Okay friends, time for the weekly list of accomplishments! I’m recording what I’ve done weekly, in the hopes that this practice will help keep me motivated and accountable. If you want to join in, please feel free to list your own weekly achievements in the comments, or if you have a blog and want to do your own post and link it up, that’s great too.
But! It’s not a race or a competition. We all just gotta do what we can, where we are, with what we have.
Planting & Maintenance
- Basic watering, weeding and training of stuff like tomatoes
- I had hoped to plant my greenhouse this week, but f*&cking rats made a tunnel straight through my greenhouse beds right after I cleaned them up so nicely. So now I have to wait to plant until after I deal with the rat highway. That sound you hear is me swearing copiously.
Harvested
- Lettuce
- Cooking Greens
- Strawberries
- Alpine Strawberries
- Honeyberries
- Red Currants
- Beets (from my neighbor)
- Snap Peas (from my neighbor)
Preserved
- Pressure canned pinto beans
- Canned strawberry vanilla sauce
- Pressure canned kid-friendly pasta sauce
- Cracked, whisked and froze 3 or 4 dozen eggs
Cooked
- Still trying to work the larder pretty hard for food. Lots of literal beans and rice. I really like beans and rice with fresh pico de gallo and a dollop of thick yogurt.
- Hot dogs. So, there are these grass-fed beef hotdogs at our local Costco right now. Between that and the new fire pit we built out back, and the sunny days that make it fun to cook and eat outside….well, many a hot dog has been grilled and eaten.
- Okonomiyaki. One of my kid’s favorites, and a great way to use up lots of eggs!
Animals
- Basic daily flock maintenance.
- Continue to adjust run time on duck tub filter to get as much cleaning as possible for as little electricity cost as possible.
- Snuggled with kitties.
Projects
- Stacked up about half of our delivered 3/5th cord of firewood
- Installed a second check valve in our water harvesting pump for better reliability
- Completed installation of replacement ductwork in crawl space. (We didn’t do this, we paid professionals to to do this. But it is, thankfully, done.)
Business, Finances and Frugality
- Over $360 per month of direct funding on my Patreon page. Completed the first Live Chat Q&A with my Patrons which was really fun. Doing our first video chat this evening. I lost my first Patron this week, which was sad but I probably just need to just expect these things to happen periodically as the page grows.
- We were better this week about logging our expenditures in GoodBudget. Despite the beans and rice I’m finding it difficult to keep grocery costs in line and I’m kinda pissed off about it. Probably all those grass-fed hot dogs.
Energy Use & Solar Panel Production
- Total electricity used: 171 kWh (Much better than last week. Phew!)
- Total solar energy produced: 173 kWh (= $92.95 in production incentive)
- Energy “sold back”: 2 kWh ($.20 in net production)
- Total earned through our solar panels this week: $93.15
Homeschool
- Nick completed the homeschool physical sciences course he teaches
- Bella finalized her proposal for her summer history humanities project – a research paper and map on the history and significance of the colonies of Ancient Greece
- We finalized end-of-year administrative stuff with our partner school
- If you missed it, here is why we homeschool
Planned & Researched
- Meh. Not a lot of forward thinking this week that I can remember. It was a pretty full week, and I spent all my downtime watching the 5th season of House of Cards.
• • •
Well, if it makes you feel better about what you didn’t get done…..
I can’t do ANYTHING in my garden right now, because Tree Swallows claimed a nearby nesting box, which they’ve done before, but THIS year apparently my garden is to close to their nest. The chicks hatched early this week. I’m now not allowed in my garden. If I try to do anything in the garden I get dive-bombed by the pissed off parent Swallows……
I guess I’m going to have to move that nesting box……
Oh no! That’s so Hitchcock. 😮
Previous years they’d usually decide the row closest to them is to close, and that I could live with, I’d just make sure that whatever got planted there was low maintenance, and could be ignored for a week+ if need be. But this year…..*sigh* I like the Swallows too, they eat mosquitos, and deer flies, and other annoying flying insects! But they don’t get to claim my whole garden either!
We’ve finally reached the time of year that the electricity bill disappears…thank you solar!
Harvested: peas, red currants, strawberries, goumi ( !!!! ) . Goumi seems to freeze really well…little cold astringent gems.
Still working in Zones 0 – 1.
Continued to weed and mulch food hedge.
Cleaned out fridge…fresh start.
Frugality – finishing home repairs on refrigerator this week.
Can I just say that being 9 months pregnant in June means you get Jack shit done…my garden isn’t even in which I am very upset about. This belly makes bending over nearly impossible…im beginning to like raised beds even more.
You’re growing a human. I think that counts.
Just got off the waiting list and assigned to a plot at my community garden this week! Thereafter, I accomplished . . . a lot of weeding. I am also very sore now, so I doubt I’ll get much more done this weekend. Maybe I’ll have things to harvest in another decade or so.
Um, I did some weeding. This is the quiet time between planting and harvesting for me. We are starting to work on some tree pruning. I made a rhubarb pie. But really, it’s the calm before the storm right now.
