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Let’s just get right to the Dashwoods, shall we? Turn up your volume so you can hear them peep.

I’ve been taking a little time to figure out who is who and I think I’ve got it. So, the little brown one with the chipmunk stripes is Marianne (Americauna). The reddish-brown one is Elinor (Rhode Island Red). The bigger black one with the white smudge on her head is Mrs. Dashwood (Australorp). The little black one with the white chin and tummy is Margaret (Barred Rock).

They eat a lot. They poop a lot. They sleep a lot. They peep peep a lot. They are cute a lot.

I am glad we were warned how fast they can fall asleep because the evening we brought them home they were all gathered round the feeder and Margaret began swaying and then took a nose dive into the food and just lay there until one of the others stepped on her and woke her up.

Mrs. Dashwood is quite protective and will charge the little scooper I use to scoop out dirty litter. She also charges the side of the box and tries to jump out. We are in the process of making the sides of the box taller. They are already noticeably larger than when we brought them home and the feathers on their wings actually look like feathers instead of fluff. This is all since Thursday.

My babies are growing up so fast!

I visit them every few hours and talk to them and traumatize them by picking each one up in turn and holding her cupped in my hands against my chest. I’ll pick up Mrs. D and she will peep like she is being murdered. I’ll hold her against me and she will calm down. I don’t hold her long, then I put her back in and she runs to the other three and tells them what happened. Then I will scoop up Elinor and she will peep like she is being murdered. I’ll hold her a little bit and put her back in the box and she will run to the other three and tell them of the horrors she just experienced. Marianne and Margaret both do the same thing. And then they forget about their trauma and wander around peeping and eating and pooping.

The cats know something is up but they have not seen the Dashwoods. They sit outside the closed door to the room where the chicks are and make upset meows, not because they want the chicks, but because they can hear me in the room talking and I am not talking to to them. When I am not in the closed room with the girls, the cats could not care less about what is behind the door.

Today has been a beautiful day and Bookman and I spent part of it outdoors working on Barton Cottage which now has a floor. The pink stuff in the middle of the sandwich is insulation. On top of the plywood we will be installing linoleum for ease of cleaning.

Our next step is to put up the plywood roof before we get going on the walls. That way if it rains any time before the walls are finished, no water will get down into the wall insulation. That’s the idea anyway.

The Dashwoods are as cute as can be and I am so happy to have them. I knew they would grow fast but I didn’t realize how fast. They are still pretty fluffy but I don’t think that will last very long at all. I will do another video next week. Stay tuned…

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The photo is black and white because the heat lamp is red and all the photos I took this morning are red. Filtering out the red leaves no color at all. But they are still cute! Later when it is warmer I will turn the light off for a few actual color snaps.

They peep a lot. They are either sleeping or eating. I watched one of them this morning fall asleep while eating and do a face plant into her food. In one word: adorable.

Waldo and Dickens aren’t sure what is going on. They have not seen what is making the noise and won’t for a long time.

More to come. And some video too where you will hopefully be able to hear them peeping!

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Something I learned today: extraterrestrial law is NOT the same as extraterritorial law. The field of extraterrestrial law as such does not exist. There is space law, but it is not the same thing. So, if there is anyone out there interested in extraterrestrial law, the area is currently wide open. Make your mark!
 
This is what happens when you should put your reading glasses on to read a title before typing it into a search field and decide eh, the type is big enough I can read it. Silly Stef. You should know better by now.
 
The Middles have moved to Almost Finished and that is a good thing because there are gobs of books I want to dive into and um, I am also about to be deluged by books from the library. Maybe not deluged, more like showered. I have China Mieville’s newest, The Census-Taker waiting for me to pick up. It is a novella so shouldn’t take too long to get through. In theory. Then I am next up for The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie. I am looking forward to this especially since I got the second volume of Squirrel Girl from the library last week. The squirrels are lively right now and I need some squirrel literature to help me feel less animosity towards them and their garden-destroying ways. I am also next up for Strong Female Protagonist by Brennan Mulligan. I have been waiting for that one a very long time.

That’s not bad. Only a few library books. A light shower. And I should be able to get back to the Richard Mabey book, The Cabaret of Plants, that I had to set aside for Herman Melville and Charlotte Brontë and Tarot Cards.

I have a feeling, however, that very soon it is going to get difficult to juggle reading and all my other goings on — the chickens, finishing the coop, gardening and cycling. Cycling is becoming a major “distraction” at the moment. I have a professional bike fitting scheduled for this coming Sunday. I just found out there is a women’s racing team here called Koochella and they are offering a clinic April 10th on bike handling skills and racing for beginners. Having enjoyed some virtual races over the winter months I am curious about the real thing. Then I have another cycling clinic on April 24th for the gravel race I registered for at the end of May. This one is informational, the how-tos of gravel riding like tires and what to wear and bring for food and how to read a cue sheet (route map) so I don’t get lost because it is not a closed course or well-marked with fans and media lining the roads. After the two clinics I will have a better idea about how much I want to try racing and how much time it might take up if I do.

So perhaps I should read as much as I can these next couple of weeks just in case reading time ends up being cut back significantly. I have a four-day weekend coming up in honor of my birthday so if I can tear myself away from cooing over the Dashwoods I will be reading. Say, maybe I could read to the Dashwoods! Do you think they’d like Jane Eyre?

Filed under: biking, Books, chickens, In Progress Tagged: extraterrestrial law, squirrels

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It was a week of moderate temperatures and changeable spring weather that gave us sun and rain and wind and snow and more rain. Today was supposed to be sunny and 50F/10C but it has turned out to be damp, cloudy and 40F/4C instead. It is also Easter which I keep forgetting since I don’t celebrate it. Happy Easter to you if you do celebrate! Bookman and I went out to pick up few final items for the chicken brooder and were surprised to find the store wasn’t open. We were not the only ones pulling into the parking lot and turning around.

What need: an oven thermometer to monitor the temperature in the brooder, two small cookie sheets to have under the bedding to make cleaning easier, one extension cord so we can plug in the heat lamp because all of the outlets seem to be on the other side of the room from where the brooder is.

Is there some sort of law of extension cords that says whenever you need one you will not have a spare?

Because, maybe I’m imagining it, but we buy them and use them and then where do they go after that? They get “put away” in a place we will easily find them next time we need one. The need arises and we run around looking in all the likely places only to be disappointed. We go buy a new one. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. It’s like socks in the dryer. Where do they go? Someday I am going to discover a seething nest of extension cords in some dark recess of the house and it will be the stuff of nightmares.

The plan today was to get the few items at the store, get the brooder set up, turn on the heat lamp and monitor the temperature and adjust the light accordingly so it will all be figured out by the time we bring the chicks home Thursday night. Thursday people! I am going to have four baby chickens Thursday night after work! But wrench. So we got as far as we could. The photo is of Barton Apartment. The Dashwoods will be in their apartment for about six weeks until it is consistently warm enough outdoors, they have real bird feathers, and Barton Cottage is move-in ready.

The coach is all ready for picking them up. Thank goodness we don’t need horses or footmen in livery. Bookman felt it necessary to put a chicken sticker on the box so we would not mistake it for a cat carrier. And he got fancy with cutting the holes in the top. Nothing but the best for our girls!

You know, when the Dashwoods arrive, for the first time ever in this house the girls will out number the boys. All of our animals except for Touche my red-eared slider turtle of 20 years (RIP), have been boys. Thursday night we will be five against three. Estrogen will finally triumph.

Even though the weather has been all over the place, the plants have all decided that spring is here. Melody Maple Tree is beginning to bloom. The witch hazel is blooming too. Poor thing, it is supposed to bloom in the fall but only managed it once. For some reason it has decided that it is a spring blooming witch hazel. And in autumn, it doesn’t like to let go of its leaves. It is a healthy shrub, just confused.

The leaf buds on all of the apple trees are swelling. Even the rose has swelling leaf buds. The spring

bulbs are pushing their way through the winter mulch that I have not had the chance to remove yet because it has been too cold or too wet. The Egyptian walking onion has shot up, there is sorrel I can pick already. All this is happening a few weeks earlier than usual and I feel unprepared.

As I walked around the garden this afternoon I thought, briefly, oh I can plant peas and radishes and kale! Not yet. In two weeks perhaps. While the frost is well out of the ground it is still not quite warm enough to sprout seeds outdoors. It definitely won’t be long though.

I spent quite a lot of time going through the plant sale catalog this weekend marking up possibilities and dreaming. My main focus this year is to plant the green roof on the chicken coop and to get started turning the very shady area under my front yard apple trees into something that recalls a woodland. At the moment it is home to moss, violets, a very tiny patch of ramps, a tiny patch of wild ginger, a small area of alpine strawberries, and one columbine. In the middle of summer it pretty much looks like weeds.

I imagine a ferny glade. But I have to stop kidding myself with the ferns. I have the shade but I do not have the moisture. My soil, even after years of adding compost, is still too sandy and every experimental fern I plant is dead by the end of summer. So it is time to imagine something else. I don’t yet know what that something else is, but I am working on it. Spring ephemerals, patches of low growing plants with interesting leaves, a few bigger plants in dappled nooks. A simple path through it all. Wish me luck.

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Happy Spring to everyone in the northern hemisphere and Autumn to my friends in the south! I am usually so keyed to solstices and equinoxes but for some reason I totally forgot about this one and was only reminded about it during the weather forecast on the radio this morning. That kind of reveals how all over the place my brain has been of late. Work has been busy and then at home there have been lots of things to keep track of — a four-day Easter weekend, a four-day birthday weekend, chicks coming in a week and a half, a chick brooder to build, a chicken coop to finish, seeds and sprouts to keep track of, a garden to plan and a just released Friends School Plant Sale catalog to comb through to help me plan that garden. Also, books to read, a Library Journal review deadline coming up, cycling workouts, a weekly virtual cycling group ride to lead, weights to lift, core workouts and time with a foam roller for all my tired muscles. Oh, and blog posts to write. Though I didn’t do so well with that last week. This week should be better though. Maybe.

In case you haven’t been paying attention, the last two weeks have seen two new essays go up on Vocalis. Check ’em out, they are great! I’m hoping the Easter weekend will afford me time to write one of my own I have been kicking around in my head for a couple of weeks now.

Phew. Breathe.

My seed starting is going pretty well. The tomatillos are being stubborn but everything else is sprouting and growing including the peppers that were so slow to start. Last week I intended to get marigolds started but for the life of me I could not find any of the seeds I saved from last year. Where could they have gone to? I really have to make an effort to get better at organizing my end of gardening season self. I am generally so tired at that point I put everything aside to deal with in a few weeks during late fall/early winter and then it ends up I don’t do anything until spring when I am running around wondering what I did with the marigold flower heads I clipped for seeds.

Since I could not find the dried flower heads, I resorted to buying a packet of marigold seeds when Bookman and I went out today to get chicken coop hardware. We got hinges and latches for the coop and run doors. Also nails. I am paranoid about critters of both the two and four-legged sort getting into the coop and run when we are not around. As a result, you would think we were building a mini Fort Knox. We got door latches for the run door, the egg door and the cleaning door that we can put locks on. Bookman and I also spent way too much time discussing hinges — what kind, how big, how many, where and how are they to be attached, how will they open, expensive galvanized or a little cheaper zinc coated? Yes, we are totally over-building this thing. It will be a chicken coop for the ages.

The weather this weekend is sunny but a cold, much more normal temperature for this time of year (40F/4C). The week brought us sun and rain and snow. Also, my tulips are up through the mulch by several inches. The week ahead will have warm sun, rain, and possibly a day of wet, heavy snow. This is much more like typical spring in Minnesota where winter isn’t quite ready to let go but spring is ready to take over. It’s a rollercoaster. Or Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates.

The chicks arrive in a week and half. To that end, Bookman built us a chick brooder today. I was planning on us doing it together but he did it while I was doing some household chores. When I asked whether he wanted me to help, he grunted at me and said I didn’t have enough testosterone. The brooder is a temporary home for the chicks until they get big enough to go outside. We built it, Bookman built it, out of cardboard boxes and duct tape. Building something with duct tape is a manly job apparently, men being distinctly qualified to fix and build things with industrial strength tape.

