Bringing Etsy back! I am going to try and list something every day! Funds are needed for upcoming Top Secret vacation. I know my photos need help...but the products are awesome! Oh when will someone invent Sniff-O-Vision?

*drum roll*

I have finally chosen a major! I am going into marketing (no matter what you nay sayers say!). It's so nice to be able to check that to-do off my list! I am going to start attending the community college here in the Fall. Hopefully a lot of my credits from my last college will transfer! And then I plan on going to the university here to finish up. Yeah for decision making!

1 Million Pound Harvest

This growing season I am going to track what we grow (weight wise) and add our meager amount to the Freedom Harvest challenge. Think we can grow 200 pounds of food? Eh. Me either. But it's worth a try! I think last season our harvest was about a pound...
Here's to hoping this season will be better! To learn more about this challenge, and to participate, read about it here.

So far we have baby lettuce sprouts, morning glory (not edible, of course), some cauliflower...and I think that's about it.
Come on Spring!!

Finances

Money is something that is sometimes hard for people to talk about or even to be honest with themselves about. I know that it helps me immensely to be able to see where my money is going and why. I use Money to track my transactions at home, because I like to see the graphs and projections. The Boy uses a mix of Excel and Money (I'm not sure how he does it. Magic?) It is a huge goal of mine to work my way out of the debt that I have stupidly put myself in. Every week I track my progress and do the happy dance when the debt number is lower than it was the week before!

Wheels, kilns, and galzes! Oh my!

Oh yes. I was gifted with a potters wheel a couple days ago. Oh hell yes.

My mind has been a non-stop mash up of pottery ideas! Toothbrush holders, pitchers, soap dishes, mugs, bowls, my own glaze recipes, fermentation containers, sponge holders! Oh hell yes.
Rumor has it that a kiln is also on the horizon. I can hardly contain my excitement!

In other news....
I began a new etsy site yesterday for the new face of the wee soap company (which is soon going to have pottery added). Stay tuned for that unveiling.

Re-Branding

I'm considering re-branding the soap biz. I want a stream lined look, something memorable, something people will pick up and say "wow! I must have this" (OK, that last bit is what I always want). I'm thinking a Victorian meets steam punk look. Very feminine, but with teeth, as it were.
I am going to have to clean out all the soaps that are currently packaged with the old label/style. Last year I cleaned out the inventory with a huge ass sale on Etsy which was very successful! I'm thinking maybe 3 for $10 rather than $5 each. Stay posted! Fear ye not, I will come to some sort of decision!

I lack creativity when it comes to naming the soaps though. A thesaurus is my best friend.

Here is the current style:

(sorry about the blurry photo)

I really love the tree. It's just so...plain? boring? nondescript?

I need a new name. And new graphics. And new images. And new descriptions. Oh my! I'm open to the universe (or any humans) providing me with inspiration.

Skits off to play with fonts and inspiration

"Beans, Bullets, and Band-Aids"

Hard times have some flirting with survivalism. Interesting article. I want to stock up on our beans and rice supply in the very near future. Not because we are extremists. Rather, just to be prepared for any "uh ohs" in the near future. Beans and rice make a myriad of delicious dishes, they are cheap, and they have a very long shelf life. Once we get the garden producing more that just jalapenos, I will feel more confident in the availability of our food at home.
The article mentions SurvivalBlog. I think I will spend my day reading that. Information is power....and all

Weekend Update

Another relaxing weekend has come and gone.
We did more garden planning and research...two raspberries to go in the front courtyard area. The blueberry bush to go in the front yard. The blackberry to go behind one of the sheds. This coming weekend we are going to get a shovel (the last one died a very dead death), a wheel barrel, and some more steer manure to make the beds ready for their new berry friends.
We rearranged the living room (again), I think we have finally got the set up down. We desperately need more bookshelves! One day one of us may be crushed in a book avalanche!
Charlie got her teeth stuck on her collar during an attempt to link the thing off. The Boy gallantly saved her; he has the scabs to prove it. Her next collar is going to be leather (with a little skull and cross bones on it) since she trashes everything else!

AUTUMN BLISS RASPBERRY

Some of my favorite posts from this weekend in no particular order:
- I want a hypertufa grot! Like I need a new project ;) Thanks Little House in the Suburbs!
- Whole grain crackers would go great with creamy pinto soup!
- With a little help from my friends. Working dogs and a Beatles nod? You can't go wrong!
- Make your own apple cider vinegar, how cool is that? It seems to be a lot like making kombucha.

Catching Babies

I just finished a lovely book called Baby Catcher by Peggy Vincent. Brilliant book! I am considering going into the field of midwifery and this book was great for me. In it she share beautiful birth stories and birth stories that are sad and tragic. The novel chronicles her journey from a nursing student to a privately practicing midwife.

