- I'm already thinking about next year's vegetable garden. It's exciting and also overwhelming and scary to me. This year I didn't get started pretty much until April, and I really could have started some cool-season crops earlier. Next year I want to get started earlier, and I want to do a lot more. One thing I am kind of thinking about is tearing out a lot of the front lawn to put in food. I'm thinking summer squash, winter squash, potatoes, garlic, onions and pole beans for next year... I just have this fear of failing and having a bunch of bare dirt instead of the pretty front lawn that we currently have. Fear of failure doesn't usually stop me, fortunately. It just makes me nervous. ;) In the long run, I'm kind of considering digging out the whole front lawn and just having garden beds (maybe raised beds...) with hazelnut shell paths. A few houses in our neighborhood have that, and I always admire it. We can do a bit more with our back and side yards, too, but there is a lot more shade in that area, so I'm thinking that our front yard might actually be where I focus a lot of my energy as we try to grow and preserve more of our food. We are also hoping to get grapes going on the back patio, and we want to put some dwarf fruit trees in pots on the driveway, too... We might be finished making our food forest before we die. Maybe.
- Today at Goodwill I finally found a stainless steel pot that is big enough to hold enough peaches/pears/tomatoes/etc to fill the seven quart jars that go into my canner. Last year the stove space was super tight because I had to use a smaller pot along with a large pan to hold all of the to-be-canned food. Add the giant canner and the little pot for sterilizing the lids... It was silly. I'm hoping to pick peaches next weekend for canning. Tomatoes should follow soon after.
- I want to make a food dehydrator before next summer. It makes a lot of sense to me to use the sun's energy to preserve food during the summer. Plus, you can pack more food in less space.
- Summer term is finishing up this week. I actually have really great students this term, but I am super ready for a break. I need to get ready for next term (which I hopefully can do in a week or so?), and then I should have about four weeks with no teaching responsibilities. Woo hoo!
- I just read a book about using bikes as transportation, and I have renewed my enthusiasm for being a bike activist. By that I mean that I'm going to continue biking more and more. Eventually, I'd kind of like to use my bike to go anywhere within 10 miles. Even more eventually, I think it'd be cool to not own a car. It's a goal of mine.
- It's also a goal of mine to a) make close friends in my area that I can hang out with regularly and b) start a food co-op in Hillsboro. One of those should happen sooner than the other.
- I am really concerned about our world's future. I kind of doubt that we'll cause our own extinction in the near future, but I can see us decimating our own population through our own haste and greed. You are welcome to think I'm silly and pessimistic, but people have done it before. If we can't even give up a little meat and use our cars a little less to help things out... It feels like science is going to have to grow in leaps and bounds or bad things are likely. Sorry, Midwest farmers. Perhaps the population can demand a less water intensive crop from you next year?
- I love being part of a CSA. I love getting food given to me every week and planning my meals around the vegetables we get. It can be a challenge especially since that just not how we usually do things in our society, but it's fun, healthy, and we're eating a lot of veggies.
- I have learned even more about money and budgeting since we entered the workforce and even more since we bought a house. I can see how people easily go into debt. It's a challenge to figure out how much money should go to different places. We finally figured out that, outside of our usual monthly spending, we needed to see how much money was leftover so that we could split it between a few categories: Putting extra money into the mortgage, retirement savings, saving for our next car (booooo... but our '95 Camry won't last forever and right now it's hard to imagine being without a car since there's no car-share available in Hillsboro and Matthew occasionally needs a car for his work... booooo), saving for house repairs/appliance replacements/etc, and then just a bit of savings for other things that may come up that we can't even anticipate. We figured it all out, and we made a spreadsheet so that we know how much money we have designated to different things. It's really helpful. We'll have to re-budget when I quit my teaching job to start my parenting job, but for now it's really nice to be intentionally putting away some money in these categories. I still spend time wrestling with how our resources are spent and wondering if we could do things better. I always hope that we are doing the right thing, being responsible, and helping others enough.
Thanks for reading the ramblings. As a reward, here's a picture of a pretty water lily from our pond:
0 comments:
Post a Comment