Summer of a Bunch of Stuff--Greenhouse update

So, my friend did a post recently about how this is a summer of miracles for her and her family. It has been one for us too, but I don't want to steal her title, or her post, so I'm just going to say: this has been the summer of a bunch of awesome stuff.

We've gone swimming in the pond almost every day,

We've found and raised monarch butterfly caterpillars, and realized that our pasture, with its russian olive trees and milkweed is a veritable Monarch paradise--something I wanted to build, but ended up with accidentally. Miracle, for sure.

We've fallen alseep during parades

Taken a million cute selfies with baby Fruitsnack on Mom's phone

and shamelessly admired her lush, long eyelashes from above

We've also made huge progress on the greenhouse. Our family reunion was held here this year, so Jeff and I quickly and frenetically gathered materials for the family service project, which was to start the process of plastering our cob walls inside. Just so you know, cob walls are earthen, baked walls with a limestone plaster finish. THey retain heat well, they're cheap to make, and they are natural. This is why we chose cob for the inside of the greenhouse. It does mean, however, that all irrigiation needs to be drip, or in-soil. SPray irrigation would wear away the walls too much. Cob can handle humidity, and some wetness, but not constant wetness. Still, we evaluated all the options, and it was the best choice. Finished, a cob wall looks something like this.

Rounded, natural. Earthen. Yes, there's a bit of whimsy to it. ANd yes, Whimsy did weigh in our choice :) Cob is made of sand, clay mud, and chopped straw. SO there was our other hitch--there is absolutely no clay to be found in any of the gravel pits, or from any of the landscaping companies around here. Many who build with cob just use the soil from their own backyard, but our problem there is, we live on the top of an old caldera, in the wake of sand dunes. Our soil has very little clay. So, we traveled to Utah to get some.

9,000 lbs of clay. We worried ourselves over the pass on our way to Pocatello. But we made it

With huge amounts of clay, and inexpressible gratitude toward the ward members who have repeatedly loaned us their trailer. SO the next steps were, Tvyek paper in all the spots bare of it. WE got that up

And then, chicken wire, with wood spacers, to create the framework for us to put the cob onto the walls. Lots of nails to anchor it so it wouldn't sag. We did this very late at night the day before the project, with the help of my little sister's generous fiancee :)

I didn't take pictures of the process the next day, where a dozen people were helping sift clay, mix clay, sand, and straw, and later, press it into our wall, because I was doing it with them and mud+phone don't mix. BUt it was wonderful. We got muddy and messy, and....

we got a patch of cob up on our wall. IT probably doesn't look as beautiful to anyone else as it does to me. But I've felt it, run my hands over it, dozens of times in the last few days as JEff and I waited for it to dry so we could see how it will hold up. (really well, btw. IT's as stuck and solid as cement. This will work!!) In other greenhouse related awesomeness, we finished the outside, finally.

That's the east side, which remained unfinished as we focused on bringing baby into the world. Jeff was out there all spring, and it looks so much better than I imagined. And also

We nearly finished the north-south run of the celing. Still need the east-west run. Again, family helped, and friends. This project has been a labor of love in so many ways. We're getting there. Feeling it. WE're growing vegetables this winter, I just know it.

Greenhouse update: Bleaching, staining, siding, interruptions and more foundation

We had to take a hiatus on the greenhouse for a month or so as our involvement in the community play (Skywalker and I played one of the couples in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers) ramped up. The play was an amazing experience. We made some good friends :) I'm so glad. Friends are the best. Also I got to spend a lot of time with a sweet person who is an almost-sister who has been on her mission and busy with college for a while. It was a great experience, and I feel no regrets about the projects that needed to be put off (writing, greenhouse, school prep etc).

Skywalker has been bemoaning his lack of tools. But tools are an investment that we have to save up for. Finally, this past weekend, he bought a used radial arm-saw on craigslist. He got it for a pretty good price. It was missing a table, so he very carefully measured and fitted a table to it, using materials from an old treadmill he'd acquired (ironically, from the last play... two treadmills were used for one of the scenes and they were going to be thrown away, and we all know Skywalker and his thriftiness.)

