mercy!

 

Alright.  Enough already with the rain.

 

 

 

ode to my clothesline

 

We’ve been one year without a clothes dryer and I’m doing just fine, thank you.   

 

Lots of people around here, especially the longtime farm folks, have a clothesline strung up outside and during the summer especially,  I’ll see sheets hanging outside, or jeans.  The thinking, I believe, is that line-drying is for fabrics that feel good if they are crisp.  Things that might have been starched in the days before permanent press ™.  I’m on a quiet little one-woman crusade in my neck of the woods to get people to just hang out all their laundry, for Pete’s sake. 

 

First off, I hang out everything.  T-shirts, underwear, towels (gasp.  But it’s true), socks, etc.  And we live in a cloudy, humid state.  We are way up north–parts of Canada are south of me.  Yet, even without constant sun, this is not a problem. Sometimes I have to leave things out there for two days, and sometimes I get sloppy and leave them out during a rainstorm, to no ill effect.  (It’s fine, incidentally, if wet laundry freezes during the winter.  So long as it thaws out during the day, it will dry, and no one will be any the wiser). 

 

I like how line-dried clothes smell.  I like thinking that the sun and wind and elements are killing whatever little bacteria survived the nurturing bath in my washing machine.  I like knowing that clothes last longer when they aren’t beat up in the dryer.  No more trying to remember to turn off the dryer when I run out or go to bed so as not to inadvertently burn down my house if the lint catches on fire.  (Obscure chance, I know, but it used to worry me). 

 

And for those of us on the Family Laundry Plan–no more dryer back-ups.  You know, when you are doing six loads in a row because you haven’t done laundry all week (because you’re a lazy housewife, yep), and the first load was jeans and it is taking forever and ever to dry, and consequently you’ve got a load of wet whites waiting to go in, and another one in the washing machine….  So you are chained to the laundry room all day long.  If you have a great big clothesline like mine, you can just pop each one on to the line as it comes out.  I have a big washing machine, and I can fit four loads on the line.         

 

But really, those are just little reasons.  Mostly, I like line-drying because I enjoy standing out there (yes, even in December) with clothespins in my mouth, pinning up my laundry.    It’s meditative work.  It’s all hippie clichés, fresh air, birds singing, usually no children clamoring for one thing or another.  Just me and my little job. 

 

It’s one of those mindful things.  It’s just not worth burning up coal or propane to get my clothes dry.  I’m out there among all of the rest of the beings in our patch, the birds and the little skittering creatures and the grasses and trees, reminded that we all share this gorgeous place. 

 

For those of us raised with the idea that dryers are Labor Saving and Convenient and a Veritable Tool of Feminist Liberation, it’s initially difficult to open ourselves up to the possibility that line-drying is pretty darn easy, relaxing (!), and more hygienic than a big expensive metal box.  But there you have it.  It is.

 

And I’m saving a ton of money.   Something like a 30% reduction in the electricity bill from this modification alone.  Clothes driers are energy pigs.         

amazing, but true

We got rain. 

 

I made it happen.  I stood out there yesterday afternoon, in despair, watering my plants with the hose for about an hour and a half.  Then presto, change-o, storms swung up from the southwest and we got a gorgeous, gentle rain.  For hours.

 

No problem.  Happy to do it for everybody.  I’d do it again….

 

(It is strange how superstitious I get about the weather now that I’m farming.  I can understand why many agricultural peoples and cultures worshipped  Rain gods and the Sun god, and why they were even willing to sacrifice children and maidens to placate them.   I understand that usually these were children and maidens captured in raids on their enemies…but still.  That’s pretty big mojo.  I’m not willing to go that far, of course.  But I will engage in a little hose-watering if that’s what it takes to make the Rain Gods smile down upon me and my tomato and bean plants). 

weather dot com

 

It’s almost summer here in southeast Michigan, which means that it’s time to start watching the thunderstorms go sliding by Just to the North and Just to the South of us.  And I’m not entirely kidding.  It’s like we’re in some horrible little drought valley.  I promise you,  I’ll call my friend Teem several times this summer, a woman who lives on a farm about three miles northeast of here, and ask her, did you just get that rain?, and she’ll, yes, we did, and it was great, a real soaker, we really needed that, didn’t we?  And I’ll say, yeah, except we didn’t get it over here, and I’ll have to try and sound really charitable and generous and say something like, well it’s great that you got it, anyhow.  But we all know that misery loves company.  And dammit, I really don’t want anyone I know to get that good rain unless I do, too.