For some reason the cats do not help Bookman build things like they help me. Perhaps they were concerned about tape and fur? Whatever the reasons, they stayed clear.

The brooder is done. Next weekend we will put in the bedding and hang the heat lamp and make it move-in ready for the babies. Just a little over a year ago we decided to get chickens. Back then it seemed like a forever time to wait and now in about ten days, the Dashwoods will be arriving and I worry if we are ready. I’ll find out soon enough.

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It’s been one of those really busy weekends with nothing much to show for all the busy. Brunch with a friend, a women’s bike race, bike rides, a movie and popcorn, a letter to a friend, housecleaning, laundry, a few errands, sprout tending, cat tending, lost sleep because of warm weather, cats and the time change, too much coffee. I haven’t managed to read anything but a few poems and part of an interesting article about crows in Audubon Magazine. The weekend is drawing to a close and I am definitely not feeling weekend restful, could I have another please?

The weather Friday and Saturday was absolutely gorgeous. I got to go home from work Friday an hour early — yay! — and wouldn’t you know it, the buses were running late. At least I got to wait in the sunshine while reading Jane Eyre so it wasn’t all that bad.

Saturday was nice enough that I had all my trays of sprouts out on the deck. The extra warmth I had been giving the peppers and the shot of warm sun Saturday has finally got the seeds sprouting. The onions and tomatoes are doing great. The basil is just beginning to unfurl some tiny leaves. Today I was going to get some marigolds started but I just didn’t manage to get those pots filled with dirt and the seeds into them. Perhaps I can still squeeze it in before my head hits the pillow tonight.

While the early spring weather is pleasant, the fact that the temperature was 25 degrees F warmer than normal is disturbing if I think about it too much. If you haven’t had a chance to read the good and interesting article at LitHub, There is No Market Driven Solution To Our Climate Change Catastrophe, I highly recommend it.

Paul Mason writes of the “complacent calm” in the “world of suits” and says,

The focus is on scenarios for ‘what will happen,’ the climate catastrophe that awaits if we allow global temperatures to rise by more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. But in the edge-places of the world the catastrophe is happening already. If we listened to those whose lives are being destroyed by floods, deforestation and encroaching deserts, we would better understand what is coming: the total disruption of the world.

I think many people are still under the impression that impending climate disasters are going to happen to other people somewhere else far away and not to them personally. There are going to be a lot of surprised people in the world over the course of the next 15-20 years.

The weather today was still warmer than normal but gray and damp feeling. Bookman unfortunately had to work all weekend so there was no chicken coop building. Hopefully next weekend will be conducive to getting out and putting on a roof and starting to build some walls. If not, we’ll be indoors getting the chick brooder ready. Next weekend puts us two weeks away from the arrival of the Dashwoods!

Filed under: chickens, gardening Tagged: climate change

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What a gloriously gorgeous day it has been today. To be outdoors working on the chicken coop without a jacket on of any sort and to be perfectly comfortable, even a little warm. The sun shone and the sky was a brilliant blue. There was a bit of gusty breeze but it wasn’t a cold breeze. We’ve had the door to the deck open most of the day and the cats have been happy as can be. It’s funny how in fall 58F/14C feels a little chilly but in spring it feels so very warm.

Bookman and I got the rafters up on the coop today. It went along really easy because Bookman had the brilliant idea of using two C-clamps to hold the rafter on instead of me trying to hold the rafter still while he drilled. It went so fast and easy we didn’t know what to do after that because we had expected it to be a thing. So we measured a board to attach the run door frame to and then attached that to the coop. And then we put up another board on the other side of the run for attaching hardware cloth to and then there was nothing else to do because we need hinges for the door before we build the door frame so we know if we need to make any allowances for the size of the door to fit it into its allotted space.

And we are also ready to start cutting plywood. But the plywood is under a tarp that still has a bit of snow and ice on it and we didn’t feel quite prepared to remove the tarp and start figuring it all out. That will be for the next nice weekend. It feels good to be making progress on the coop again. We still have a lot to do but all the structural framing and stuff is all done. In some ways that feels like the hardest part. Now we just have to fill it all in.

The seed starting continues apace. The onions and leeks are doing great. The tomatoes have a few tiny sprouts. The peppers still have not decided to give me any satisfaction. I think they might not be warm enough or getting enough light so I now have a lamp shining on them when the sun is not which is about half the time. Hopefully that will be enough to encourage them to get going. If not, I guess I will be buying plants in May. There is still time yet, so fingers crossed!

Today I filled paper pots and planted parsley, basil, pineapple tomatillo and cumin. I have never grown tomatillos before, I have never even tried one. Have you? I’ve seen them at the store and I have heard they make great salsa and I always like to try something new every year and these are it. The catalog description says these actually taste like pineapple. Now, I don’t expect they will, not exactly. In a blind taste test no one will be fooled. However, I expect they will be pineapple-y, a little sweet-tart and kind of fruity. Since they are an experiment we’ll see how it goes!

The weather forecast for the coming week is up and and down temperatures but always above freezing even at night. That is just crazy for this time of year. March has traditionally been one of our snowiest months and the precipitation predicted for mid week is rain, not snow. Looks like it is time to get out and start cutting back last year’s perennials and prairie grasses. Too early to remove winter mulch yet. This week might be warm but next week could be a blizzard. Not likely considering weather trends, but one just never knows.

One last thing. That photo over there is what reading in bed at night is like for me. Dickens is on my lap and that’s Waldo curled up next to me. Bookman took the photo this week because he thought it was so funny. But this is not unusual, this happens every single night. If it doesn’t then there is something out of the ordinary going on. So now when I talk about reading in bed, you can fill in some of the details of what that looks like.

Filed under: Books, chickens, gardening Tagged: seed starting

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Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!

Some very exciting news! The Minneapolis City Council voted unanimously on Friday to pass the new chicken rules. That means I no longer need to get the signatures of my neighbors to have chickens. It’s not that I thought any of them would object, it was the bother of it all. Most of my neighbors work and catching them at home and getting them to open their door when it is freezing cold outside is not something Bookman looked forward to doing. So the only thing we have to do now is finish building our coop and pay for a permit. Easy!

To celebrate, Bookman and I went to Egg Plant Urban Farm Store today to gather supplies and talk to the folks there. The authors of my chicken book are not from Minnesota and had no advice about when the chicks would be able to go outside. After talking with the people at the farm store we learned that six weeks is about the right time. Given we still need to finish the coop and spring weather is inherently unreliable, we decided to hold off ordering our chicks for a couple weeks. So instead of having babies the first weekend of March, we have postponed new parenthood until the first weekend of April which also happens to be my birthday weekend.

We did, however, buy the supplies we needed to set up the brooder, that is not something you want to be doing when you have four confused new babies that need warmth and food and water. We got a big bale of pine shavings, a feeder and waterer, and a heat lamp with a red bulb. The red bulb is so the light does not disturb the wake/sleep cycle of the chicks. We will get the feed when we get the chicks. I was worried it might go stale if we had it sitting around for a month.

We haven’t built the brooder box yet. I need to bring home one more cardboard box from work. Then Bookman and I will get creative with the box cutters and tape to make a nursery for our babies.

I admit to being a little disappointed to have to wait until April for the chicks. I wanted so badly to throw all caution to the wind and order them today. But it’s best to make sure we won’t be scrambling to finish the coop and/or have to keep them indoors longer than we should. And okay, I admit, baby chickens for my birthday is a pretty cool thing.

Seed starting also began today. I am trying something new this year. Instead of playing musical seed

trays on top of the refrigerator, I have placed our mini greenhouse in front of the south-facing kitchen window. The tray of seeds I planted is mostly cipollini onions with a few pots of leeks. I have not had any luck growing either of these to full size because I think I have always started them too late. Maybe this will be the year it all works out.

I continue making paper pots and hopefully next weekend I will have enough ready to get peppers started. We have a couple different kinds of bell peppers and quite a few varieties of hot peppers. Last summer was unusually mild and the peppers did not do well, they like it hot. I hope they do well this year, not because I want a hot summer, but because Bookman is very excited about purple jalepeños. I like spicy but hot peppers are not my thing.

In spite of several days of arctic temperatures last week, it doesn’t seem like there has been much winter at all this year. I feel like I have barely gotten a chance to breathe and rest before beginning the whirlwind of seed starting and early spring. I have all the supplies and plans prepared, now I just have to get my brain and energy focused there. It’s a shift I’ve known I have to make but it still feels like everything is rushing at me. Then again, it feels like this every spring. I’m like a hibernating bear that has smelled spring coming from its den for a few weeks and now that it is imminent it takes a bit of stretching and shambling about to shake off the winter. But it’s all good; just have to stretch a bit and maybe scratch my back on that tree over there…

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Have I mentioned lately how much I love Minneapolis? It is by no means a perfect city and the winters are long and hard, but by golly how many other cities have a community advisory group that works with the city council on things like urban agriculture and food security issues? Homegrown Minneapolis is the name of the group and their latest newsletter included a map of all the vacant city lots that can be leased for community gardening and urban farms. Also in the newsletter is information regarding a proposal to turn a public golf course near my house into a food forest.

What’s a food forest? It is exactly what it sounds like. It is a designed landscape that mimics a natural ecosystem while incorporating food producing plants like nut and fruit trees, shrubs, perennial vegetables and herbs. Annual plants can also be grown in the mix. And of course it is a space that also utilizes native plants to attract pollinators and other beneficial insects, control weeds and build soil fertility.

The site of this proposed food forest is a public golf course near Lake Hiawatha. The golf course is very expensive to maintain not just because it was built on a wetlands and requires millions of gallons of water to be pumped out of it every year. It turns out the amount of water being pumped far exceeds the permit limits and is therefore illegal. A portion of the golf course has also been closed since 2014 when we had so much rain that the “back nine” was flooded and is still so soaked and damaged the park board can’t really afford to fix it. This golf course also drains into Lake Hiawatha which suffers greatly from water quality issues do to run-off into the lake. This golf course covers 140 acres and serves very few people, costing to my mind and many others, more than it is worth.

So a young, brilliant city resident has put up a proposal and taken up the challenge to advocate for repurposing the land. His vision allows for a much reduced golf course, fruit orchards, nut trees, and more. His vision even includes returning wild rice to Lake Hiawatha which, I just learned, used to be called “Rice Lake” because local Native Americans grew and harvested wild rice there before they were forced to move elsewhere.

The food forest would be grown on public land, would be tended by volunteers, and would welcome all from the community to go and harvest food from it. It would solve the water pumping problem and the lake’s water quality issues as well. And it would provide learning opportunities for both adults and school children. Plus it would be far cheaper to maintain than a full golf course not to mention more beautiful and useful.

This is such an incredibly exciting thing and if it goes through, if the Park Board decides to go along with it, it would mean Minneapolis would be home to the largest food forest in the United States. And yeah, you know I’ll find a way to be involved with the project even if it is only volunteering a few hours every month. There is a meeting being held on February 27th. It’s scheduled for four hours in the afternoon which is a big chunk of Saturday time for me, but I might just see if I can make it for at least a portion of the meeting. If not, I am sure there will be other opportunities as the proposal picks up steam.

In my own garden, I have a tray full of paper pots ready for onion seeds next weekend. I must continue working at making pots because at the end of the month I will need to get the peppers and tomatoes started. I love this time of year. While it feels so hectic getting everything started, it is also the most hopeful time of the gardening year because there is still so much possibility. The slugs haven’t eaten the greens yet, the squirrels haven’t dug up or stolen anything, there hasn’t been too much rain or not enough, too much heat or not enough. In my mind’s eye my garden is lush and green and perfect. Reality will kick in soon enough, but until then, everything is still perfect.

