On Friday I shared with you a wild turkey egg that Matt had found while walking with Baxter. On Saturday while clearing one of our very over-grown areas, I found turkey eggs.
Look at these.
From the looks of the nest and the feel of the eggs, these are not from this season.
I’m a bit dismayed that this clutch was obviously not successful. But I’m ecstatic that I got to see this nest.
Ahh, I need some birds of my own.
My husband knows me well. He found this wild turkey egg while he was walking Baxter and carried it home for me.
Little things like this bring both of us so much joy now that we’re living on the farm.
It’s broken, and it’s so early in the season that I don’t think we have a little poult running around. But perhaps it’s still early enough that a mama turkey may be out there somewhere on this Mother’s Day weekend.
Happy Mother’s Day to all of the moms–human, avian or other. I hope that you have a special weekend.
My office. A space that’s completely my own. The last bedroom in our house. It’s done. And I’m so happy with how it turned out.
While I’ve used the word “office” to describe this room, it’s really a sewing, crafting, creative space.
It’s filled with the things that I like to do. The things I like the most and that mean the most to me (Bill!). I love that I now have an organized room that I enjoy being in.
This wall used to be filled with boxes that had been packed since we moved in five years ago. Now, the thrifted china cabinet holds sewing and knitting supplies, magazines and memorabilia–and keeps them all organized.
Growing up, I never won a trophy. When we were dating, I mentioned this to Matt. One fall, after I ran my first 10K, Matt presented me with a huge trophy. It meant so much to me that he did that. However, the trophy was truly huge. I took it apart and then put it back together in a slightly smaller configuration, and it fits easily on the shelves.
Reconfiguring the closet was also hugely helpful to keep everything organized. Hanging up my big pieces of fabric makes it easy to see what I have and ensures that I’m more likely to use them.
When it came to art, I wanted to display some of my favourite things–like this collection of vintage hats. My Mom taught me how to sew. She learned from her mother–the original owner of most of these hats. In fact, my great-grandmother made one of the hats that is hanging on the wall.
I love the idea of a time where people regularly dressed up to go out, and hats were part of the outfits. I don’t live in that world, but I can still enjoy these hats by having them on display.
The gallery wall is another showcase of my favourite things.
The same grandma that taught my Mom to sew also had a collection of Red Rose Tea figurines. Often when we were leaving her home after visiting, she would give us a figurine to take home. A few years ago, I decided to collect a full set of the nursery rhyme statues. Between gifts and flea markets, I got every one. However, I’ve never had a place to display them. Now I do–along with a fun photo of my Mom and I modeling some of the hats.
Another small collection that is finally on display is my thimble collection. Matt’s parents travel a fair amount, and my MIL buys a china thimble for me pretty much everywhere they go. I made a really small shelf to go above my sewing machine, and it holds all of the thimbles perfectly.
A magnetic strip from Lee Valley, painted the same colour as the wall, holds sewing instructions where I can easily see them as I’m working.
While I’m not an official participant in the One Room Challenge, which concludes this week, it definitely helped motivate me to finish off this room. I love that every item on my to-do list is crossed off.
You can check out all of the official ORC participants at Calling it Home.
There are so many little details that make this room work really well for me. And I love the beauty and the sentimentality that I was able to incorporate as well. While the ORC motivated me to finish the office, the room itself is now motivating me to keep crafting. I’ve returned to some projects that have been hanging around for a little while and had a super productive sewing month where I’ve churned out a dress, jacket and several pillows. I’m excited by what else this room is going to inspire.
Thanks for following along on the makeover. Do you have a crafty creative space at your house? What helps motivate you to finish projects–whether big like a room makeover or smaller crafts? Do you have a favourite collection on display?
Things are a bit wet around here. We’ve had rain on and off for about two weeks. And last week, the rain was pretty steady.
The ground is completely saturated.