He now has the tool he needs to do a lot of the work. It can now be done quickly and much less tediously. And in the past few evenings after work he has sided an entire panel. He tells me that the rest will go even faster now that he knows what to do and what measurements we need. The wood we are using was acquired from a source we found online a couple years ago. Skywalker has had an eye on this website for quite a while. The funny thing is, the owner of this company happened to move into our ward a year ago. Another not-coincidence in this endeavor. We're supposed to be doing this; Heavenly Father has given us reassurances and signs at every stage of this process. When we were finally ready to buy siding (we used a bit of our income tax return this year for that purpose, instead of devoting the whole of it to paying off principal on our house) we knew exactly what we wanted. And we ended up with a discount that helped, that we were not expecting. Blessings. Anyway, this company has the best prices for siding/tongue and groove etc that we have found anywhere, and they're great to work with, and they have branches all over the Salt Lake/Utah Valley on up through southeast Idaho. Check'em out.

We chose cedar tongue-and-groove siding and cedar-log siding. We got some discount pallets and bundles, so not all of it is utterly perfect, but we want our project to end up looking lovely and natural and whimsical and imperfect so it really was quite perfect. Here is what the wood looks like, after lying in the sun bleaching for about a month.

We will probably just use it like this, sun-bleached with no stain or anything, on the inside. Cedar is meant to be exposed to the elements, and it is lovely as it continues to weather naturally.

For the outside, we kind of wanted a more uniform look to the weathering, though, and we didn't want to wait years while it changed to the silvery color we've got our hearts set on, to match the grey/white/taupe colors of our house. I was planning on using commercial stain and bleaching oil, but following some good advice from the guy who runs this lumber company, we went a different direction. We bought a natural weathering treatment. It's a dry powder that you mix up yourself and paint on the boards and it is really effective. The results were immediate and beautiful, and exactly what we wanted. And it was natural, which we prefer, and much less expensive than what we were planning.

Here is what we've got on the house so far. You can see how the treatment has changed the color of the cedar wood. I think it goes so well with the color of our house. I couldn't be happier. We need to clean up those windows. This is an in-progress picture... you kind of have to have an imagination to know how awesome it looks :)

And from further away, so you can see how it looks with the rest of the house (you kind of have to squint to see where the siding is, and where it's still plywood. The colors are pretty subtle):

So this last schoolyear, Loli had a band trip, and because she is our first, experimental child, Skywalker and I had no idea that this meant she needed to sell 100 dollars worth of band cards. We didn't even know about the trip until two weeks before the money was due, because Loli plays her cards close to her chest. Or something. ANyway, when we found out, we didn't know what to do for a bit. Loli needs to be responsible enough to do the work or at least inform us that work needs to be done to go on this trip she wants to go on.

But she is the first, experimental child. Forging the path. Doing everything new. Not sure how to negotiate things, and she knows how full my plate is with all her siblings. I know how that feels.

So we cut her a break. We paid the band stuff ourselves out of the greenhouse budget, and she became our little laborer for the summer to earn the money. She's been helping Skywalker put in ceiling paneling, holding stuff for him, and a couple saturdays ago, she dug a pretty nice ditch under the north wall so we can lay down a concrete footer. That is the only area where a footer is missing. We're going to lay the concrete before the ground starts freezing again.

She did a pretty good job, didn't she?

The siding should progress fast at this point. And once we've got the new piece of footer poured, we'll move the wall there out slightly so it matches the edge of the house, and we'll side that too.

It feels so wonderful to almost be done with the outside! I've been stressing over that for a long time, because we want our lot and house to look nice. Once we get the siding off the grass, we'll be able to mow that stretch of lawn again, too.

Greenhouse update: foundations and family

We finally (finally) after worries and weather and seasons passing wherein we could not continue until the ground un-thawed...

we finally finished the foundation for our greenhouse.

We stacked the cinder blocks during winter last year and buried them. This spring, we un-dug them, stacked them, swept and cleaned all the dirt from the footers

and then

slowly, painstakingly stacked them and cemented them and coated them (with the help of our wonderful aunt Arlene, with Squirt as her sidekick.)

That's a picture of Jeff laying in the last block.

This is how things look now.

We have also bought insulation for the roof and walls.

The next step is to buy siding, and then get to work on that. But in the meantime, Jeffrey bought lots of braces and screws, and we're reinforcing the roofline. Just to make sure it'll bear the weight of snow. We were told in our inspection that this needed to be done... better do it before we have awesome stuff to protect.