In chicken news, the same newsletter that brought word of the food forest proposal also informed me that the city council will be voting on the new chicken ordinance on February 12th! I wasn’t expecting anything from the city council until summer. But perhaps they want to get it all settled before spring when people who want to start keeping chickens will be looking to get underway. Bookman has not yet begun to collect neighbor signatures, it has been too cold and snowy. But now we will wait and see what happens come Friday. Bookman may just be saved the trouble of collecting signatures after all. Fingers crossed!

In cycling news, I am still riding in virtual races on Thursday nights. Each week is different and sometimes I finish first or second and sometimes I finish last. One thing for sure, my fitness has improved immensely. I am also in the final week of a 6-week workout program that has meant hour-long (or more) workouts four to five times of week doing intervals of varying intensities. This too has paid off. On a (virtual) ride after my workout yesterday I decided to see if I could beat my personal sprint records on the two sprint sections of the course and I blew each one away by several seconds! I even managed to ever so briefly hit 4 watts/kg, something I thought I would never manage. I also noticed I now frequently go over 3 w/kg which means that after this week I will start racing in group C instead of D. Technically I should start this week but I want to give myself one more “easy” week before I go to the next group and start coming in last all the time. I will be good incentive to work hard and improve, right?

Also this last week on Wednesday night I participated in my first virtual group ride. It was so much fun! I am part of a group on Zwift called ROL (Ride On Ladies — in Zwift you can give riders a “ride on” thumb’s up, it’s a way to offer support and tell other riders they are doing great or thanking them for a good ride, etc). There is an ROL group ride on Wednesday nights but I had not joined in because it is a fast ride and with the races I’ve been doing Thursday nights I didn’t want to overdo it the night before. Anyway, a slower group ride was introduced this week so I joined that one. We used an app called TeamSpeak which allows us to actually talk to each other while we ride. I rode with a couple people from Seattle and someone from Ohio and I think maybe Texas. Technology is awesome!

Also, there are enough ROL women who are interested in racing that we are going to have our own women’s race on Saturday upcoming. It will be a 30km race and I will have to race in group B which is both exciting and scary. There are not a lot of women on Zwift, I saw somewhere that women are only about 8% of the Zwift population, but among them are some really strong riders and racers. It is exciting to ride with them because it forces me to work harder and they are all supportive and encouraging so even though I feel intimidated, it comes from my own personal worries of not being very good rather than anything anyone else has said or done. Currently there are 24 women who have indicated they will be racing Saturday and 56 who have said maybe. We’ll see what kind of turnout there really is. I just hope I don’t finish last in my group. But hey, if I do, incentive to improve!

Filed under: biking, chickens, gardening Tagged: Food forest, Lake Hiawatha, Minneapolis, sustainable gardening

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This weekend has zipped by! I feel like I have been busy but for the life of me I can’t tell you what I have been busy doing. Not a feeling I like to have because it makes me tired without seeming to have a reason.

I suppose much of what I have been doing is planning and that is mental work that doesn’t have anything immediately to show. What kind of planning you ask? Chickens!

We will be getting them as babies only a couple days old. They will be living indoors with us for a while in a brooder. My chicken book says it definitely does not have to be anything fancy, it just has to be big enough. It suggested big plastic tote bins or even sturdy cardboard boxes taped together. Since I have access at work to free paper boxes that are quite sturdy, we are going to build their home out of those. I have two boxes already. I think we will ultimately need four. But if we need more that will be easy enough. So brooder solved.

In the bottom under the bedding we will put old cookie sheets to keep the cardboard from getting damp and to make cleaning easier. We can then also use the cookie sheets out in the coop beneath the roost to make cleaning up easier there too.

I have a checklist of other items we will need including bedding, feeder, waterer, heat lamp and baby chicken food. We will get all of that in February when we order the babies. Then we will have time to get everything set up but there won’t be a long time to wait after that before the girls move in. I will be sure to have my video camera battery charged and ready so I can share the fluffy cuteness with you.

We have also finally decided what breeds of birds we will be in our small flock. Our chicks will come to us via Egg Plant Urban Farm Store and they have eight breeds to choose from. Unless they tell us when we order that our chosen mix is not a good idea we will be getting one Rhode Island Red, one Ameraucana/Easter Egger (so named because they lay green and blue eggs), one australorp, and one barred rock. We decided one of the advantages of getting four different breeds is being able to tell them all apart.

And yes, we have names for them already. Since we are getting four, we have decided to call them The Dashwoods. Which one will be Elinor, Marianne, Margaret and Mrs. Dashwood remains to be seen. We have plans once the coop is completed to paint it up as Barton Cottage with a faux brick paint job. Why not? There will be no Mr. Willoughby or Colonel Brandon or Edward Ferrars, only the ladies. I wouldn’t mind a rooster, but the city requires I get 100% approval from all my neighbors within crowing distance. Stupid city regulations.

While we are on the topic of stupid city regulations, let’s talk about those for a second. My neighbors can have big dogs that bark at all hours and none of them require permission from anyone. For me to have four hens that hardly make any noise at all I have to get permission from 80% of my neighbors who live within 100 feet/30.5 m of my property. The city sent me a list of all the addresses I have to solicit and there are fourteen! That fourteen includes four houses across the street from me who will never even see the chickens because they can’t see into my backyard. At least they should be easy to convince to sign the form.

We need eleven signatures. We don’t foresee any problems, we get along well with our neighbors. It’s just having to go through all the trouble of getting their signatures that is ridiculous. Last year the city held hearings to drop this requirement but nothing has yet come of it so we have to jump through that silly hoop.

The Dashwoods will be worth the trouble, right?

Filed under: chickens

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I hope the New Year is off to a good start for everyone!

I did not stay up until midnight, I haven’t made it up that late in so long I can’t remember when last I did. This morning person has to have a darn good reason to be up that late and since parties and other sorts of gatherings aren’t my thing, there was no reason to not read in bed and go to sleep as usual.

However, BookerTalk is a curious person and wanted to know what reading was winding down 2015, so to satisfy her nosiness, I read The Small Heart of Things: being at home in a beckoning world by Julian Hoffman. It is a lovely, quiet book full of observations of the natural world and humans in it.

Today though, today, let’s talk about 2016.

For the last couple of years I haven’t had any reading goals. This year though, I think it is time. Oh it is nothing so lofty as reading more classics or finally getting around to reading particular authors. No, it has to do with my reading table and all the books that are piled on it. Some of those books have been there for two or three years. This table is meant for books in progress or books to read next and it has become clear that in progress and next are ideas that have gotten extremely wobbly and imprecise in my vocabulary.

Therefore, it is time to clear the decks, or rather, the table. I am growing weary of Bookman’s jokes that he is worried about it collapsing. But if you think I am going to go through and list every single book that is on that table in the post for your edification, you have another thing coming! As the year progresses I will definitely make updates so you don’t have to worry, you’ll find out what is on the table as I do because, big reveal, I don’t even know all the books that are piled up on it! Surprises for everyone!

And of course there will be non-bookish Sunday posts to look forward to as well. Chickens ahoy! Biking adventures! Chills and thrills! You just never know what might happen. Oh, and then there is Vocalis too. I had better get working on my next essay. I already have the title: The Joy of Socks. Do you like it? I wonder what it’s about?

It’s going to be a good year.

Filed under: biking, Books, chickens, gardening Tagged: #readinginto16, Read the Table

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One week of vacation down, one more to go. What have I been doing? Waldo and Dickens over there give some indication. My legs are beneath the quilt and they are laying on them. We are all three on my reading chaise. This is the good life.

One of the things I have been doing on my reading chaise is going through the pile of gardening books I borrowed from the library. At this point in my gardening life garden books have reached the point of being repetitive. Knew that. Knew that too. Oh yup, also knew that. It gets hard to find and learn anything new. But I keep trying. Sometimes I do learn something interesting. Like, did you know that beets, spinach and swiss chard are all in the beet family? Or that when garden space is limited, potatoes give you more calories and nutrition per square foot than any other vegetable? I also learned that building a wind turbine in my backyard will never happen. It has to be 100 feet away from any other structure and at least 30 feet taller. Like the city or the neighbors would ever let me put that up!

I have also been sorting through the chicken books I requested from the library. I figured out which one I decided I wanted to buy last February, A Chicken in Every Yard. I also found The Chicken Whisperer’s Guide to Keeping Chickens has some good advice in it. However Chicken in Every Yard is the best comprehensive book and includes everything from raising chicks to caring for sick birds.

Since I was thinking about chickens, I checked in at Egg Plant Urban Farm Supply to see if they had anything up about ordering chickens yet. They do!. I can order my chicks as soon as the end of February. Crikey that isn’t that far away! Way back I had thought we’d get two buff orpingtons and two australorps but, as much as I love the way the orpingtons look, so big and fluffy and pleasingly round, they seem a bit too docile. I want chickens with more curiosity and who like to forage and I didn’t want to worry about the orpingtons getting picked on by others. So, at the moment we are planning on two australorps and two Rhode Island reds. Of course, until I actually place the order, I might change my mind again.

Back at the end of September I cut off all the amaranth flowerheads, bagged them up and brought them indoors to dry. They’ve been hanging out in the basement since then. Today Bookman and I finally decided it was time to start doing something about harvesting the grain. It’s a process and the seeds are tiny but as a first try with amaranth we are pretty pleased. We haven’t finished yet, but we expect we’ll be able to fill the jar. Next year we aren’t going to plant corn so there will be more room to grow more amaranth, both red and gold varieties.

Which leads me to something else I did: seed inventory. I went through all my seed packets to see what I have, what varieties did well, what didn’t what I want to order again, that sort of things. Then I went through the seed catalogs and marked what to reorder and of course had to mark a few other things new to try. I also decided that next year I have to be better at saving seeds so I don’t have to reorder so many. I make it a point to buy heirloom and open-pollinated varieties so I can save the seeds but then I rarely do mostly because I want to eat them and begrudge letting peas and beans go to seed and setting aside the biggest heads of garlic to replant in the fall. I’ll be placing my seed order mid-January so I still have time to revise what I want. Once the order is placed, I’ll let you know what yummy things will be going into the garden come spring!

On the cycling front, I rode 100 miles/161 km yesterday. It took me five hours and eighteen minutes to do it and my legs complained the last ten miles, but by golly, I did it! When the odometer clicked over to 100 I cried a little from happiness over my accomplishment, because my legs were hurting so bad, and from relief over being able to stop. I thought when I stopped pedaling I my legs would stop hurting but as soon as I climbed off Astrid they started hurting even more! After stretching and walking around for ten minutes the pain went away and I was just plain tired. Today there are no lingering effects and the pain is a vague memory, so vague I am actually looking forward to doing it again sometime!

But not yet. Because now I am going to try my legs on virtual racing as well as a six-week structured workout program for building fitness. Astrid and I don’t necessarily like being stuck indoors, but Zwift is working out well for both of us.

One more thing before I go this evening. That essay site I’ve mentioned a few times? It is now live! Stop by Vocalis if you feel so inclined. Let me know what you think. And if you have an essay of your own you would like to publish, send it over! All the information including the email address is there.

Filed under: biking, Books, chickens, Essays, gardening Tagged: amaranth, Vocalis, Zwift

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Because the pile of gardening books I already have from the library for my impending vacation isn’t enough, I had to add more. Really though it isn’t my fault and I am sure you will agree.

Today I realized that I’d be having chicks in a little over three months. I personally won’t be laying eggs and hatching chicks, that would be weird even for me. No, I’ll be picking up the three-day old babies from the urban farm store. To that end, I must begin to think about and prepare their indoor home. Plus, I need to read up again about how to care for them. Last February I went through a pile of care and feeding of backyard chickens books and found one I really liked that I will probably buy to have on hand for quick reference. Can I remember what the title is? Of course not!

I felt certain that my February self knew I would not remember the title and that I put it on my library wishlist. So I had to browse my library list. I didn’t find it but I did find a number of gardening books that I had put on my list and forgotten all about so I requested them. Tis the season to learn about new plant varieties and things to try in the garden so I can include everything in one seed order in January or make digging/planting/building plans. I think I requested something like five gardening books.

But then I had to find the chicken book. And since I couldn’t remember and so many of the book covers looked familiar I had to request several, possibly four or five, I’m not sure; it is all rather a blur at this point.