Had this been a year ago, we would have been soggy inside as well as out. Our big (and expensive) project last summer was waterproofing our basement. However, when I last reported on the project back at the start of September, we had just found puddles in two of the rooms that we waterproofed. We were so disappointed.
After talking it over with our contractors, we decided to go with a wait and see strategy.
So this extremely wet spring is our test.
And I’m pleased to say that our basement is passing.
I don’t know what was up last fall, but this spring, when we’re basically immersed in a bog, inside of the house is nice and dry.
Phew.
The sump pump has been running fairly regularly for about a month. Over the weekend, it was running about every one and a half minutes.
You may remember that we elected to waterproof from the inside. There are a couple of little “hatches” where we can access the weeping tile that the contractors laid around the foundation. Checking them out, we found water in the pipes. But the pipe is doing its job and funneling the water to the sump pump.
I’m so relieved that everything is working the way it’s supposed to and that we have a dry house this spring.
How’s the weather where you are? Have you had any water issues this spring?
Forty solar panels. Three years. $0.396 per kWh.
Grand total so far? $12,614.13.
It’s been three years since we turned on our solar panels. As I’ve done for the last two years, I’m looking back at how much income we have generated. Here’s the summary from our first year and from last year.
As a reminder, we’re part of Ontario’s microFIT program. Under this program, we installed solar panels, and then the power that we generate goes back into the provincial grid. We have a 20-year contract where the province pays us $0.396/kWh. You can read about the whole saga of Going Solar here.
The grand total that we made on our solar panels last year was $4,519.09–close to the previous year’s $4,473.91 but up just a little.
Here’s the comparison over the last three years.
After a dismal January–seriously, in the whole month we had less than 50 hours of sunlight–things started to brighten up. We even had a few days of double digit income in February, which is a very good day in the winter.
Beyond looking at the income we generate on its own, the other check I like to do every year is comparing the income we’ve generated to what we’ve spent on hydro. This year, we came out ahead by $828.06.
It is such a nice feeling to know that our electrical bills are essentially covered.
The solar panels were a big investment three years ago. We’re still looking at about 6 more years before we’ve generated as much revenue as we put out for the panels and the install. However, we’re a third of the way in both time and money, so we’re right on track.
Also, our motivation in going solar is not solely financial. As nice as the money is, it’s equally as nice to feel like we’re making smart choices for the environment, for the future and for our little corner of the world.
Illinois is soggy for Sarah these days, so her gardening is on hold. But before the flood arrived, she got a great start on planting. She’s sharing some of the progress in her update today.
Julia may be “tiptoeing into the vegetable garden” at her house, but we have to wear muck boots in our garden right now.
Well, no I wouldn’t even attempt to step one foot in our garden. This morning before I wrote this post, our garden looked like this:
And they are predicting constant rain for the next 48 hours for our area with a total of 5 to 8 inches according to our local weather. So all of our gardening has been put on hold.
However, I want to share what we accomplished before the rain began.
We like to get our potatoes in the ground on Good Friday, and we were only a day late. On that Saturday we were able to plant potatoes, carrots, radishes, lettuce and kale. The next day we got a hard rain. We didn’t get much volume of water. It just fell hard.
I am learning every day about gardening and farming, and what I learned is the rain somewhat compacted the top layer of soil in the garden and then it dried. So when I went back to check on what I had planted a few days later there was a “crust” of soil on top of the seeds.
The radishes were able to break though but the more fragile plants like the carrots and lettuce were not able to break through the “crust.” It looks like we will be replanting those crops.
About a week later Steve and I got several more things in the ground.
We planted two holly trees.
Two cherry trees and four grapevines. Steve set three poles for our grape vines that we will eventually string with cable. Of course right now the vines are about 12 inches tall so not much support is require yet.
Three blueberry bushes.
Then we planted cucumber, sugar snap peas and new asparagus crowns in the garden.
I have planted trees before, and my mom has always taught me the importance of watering. In fact, she has told me, “water every day for a week, every week for a month and every month for a year.” So every day after work I made sure to do that.