I believe this book helped nudge me more toward a job in midwifery. Who knows how many other nudges I will need to take that first step though.

"From Publishers Weekly
It was in nursing school at Duke in the 1960s that Vincent found her calling: delivering or "catching" babies. She moved to California and became a midwife, specializing in home births; over the course of 40 years, she brought some 2,000 babies into the world. There's a predictable plot structure to most of the stories she recounts: the initial meetings with the pregnant woman, the last-minute phone call once labor speeds up, the coping with contractions, the appearance of the baby's head, the wet newborn, the oven-warmed blankets, the celebratory meal afterwards. Despite the repetition, Vincent's account is a page-turner. It's not just the risk that something might go wrong (meaning a nail-biting trip to the hospital for an emergency cesarean), and not just the quirkiness of home birth settings (which can involve jealously raging house pets or leaky houseboats), but something inherent in the magic of birth itself. What sustains Vincent and her readers is this sense of standing ringside at the greatest miracle on earth. A solid writer, Vincent doesn't preach the virtues of unmedicated birthing; she just lays consistent stories of women doing it Christian Science moms, Muslim moms, spiritualist moms, lesbian moms, teen moms and just plain ordinary moms. With the midwife's axiom "birth is normal till proven otherwise" as a guiding principle, all these women have a chance to make childbirth a crowning moment in their own lives. Male readers may find this female-centered narrative off-putting, and mainstream readers might raise eyebrows at the inclusion of children in the birthing process, but Vincent addresses these issues fairly directly herself. Agent, Felicia Eth. (Apr.)Forecast: With appendices guiding readers to more technical resources, Vincent's latest baby is bound to be popular with women's health and alternative medicine readers. A cover blurb by Anne Lamott could break it out further."

Slide Show

Off topic, but I'm proud of myself...check out the new slide show on the right side of the blog! These are pictures from our wee urbanhomestead! Yeah!

Thinking Not Doing

1. Plan a garden:
I did more work on the tentative plan (Had to make room for the luffa, after all)
I put all the chicken compost that The Boy got via freecylce

2. Take a formal herbwifery calss:
Nope. I did do a lot of reading though.

3. Choose a major:
Eh. Not yet. The Boy and I did do a lot of talking about it last night though. So that is a start I guess...

4. Learn to tie-dye:
Gr. No. All the stuff is still sitting in the box by the backdoor though.

5. Organize soap lab:
I did a bit of work in there. Only to make room for the new and fun things I bought. I must stop buying things! On a positive note I did craft a wonderful hair mask :)

6-8.
Nope.

9. Exercise:
No :( The work I did in the yard has made my arms sore though. So that should count a little.

10. Getting into craft shows:
No. Maybe I'll look into that today.

Note to self: Have fewer irons in the fire.

Luffa

This morning I was reading the newest post over at Women Not Dabbling in Normal in which they are responding to a question regarding growing luffas. Wow. I've never even thought about the possibility of growing my own luffas! Following links and doing some Internet searching I came up with a couple more links. Here. And here.
It would appear that the zone we live in is just barely passable for growing luffa. I'm thinking about buying seeds from Local Harvest. Now we need to find a place for it to grow. They need a strong trellis to grow their up to 20' tendrils on. Eek. I'm thinking maybe it could grow over the sheds in the back yard? I don't know how easy it would be to harvest them though. We need more wall to grow all the fun plants on! I'm wary of growing something that may become invasive near our neighbors, as a courtisy thing. I guess they could have their own luffas too though.
I think having home grown luffas for sale along with our handmade soap would be wonderful!

Luffa fruit and flowers from Outdoors-Magazine.com

A ripe/cleaned luffa and some seeds from Rasta Seed.

Luffas are also good at cleaning dishes and other surfaces. One less thing that we would have to buy!

Solar Fiesta

The Boy and I went to the 9th annual Solar Fiesta over the weekend. There were some very interesting booths, and some not so interesting. I love how people have adapted the suns energy for various uses. The Solar Oven, for example, very cool (unless you get blinded by them, then it's not so cool). Breeze Dryer had a booth, very cool stuff. Santa, if you are reading this...I want this one :) or this one. Those are some heavy duty clothes lines!! Ban the dryer, use the wind and sun to dry your clothes! We also met some people from the local Vegetarian and Vegan group. It's always nice to meet people with similar interests. Their pot lucks sound interesting.

Definitely lots of food for thought and ideas for the future!

Trench Composting

This year we have put all of our soil amending efforts into one of the two veggie beds the house came with. We've airated (we needed to use a pic axe because the soil was so compacted), we've added steer manure and organic mushroom compost. The Boy is on his way to pick up several garbage bags of chicken compost so we can finalize the first veggie bed for the winter.