I do, however, want to give myself a big pat on the back for restraint. I see you going all big-eyed whaaa? at me. Yes, restraint. I have over three hundred items on my library wishlist and I looked at them all in search of the chicken book. Don’t you think that I wanted to request some of them? That I only requested the gardening books shows just how fantastic my willpower is. Don’t you agree?

Posting will probably be spotty through Solstice. I am making a selection of dishes from Vegan Richa’s Indian Kitchen. I am going to start the cooking on Sunday for a few things I can make ahead like the dessert and the naan bread and the chutney so I don’t have to spend the entire day Monday in the kitchen chopping things up. Because of course I chose recipes that require lots of different vegetables and they all have to be chopped up. Since I don’t cook except for Solstice, my chopping skills are lacking and in order to make sure none of my fingers are lacking by the end of the meal preparation, I am very slow and careful. But even before that is the grocery list making and then the actual grocery shopping and it always ends up taking more time and energy than I plan for so this year I am trying to remember that.

So, if things are quiet in my little corner, that’s what I’m up to. Or I am at the library picking up all those books I requested.

Filed under: Books, chickens, gardening, In Progress, Library

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I probably should have known better. But so many weeks of mild weather lulled me into complacency. Each weekend I thought, I should empty the rain barrels. But the forecast for the week would be warm and I’d think, eh, I’ll do it next weekend. The last two days we did not get above freezing and Bookman went out this morning to drain the barrels. Too late. Both of them are frozen solid. How could that be? How could 55 gallons of water freeze solid in two days? Well it did. We were hoping for some melt today but the high only made it to 33F/.5C. However, the forecast for the next few days says nights below freezing but days above. So. We opened the hose valves on the barrels for the water to drain should it melt. I hope it melts. Then we can tip the barrels upside down to keep snow out of them and set them up again in spring. Hopefully this one freeze won’t spilt the barrels. Plastic, even when it is thick, is surprisingly fragile when it freezes.

During the week I noticed the butterfly weed pods split open. I have one in the front yard and have never seen it do this, probably because by late summer it gets hidden by the taller purple coneflowers. At first I thought it was milkweed and for the life of me could not remember milkweed growing there at all. I was beginning to doubt my memory when I looked up butterfly weed on the internet and discovered, yes, it does have pods that burst open and looks remarkably like milkweed. I also discovered that the plants really like sandy soil which explains why it is doing so well where I planted it in the back garden, the soil in its bed is pretty sandy. This is a happy stroke of luck. I have a chicken garden that is full of sand buried beneath woodchips and leaves. Some of those seeds are going to get scattered along the sandy margins this week. Come spring I just have to remember where they got planted so if they actually sprout, I won’t accidentally pull them up thinking they are a random unwanted weed.

Speaking of the chickens, Bookman and I went out to work on the coop this afternoon. While our bodies were warmly layered, our hands were not. Work gloves are not insulated and one cannot build in mittens. So we got two rafter support beams up before our hands were so numb we could no longer feel them. Barring any surprise “warm” days or December/January thaws, our coop building is done until spring. We didn’t get as much done as I had hoped, but we made pretty good progress considering we have never done anything like this before. If we don’t get the rafters attached before spring, that will be first on the agenda. Then the fun with plywood and foam insulation begins. We bought a jigsaw in preparation for cutting holes in the plywood sheets for windows, doors and vents. Fun times ahead for spring!

Will you be surprised to know I am already thinking about what to plant in the garden next year? That early seed catalog I got? I’ve paged through it all and marked it all up. I’m planning on trying a new to me green bean in the garden, a variety called “masai” that I have heard is tasty and has a very high yield. I also just read a Mother Earth News article about turnips and learned there are small turnips about the size of a golfball that are mostly Japanese varieties that can be eaten fresh, even sliced up like water chestnuts and used in stir fries for a bit of crunch. This has made me far more excited than I should be. After two years of not having much success with parsnips, I have decided to toss those out and plant more turnips which I do have success with. So next year I’ll plant the big late season turnips and the small early season ones too.

And then of course I am planning what to grow on the green roof of the chicken coop. I decided to have a purple/blue and orange color scheme. All the plants have to be drought tolerant and low growing. So far I have decided on blue fescue grass, pussytoes, pasque flower and catmint (not a cat-attracting variety!). Next autumn I will plant spring blooming bulbs of Siberian squill, grape hyacinth, and orange species tulips. The roof is 10 feet/3 m long and about 2.5 feet/.8 m from peak to edge. I am planting both sides of it so have lots of area to play with and all winter to imagine and plan. If you could see me as I type this, I have the biggest, dopiest grin on my face.

I am still reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I am reading it little bits at a time and I hope, as the gardening posts become few and far between for a while, you won’t mind me updating you on my progress through this beautiful book and the occasional quote. This one is from the chapter called “Seeing:”

It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you rig a giant sail and go. The secret to seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.

Isn’t that a beautiful image?

Biking

Biking on the trainer is going great. Zwift added a bunch of workouts a couple weeks ago and I thought I would give one of them a try. I chose an intervals workout that was 60 minutes long. The workout Zwift gives me is based on my FTP (functional threshold power). I expected it would be hard, but holy Lance Armstrong Batman! After the first two intervals I was sucking wind so bad I could not get my watts up to where they were supposed to be. The screen kept flashing “More Power” in big read letters. I yelled at my legs like Captain Kirk to Scottie, “Give me more power!” And my legs yelled back, “I’m givin’ ye all she’s got Cap’n!” And then the five minute interval would be over and “Fail!” would flash up on the screen in big red letters. To my credit I didn’t give up. I failed interval after interval right up to the end. I am apparently not the only one who is having problems because this week a new workout was added: 6-week ftp for beginners. Ha! As the name implies, it is a six-week workout training to improve ftp. I have decided to embark on that in January.

At the moment my riding plan is to add 5 miles/8 km to my Saturday ride each week through the end of the year. Have I mentioned this yet? Sorry if I am repeating myself. Anyway, by doing that I will be putting in a 100 mile/161 km ride on January 3rd. Yesterday I did 70 miles/112.7 km. I’ve done that far on Astrid outdoors but that included rest stops. Yesterday my only rest was a quick bathroom break. My legs were tired but my rear end was a bit sore. A hot shower never felt so good. Everything is feeling just fine today, but then I haven’t gotten on the trainer yet. That will be the real test.

That I think all of this is a whole lot of fun is utterly amazing to me. If this time last year you would have told me about this I would have called you crazy. Now it seems I am the crazy one.

Filed under: biking, chickens, gardening Tagged: Annie Dillard, green roof, Zwift

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I’ve been thinking about the terrorist attacks in Paris all weekend. It breaks my heart, all this hatred in the world. My deepest sympathies to the family and friends who lost loved ones and to all the people of France. I grieve with you.

I rode 65 miles/104.6 kms yesterday and it was really amazing to see the support for France offered up by the other cyclists. We all have our country’s flags that appear with our names on the rider board and people riding in France were deluged with “Ride on” thumb’s up. One rider even commented on how wonderful the support was. Many riders added “PFP” or #France or some other tag after their name. There was even talk of having a group ride against terrorism. It was a supportive communal kindness I did not expect to find in an online virtual cycling “game” and it made me glad to be part of it.

This morning Bookman was out working in the front yard cutting back perennials for the time when the snow arrives. Even though it was close to 60F/15C today, the cold and snow will eventually descend. And since I do the snow shoveling I can tell you it is a giant pain in the backside to have the dead perennials and grasses flop over onto the sidewalk and freeze there. Unfortunately Bookman’s hard work gave him a pain in the back and he barely made it into the house before he was hit with a big spasm.

He sprawled out on the floor just inside the door and lay there until the worst of it passed. I got the heating pad and arranged pillows on the couch and stood at the ready to lend a hand as he slowly struggled to get himself upright. Water and ibuprofen soon followed.

Gradually his back began to feel better and he was able to get up and carefully move around. We had plans to do the rafters on the chicken coop today and it seemed as though they were in jeopardy. However, not long after lunch Bookman decided he wanted to give the rafters a try, he needed to move around. I did all the bending and lifting and ever so carefully we managed to not only cut all the boards to build the rafters but we put all five of them together too!

I must say we both feel rather proud of ourselves and like we accomplished something really big. The rafters are not up on the coop itself yet, I can’t lift them up alone and Bookman was in no condition to do any lifting anyway. So getting those up will be for next Sunday which will not be nearly as nice as it was today. It appears the weather shoe is about to drop and by mid-week we will be crashing to seasonal temperatures — hard frosts at night and daytime highs only a few degrees above freezing. As long as there isn’t snow we’ll keep working.

And now for something a little different. I’ve been thinking for a few months about wanting to try my hand at essay writing. I am not keen on the idea of writing an essay and then flogging it around to different websites or magazines trying to get it published. Nor do I want to purposely write commercial pieces with a specific audience or publication in mind. I just want to write essays on whatever I feel like.

I read an article at The Guardian the other day about how the internet is an ideal home for the essay. And I thought, hmm, what if? I haven’t made it past the idea stage to execution stage yet, but my plan is to create a separate website from this blog for the purpose of essays. I’d like to aim for two a month but I don’t know if that is too ambitious. It seems like it might be. I am thinking it would be good if the site were more active than just one or two essays a month from me, and wonder if any of you might be persuaded to write an essay? It could be a one-off or perhaps you enjoy essay writing so much you might want to write a few. In my mind, I am thinking posting one essay a week would be pretty decent. Topics will not be limited to books. My intent is a site for personal essay writing to explore whatever strikes my — or possibly your — fancy.

What do you think? Even if no one wants to contribute an essay I will still be moving ahead with it for my own personal experiments in writing. It could be a wild success or a terrible failure. But to me, essays are all about the process, the attempt, as the word “essay” implies. I don’t know when I will have this new venture up and running, but it is in the works and I already have begun a list of things I want to write about. It’s a little scary, a leap into the unknown for me, but no matter what happens, I’ll be glad I at least tried.

Filed under: biking, chickens, Essays Tagged: France

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The weather is making it really difficult to believe it is November, but I’ve decided to just go with it and try to not be too freaked out by the weirdness of it. Climate change in action? Probably a little bit. But there is also a “Godzilla” el niño in the Pacific that is a major contributor as well. The combination makes part of me very happy because, wow, November and I spent time outdoors today plenty warm in a sweatshirt. The other part me of is worried and a little angry because this is just not right, not normal at all and nobody seems concerned, too busy running around and believing we are somehow lucky. Humph.

On a happy note, I jumped with joy the other day when President Obama said no to the entire Keystone Pipeline project. I want to thank the farmers in Nebraska for all their lawsuits that slowed the entire review process down and gave a lot more people time to comment and protest and government officials, including the president, time to seriously consider what an oil pipeline running across the U.S. from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico would mean in terms of climate change and immediate environmental impacts. So thank you Mr. President. You made me squeal with joy, clap my hands and do a happy dance. My eyes might have gotten a little teary too.

Then there is the news that Vermont Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and Senator Jeff Merkley from Oregon have proposed legislation to stop the government from issuing new leases on public lands for fossil fuel extraction. The “Keep it in the Ground Act” would also end all current non-productive leases for fossils fuels on federal land and offshore in the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific. It would also prohibit offshore drilling in the Arctic and the Atlantic. It is a bold move and Republicans, many of whom don’t “believe in” climate change, are already saying the bill has no chance of passing. It is unfortunate but not surprising. Nonetheless, the fact that anyone is even proposing such legislation is a huge step in the right direction.

Closer to home, I pulled the turnips today. One huge one and three radish sized ones and an actual radish that’s a bit deformed. Bookman is going to boil them and mash them up with a potato to have with dinner tonight. Yum.

We do not rake our leaves up from the yard. We rake them off the sidewalk only. This year we are putting the sidewalk leaves in the chicken garden. Remember it is all sand? We covered it in wood chips in August but those take so long to decompose. Now we are adding leaves. And since it has been windy these last couple of days and the neighbor across the alley from us has a huge tree in their backyard that dropped its leaves, a good many of them blew over and caught themselves along our new chain link fence. I raked them all off the fence and deposited them in the chicken garden while thanking the neighbor’s tree for the donation to our soil-building project.