Of course, I get a little break right now with all of this rain.
When it does dry up, I have a few plants ready to go.
I have some cabbage, bell peppers and tomatoes sitting near my window. I try to start tomatoes from seed every year and as I have mentioned before I really struggle with it. I had bought Black Krim and San Marzano seeds, and I have starts that are about 3 inches tall but they do not look very healthy.
A family friend of ours starts hundreds of tomato and pepper seeds every year and gives us nice healthy plants. I told her of my struggles and she said that she does use grow lights but she also plants by the moon. That is something that I have heard of but never attempted myself. I think I should really rethink that though when I look at her plants.
This year she brought Celebrity, Early Girl, Better Boy, Rutgers, Roma, Orange Slice, Sunny Boy, Jet Star, Brandywine and a cherry tomato.
We divide all of the plants up between my parents and my brother, so I have a small selection to plant at our house. I hope to mark all of the varieties clearly so that I can keep somewhat of a record of which varieties I like best. I love that she not only gives us strong healthy plants but also we get so many to choose from.
My mom also brought me a couple of Mr. Stripey tomato plants for my garden so we are going to have a rainbow of tomatoes to choose from this year.
Of course that is if we ever see dry ground again.
Oh, Sarah. That’s a ton of rain. Good for you for making so much progress, though. You have so many great plants. Hopefully the weather cooperates for you this year and you harvest a ton of great food.
My sidekick and I made some more progress in the office this weekend. To be truthful, my sidekick snored and snuggled his dinosaur. I made the progress.
Beyond making the office pretty, I want to make it useful, organized and tidy. Usually when it comes to storage, I make due with whatever freebies I can find–cardboard cartons, shoe boxes, containers destined for the recycling bin.
While sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. So for the office, I bought proper storage containers. Thanks to all of the sorting and tossing I’ve done, I didn’t need too many.
From a big cardboard box full of old school papers, I now have one–much smaller–plastic bin.
Six smaller containers hold all of my fabric remnants and fit perfectly into one of the cupboards in the china cabinet.
On the pretty side of the office makeover, I worked on the gallery wall. I’m actually not a huge fan of gallery walls. But I when I thought about everything that I wanted to display in the office, I realized that the best arrangement was to put them all together.
I am not a patient person, so I tried just laying it out on the floor and translating that to the wall. But it was hard to visualize. I traced each item onto paper and then taped them to the wall. I’m glad I took the time to map it out. It helped to finalize the layout–and realize that the initial placement was much too high.
Once I settled on the arrangement, I started hammering nails into the wall right away. But then I had to exercise some patience again. It was hard to get the pictures exactly where I wanted just by guessing where to place the nail. I took a minute to run downstairs and grab a paint stick and a screw. I don’t know why it took me so long to make this little tool. It made hanging the pictures so easy.
I’m excited to show you the final gallery wall and the rest of the office next week when the One Room Challenge concludes. You can check out all of the official participants at Calling It Home.
Do you have a gallery wall in your home? How do you handle storage? Who else has a lazy sidekick?
I’ve been avoiding the vegetable garden. Not out of a lack of enthusiasm. I want to be in the garden. But I’m trying to be strategic about where I spend my time right now. I want to finish the office and I want to give the flowerbeds some attention. The garden has to wait.
I’ve set May as my start date for any serious work in the vegetable garden. I say serious because I can’t deprive myself avoid it entirely.
There are a few things that needed to happen sooner.
First is unwrapping the grapes. I had covered our new vines in burlap last year hoping it would help them survive the winter. Now that the temperatures are warmer and the sun is shining, I wanted them to have the benefit of the nice weather. I’m still not entirely sure how many vines survived the winter, but I feel like at least a few are alive.
