Mower and Isaac’s dresser. That’s just a few of the items among the many boxes and things still sitting in a warehouse in Wilsonville, Oregon. Seriously!! How could you miss a Baby Grand Piano??! The guys who unloaded our stuff here were very helpful in taking inventory multiple times so we could figure out exactly what’s missing. So, are we settled in yet? Hell NO!! But at least we have our beds and I found the Instant Pot. Isaac’s life is complete as he found his stuffed animals and Kaleb has his legos. So yes, we are a few steps closer to being home. But not yet. It’s just almost starting to feel a bit more like we aren’t staying at a vacation rental. Today I asked for the guys to help me clear the rest of the garbage from the garden area, mow it, and weed the raised beds in preparation to plant some veggies later this week. Such an amazing transformation! And it feels great to have all that garbage out! We hauled up a few cart loads of weeds loaded with slugs and bugs of all kinds for the chickens to scratch through. They were in their glory.
My other request for today was taking the tractor and cart up into the woods to load up more garbage. We ended up with two massive cart loads of garbage brought down the hill to the mother pile by the garage. We met a neighbor the other day who will help us get rid of most of it as it’s mostly metal and tires. Lots of car parts and seats and grossness. Still more to bring down. But that was a good start. It felt great to get the garbage out of the woods and garden today and ready the garden for planting. Now I will focus on amending the soil a bit this week and get ready to plant by the end of the week! Let’s pray our moving van arrives Tuesday! Send us some good vibes. I’m totally done with sleeping on the air mattress. We just now heard that our belongings have arrived in Syracuse at the delivery location. We have been sleeping on the floor for 20 days and have had NO idea where our stuff is. Apparently there is a shortage of CDL drivers right now and an influx of people moving. Which equals a serious mess. They hired a third party to move our stuff which means no tracking on the driver. The costs of using a company like this is astronomical and at this point, I’m totally over it. I honestly will NOT recommend #americanvanlines to anyone who is moving. So, now that we finally know WHERE our stuff is, the question is WHEN can we get it delivered? Now they have to unload it from the semi-truck onto a smaller, local truck in order to get it here. That means we won’t get our crap until Tuesday!! Yep, that’s right, TUESDAY!!! OMG!!!! Ok, my rant is over. On the plus side, we have learned what is important to us and that we can live happily without a bunch of crap. (PS: in case you didn’t know this, Nick and I were minimalists before moving to OR and lived in a tiny house before tiny house living was cool) So, Nick and I have decided that when we unpack, we will take each box with intention and care and only keep/unpack what is meaningful and/or useful. Like my bed and instant pot! Lol. Time to truly look at what we bring into our lives and homes again and wonder if it is necessary. Clear out the clutter and open the mind!   Finally got our tractor today!! So excited to start getting things done around here. It took me about 4 hours to mow the whole yard. Not too bad. Hopefully next time it won’t be that long since it won’t be a hay field. Lol. We also had a lot of cleaning up to do. Branches everywhere hiding in the tall grass.
Kaleb is practicing his driving skills and will soon be my right hand tractor man. I’m looking forward to his help. Now....where’s our moving van?! I would REALLY like my bed soon. I’m starting to feel the repercussions of sleeping on an air mattress for 21 days ....  We got the dilapidated broken down green house apart! Yay! Now to haul out the garbage and get to those planter boxes!
In the garbage pile there emerges a wonderful water cistern. I think it’s a two hundred gallon. I also found a few rain barrels. And there’s a loooooooooong hose running from the house to the garden. Oooooh this is so fun! All the potential!!! We decided to take a relaxing morning and go exploring. All the locals talk about the falls as a must see. So, we ventured out on this misty morning to Chittenango Falls State Park. It was only 10 minutes from our house and SO much more beautiful than we expected. We all four had a moment of "I can't believe we live here" while standing at the base of this majestic site.
The kids and I decided to get out and take a little adventure.
This local greenhouse is just a couple minutes from our house. The guy is amazing. It’s all ornamental. But he starts all the plants himself from either seeds or clippings. It’s beautiful! He has three giant, lovely greenhouses filled to the brim with beauty! The boys enjoyed picking out a few plants for the yard. We ended up with a couple sunflowers, salvia, marigolds, lavender, butterfly bush, citronella, and echinacea. I can’t wait to get them in the ground. He also told us about the most amazing markets that are less than 20 minutes from our home. Next weekend I might venture out to explore a little and see what this area has to offer! It’s garden time. And I’m coming to terms that this year I won’t have a big veggie garden. We still don’t have our tools to fix up the garden area. Guess I’ll take the year to observe and see what the season and sun are like so I can plan for next year! |
The HancocksWe are stewards of the land. The land called us here to care for it. So, we bought 10 acres in Chittenango, NY in the spring of 2021 and left the hustle and bustle of our busy West Coast Oregon lives to build a long held dream of homesteading and living in tune and rhythm with nature. This is our journey to living our truest potential. Archives
May 2021
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