Bookman and I spent quite a lot of time today looking at pictures of rafters on the internet and discussing physics and geometry. We are ready to frame the roof on the chicken coop and run and sine we are building it as a green roof we have to account for extra weight. What’s the best and easiest way to build five rafters? Lots of rafters are notched on the end of the board that sits on the structure’s frame. Do we need to do that? Also, how steep do we want the pitch of the roof?

We decided from roof peak to frame would be a foot which means the roof pitch is not super steep but steep enough to provide decent drainage for the green roof. So then we had to do some geometry. Kids, if you are sitting in geometry class thinking, this is so stupid, I will never need this in real life, let me tell you that you are wrong! So we worked out the math and started to cut and drill and we changed our minds about how we wanted to build the rafters from mitered triangles screwed to the frame to notched rafters sitting on the frame edge. And we got ourselves so turned around upside down and backwards that we decided to stop and have some chocolate chip cookies.

The cookies made everything better. We decided to go back to our original rafter plan of making triangles that attach to the coop frame. Much easier than figuring out how to make notches. By this time though we had worn ourselves out so we called it quits for the day on coop building. Our building progress today was conceptual rather than actual but we have to have the concept down before we can make it reality. Now we know what we need to do and how to do it so next chance we get should go more smoothly.

That’s the idea anyway.

Something bookish. I am very much looking forward to Richard Mabey’s new book The Cabaret of Plants becoming available in the U.S. The Guardian had an essay by Mabey recently in which he talks about plants and the environment and much of what he talks about is in his book. Things like how beans use echolocation to find their poles and mimosa shrubs have a greater memory-span than bees. I am all agog. I must know more! Please book, hurry up and get published!

Biking

Just a quick note about how indoor biking is going: great!

Achievement unlocked! I did a metric century on Zwift yesterday (100km/ 62.2 miles). For that I get a special jersey my avatar can wear to let everyone know about it. It was actually harder to do on my trainer than on the road. When I am riding outdoors I get to coast on the downhills and get to rest at traffic signals. On the trainer I am pedaling all the time, no stopping. I did stop halfway for about two minutes to run to the kitchen and get a couple energy bites. But golly, did I work! And sweat! Even with a fan blowing right in my face the entire ride I went through both my water bottles, something I only have ever done on the hottest days of summer. But it was good and it was fun and I got lots of kudos from other people riding at the time. The next big goal is an imperial century (100 miles/ 161km). I wonder if I can do it by New Year’s?

Filed under: biking, chickens, gardening Tagged: In which I learn that geometry and algebra are both handy real life skills to have

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We had frost! Two weeks late but, hey, who’s counting? One of the best things about frost? My allergies are pretty much over. It will be another week or two before they are completely gone, but the worst has passed. I can’t begin to say what a relief this is. If you suffer from seasonal allergies, you will completely understand.

The frost happened Friday night/Saturday morning. Friday evening after work I took a bowl out to the garden and picked a bunch of very green tomatoes, a small lemon squash, a few beets and brussels sprouts. If this were early October we would have simply covered the tomatoes, but seeing as how we had frost last night too and except for a surprise warm day here and there, it is not going to be warm enough going forward for the tomatoes to get ripe. So I picked them. Bookman is going to either make green tomato salsa or fried green tomatoes, he hasn’t decided which yet.

The kale survived the frost as did the turnips and chard. The asters and the mum are still going too. Everything else is done. Gardening now turns into pulling the dead vegetable plants and stuffing them into the compost bin and cutting back some of the perennials. Also seed saving. Also harvesting the pumpkins, amaranth and sunchokes. I am so looking forward to trying the sunchokes. One of the pumpkins that was done early Bookman cooked up last weekend and turned into pumpkin butter. It tastes just like pumpkin pie on my toast! We still have lots of apples to cook too. Today Bookman made apple spice muffins. Fall is definitely one of the most delicious times of the year!

I had completely forgotten what we had planted in the new little bed on our boulevard in

the spring and early in the week was pleasantly surprised to see a bunch of beautiful purple asters blooming in it. I might have even exclaimed, where did those come from? I had to check my new plant list for the year and, what do you know? I planted them! They are symphyotrichum oblongifolium, aromatic aster. I love a good garden surprise.

We began building up on the chicken coop today and were making good progress until the battery in the drill prematurely died. We took a break for it to recharge and even though it indicated it was fully charged, it did not last long at all. Since this is the only drill we have, we had to stop work sooner than we wanted. Very disappointing since it turned out to be such a gorgeous day. We’ve had the drill for quite a few years so I guess the battery has sustained as many recharges as it could. Time for a new battery. We will get on sometime during the week and have it charged up and ready to go by the weekend.

Biking

Last weekend I ordered a smart trainer. A smart trainer is a contraption I fit my bike on for indoor riding. The smart part is that the trainer connects to my computer and I can watch video and ride routes around the world in the comfort of my own home. When the road goes up, the trainer will make it hard to pedal my bike. That’s how it is supposed to work anyway. I was hoping it would be delivered by yesterday so I could set it up and try it out, but it won’t be here until tomorrow.

Which means I had to bundle up and ride out into the frosty morning. Now the only warm cycling kit I have invested in are arm warmers, a windbreaker and gloves. These would keep my torso and hands warm enough but my legs, not so much. I have warm clothes that I have biked in before. Seven years ago, before my current job, I used to bike commute to work year round. It was only a three mile/4.8 km ride so I didn’t need special bike clothing, I just needed to be warm when it was ten below (-23C). No need for the thermal underwear Saturday, but I pulled out my fleece ear warming headband and my knit leg warmers.

I am not worried about being aerodynamic so I was not concerned about the knit leg warmers slowing me down. However, if you have ever seen actual cycling leg warmers, they are usually sleek and black and spandex and they have grippers that hold them up. My leg warmers? Not so sleek. Also, gripper-free so to keep them up I had to tuck them under the grippers on the bottom of my bike shorts. A bit unconventional but no big deal. However, my leg warmers are not black. Oh no, they are a snazzy gray with blue and black stripes and scream, dork! When it is freezing cold and blowing snow in your face you don’t care about looking like a dork, you only care about not going down on a patch of ice. Plus anyone who bikes in the winter in Minnesota is automatically awarded “badass” status no matter what their kit looks like.

Not once during the summer did I think, hmm maybe I should buy some leg warmers for when it gets cold. And now it is too late. So I pulled on my striped knits and ventured out feeling a bit embarrassed. To my surprise, there were hardly any cyclists out. By the time I began seeing more cyclists I had been out for close to two hours and was happy as could be with warm legs and no longer really caring what I looked like. I felt so good I actually decided that everyone who saw me must be jealous of my stripes. Far from being a dork I am a cycling fashion trendsetter!

I didn’t want to ride out to the park reserve like I did the last couple of weekends so I decided to do the training route I had been riding most of the summer. Except I rode it in the opposite direction. If you ever want to freak out your body and your brain, such a thing is highly recommended. I was tired in all the wrong places and my brain did not know where I was in the ride since the landmarks were well known but they came during different parts of the ride than usual. My hilly segment came after the halfway mark instead of before. While my legs were more tired than usual at that point, I also didn’t have to worry about moderating my pace very much so I would have energy left for the rest of the ride. It was all so strange, but fun.

I have no idea what to expect for the weather next weekend. At this point long outdoor rides are wait and see. But I will have my trainer by then so if I decide I don’t want to be a fashion diva with my striped leg warmers I will have an alternate way to ride.

Filed under: biking, chickens, gardening Tagged: cycling fashionista

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The week was warm and we had a couple evenings and one day of rain. A lot of rain. The warm and the rain are rather unusual for this time of year, especially night time thunder storms. The month is trending much warmer than normal and the weather people are saying we might be looking at a top ten warmest on record. I am pretty happy and so is the garden but my allergies are not pleased. September is one of those love-hate months. I love that the weather has been mild because gardening and biking. I hate that it has been mild because I suffer. As long as I am busy and absorbed in a task I manage ok, but sit down to rest and I fell like I’ve been through the wringer.

Needless to say I did not spend much time working in the garden this week. And when I was out in it, I was simply passing through and maybe picking a tomato or checking on the progress of the pumpkins. Grasshoppers are everywhere and I don’t even want to think about what they are chewing on. Bees of so many varieties are on the hyssop, the zinnias, the asters, and goldenrod. The monarchs are everywhere too and one even flew into my head as I was watching bees yesterday. Was it drunk on nectar? Hungry and disoriented? Whatever the case, those butterflies pack a wallop! Not that they hurt, only that they make a bigger thud when they run into you than you would expect.

We got all the beans I picked last weekend shelled. There are still more to pick in the garden. The coco noir black beans are not very prolific so I think I will not grow them again. If we do another black bean, it will be a different variety. The Jacob’s cattle beans (great in stew or soup) is pretty prolific and I wish I had planted more. This year I just planted what remained in the seed packet from the year before. I think in spring I will be ordering these again, or maybe saving a large portion of what we got this year to plant next year.

What I am really pleased with are the cow peas, also known as black-eyed peas. This

variety is called “lady pea” and is about the size of a lentil. The plants are really prolific and are still blooming and producing more pods. We’ll be harvesting these until frost. I definitely will be planting more of these next year.

Bookman was cooking up apples into sauce the other day and had put the cores in a bucket and set them out on the deck until he had a chance to take them to the compost bin. The squirrels are busy and extra bold right now and before the bucket made it to the bin, a squirrel made it to the bucket. Dickens was looking out the screen door at the time and as the squirrel helped itself to the apple cores, Dickens turned to stone inside, watching. The squirrel didn’t care at all that there was a cat less than a foot away watching him through the screen window.

I’ve been talking about it all summer and finally, finally, we have begun work on the chicken coop! Today we began with the “foundation” and digging critter barrier. Our options were to build the coop on brick pavers or to bury hardware cloth a couple inches down and several inches out from the edge of the coop to keep digging critters out. We went for the pavers. It is a more expensive option but we thought less work in the long run and we felt better about having the coop sit on something solid instead of bare ground.

Today we started laying down the pavers. Of course we can’t just lay them out and start building. They all have to be squared and level so our coop doesn’t lean and all that. Luckily we have plenty of sand to lay the foundation on! We managed to put down half of the foundation today. A good start I think. Once all the pavers are down we’ll start building the coop and run frame. Hopefully we will have time to work on the foundation a bit this week, if not, next weekend will see us finishing it up.

Bookman, who was initially reluctant on the chicken idea back in January when I suggested it, is now gung-ho and as excited as I am. We are both really glad to at last start work on the coop!

Biking

Well, bad news. The Gran Fondo race I signed up for at the end of the month has been canceled due to road construction. Apparently there is too much road work being done in the area where the race is to be held that they can’t put together a route that avoids it. I was so disappointed. I’ve been working so hard all summer to train for it and now I won’t have a chance to find out if my hard work paid off. Plus, since we didn’t do the 60 mile/100 km route at Jesse James Days, the Gran Fondo was going to be my “century” ride this year. Disappointed as I am, I will still do a 100 km ride even if I am on my own. I was going to do that yesterday but it didn’t quite work out.

Not having to train for a race anymore, I decided I was now free to do some exploring for different routes and just ride for the fun of it. Not that my training rides aren’t fun, I do love them, but I don’t have to worry about time or getting in so many hills or practicing sprinting or anything like that.

Saturday morning began chilly and I had a really hard time warming up. I felt like I was pedaling through sand for the first hour and half. My allergies were also bothering me and I was fighting off a headache. I road a little less than half my usual ride and took a turn off where I see some other cyclists turn now and then. It turned out to be quiet suburban streets that felt suddenly almost rural. I was hoping for some good hills to try but there was only one, a long gradual grade that didn’t make me work too hard until I got close to the top. The route spit me out close to the end of a nice hilly section I usually ride on. I doubt I will take that alternate route again.