It's getting there, guys. I'm excited. This spring we will likely be able to start some plants inside. By the time summer ends i hope it will be insulated enough that we can keep them growing through the winter. Hooray!

Greenhouse and.... green everything

We have been struggling forever with our grass and our field. When we first moved in here we asked for a bunch of advice on facebook--what to do. We were told we'd likely need to till and re-seed. We've been planning on it... and planning... and planning. Each year something else came up and it got put off. And each spring, instead of enjoying one of my favorite times of year, I've experienced dread as the snow melts away to reveal my utterly horrible lawn and yard and field.

To start off this spring, though, someone anonymously came by and sprayed our weeds for us. It's something Jeff's struggled to want to do. He's dug his feet in a bit. He's really hesitant to do chemical weed killers and.... to be honest, I think he's liked having the dandelion greens within closer reach. But our neighbors (the high school, the seminary building) understandably do not like our dandelions. It was sort of a relief to me (I'll admit) when someone just came and did it for us, and we didn't have dandelions or alfalfa coming up through our grass.

And to add to this, last summer something kind of awesome happened. A guy came to our door--his mother sold the lot we now own to its previous owner, and apparently she sold water rights along with it, which were never officially transferred, but were, in fact, paid for. Because they were never transferred, the bank did not know about them when they were in possession of the property, and when they sold it to us, they told us that we did not have water rights.

Well, in settling up his mother's affairs, this man transferred the water rights. We now have official certificates for a certain number of shares in the canal that runs close to our property. And, to make it even more wonderful, the person who recently bought (or rented) the fields around us was motivated for us to irrigate. He said that it would make his situation better if we did. So.... he loaned us his tractor. And we dug our ditches. And with being able to flood a little, and bring our sub up, and with all the crazy rain we've had here, and horses that we've asked to come help us eat our weedy field down we are now....



Ireland.

(Look! it's grass! It's real grass!) And we're going to keep killing the weeds (yes, I'm going to put my foot down :/ ) and continue to add grass seed and it will get better each year. But this is the year we actually. have. a lawn. (of sorts. it's still patchy and there's still a lot of crab grass mixed in with real grass.)

It's nice because, rather than the expense of till-and-reseed, we may be able to instead purchase something we badly need.... a riding mower. Right now it takes about eight hours, all told, to mow everything that counts as lawn. And we have to mow it, or we get lame letters from the city.


As to the greenhouse. WE've made a breakthrough!! Jeff's continuing to mortar the blocks of course, but... we're doing the outside, and the inside, and the ceiling, in cedar. It will be lovely, and much cheaper than the other materials we've considered. I've liked the wood-look, so I'm pretty happy. If we could finish the blocks and finish the outside, at least, by the time snow comes, we'll be in good shape to slowly put things together inside over the course of this winter.

Greenhouse Update & You Aren't What People Say You Are (redux)

I put up a post yesterday that I soon afterward took down. It detailed some struggles I've been having lately. I took it down because I worried that, even with making things vague, it'd end up being spread around and someone would find out and be upset, or others would assume I wrote about them. But I do want to repost one thing from what I posted, and that is, you can only control what you give, not what people take. You can do your absolute best to convey love, kindness, sincerity and someone could still take offense, if they choose to.

I am a kind, generous, creative, fun, nice, intelligent, loyal and good person. Nothing that somebody does, or says about me, will change that. The end.

Ok. Anyway. The greenhouse stuff is starting up again. Now that the ground is thawed, we can work on mortaring our cinderblocks. Jeffrey borrowed a cement drill from a nice ward member and put in rebar, and we're stacking the cinderblocks and mortaring. We're hoping to have the whole south side done, and the east side dug up, by the time our friends Dave and Courtney get here on Fourth of July weekend, and then Dave and Jeff can have some fun guy time putting together the east wall, which is smaller and hopefully will go faster because Jeff will have a routine down.

After that, we'll be doing outside insulation and the plan right now is cement-board siding, though I need to look into that more... I'm not sure if i like it or not. Jeff's really great at building things well, functional. I'm the one who's a bit more picky about appearance. I don't want a utilitarian greenhouse, I want a *beautiful* greenhouse. Suggestions for siding are welcome. Our house is currently light grey and white.