I have some requests for future posts, if you’re so inclined. Freezing eggs – I noticed you do this. Tell us more about how you do this to keep them yummy and accessible and easy to use!
But most especially – energy use and solar panel production. I want to know everything you have to say about this. I’m in Canada, so things might be different, but I’m thinking the basics will be similar. At least the terminology should be. What exactly is “production incentive.” And how does $.20 in net production equal $93.15 earned? I’m missing something here. Would love to know more!
Re: budget – it’s totally those grass fed hot dogs from Costco. Those things are pricey!
I need to get back into sausage making. Back when we lived in Wisconsin we would buy and process up to a whole hog (a half hog is much more reasonable – learn from my foolishness) and I got pretty good at making sausage. I’ve got this cool hydrolic sausage stuffer that uses running water to push the mixed sausage into casings. I had a couple of fails (the most spectacular was when I added uncooked pineapple to sausage – it “broke” the meat and made holes in the casings) but mostly it was fun and frugal.
Returned from vacation to find 6 heads of broccoli and peas about 2 ft higher than when we left.
Harvested (yea! I have a column)
6 heads broccoli
lettuce
strawberries (both wild and cultivated)
Garden maintenace:
took the first steps to take back the very overgrown flower bed – weed wipped large sections and put down black plastic around the plants I want to save
Animals:
Gotta check bees tomorrow when there’s daycare. toddlers and beekeeping doesn’t mix
Cooking:
No knead bread
granola bars
Don’t even want to go into the budget item but a week with grandparents is priceless right?
I got bees!!
And on a side note, there’s a farm with Highland cattle a few kilometres from my place. I drive past them on my way to town. Have to stop and admire every time!
I’m jealous. 😀
Planted:
Fall cabbage seeds, hopefully not too early for them. I’ve been struggling with fall garden planting in terms of timing when to start seeds, and am definitely going to run out of space.
Harvested:
All the bolting arugula, mint, peas
Garden:
Got some tomatillo starts from a friend.
Housemate ended up not using the second raised bed in the yard, so I weeded it, added compost, and transplanted the tomatillos! We’ll be adding more cherry tomatoes as well courtesy of husband’s generous coworker and his endless tomato starts.
Preserved:
Made strawberry vanilla jam (almost 4 half pints)
Made and froze more arugula pesto
Dried a handful of mint
Frugality:
Joined a neighborhood tool library and borrowed a weed whacker for the out-of-control lawn. Very excited to have access to a wide variety of tools that I don’t need to buy or store!
Been doing an unintentional eat-down-the-larder month. Haven’t been to the grocery store in a while, yet somehow dinner gets made.
Broke out the superglue and made some repairs. My $10 sunglasses live to work another day!
Just joined on Patreon, hope that makes up for s/he who jumped ship. 🙂 been meaning to, finally clicked the button.
The garden is a fail for the 4th year running… first year–“WTF are wireworms?” Second year–“the invasion of the killer bunnies” (without the cool Monty Python humor); third year–3 surgeries in 19 months does not a productive garden make; this year–feeling good, ready to tackle reclaiming my space! Until: “rat-pocolypse!!” (and moles, voles, mice, chipmunks, etc) followed by, “when your fence falls over and the deer find your strawberry patch, fixing the fence does not get rid of the deer–damn can they jump!”. I’ve decided to focus on infrastructure: water; trellises, a bigger damn fence. Debating barn cats for rodent control, but not sure how outdoor kitties and garden will mix. Next year I swear I will actually grow food. Would love to hear how you’re tackling the rodent problem, we’re infested and I won’t use poison. Traps are my current weapon of choice, with cats as a possibility. They’re not in the house, thankfully. Just the garden.
This week I weeded random perennial beds, scowled fiercely at my rodent-infested raised beds, and chased deer with a pitchfork–my neighbors probably think I’m batshit crazy, and I feel that way sometimes. My daughter starts kindergarten this fall, and I have no idea how I’ll function with all the new free time. But I’m debating homeschooling, so that might be short lived. Cheers!
Thank you Staci! For rats, we are with you on control – I did a zillion hours of research and pretty much old fashioned snap traps are still the best way to kill rodents. We are trying another thing we saw online – it’s like a roller that you put in a 5 gallon bucket half full of water and you bait the center of the roller. In theory, the rats or mice walk to the middle of the roller for the bait and flip off into the bucket where they drown. So far it has not worked, but we are still playing with it because the video I saw of it was really compelling. I’ll do a Patreon video talking about the bucket thing if we get it to work.
A bit off-topic, but why do some articles allow comments and others don’t? Is there a time limit on commenting?
Yes, in order to cut down on the workload related to the massive amount of spam comments that I get on this site, I turned off comments on articles older than…I think it’s 1 month. At last glance there were about 3/4 of a million spam comments that have been filtered. Most of it gets caught in my great spam filter without me having to do anything, but even a fraction slipping through becomes a serious pain.