I planted a rhubarb plant that I stole from my parents’ garden. Rhubarb has been on my list for a few years, so it’s exciting to have our own plant finally. This plant seems quite happy. Transplanting early in the season is working very well for me this year. The ground is wet, temperatures are mild, sun is shining. I’ve been moving a number of plants around and they all seem to be thriving.
Matt and I cut up our seed potatoes. We planted our potatoes the first of May last year, and it worked out great, so we’re trying to get them ready. The cool thing about our potatoes this year is that except for one new variety our seed potatoes are all potatoes that we grew ourselves last year. We have Russian Blues, red and Kennebecs. The Kennebecs were our favourite last year and lived up to Karen’s hype. This year we’re adding Basin Gold, which are a big baking potato. Matt had bought these at the grocery store and they happened to sprout before we ate them, so into the garden they go.
I’m not sure where I read about this chitting technique, but this has worked for us the past few years. We cut the potatoes so that each chunk has about one eye. Then we let them dry out for a few weeks so that the potatoes don’t rot when we put them in the ground. I know people say these white stringy sprouts are not desirable, but they worked well for us last year and our plants seemed to grow faster.
Methinks we’re going to have lotsa potatoes.
The other exciting garden development–and one which I’ve done nothing for–is asparagus. It’s alive! Our scraggly little plants that we started from seed last year have begat a few slender stalks. Spindly might be a better term. A step up from scraggly, but not quite slender yet. Size does not matter in this case. The fact that they’re alive is a win.
We’re just a few days away from May, so my self-imposed hiatus will be coming to an end shortly. Then it’s full speed ahead on the vegetable garden. I’m excited with what’s to come next.
What gardening have you been doing? Do you have any transplant or potato growing techniques?
Maple trees are not known for their blossoms. But apparently bees know better.
I spent Sunday weeding the flower garden on the turnaround under a big maple tree. The air was filled with constant buzzing.
Looking up, I was entranced by the beauty of the buds.
Oooh, you’re in for a special blog post today. The next step in my office makeover was… wait for it… paperwork and filing. You can’t stand the excitement, right?
Paperwork may not be the most photogenic or interesting topic for a blog post. But it’s a fact of life, or at least a fact of my life.
I actually have some great systems to manage paper in my office. I’ve set these up over the last few years and they work pretty well for me. So even though I’m making over the office, I’m not making over absolutely everything.
This mail organizer is my main tool. As soon as the walls were painted, I reinstalled this right away. I only file paperwork a few times a year (all of our bills except for our credit cards are set up for automatic debits), so the piles of mail and bills grow and get messy. The organizer isn’t always tidy, but it avoids the piles.
Receipts live in a box in a drawer until I reconcile them with my statements.
You know we keep a pretty close eye on our finances. This reconciliation is one of the ways I do that.
Once everything is sorted, the papers go into our filing cabinet. The filing cabinet may not be the prettiest piece of furniture, but it’s very functional for us. I’ve seen some cool filing cabinet makeovers with paint, hardware and even fabric, so that may be something to consider for the future.
In the meantime, appreciate the nearly empty mail organizer.
The other paperwork I tackled was a huge box full of old schoolwork. As in from kindergarten through to university. Most of it ended up on the burn pile, but I kept a few things like report cards, class photos, my award-winning science project, a couple of memorable stories and this prophetic drawing.
Even for the things I didn’t keep, it was fun to look back. I could see how my teacher’s comments on my grade 12 English essays made me a better writer–she was a tough marker, but completely right. In the kindergarten folder, I found this mimeographed matching sheet.
On the back in my Mom’s hand-writing, it said “Julia’s first school test.” Awww.
Now that I have returned from memory lane, I’m looking ahead again on what’s left for the office. Here’s where I’m at:
We’re down to two weeks to go in this mini One Room Challenge. Remember you can check out the official ORC participants at Calling it Home.
How do you organize mail, bills, receipts and paperwork at your house? Have you gone paperless yet? Has anyone else kept old schoolwork?
Home on 129 Acres 