 

I know.  I’m a bad person with little fellow feeling for my neighbors. 

 

So that’s what I’m doing right now.  Watching the storms roll north and south of us.  (I keep pausing to check out weather dot com.  Because we may live in the boonies but we do have a high speed internet connection).  I am hoping especially for a rain because I worked furiously the past few days tilling up my garden aisles and sowing (translation: throwing messily) New Zealand white clover in them and I’d really like it to get going soon.

 

‘Cause here’s the thing.  I need to choke out the weeds that flourish in my aisles.  Lambs quarter (and pigweed, to a lesser extent) does not require rain to germinate, nor does it require rain to grow.  It’s weed magic.  Perversely, the less rain we get, the stringier the lambs quarter gets, and the grippier the roots are.  And a single lamb’s quarter will grow to five or six feet, easily, in my garden.  So millons of innocent looking little broadleafs are going to come up in three days, no matter what happens, as there is an apparently inexhaustible seed bank of lambs’ quarter in my soil.  But.  New Zealand white clover will smother them, once the clover is established.  Plus NZWC adds nitrogen to the soil, and the chickens love it when we yank up huge armfuls of it and feed it to them in their pen (sort of like free-ranging them but without the mortal danger to my veggie seedlings), and it grows green and lovely into December around here when everything else on the ground is brown and dead looking.   Finally, and perhaps most significantly, I won’t have to measure out my garden beds every year.  By mid-March, these lovely, lush green aisles will sprout, outlining my beds.  I did it in part of my field last year as an experiment and it was shocking how professional it looked.  Really, I don’t know why more people don’t grow it in their aisles. 

 

I could stand out there for approximately three or four hours with my pitiful hose, I know…. But I prefer the lazy, natural way.  I try to plant stuff (and transplant stuff) when I know the rain’s coming, and weed on dry days, so those bastards wither up and die.      

 

So please, please rain on my clover.  And my other stuff, too.  I put out about two hundred tomato starts last week and boy, they could use the rain.  I must say, I have grown some absolutely gorgeous tomato plants in the past few years but this year’s were Absolutely Nothing like those.  (You reading this Teem?  They were just about the saddest things you ever saw, right?)   I’m thinking maybe they got too hot in the hoophouse one day and got sunburned.  Plus we had some weird late frosts and my hoophouse isn’t heated and I think they got very close to being killed by the cold.  Poor little pitiful things.  (They’re very small too).  So it’s been a sort of trial by fire and ice for my beloved heirloom tomatoes.  It would be nice if they could catch a break and get some rain now that they finally made it outside. 

 

I’m trying some new cool varieties this year, like “Wapsicon Peach” (sp?) and “Green Sausage” (self explanatory), and the insipidly named “Italian Heirloom.”  Also “Brandywine” (Dad and I love them) and “Hillbilly” and “Pruden’s Purple.”  Now, we only have to wait months and months, and weed them and tie them up, and pick off hornworms, and make sure they get watered.  And THEN we’ll get to eat them.        

 

Also Mom and I put in trays of sunflowers and tithonia (even though it’s a lousy cut, my friend Maurina loves it, so what the hey) and some cosmos, and a bunch of Swiss chard and some dry beans.  Wow, I got a lot done the past few days.  With help.  My mom is definitely an Indoor Girl but she was feeling sorry for me, I think.  I was starting to panic about getting stuff in the ground before this great big rain came through.  So  Grandma the Indoor Girl worked down on her hands and knees all afternoon, doing stuff she doesn’t even like, because weather dot com said we have an 80% chance of rain, may be severe at times.  TODAY.        

 

a bunch of crap

 

 

We built this house about six years ago, I think.   (Wait, I’ll tell you exactly.  We got our certificate of occupancy in June 2002.  For the previous eleven months, we lived with my parents with two elderly dogs, one toddler and one infant.  Moving into our new house was an eagerly anticipated event all around.  My mother is not a lazy housewife and does not approve of house dogs.  But she puts up with my animals).  Anyhow, we moved into this house a while ago, after Paul and my brother the builder and my Dad built it.  My brother the builder advised us to write down the location of the lid of the septic tank, which we did, and told us Not To Lose It.  Which we didn’t. Until last year. 