For the second veggie bed we are going to try trench composting. We've chosen this method because we don't need that second veggie bed for next year (baby steps and all), and we still have a lot of kitchen scraps that the worms can't possibly eat it all.

Photo: Those are our two veggie beds this summer while we were trying to figure out what to do. In the forefront is the bed we have concentrated our work on (ignore the weeds, they are no longer there) to the right is the second bed in which we will be trying trench composting. In the far right top corner (barely visible) is our main compost heap, that should be ready for use this summer.

Quoted from Florida's Online Composting Center-
"Trench Composting is a relatively straight-forward method of composting directly in the soil. This method does not require a bin. Simply dig a trench 8 inches deep in the garden area, fill with 4" of kitchen scraps and backfill with soil.

After a few months, the material will have decomposed sufficiently for planting above the compost trench. For large amounts of material, consider roto-tilling the material into the soil, and waiting a season before planting.

The advantages of trench composting include ease of implementation and its ability to handle kitchen scraps without attracting pests as readily as in sheet composting.

The disadvantages of trench composting include slow rate of decomposition and potential for pests to excavate trenches. Additionally, if the raw materials contain weed seed or plant pathogens, these undesirables will not be destroyed in the trench composting process.

A variant of trench composting was taught to the pilgrims by the Native Americans. You may have heard the story of how Squanto showed the pilgrims how to fertilize their corn crops by burying fish scraps underneath the corn. As the fish composted, nutrients were released for the crop"

More info:
Instructable- not a lot of info, but there is some
Horticulture Blog
Mother Earth News- article on general composting, touches on the trench method

A picture of trench composting from Garden Organic

Now we (I mean The Boy) has to dig a trench so we can get started!

Thinking Not Doing: Week 4

Goals:
1. Plan a garden.
-The Boy planted the bamboo (pictures to come)
-While he was amending the soil for the bamboo I found a cache of more morning glories. I have no idea where they have come from but they have the most beautiful purple flowers.

2. Take a "formal" herbwifery class.
-I brought several Sage Woman and The Essential Herbal magazines that Cory gave me. Both have amazing information and inspiration.

3. Choose a major, and act on that choice.
-The Boy and I have been talking about opening an all vegetarian restaurant. I think that would be a wonderful project, but not one we are ready for at this time.

4. Learn to tie dye.
-I'm really slacking on this goal. All the materials are in a box next to the back door, I just keep putting it off for some reason.

5. Organize the soap lab, and make space for an herbal lab.
-I went on a "cleaning out the cupboards" over the weekend on a couple products I am making for swaps. That helped a bit.

6. Replace our current refrigerator.
-Nope

7. Learn to can and preserve food.
-I made and canned mustard yesterday. I think I must have done something wrong though because it is as thin as water. I took a lot of photos so hopefully I will have them up some time this week.

8. Get 24/7 off the ground.
-Voted on logo colors.

9. Exercise four days a week.
-I'm so embarrassed about this goal. We did yoga for about five minutes on day. I spent some time weeding. That's about it though.

10. Be a vendor for two more shows.
-I still haven't heard from the woman I emailed last week. I think it's safe to assume I didn't get in. I wish she would email me so I would know for sure.

More Progress

I love when things start clicking into place
The Boy, as I type, is off to pick up our new rain barrel! The prospect of harvesting our own rain to feed our plant friends is so exciting!
We also ordered the bamboo (Semiarundinaria yashadake) for our privacy screen. It will be so nice not to have little kids yelling at us and watching our every move when we are outside.
And I am working on a master-ish to-do list for fun things we need to do around the house. Go lists!

Cob Oven

I've been browsing the internet for cob oven instructions and information after seeing one on The Path To Freedom site. Isn't it beautiful?
I found some instructions on the Instructable website here. In the article keeps referring to Kiko Denzer's book, which, lucky for me, my local library has! I'm so excited at the prospect of having my very own outdoor cob oven.
Here are some photos of artistic cob ovens built by Kiko Denzer and others for inspiration.

















Here is an adorable toad shaped oven from cobcottage.com



















And a snail from the same site



Another frog oven from ranchomastatal.com


I'm sensing a frog theme. This cute oven is from cobworks.com


I love the mustache! This creative cob oven comes from appropedia.org

And lastly, here is a great article on a community center putting in there cob oven. Southern Cross Permaculture Institute and their oven.

Self Sufficiency

I was over reading at Path to Freedom this morning and happened across their self-sufficiency graph. What a clever way to set goals, and see the progress. I decided to make my own and fill it using theirs as a guide line. Very revealing! We're 50% and above (if not 100%) on most things....except agriculture. We pretty much flopped that category. Hopefully, with all the garden plans for next season we will be able to change that. I plan on making a new graph for each season (I'm a graph and list geek) to track our "progress". Self-sufficiency is very high on our list of goals!