After that, we'll be able to (yay :) :) ) start on the INSIDE. Setting up watering first, I think. Then the floor, which will be landscape fabric covered with flagstone& swept, pressed sand. We have a ton of white flagstones lying around; we're repurposing them for inside the greenhouse (and, eventually, a walkway around the greenhouse and a patio).

After the floor is in, we can get going on square foot beds. And a greens tower (lettuces, kale, spinach, collards and dandelions) (yes, dandelions) and an herb tower. And also starting to grow cool mosses and creeping thymes in between the flagstones.


So that's where we are right now. We generally have about four hours of time on Saturdays that we can use for projects. Lately it's been completely eaten up in getting our ginormous jungle mown. So Jeff may need to take a day off work to finish the greenhouse. We spent the last three Saturdays getting all of the acre we call yard so it's inches-long stubble instead of a frenzy of dandelions and bushy alfalfa, but you know, weeds grow. We'll have to start again next Saturday.

2000 word update

I am doing ok with my 2000 word goal, except for a couple things: when the kids are sick, it all goes out the window. Also, DavyJones is keeping me up at night and there have been a few mornings where I just couldn't manage it. And... Saturdays have fallen off the table. Now that it's summer. I forget how insanely busy Saturdays are during summer. Especially with the yard, and play practices, and other summer activities... and finishing the greenhouse. Which I will post about soon.

Still, right now I'm at 96,000 words with my LDS contemporary novel, and about 85,000 words of my fantasy. The LDS novel is almost finished. I can feel it winding to a close. The fantasy... maybe we're at the halfway point. I was right--it is an epic fantasy. Hooooow to get an agent to read it, when it's my first book? I guess I have to market to agents who deal in epic fantasy? Are there such things for people other than Robert Jordan?


Anyway. Thoughts. You could send some my direction, too... I'd welcome input.

BRT (Bunch of Random Things)

This is just going to be a bunch-of-random-things post.


So this is day eight of my 2000 word experiment. So far, I have done just fine. My writing has ranged from 2000 to 2500 words daily and I'm still able to get other stuff done. Not much other stuff, because I'm pretty much stuck nursing this incredibly cute infant around the clock, and I can't get much done anyway.

Speaking of incredibly cute infant:

I think his blog name might have to be DavyJones.

Anyway, he loves the nursing. Loves it just about every half our. This baby came out clusterfeeding and hasn't stopped for one day. Except for one day when I think he was feeling sick, and I got very worried about him. But he's doing just fine and is happy, and his brothers and sisters love him a lot.

I have realized that writing, for me, is at this point a part-time job. I have enough stuff going on (drafting fiction, networking, poetry, marketing) that we're talking a few hours a day minimum. So I need to make myself a good plan, how to do this and still be an acceptable mother. I think it will be much easier when this baby is no longer quite so needy and can go a couple hours between feedings, but it is still important for me to figure out how to do the writing thing while also keeping house clean, kids schooled, laundry done, etc. I love my kids, but lately feel so much like i miss them. Because if I go where they are, they maul the baby. Like, hang all over him, lean on him, climb on top of him (in Chumba's case) so I have to go somewhere away from them to feed him... which he wants to do, as I said, all the time.

... our greenhouse is now completely enclosed. We still need to caulk up the little holes, and next spring, put the cement board and insulation on, and mortar the cinderblocks. BUt ideas are brewing, and I'm excited, and it is beautiful. Seriously. I love seeing the outside, and from the inside, it's such a restful place.

Well, that's all for now. Thanks for reading.

Update on our Attached Greenhouse (we are excited.)

So, the funny thing is, when we got that notice from the city I talked about a couple of greenhouse posts ago, I knew it had to have come from someone in the neighborhood/area who read this blog. Because somehow, the city had gotten word that we were building a "greenhouse," only they were told it was going to be a freestanding greenhouse. Since Jeff & I don't generally talk a whole lot about our plans with people, the only real place I could think that someone would know we were building one would be if they read this blog. So I know now that people in this city, people I know, read this. Thus, being more careful about posts, being more aware of peoples' privacy.

I have worried that people will think this is going to be an ugly monstrosity. I don't blame them because, hey. Look at our place! So many weeds. WE used strawbales to insulate our walls last winter, and then Jeff pulled them away from the walls & then never found time to go put them in the horse shed thingie. My kids scatter stuff everywhere. Just like they do inside. And it's harder to remember to ask them to tidy up in the backyard because I don't see it all that often, to be honest. And it doesn't help that all the garbage blows over from the highschool. I have dealt with that by paying my kids to pick it up, a penny a piece, and generally we've been able to keep the area looking OKish, but. You know. Our place is currently kind of the neighborhood disaster. I have goals about changing that this next spring, but who knows if they can happen depending on finances, how well the new baby fares etc.