I then decided I was going to take on Purgatory Park, a trail Bookman and I had tried in early spring that had a couple really short but steep hills. I headed down the road and turned off into the park, finally starting to feel energetic and looking forward to the challenge of those little hills. I came down a hill and around a bend to cross a foot bridge over the creek. I was on a packed gravel path and it had washed away a bit from the edge of the bridge, leaving a concrete lip sticking up of about 3-4 inches / 7.5-10 cm. I hit it rather hard, got a bit of jolt, continued across the little bridge and back onto gravel. And then I noticed Astrid did not feel quite right. I stopped to check things out and surprise! Two flat tires.

I knew at some point I would get a flat. I even took a class early in the spring to learn how to fix one. Now confronted with not one but two flat tires I was somewhat at a loss for what to do. For some reason I thought if I just pumped air into them they would miraculously repair themselves. So I took my little pump off my bike and realized I had never used it before and had no idea how to use it now. Fifteen minutes later when I figured out how to get the pump locked onto the valve stem I started pumping, listening for air to leak out to confirm the tube was punctured because for some reason I thought maybe I could have two flats but no punctures. I could not hear any air leaking but the tire was not inflating. Instead of blaming a puncture I blamed the pump. Why not? I called Bookman who was at work. I was not far from the park entrance which is on a major road and not far from where Bookman works. He happened to have the bike carrier in the car still. He decided he would take his lunch break and come get me.

I walked poor Astrid out of the park and we waited for Bookman’s arrival. I felt really dumb not being able to figure out how to use the pump and fix my tires. I had a spare tube and a patch kit so I technically could have gotten myself mobile again so I could ride home but my hands and my brain just couldn’t manage it. After Bookman got lost a few times he pulled up, put Astrid on the back of the car and delivered us home. My Hero!

I showered, had lunch, and in a better frame of mind and comfortable surroundings decided to tackle fixing the tires, or at least one of them since I only had one spare tube. And it is just as well Bookman rescued us because I had to come in the house and quick watch a YouTube video to figure out how to get the tire off the bike. I have a quick release lever but I also have to unlock the break lever too. Oh yeah! That fix a flat class was a long time ago! Once I got the wheel off the bike I was fine with the rest, though getting the tire back in the rim almost had me in tears. I do not have strong hands and I could not get the last little bit to go in. I was just about to give up, when as a last ditch effort I used my feet to hold the tire and act as a counterweight while I pushed with my thumbs on the tire and in it popped! Then I started pumping. I used the little pump I carry on my bike to make sure I would know how to do it next time. Then I got the wheel back on and checked to see how long it took me: 45 minutes. And that was one wheel!

I didn’t have another tube to do the back tire but I took it off and got the tube out anyway. Then I decided now would be a good time to do some cleaning. So I scrubbed the cassette and the derailleur and cleaned them of road gunk and felt pretty good about that. The bike shop was closed by the time Bookman got home from work last night so we went today and I got three tubes. One for the tire now and two spares. I also talked to one of the bike mechanics and she said from the punctures I described it sounds like my tires were underinflated. So she talked to me about inflation and I had brought one of my wheels with me and she inflated it to the proper psi and it was hard as a rock. Turns out we had not been reading the pressure gauge correctly on the pump. That means both my flats could have been avoided. Live and learn, right?

So now having crashed twice this summer and getting two flats at once I have learned many lessons. I am stronger than I suspected. And I also now really know how to fix a flat. Next weekend Purgatory is not going to beat me!

Bookman likes me to text him from time to time while I am out so he knows I’m still alive. My eyes have reached the point where the text on my phone is almost too small for me to see clearly. I also wear polarized sunglasses which prevents me from seeing the screen on my phone with any kind of clarity, and yesterday my eyes were burning and itching from my allergies. All that to say with autocorrect, Bookman got some interesting text messages.

About an hour into my ride I was stopped at a traffic light and still pretty cold. I texted Bookman “Brrr” Except with autocorrect and my inability to see the screen the text Bookman actually got was “Beer.”

An hour later I stopped for a brief snack. I texted, “snack break finally not so cold.” The text Bookman received: “smack break finally not so old.”

The next time Bookman heard from me was a phone call to tell him I had two flat tires. That wasn’t fun but the text messages kept us laughing all day.

Filed under: biking, chickens, gardening Tagged: flat tire, Gran Fondo, Purgatory Park

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Goodness gracious! So much going on in the garden right now and so much to do! It seems like there is never enough time for it all but Bookman and I do what we can and that just has to be good enough.

Before we went to Albuquerque last weekend we had been watching our zucchini plants flower like crazy and grow bigger and bigger. Where are the zucchini? We looked and looked and couldn’t find any. Well today I found some. Couldn’t miss them really, they are so huge. How could I not have seen them before? Zucchini bread anyone? Bookman will also be making zucchini latkes and if they aren’t terribly woody, there will be zucchini noodles too. And zucchini relish. I’ve been antsy to try making relish. So excited to finally have zucchini! Must now keep a close eye on them in the garden to avoid more like this. There are a few lemon squash out there almost ready to pick. A day or two probably. At least those are bright yellow, hence the name lemon, can’t really miss them.

Also before the trip, I was in a battle with the slugs over the potato plants. I went

away for three days which meant the slugs ate every single last bit of green. Today I dug through the straw to see if there were at least some small potatoes. As I was digging I discovered why I had such a hard time with the slugs. We used straw for mounding up around the plants and while the top layer was dry, beneath it was wet, and, judging from the number of slugs I exposed to daylight, a happy haven for them. Seems I provided a near utopian paradise. But there were potatoes! Not big, but quite a few, enough that Bookman and I have decided that we will try again next year. But next year we will not be using straw!

I planted a little patch of amaranth this year as a kind of experiment to see how it grew in our garden and to discover if it was worthwhile to make it a regular thing. Amaranth is a grain that is high in iron and calcium and higher in fiber than whole wheat. It’s a versatile little grain that you can cook up for breakfast or “pop” and use in salads. You can also make pudding out of it and all sorts of other things. I am not certain how much we will get from out little patch. It is a tall and pretty plant with think red stalks and red-veined leaves. It is just starting to flower. I am not certain how large the flowers will get, but it looks like they might get pretty big. Since it isn’t a grass I don’t have to thresh it like wheat or oats, I just have to dry the seed heads upside down in a paper bag and then shake out the seeds. Sounds easy enough. We’ll see if that is true!

Walter has quite a lot of crabapples on him for such a little fellow. They are getting ripe and I picked a few today. Can you say crabapple jelly? I’ve never made it before but Bookman and I are both very excited to give it a try. I have to go on a hunt for a good recipe. If you have one, will you share it with me?

The okra is also starting to get pods. I have never eaten okra before. I know a lot of

people hate it but there are many who love it. It is a highly mucilaginous vegetable that needs to be cooked just so in order to avoid the slime. I only have one plant so it will be a while yet before I have enough to actually do anything with them. Can I freeze the pods, does anyone know? If they are tasty I will plant more next year, especially since they are pretty plants.

Bookman called the fencing people we are contracted with to install chain link fencing around the chicken garden. We are still at least three weeks away from getting it installed apparently. Good thing I am not waiting for it to be installed before moving on to building the chicken coop! I drew out the plans of what we want it to look like and how big, where to put windows, roosts, access and egg doors and all that. Now we have to figure out the materials list which then might lead to a few height and size adjustments depending on standard lumber sizing and all that.

Bookman is going to call the city on Tuesday to find out if we can start building the coop now without having first gotten permission from the neighbors and going through the whole permitting process. Rumor has it the city is still planning this year on changing the requirement of getting your neighbors’ signatures. The city will still require a permit though because the coop has to be inspected annually. The city also requires a site plan submission so they can be sure

the coop is sited according to city code. I’m confident our coop location won’t be a problem, it is far enough away from inhabited buildings and well away from the garage of both my nextdoor neighbors. Plus there will be a fence before we have chickens and eventually there will be a screening hedge along the alley.

I want to finish the coop this year, but, if for whatever reason we don’t manage to, as long as we get pretty far along we will have time to finish it before the chickens move in. We will get chicks in March and they won’t be old enough to move out to their house until early to mid May. I think I mentioned the coop and the run will be covered with a green roof. Is it bad of me to have already begun thinking what plants I want to plant in it? Most people plant sedums but I’m not going that route, I have other ideas!

Biking

I missed my long bike ride last weekend, missed it mightily. But it is good to take a rest so as not to get burnt out and all that. I had a friend join me again this week for part of my ride, about the first 16 miles/26km. It’s amazing how fast the time goes when I have company and we are chatting the whole time. I’ve been working to up my average speed to 15 mph/24 kph and I am happy to say I did it! I am really pleased about this. By the time I get to my race at the end of September I should even be a little bit faster. So exciting!

I started doing interval training twice a week on a stationary bike indoors. Have you ever done internal training? It sucks. But it is supposed to help me be fitter and faster. You know you are in deep with a sport when you are willing to do stuff you hate in order to get better at it. Also, I need up my core workout. I’ve been doing free weights since early spring and they have helped build upper body strength, something I have never had much of, but I need to start doing even more focused exercises. Like intervals, this too sucks. I’m resigned to the weights, I don’t love them but I don’t hate them either. But I am not keen on doing side planks and a variety of other strengthening maneuvers, but I have to do them if I want to get faster and stronger. Maybe as a side benefit I will get some sexy abdominal definition? I’m getting some nice muscle tone in my arms, a friend of mine even remarked on it the other day out of the blue, so why not some abs? It could totally happen! However, this does not mean the core workout stuff sucks any less.

Filed under: gardening Tagged: chickens

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Why do long holiday weekends go by so fast? Probably because I try and cram so much into them. And did I ever cram this weekend.

The garden is doing great. I picked so many peas this week I couldn’t keep up and had to start freezing them. This makes me very happy because I love peas so much and now even after the peas are done producing I will have some for a little longer especially since I have only just begun picking them.

Last week I mentioned the black raspberries were turning red, well, once they go red, they don’t take but a couple days to turn black and ripe. So I have started picking. The netting has done well to keep critters away. I have never had black raspberries before and was expecting them to be a bit tart like the red ones but they are slightly sweet, rich and kind of earthy, if that makes sense. Very tasty. Since this is only their second year there aren’t a huge amount but there will be enough to make into something, so as they get ripe I have been picking and then freezing them. Once they are all ripe we’ll see how much there is and go from there. I like them very much and may just have to plant some more in the chicken garden.

Last week I said I wasn’t going to bother to pick the elderberries but I changed my mind. I picked about a dozen very ripe berries and then froze them. The gooseberries are starting to get ripe and I even have a few

red currents, so I am freezing all of those too. I figure between gooseberries, currents and elderberries I might be able to cook up a tasty bit of jam. Why is it that so many berry bushes have thorns? The black raspberries have tiny ones but they will still get you if you aren’t careful. The current has very tiny ones that are just big enough to get your attention. The gooseberries have big, dangerous thorns that hurt like heck. When I am picking them I sing a little song called “Ouch” over the shrub. It has not yet drawn blood but I suspect it is only a matter of time.

I picked a bunch of radishes this week too. I had some sliced up on my tempeh sandwich today along with broccoli sprouts and a little mustard. So tasty! When picking radishes I realized I have to get better at thinning. I had thinned them but not aggressively enough which means much smaller radishes in spots where they are crammed together. If I had thinned them better I would have fewer radishes but the ones I did have would be much, much larger. I had to thin the beets and I think I did a better job at it. We shall see.

Here is the garden mystery of the week. Bookman was weeding and found a nest of eggs. They were in an especially sandy part of the garden and all together in a clutch, each one about the size of a walnut. What could have laid them? I investigated. They are white, felt firm and smooth but a little leathery. They look very much like snake eggs. So I did some snake research. Minnesota has 17 different kinds of snakes and of those only nine lay eggs. Of those nine two are very rare. Of the remaining seven because of range and habitat I was able to narrow down the possibilities to two. I decided that it wasn’t a gopher snake because they like to eat rodents, frogs and small birds and our garden isn’t exactly a prime food source for those critters. Squirrels on the other hand… So I decided the eggs must belong to a smooth green snake that solely eats insects, especially crickets of which we have an abundance. I was so excited about the prospect of having snakes in the garden that I’d go out an check on the eggs every evening to see if they had hatched.

