To The Surbiton Manor Born

Zipper It's a cold sunny day today, but dark clouds are looming. It's more than the usual dread of living in the Anthropocene that darkens every joy. It seems that the imbeciles with all the guns and money are intent on making everyone's lives worse with moronic trade policies that are going to drive up food prices. This is not the right blog for trying to solve the world's problems. It's focused on the garden and self-sufficiency, which is always a good policy.  Rumor has it, today, that Colombia is about to have a 25% tariff inflicted on it. Of course, the people paying for it will be people who drink coffee. The cost will just be passed on to consumers here. This is what happens when idiots vote to put buffoons in charge.  But you can't fix stupid. Whinging won't change it.  So it is time to be practical and stock up on coffee. We've been doing this for a couple of months already, but we will be stepping it up. There are about 20 lbs. in the basement,...

  Princess Poppyseed Watson and her Magnificent Tail It is never too early to start planning. This is the indoor part of it. You can do it with your cats. In fact, I think that planning is half the fun. It is part of the process. It might be argued that too much planning removes one from the moment. As Allen Saunders put it in the January 1957 issue of Reader's Digest , and later John Lennon put it, "Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans." But the answer to this half-baked argument is that the making of plans is in fact part of the process of life, and it is worthwhile in itself, because it is more than just a mental exercise, it has practical repercussions on your future. My future involves a summer of gardening. Here are some of the things that we're going to be growing: Fresno peppers (Tasty! Just had one. We've tasted blood, and we want more !) Snow peas Pole beans Bush beans Hubbard squash Pumpkins (They can share the trellis with the bea...

  Helko Werk Nordic Splitting Axe Over the last couple of weeks, I've acquired more than one axe, based on new information. While readers who know about cutting wood may find this a bit dull, like my old fiberglass-handled felling axe from a big box hardware store, if you haven't cut a lot of wood, it may be new to you. I was scrolling through Instagram and I came across one of the folks I follow, Rowdy Claude, the cross-dressing homesteader who gave a wood splitting 101 class. Aha! This was why my axe continually jams in the wood. The "cheeks" of the axe head are the wrong shape. Great for cutting a tree down. Lousy for splitting.  This should not have been news to me. My dad used to heat with wood. This is our third year heating with wood at Steepmeadow. And yet... So I purchased a really good splitting axe. It turns out that there's a whole world of axes. There is the brand with the big recognition, the Gransfors Bruk. There's Helko Werk from Germany. There...

Good night, raised beds.  A good chunk of this afternoon was spent out in the howling winds - gusts reaching a 7 on the Beaufort Scale - prepping the raised beds for winter & spring. Fortunately, it was a pretty mild day, by November standards. 53 degrees. This involves: 1) Removing the detritus of last summer's crops.  2) Loosening the soil. Note that this is NOT turning it as some poor gardening advice columns suggest. When you stick a fork in it and shake it, the soil gets loosened, but it doesn't upset the balance of the bacteria and microorganisms down there. 3) Add about 20 lbs. of our home-made compost. Food scraps, leaves & grass clippings from two years ago 4) Add a sack of commercial raised bed soil. Sack of commercial raised bed soil 5) Rake it smooth. 6) Dump leaves that have been chopped up in the lawnmower on top. Nutrients will leach down into the soil over the winter, and the leaves will act as mulch next spring when we scrape them away from the seeds a...

  Half of our wood for the year Our annual wood deliveries arrived this past week. Two cords on Thursday (which I moved to the back yard myself) and another two cords on Friday (which I stacked, while we got help from one of the kids, currently the Golden Child, and her boyfriend.) It's a satisfying feeling to have it laid in and know that we will be toasty warm, even if fascists attack the power grid post-election. The season has well and truly changed. The last cosmo (and, coincidentally the first cosmo) of the summer bloomed last week. The deck furniture has been eaten by a large chocolate blancmange that has taken up residence outside of our kitchen window. On the positive side, the grass and clover that I started from the end of September through early October has taken over the dirt patch that was our back yard after I'd raked and ripped up the creeping Chalie infestation. Too early to say whether the grand army of nematodes has managed to slaughter the foul invasive whit...

I've been using October 12, 2024 - my annual marathon date - as the end of summer all year long. That marks #15. With age-grading, #5 fastest.  Not terribly surprisingly, it turns out that it truly is the end of summer. Leaves are at full color, and this week we will get a hard freeze. I pulled the last of the vegetables: some tomatoes, the second lettuce crop planted in early September (which produced very well indeed), and, of course, jalapeño peppers (which went berserk and couldn't be stopped). Hopefully the grass / clover seedlings that I planted over the past few weeks after ripping out the creeping Charlie have set. The first part of the lawn that I did this seems to be in good shape. I'm worried about the bits that I only got around to seeding last week. There is a haze of green across all the bits that were laid waste to in the culling. We ate a squash soup for dinner. There's a fire in the fireplace to keep the house warm.  Fall is here.  

  Every living thing is the amazing product of four billion years of slow growth and adaptation. Some would say that every living thing is precious.  I'd make an exception for invasive Asian beetle grubs. Vile, horrible, disgusting and slimy are just a few of the words I'd use to describe these hideous visitors to my yard. Almost as bad as Republicans. They love our apple trees, and have tormented them and stunted the last two seasons of growth. They skeletonized Kirstin's flowers.  They seem to thrive in another unwelcome and invasive thing that grows freely in our yard: creeping Charlie. Horrible stuff that makes the ground spongy and provides haven for the foul grubs.   Now, to clarify: We are not sticklers here at Steepmeadow. We are not striving for some "perfect lawn" full of weak non-native fescues. We won't artificially fertilize. We are loathe to water. We are going after a pollinator lawn, with healthy swaths of hearty clover, red creeping and sheep ...