Anyway, I can see how someone who is familiar with our place might be like, "a greenhouse? Right. It's going to look cobbled together and terrible."

Well, and it's funny because our friend Dave thought the same thing, when we were initially describing our plans to him. Though he didn't tell us this until a couple days ago when Jeff showed him the progress we've made. He gave us a compliment that was also a bit of a dig--"Wow. It actually looks good! From the way you guys were describing it, I was thinking it'd be kind of trashy looking." (Not offended, Dave. It made Jeff laugh. But only because we know you love us!!)

The thing is, when we do stuff, we want to do it right. For Jeff, that means planning meticulously, gathering the precise measurements, the exact pieces, and then (for me) an important thing is finding a period of time when we can work on it until it's finished. I hate half-done projects. They are usually messy, obstructive to routine and space, and not very nice to look at. So... yeah. When we do stuff, and slowly, little by little, we'll do stuff, people will hopefully get an idea of us as a family that really does want their place to look nice, and be a credit to the neighborhood.

Having said all that. Here's where we're at now for the outside (about 3/4 done with plywood, window framing, etc):

We're going to have to leave it plywood until spring, when we'll put insulation and cement board on the outside. Also we'll be mortaring the cinderblock then; right now it's just stacked.

We'll be painting the cement board probably the same color as the rest of the house, with another complimentary for windowframes etc. I'm trying to decide if we do the other color in white, kind of like the rest of the house, or if we go a darker grey to make a nice, pretty contrast. And I'm planning on hanging flower basket planters all along the beams, and planting some red flowers in each. That combination of grey and red is just very pretty. I've seen it done before.

We also plan on taking some of those white flagstones our friends the builders of our house put in a long winding path throughout the yard, and repurposing them to create a path along the house, along the periphery of the greenhouse, and then out to a white flagstone patio/barbecue pit. We're also planning on coldframes along the south (so the path would go around those, too). Overall, I'm pretty certain it will end up looking very nice. Which actually is quite important to me :)

Here's where we're at for the inside:

I am kind of swooning over the amount of space. Our plan for the south side is 4X4 square foot garden beds up against the window side, for sun and warm loving plants such as tomatoes, squashes, peppers and herbs. I plan on hanging strawberry pots/baskets on the inside from every post as well... lots. I love strawberries and want to grow a wide variety.

There will be a path of dark flagstones or pavers (which we will have to buy) for along the house-side wall, so we can walk and have access to everything. We plan on setting it all on sand (with landscape fabric underneath to prevent weeds growing up through, though we don't have many weeds inside anyway because it's graded gravel.) I plan on growing nice mosses in between the flagstones/pavers. It should be quite beautiful. Then as we wrap around toward the east (that corner there you see) we'll probably change to either trees planted in the ground or trees aboveground in giant pots, plus lots of multi-level pots, on stands or hanging, containing bush-berries and fruits or other edible plants that like a great deal of sun. Then as we come around to the east, where there's still good sun but not as much, and it won't be as warm, we'll have a few more square-foot beds with the colder winter vegetables. Then in the very north corner (jeff hasn't built yet) we have a pair of French doors off of the house that open into the greenhouse. We're planning on making that area a sort of indoor solarium/patio, with nice wicker chairs or cast-iron chairs or something more solarium-like, and probably a fountain and a little pot-pool with some stones and maybe a few fishes.

And possibly on that wall of the house, we'll hang one of those pallet-gardens, or a couple, with shade-loving plants like ferns, etc.

Underneath will be more of the dark flagstone pavers on sand, with mosses or elfin thyme growing between the cracks.

In a word, when we get done, it will be wonderful.

SO, back to right now: we've almost got it all enclosed. Jeff is also working on making it airtight--closing in the space between wall and rafter, etc. It's still pretty drafty; we haven't insulated, there are places for the air to get in quite easily, and we haven't even closed off the entire thing yet--the north side's just an open frame, and Jeff hung a tarp to close off the enclosed space to give himself a warm area to work in during the day. But guess what? Even with just that, the nighttime temperatures inside the greenhouse have measured 20 degrees higher than outside temperatures. And during the day:

It's already warmer outside in the greenhouse than it is inside our house!