Today when I checked on them I discovered that they aren’t eggs at all! It turns out they are a species of fungus called mutinus elegans, also known as elegant stinkhorn, dog stinkhorn, headless stinkhorn and, my favorite, devil’s dipstick. We’ve had the single red fruiting stalks pop up around the garden last year but they are in abundance this year. Turns out the red stalk grows out of the white eggs. When I checked on the “snake eggs” today, there were a number of the red stalks growing out of them. Fungi are good and this one is a rather weird, if rude looking one (Bookman says they look like a dog’s penis, which is true and which also might clue you in on why one of their common names is “devil’s dipstick” wink, wink, nudge, nudge). Still, I can’t help but be disappointed that I won’t be mothering any baby green snakes.

We’ve had a setback with the chicken garden, the area formerly known as garage. Bookman and I went out with rakes to rake up the sand into a pile and get to work on breaking up the compacted soil beneath. It turns out the one place we had dug beneath the sand is just about the only place in the entire area that has actual dirt under it. The rest really is nothing but sand. Well and so, there is more work to do to than previously thought. How does one go about turning sand into soil? One must add lots and lots and lots of organic material. To begin, we set up the old round black plastic compost bin we took down from the main garden last year when we built a two room post and wire bin. Good thing we saved the old plastic bin! We put it in a spot close to where we think we might plant a cheery tree next year. Since our two room bins are full we have already begun adding to the plastic bin.

Before the garage came down I was assuming there would be dirt beneath it that would need help and bought several different annual cover crops. I don’t know if they will grow in sand. An experiment is in order. I marked off an area and seeded some buckwheat. If it sprouts in a week or so I’ll mark off a few other areas and sow more. If the buckwheat doesn’t sprout I have some hairy vetch and winter oats I can try. If those aren’t successful then an inquiry into having topsoil delivered is in order and/or raised bed gardening until the soil in the whole area is generally improved. No matter how you look at it, those chickens are going to have their work cut out for them. Actually, all they have to do is poop, all the work falls to me.

We have the fence installation arranged but the work is 6-8 weeks out on their schedule. In the meantime, we are in the process of ordering the shed kit and arranging its delivery. Then we get to build it. Once the shed is up we’ll start work on the chicken coop. Huzzah!

Biking
I can happily report that Astrid and I are crash free this week! My scrapes are healing and my bruises have reached that oh so very colorful stage. It was nice to not add any new ones. It also made for a better ride. I am really liking “my route.” This week I thought I would add a bit more distance but instead decided to keep the same distance but just do some sprint intervals in a great section of trail that is paved, flat, fairly straight, wide, crosses no vehicular intersections for a several miles and is not crowded with slow moving cyclists or people out walking their dogs. It worked out really well and I had fun and was pleasantly tired when I got home. I’m looking forward to doing it again next week.

In spite of the summer warmth, Bookman has been getting out on evening rides with me a couple times a week. As long as he keeps moving he doesn’t overheat and doesn’t feel the fatigue (both are MS symptoms). We have a 22 mile/35 km route we’ve done a couple times that seems to work well for him.

We had been planning on doing the half-century route In October at a ride in Mankato, Minnesota but it is close to an hour and half drive to get there so we decided to do the 60-mile route at Jesse James Days in Northfield which is less than an hour’s drive from us. Plus 60 miles is a metric century so that’s something! They have a 100 mile /161 km route that we will do next year. The Mankato ride offers pie at one of their rest stations which is a great temptation, but the Jesse James ride has free massages at the end. If only there were a ride with pie and a massage that would be be oh so heavenly.

Filed under: biking, gardening Tagged: blakc raspberries, chickens, cover crops, Elegant stinkhorn, Jesse James Days, smooth green snake

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First off, it is Pride weekend and is there ever cause for celebration! In case you haven’t heard, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling Friday that makes same-sex marriage a legal right in all fifty states. The court made a good decision for a change and I am so very very happy I may have even gotten a little teary-eyed about it. A big virtual kiss to the five justices who wrote the majority opinion (Kennedy, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan). Thank you for doing the right thing.

Now, on to gardening.

I suppose I should apologize to the rabbits but I am not going to. Turns out they are not the ones who have been eating everything. They have eaten some things like the sunflowers, but they have not been the culprits when it comes to greens. My true nemesis/nemisises/nemisi are slugs! Not the big huge fat ones, but tiny ones the size of the tip of a well sharpened pencil. They look innocuous, like little moist pieces of dirt stuck to leaves after a hard rain. And so I didn’t notice them. But I have been spending time with my face close to the dirt weeding and discovered them hiding in plain sight. But they are so tiny and the plants are growing so fast now they are no longer really an issue. Still, I am not going to say sorry to the rabbits.

The second planting in the polyculture bed is doing pretty well. I had to thin the radishes this week and soon I will need to thin the beets. While thinning the radishes I began to wonder whether the greens were edible. They are! As are carrot greens. Radish greens recipes abound but it seems like they do best in soup and stir fried and as pesto. Carrot tops also make good soup as well as tea and supposedly a really fantastic pesto. Who knew? So now all radish greens are being saved and any carrot greens that might happen will be saved too. And is it me or can anything green be made into pesto? I think by the end of summer I am going to have so much pesto in my freezer it will last me nearly all winter.

Last year I planted parsnips in the polyculture bed. I thought I had pulled all of them out in the fall but it

turned out to not be the case. Parsnips are biennial and flower and seed in their second year. I heard they were great for pollinators so when I saw three or four parsnips coming up in spring I let them go. Now they are really tall and blooming pretty umbels of yellow flowers that pollinators are definitely enjoying. I will allow them to go to seed and then save the seed for the garden next year and see if I get some good parsnips from it.

The peas are beginning to be pickable. I got the first ones today and there will be even more to pick tomorrow and every day or two after that for then next couple of weeks. Yay! It is nice that the peas are ready now just as I picked the last of the strawberries today.

Bookman staked up and covered with netting the black raspberries. They are getting close to ripe and I don’t want to share them with the birds and squirrels. The birds can’t get them but an enterprising squirrel can get under the netting if it dares. I hope none dare. The raspberries are supposed to be black but they look like they will just be a really dark red. Oh wait, nope. Just did some googling. It looks like they turn red first and then black when they are ripe. Nifty. They are starting to go from green to red. I assume black comes not long after. Will keep an eye out and let you know.

My tiny elderberry bush that I got at the plant sale in May has some berries on it. Not many, less than a

handful. Elderberries cannot be eaten raw, they must be cooked into jam, syrup, or alcohol. There are not enough berries to bother cooking into anything so I will just leave them be this year and wait until the shrub is bigger in a year or two. I got the shrub to plant in the chicken garden but had to temporarily plant it in the regular garden because the garage was taking so long to get knocked down. Now it is so far into the growing season the shrub along with the serviceberry and the prairie rose will stay in their temporary locations until spring next year when I will move them.

Speaking of garage, guess what finally happened? It ended up costing a little more than originally estimated because the concrete slab we also had removed turned our to have wire reinforcement in it. But it is all gone now with only a sliver left just big enough to park a car and on the NE corner is an 8×8 foot square that we will use to build the shed on. It is such a relief to have all of this finally done! Beneath all of that concrete I was expecting gravel and compacted dirt. What is actually there is a 1-2 inch layer of fine building sand. I joked with Bookman that we should forget about the shed and chickens and put up a volleyball net and start hosting beach volleyball tournaments. Not to fear, under the layer of sand is the compacted dirt.

Now that the garage is gone, the next order of business is to have a chainlink fence with a gate installed. That should not be the ordeal that having the garage knocked down was. While that is in process, we will be

raking up all the sand into a neat pile. We will save some to use for the chickens — they will need sand for dust baths — and begin distributing it through the garden. We have plans to turn the polyculture bed into a year-round garden by building a small winter-hardy hoophouse and growing cool weather veg beneath it to harvest when there is snow on the ground (that is the hope anyway). The polyculture bed is a raised bed made of cinderblocks. The sand will go in the cinderblock holes. Sand does not freeze in winter and will serve as insulation. More sand will get spread out on the main garden path before it gets covered over in pea gravel. If there is still sand left after that, well, we’ll worry about it when we get there.

Once we get the sand raked into a tidy pile, Bookman will begin going over the compacted dirt with a shovel and fork to loosen it up. Then we will plant buckwheat as a ground cover and mulch that under in September and seed hairy vetch and oats as ground covers that will sprout first thing in spring. The idea is to keep the weeds down and to improve the soil. Wish us luck!

Biking
I am not trying to kill myself, I’m really not. I crashed again yesterday. This time it was totally me being stupid. I was on the last leg of my ride coming from a street bike lane to an off-street bike trail (it strikes me now that I have difficulty with transitions) and hit the curb. The curb has a very narrow cutout that is still kind of high. I have successfully navigated it a number of times and cursed it every time. Yesterday I was going too fast and not paying attention. I missed the cutout and smacked right into the curb. I knew it was going to happen a spilt second before it did. I do not know how to pop my front wheel up off the pavement. I don’t know that even if I did I would have been able to react fast enough for it to save me. Nonetheless, Bookman has promised to teach me how to do this.

So, I hit the curb. The good news is I did not go over the handlebars. The bad news is I still got pretty banged up. Last week when I fell on the gravel I was going slow and the scrapes were pretty minor in spite of the blood, and are actually almost completely healed. Yesterday I managed to scrape my shoulder, elbow, knee and shin. There is quite a lot of skin missing. When I got home I saw my elbow and shin each had a big lump developing. We had no cold packs in the freezer so I used a bag of frozen corn on my shin and a bag of frozen peas on my elbow. This was very effective and the lumps have gone away. The scrapes are tender but they will be healed soon enough. My knee, however, is one very large scab that will take a few weeks to have skin again.

Far from feeling badass, this time around I feel like an idiot. The repetitive motion of cycling is very relaxing to me even when I am working hard up a hill. On the flats, though, I tend to get meditative and have a bad tendency to zone out. This is not such a bad thing on a nearly empty bike-only trail. It is a very bad idea when there is a tricky route change.

Astrid is perfectly fine. Her chain came partly off which panicked me a bit because I do not know how to put a chain back on a bike. But since it was only partially off, it was not hard to fix. Poor Astrid. She’s a trooper she is.

All that happened with less than half an hour to home. And in spite of it, it was a really good ride. I am still Queen of the Mountain on the one Strava segment and I even managed to beat my time by five seconds. Someone else had created a segment within that long segment, a particular hill, and I am sixth overall. Woo! I am a very competitive person, in case you haven’t noticed. I’ve not had anything over which to compete for a very long time (competitive vegetable growing just doesn’t do it for me, I really don’t care who has the biggest carrot) and cycling has awakened those urges. I am not interested in racing though, I am perfectly happy competing with myself and the likely never to meet them cyclists on Strava. It is good motivation and makes me work harder to improve my stamina and strength.

Aside from Bookman teaching me how to lift my front wheel, the thing I am really focused on at the moment is pacing on hills and for distance. I have a tendency to attack the bottom of the hill and then run out of steam about halfway. Same with a long ride, I ride fast early and then the second half is nothing but slog because I have used up all my energy. I read an article in a cycling magazine that says when going up hills to keep a steady pace throughout. Also, shift before you need that next lower gear, not when you find yourself mashing the pedals as hard as you can. I practiced this yesterday and you know what? It really works!

As far as pacing during the whole ride, I discovered yesterday that a mix of music is a great assist. Don’t worry, I don’t put my ipod earbuds in my ears, I am not that dumb and it is illegal. No, I wrap the earbuds over my ears and turn up the volume — musical earrings. Bookman tells me that it isn’t loud enough for others to really hear anything other than a low buzzing sound which is much quieter than the young men on the train who have their earbuds in and the music blasting so loud I can hear the lyrics. So the music mix helps with pacing. I have fast songs and slow songs and somewhere in the middle songs. When the slow songs come up I get to have a more relaxed pace. When the fast songs come up I pedal faster without even having to think about it. When I finished my ride yesterday I was hurting from my fall but I was not really tired like I had been before. So I count this as a big success.