 

Paul, who is super organized (I am not) and whom I trusted not to lose such a critical piece of information, misplaced it.  We turned to our memories, which have been destroyed by eight years of child-induced sleep deprivation.  All we knew was that the lids were really deep—almost too deep to pass inspection—and somewhere off the northwest corner of the house. 

Septic tanks need to be pumped every few years or so.  Five years is the max, apparently, and we were going on six.  And going, and going, and going.  Potty trained two kids here, and anybody’s who’s had newly potty trained kids knows that an awful lot of toilet paper is involved in the process.  Paul was getting very anxious about the state of the septic, and I, who tend to be much, much less melodramatic about such things, was even getting a bit concerned.  We dug around lots and couldn’t find the damn lid to save our lives.  Lots of rocks though.  Using the post-hole digger, we discovered our biggest rocks about six feet down.  A very jolly enterprise.   

 

Fortunately, George Bush, in his futile effort to (a) get us to like him better and (b) stave off an economic depression, mortgaged our future just a bit more with the Economic Stimulus Package.  (And what a difference that’s made, eh?).  So, we got this lovely check and decided to share it with the local septic company.  Guy came out, poked around with a stick, he couldn’t really find it, so he flushed down a nifty little disc which ended up in the tank (fortuitously under the lid), septic tank guy detected it with a little radio thingy, and using his mini dozer, dug up the lid.  Then he got to pick the disc out with a stick (!), and another guy came out with the honey truck and sucked up all the honey to send to Lansing to be treated.   (What a stupid system—this is a good way to deal with human waste??? Collect it in a big tank then cart it all over the place?).  Paid our big old bill, doing our part to revitalize the local economy.

 

Clearly, though, this septic tank stuff is not sustainable pooping and peeing.  So we used more of the Economic Stimulus Check to buy an outhouse.  A real, live outhouse, with a little window and thick oak barnwood siding and a cool door with half moon cutouts.  (Incidentally, it’s not that kind of moon.   According to my outhouse book—yes, I have one—the moon meant women’s bathroom.  Women/luna/lunar cycle/menstrual cycle, I believe.  Men’s outhouses had stars on them.  Don’t know why.  Leftover celestial body for the men, since the moon’s already been taken?)    One of our local paranoid, non-tax-paying guys makes these cool outhouses and sells them by the side of the highway.  Name’s Danny.  (Incidentally, Danny wouldn’t tell us where he lived even though we owed him money and just wanted to mail it to him, for Pete’s sake.  And he wanted cash.  Cash only.  Our wood guy has a similar survivalist nutcase persona.  What’s up with all the guys who provide real services being such tax-dodging oddballs?)   

Anyhoo.  Paul redid the stool so that it will work for grownup persons instead of the elvish folk for whom it was built.  And he put in a nice, non-splintering toilet seat that was kicking around the barn.  Now, we shall poop and pee, at least for the summer, in a sawdust bucket in our lovely little outhouse.   And I will happily compost it in a discreet corner of the yard, just as soon as I score some free pallets to make said compost heap. 

 

Visitors can use the house, I suppose, but la familia is going outside.         

 

PS The definitive work on composting one’s own waste is Joseph Jenkins, The Humanure Handbook.  It’s available online, for free. 

 

 

 

the heavens and the earth

Hello. 

 

It seems like I ought to do some sort of introductory inaugural entry to this blog.  Why now and all that.  I’m looking to document the life I’m trying to create here in rural-ish Michigan for my children and my family and my community.  I’m concerned about peak oil and peak food and peak water and the imminent crash of the economy and climate change.  I’m a person of action, so my response to the half-dozen Horsemen of the Apocalypse has been to do lots of stuff, differently.      

 

So that’s brought us to our dirt road, an outhouse and chickens, a big garden and a clothesline, homeschooling and a woodstove.  This, mind you, for a couple of people who used to live in a lovely university town, amongst cafes, dog parks, Volvos, sidewalks, and teensy, tiny suburban lots of California’s northern Central Valley.

 

It’s pretty interesting around here.