Think of how it'll be once we get it all enclosed, insulated, caulked if we need to. We may actually need to vent heat inside the house during the day to make sure things don't get too hot for the plants.

Jeff and I have a plan, too, to keep things warm at night (though hopefully it'll be less of a problem than we currently anticipate)--we're going to create curtains of insulation that can drop down over the windows once the temperature inside the greenhouse gets too low. Jeff loves smart-home techology; he'd like to set it up to work automatically with thermometers that gauge temperature, so that when the air at night starts to get below a certain temp, these thick, insulation curtains slide down over the windows and in the morning, when the sensors pick up that the outside temperature is warm enough, they can slide back up. And we can get our sun and warmth at night, too, so we can grow things like...


tomatoes. the holy grail of vegetables. Which I have never been able to make work to well here in an outside garden, even during the summer. The season is just too short.

Well actually, honestly Eggplants are the holy grail. I couldn't even get those to grow in Utah.

It's possible we can use the same system of heated water tubing that warms our concrete floor inside the house, to heat the garden beds as well. Run several loops of the hosing under the bed, keep the soil warm at night. There are lots of options. I want vines of tomatoes swinging from my ceilings year round. Did you know they get really long if they can grow all the time? And they keep producing, too.

It will be amazing. It's Jeff's & my christmas present to each other this year... he's been building all christmas break and I think he's really enjoying it a lot. I'm enjoying seeing it go up, and seeing our dream become a reality.

Greenhouse, part 3--miracles

So, I feel pretty overwhelmed with gratefulness right now. It's not just the Thanksgiving season. I just feel like, lately especially, Jeff and I have had a lot of prayers answered. In some ways that have been surprising. Jeff's parents, sister & boyfriend, sister, brother & wife came over for Thanksgiving. The boyfriend informally sort of asked for permission to ask sister-in-law to marry him, and that was special. Grandma and Grandpa got to see Roo and Loli perform in Sound of Music, and that was special. The dinner was special. There was very little tension. We went to see the Teton Flood museum and the dam, and it was fun to watch Grandma, especially, enjoy all the kids. By the way, I have great kids. (I've mentioned that).

But there's so much more. We have a friend who we connected with and agreed to have him bring his horses to eat down our pasture. And he fenced off the corner of the property that wasn't fenced--just because he's a nice guy, but probably also because it meant more feed for his horses. But it's a huge blessing. My goal: next year, no notes from the city about our weeds. None. I think we can make it happen this year.

Also, the greenhouse.

In our initial post about the greenhouse, I mentioned how glass suddenly became available for an insane price, and that prompted us to start on this project much sooner than we ever thought we could. We thought it was ten years out. But I prayed, and said, you know, Heavenly Father. This would really make us happy. And guess what. Glass.

It's been like that all the way through this project. We found discounted cinderblocks. We found two perfect-sized doors on craigslist that were within our budget, but should have not been. They match our house perfectly, too. So they'll look nice--which I want. Because I want to be a credit to the neighborhood and not a pieced-together not-too-nice looking place.

And most recently, something kind of overwhelming and miraculous happened. All along, I've felt driven by time... deadlines. We knew, for instance, that we could not pour concrete for our footer after the ground started freezing. But plans were taking longer to complete than anticipated, and going to the city meant Jeff needed to find time off work, which could only happen on days where he didn't have very important meetings all day. By the time we finally got everything approved so we could start, the ground was freezing half the days out of the week. Problem is, cement needs time to cure. If we pour it on a good day, we could have two bad days after that & ice crystals form in the drying cement and render it crumbly and unusable.

Jeff was all for not finishing the digging. He had started on the ditch--about a foot deep-- all around our porch, and it was intense work especially on icy days, and I think he was getting discouraged. He suggested we don't finish digging, we either haphazardly do something for a temporary measure this winter, or leave it alone and continue next Spring.

But inside me I felt this urge, or drive, that we needed, and Heavenly Father wanted, us to finish this before this winter. So many things have happened so quickly. It just didn't make sense that Heavenly Father would then want us to wait six months. Plus, we'd have a tiny baby--that's really a stressful thing to deal with. I kind of knew that, if we set the project aside, it wouldn't get done anytime soon.