When I ride with Bookman or on a group ride, I do not take music, music is for when I am out alone. Pacing is easier when I am with other people I find. When I am alone I have no one to compare myself to, no outside perspective. The music seems to have solved that problem. Plus, there is no way I won’t get up a hill with Ricky Martin’s She Bangs playing through my musical earrings

Yup, Ricky Martin. I have a number of his songs on my ipod. He is great workout music. Don’t worry I have more current songs too. Walk the Moon is also great and P!nk is always fantastic. And for a slower or more moderate pace Indigo Girls and Sia work pretty well. I have 15 hours of songs on my ipod, I put it on shuffle and let them fall where they may. Except on the hilly sections of my rides, I always skip around and make sure I have a fast beat.

My cycling goal for the coming week? No crashes!

Filed under: biking, gardening Tagged: beach volleyball, Carrot greens are edible too go figure, chickens, crash test dummy, radish greens are edible who knew?, the garage is finally destroyed and now it is on to reclaiming the land from car culture, uncooked elderberries are toxic

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With Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman out next month after a 55 year wait, gaps between (the publication of) sequels are the talk of the town. After all, we readers all love it when a great book has a sequel that we can dive into, sparing us the loss of having to leave a new world behind, allowing us to continue being part of a landscape we’ve fallen in love with.

Some gaps between children’s books and their sequels are very large indeed: There were more than 50 years between Heidi and the first publication of Heidi Grows Up, in excess of 90 years between Peter and Wendy and Peter Pan in Scarlet, and 102 years between Five Children and It and Five Children on the Western Front.

But hang on – in each of these cases these sequels were written after the original author had died.

What about story arcs which have been returned to by the original author after a considerable period of time? 18 years went by between the publication of the third and forth volumes of Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea series (The Farthest Shore in 1972 and Tehanu in 1990). 23 years after Richard Adams penned Watership Down (1972), he returned with Tales from Watership Down (1996). Alan Garner finally completed his Weirdstone trilogy with Boneland almost 50 years after the second book in the series, The Moon of Gomrath (1963).

It’s not just novels which are sometimes returned to after a long gap. There are several cases where picture book sequels have appear a considerable time after a first book about a given character. There were 9 years between the debut Winnie the Witch (by Valerie Thomas and Korky Paul) and Winnie in Winter (1996). Despite a slow start, there are now 15 books in the series!

There was an even longer passage of time between the first Elmer book by David McKee and the second outing for Elmer although they weren’t quite sequels; Elmer was first published in 1968 and 21 years later a re-written, re-illustrated version came out with a different publisher (Andersen), essentially as a new book. More easily identified as sequels, Chris Van Allsburg’s Jumanji and Zathura were also published 21 years apart.

But the longest gap I can find in the world of picture books, when it comes to time elapsed before a sequel appeared, is 47 years. Rosie’s Walk by Pat Hutchins first appearing in 1968. It’s been 47 years in the coming, but this year finally saw its sequel hit bookshelves, in the form of Where, Oh Where, is Rosie’s chick?

When we first met Rosie the Chicken we delighted as she walked about her farm, managing to avoid being captured by a wiley fox. Was she really entirely oblivious to the vulpine threat as she strutted about? Was the fox simply so stupid he only had himself to blame for his downfall? Great fun is had by the two stories running in parallel and yet intricately entwined. It’s a super joke – the fox isn’t ever explicitly mentioned, and yet without the fox there would be no story.

Fast forward nearly half a century and we meet Rosie just as her chick is hatching. Just as the chick tries to leave the nest, Rosie loses her little one. She searches high and low whilst the little chick faces threats from cats and fish and… yes, foxes, each time being saved serendipitously, by the un-knowing actions of her mum. It’s a funny read, with elements of slapstick, rounded off with reassurance (even the foxes appear only to have been playing family hide and seek), faithfully echoing the original palette and style of artwork. A little bit of nostalgia helps carry the the visual and written stories; the sequel’s ending doesn’t have quite the wicked joy of the original, but can nevertheless be enjoyed both those new to Rosie, and by old friends.

Inspired by Hutchins distinctive art we tried our had at making landscapes through which Rosie and her chick could wander. First we painted swathes and patches of various shades of green and yellow. Once these patches were dry we use leaf and fruit shaped stamps made from modelling clay (plasticine) to created repeated motifs on top of our blocks of colour. Once leaves and fruit were dry we went round the contours with a black permanent pen.

Hutchins herself creates her art in quite a different way creating the line drawings first and adding colour afterwards, but even so, our end results mirrored her landscapes rather pleasingly.

One of the lovely things about returning to Rosie years after I first met her is in the opportunity the sequel gives to reflect on how my life has changed since I first read Rosie’s Walk as a child, and years later shared it as a parent myself. There’s something very comforting about now having the story of Rosie’s chick to giggle over together with my own children. It’s a treat I suspect many parents and children, or even grandparents and grandchildren will enjoy.

But what about you? What sequels have you eagerly waited for? And what sequels (real or only dreamed of) are you or your children still waiting for?

My thanks go to Lisa Davies, Liz Cross and Clare Helen Walsh, Emma Layfield, Libby Hamilton and Ellen Duthie for help with some of the research for this post.

Disclosure: I received a free review copy of Where, Oh Where, is Rosie’s Chick? from the publisher.

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After a cold, wet and grey week it feels almost like summer outside this weekend. Saturday was about 70F/21C and today is 76F/24C! Rain followed by warmth and sun is going to jumpstart all things growing. I have tulip leaves pushing up through the mulch and a few eager perennials too. Next weekend will see me outdoors cutting back all the dead perennial stalks and clearing mulch off the low growing plants. I saw lots of people out in their gardens today while I was torturing Bookman with a bike ride, but it is too windy this afternoon to be out. My allergies were bothering me before the bike ride, they are worse now. To be outdoors getting dust and leaf mold up my nose right now would send me over the top. So, perhaps there will be a nice evening during the week to start work outdoors. If not, nothing horrible will happen if I don’t get to it until Saturday.

The bike ride this morning was wonderful. I don’t know how far we went because I accidentally hit the wrong button on my bike app and poof! our whole ride about three-quarters of the way through disappeared. We took some bike trails we had never been on before and took some wrong turns onto other trails and had to backtrack, so my guess is we rode 24 (38.6km), maybe 25 (40km) miles. The ride was originally mapped at around 23.5 miles (37.8km). The light breeze blowing when we began our ride soon turned into a 20 mph/32kmh wind. And it seemed like we were always riding into it. There were a few times it blew as a cross wind, which made for some interesting riding when it would gust. If you were watching me and didn’t know better, you might have thought I was riding while intoxicated! Bookman was not too keen on the wind but I kind of liked it even though it made my nose run even more because of my allergies. It was a good opportunity to practice balance and get bonus workout points.

But back to the garden. Most of the seeds I’ve been planting since the beginning of March are doing well. The peppers didn’t germinate in profusion, but there are some and some is better than none, right? All the seed starting is pretty much done except for sunflowers and the only reason we start those ahead of time is because the squirrels dig up the seeds. Those I will start next weekend. And I just realized, that if the weather continues warm this week, and it looks like it might, I will be able to seed lettuce, peas, radishes, spinach and other cool weather veggies in the garden next weekend. Woo! I had better figure out what my seeds are and where they are going this week!

Bookman will have a couple different contractors out during the week to look at our garage and give us estimates for tearing it down. We were out measuring today to get an idea of how big the space is so I can figure out how many shrubs to purchase at the plant sale for planting along the fence we will be putting up along the alley. The space is so much bigger than I thought it was! It looks tiny with a big one-and-a-half-car garage on the site, but take that down, replace it with a 7.5 x 7 foot shed (2.3 x 2m) and a chicken coop and run that will be about 5 x 10 feet (1.5 x 3m) and Bookman guesstimates we will have about 200 square feet (61m) of additional garden space! Squee!

It won’t all be planted though. There will be a gravel path between the shed doors and the gate in the fence and there will be gravel around the chicken coop for ease of access and what-not. However, there will still be a lot of additional garden to grow in. Do I need to tell you how much fun I am having planning this space? I am calling it the Chicken Garden because I am designing it so the chickens can free-range in this little garden without having access to the bigger vegetable garden. It is going to take a lot of work because I expect after being buried under concrete for sixty years, the soil is going to be pretty compacted and fairly dead. Roaming chickens will certainly help improve it much faster, however.

I have also decided that when we are building the coop over the summer, we will build it with a green roof. Mine won’t be exactly like this but you get the idea. I borrowed a book from the library called Small Green Roofs to help us figure out how to build it. The roof will have to support the extra weight of all that soil, which requires some extra structural pieces. In addition to looking pretty, a green roof will keep the coop cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter. How fun is that going to be?

Can you tell how excited I am about all the planning? The actual doing will start soon. Stayed tuned!

Filed under: gardening Tagged: chickens

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No, it’s not a robin, I’ve seen a few of those already.

I’ve been starting new flats of seeds every week since the end of February and they are all coming along nicely. The onion sprouts were the first and they are getting tall. The peppers came next. Those take a long time to even sprout and just this last week a few little pops of green gave me relief that something was actually happening. Last week was tomatoes and cabbage. Tomatoes take a bit of time but the cabbage has started coming up. Today was marigolds and parsley.

Was it last week I mentioned the cover to the mini greenhouse was no longer functional? One of the zippers was broken and the plastic has become brittle. It turns out you can order new covers without having to buy the whole set up. Thank goodness. I ordered a new cover Monday and, fingers crossed, it will be here in the next day or two. I now have four flats of sprouting pots that are getting difficult to manage and being able to use the greenhouse will solve all my problems.

The weather this weekend has been chilly. This morning we had rain and now it is sunny but so blustery the house is creaking. Of course the forecast for the coming week is gorgeous when I will have to be at work and indoors. Sigh. Tuesday night Bookman and I are signed up for a class at the bike shop to learn how to fix a flat tire. I can change a flat on a car but I have no idea how to fix a flat on my bike. Oh, and my new bike, she has a name now: Astrid. Bookman gives me odd looks when I talk about Astrid but I really don’t care!

I know real honest to goodness spring will be here soon because the Friends School Plant Sale catalog arrived in my mailbox Friday. I wasn’t expecting it until this week so it was a surprise. I was only going to look through the herbs in the first section of the catalog and save the rest for casual browsing throughout the weekend, but I was kidding myself. I couldn’t put it down and devoured the whole thing, gleefully marking off plants. I’ll take this and this and oh, doesn’t this sound nice? And yes, definitely one of those. And that, a must. And, hmm, where could I put one of these? Want to know what a happy Stef looks like? That was her reading and marking up the catalog.

All year long I keep lists of plants as I learn about them that I think I might like to try in the garden. So Saturday I got out all my lists and scraps of paper and sat down with the catalog again and marked things from my lists. There were quite a few items on my lists that are not in the catalog but that’s okay, there are also plenty of plants that were.

Then, of course, I had to think about the chickens and the chicken garden area where their coop is going to be. A friend of mine recommended a very good book called Free-range Chicken Gardens. It has lots of helpful advice in it. I had been wanting to plant elderberries and serviceberries in the garden but couldn’t figure out where I could plant these large-sized shrubs. Well, they make good hedges and places for chickens to take cover it turns out so now I have a place and a reason for them. Yay! Also, I have an excuse for a wild rose bush and more gooseberries, more prairie grasses and all sorts of other plants. All these I have dutifully marked in the plant catalog.

Now I just need to win the lottery jackpot so I can afford them all!

And poor Bookman. He says he knows nothing about gardening and asks I just point to where I want him to dig and tell him what to put there. He’s going to be doing a lot of digging.

Filed under: gardening Tagged: chickens, Friends School Plant Sale

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