To The Surbiton Manor Born

 November is nearly done and it has forced us to concentrate our efforts here at Surbiton Manor indoors. Yet, efforts continue, facing at last the fiasco that the Hated Previous Owners (HPO) left inside, planning for next year and battening the hatches.  Electricity The HPO left gigantic, oversized ceiling fans in every room of the house. The three bedrooms all have them. Each was controlled through a bizarre remote control system of some kind. And all of them are broken.  The obvious solution: replace them with a simple, flush-mount light fixture. How hard can it be? A late '70's house should be up to code and sport fixtures with all of the right wires. Let's do it. A cheap home improvement scheme.  Now I have never been what one might call "handy." Basically, if you want a DIY project to have a certain air of being not quite all the way correctly done, something that will cost 2x as much and take 3x as much time as you might think it would, I'm your man.  Pa

  Last night while looking at Britbox, Kiki and I discovered a wonderful thing: a fourth season of the 1970's series The Good Life  which is one of the main inspirations of our homesteading experiment. It's why we call our house "Surbiton Manor." We really thought we'd seen it all. I mean - they're not making any more episodes here in 2020. And we own the boxed set of the first three seasons on DVD.  But there it was, bold as life, Season 4 with some of our old favorite characters. Must...not...binge watch.

  Everything Kiki and I know about gardening - or almost everything - we read in books. This is the first in a series of posts that I'm going to dedicate to reviewing the books that inspired us and that we followed in our first year here at Steepmeadow. The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City  by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen is a manifesto. While their brand of city self-sufficiency might work in a more urban setting, I would not want to be their neighbors. They're not wrong, they just advocate a lifestyle that's going to make your home into a weedy, messy place with garbage can lids and grey-water collection bins. "Tater Tires" are one of their projects. It is a matter of taste, but I want our place to look tidy and alive rather than strewn with scavenged garbage. It's not that it's not noble, because it is. It is a great do-in-yourself aesthetic They have a whole section on raising livestock. We want nothing to

  See this well fed kitten? Last night he got up on the counter and ate all of the Hubbard squash seeds that we were drying for next year. We'll have to buy some if we want squash. It is a bummer. This is the container that once held drying squash seeds, as discovered this morning.

We are getting a reprieve in the weather. 69 degrees Fahrenheit by this afternoon. This is a good thing, as it has already enabled us to clean up most of the leaves (a job complicated last week by howling 30 mph. winds), and install these solar fence-post lights in the corners of the raised beds. They're not on every post - just the corners of each garden. The hope is that they will do two things at least: attract night flying pollinators and illuminate falling snow at night. They're kind of pretty. They act as little beacons at the corners of Steepmeadow.  We have a busy week ahead. We have about 100 tulip and crocus bulbs to plant and the gutters need to be cleaned. Also, I need to overcome my fear of heights and install a gutter to correct a design flaw in the house that dumps water from the roof onto the front step, causing it to be covered with inches thick ice all winter. It's not too high up, but it is terrifying. Just six screws need to be installed. Shouldn't t