So I basically told Jeff... please. Keep digging. Finish the ditch. I think Heavenly Father will provide, and we just need to have faith, and I think we'll have some good days next week to pour, if we only finish the ditch and put in the forms. Which we know we need to do anyway, so even if we don't move on until next spring we'll have that step taken care of.

I went off to a book signing after that.

Halfway through my book signing I got a text.

Jeffrey had continued to dig, squaring out what he'd already done, and digging further along the house.

IN the process, he hit cement. He found a footer. Already there. 18 inches down. Perfect for what we needed, already set, already built. All ready for us.

He became emotional about it. I'm grateful, because I think things like this help us see that we're doing what we're supposed to be. I feel emotional about it because I know it means Heavenly Father listens to me, and loves me and answers my prayers. I love to see my husband feel that, too. It is wonderful to share an experience as a couple, something we both feel special about, and build our faith together. Kind of bind our testimonies together over shared efforts and faith.

So, Jeff's family was over. And while they were here, they stacked cinderblocks for us (we're not mortaring them until Spring, when the mortar can set, but that is Ok because the design of the greenhouse makes it possible to do this easily even when the rest is complete).

We also got wood. Yesterday, Jeff spent hours going over the building materials we'd need, then comparing all the prices offered in our area. Then he found a source on Craigslist for some of what we needed, for an even better price. We headed over to Lowes to get the leftover stuff he didn't have online, and found it was more expensive there than Jeff had anticipated. He called the guy, and found out he happened to also have everything else we needed, for a better price than Jeff had anticipated. Another small miracle.

And now, this is happening.

I'm getting pretty excited. Something about seeing that first window (actually it's a door) go up is suddenly making it all real for me. We're doing it. We're doing the thing we've both, Jeff and I, dreamed about and talked about since before we married--a greenhouse attached to our house where we can grow our vegetables and herbs year round. A place where we can grow what we want, and have a uniquely beautiful place to be, warm and lush and beautiful during winter, spring, summer or fall.

And with that, the blessing of knowing we're where we're supposed to be, doing what we're supposed to be doing. That's the best blessing of all.

Greenhouse Project Update

SO we've collected the windows. Got the cinderblocks. Jeff's actually been very busy painstakingly constructing plans to submit to the city, so that's where we were at as of two weeks ago, when we got a "cease and desist" notice from the city.

Which was kind of frustrating to me, because we haven't started anything.

Also we've been getting a lot of notices from the city about our lot. Mainly about the tall weeds (but we've got 5 acres of alfalfa field, Yo.) WE've been working hard on keeping our yard & lawn mown down, and some grass does seem to be coming in, which is good. I've got a feeling we really are going to have to till and re-seed, however. We're doing it this spring. I feel like it needs to happen this year so we stop getting these notices (which are promulgated by complaints from our neighbors... or neighbor. But let's not talk about that.)

(OK, no, let's talk about it. Confession time--when we got the notice, I got upset and called the city guy. & left a message on his phone asking what it was he wanted us to stop doing... mowing our lawn? Because that is the only thing we're really doing with the property right now. And I said we needed to talk about all these notices and come up with an understanding... we want to do lots of wonderful things to this property, but we have seven children and limited resources so people might need to be patient. And remember that, before we moved in, the "lawn" was just a giant, weedy field. With tons and tons of dandelions. So, yeah, I lost it and got kind of assertive on someone. ANd I'm not sorry... I feel like it's time to make sure people know we *live* here and they have to deal with us. Preferably face to face and not with intimidating notes. Gah! Love my city. This is the one bad thing about it--whichever person/people keep sending complaints to the city instead of talking to us face to face, and the city's idea of how property should be. We can't, for instance, have anything but dog, cats or horses according to the zoning on our lot, and it's five acres of alfalfa field in the middle of nowhere. SIgh. We're going to work on that issue sometime in the future. Right now we're just trying to figure out how to grow grass.) OK, Vent over.

Anyway, Jeff went in to ask the city what the cease and desist notice was about, and the city guy said it was because he'd heard we were trying to build a greenhouse. Jeff informed him that, in fact, we're really just glassing in/enclosing our porch, and the guy was like "Oh. Well, that's OK."

So that's OK then.

But it spurred Jeff into faster action on the plans. He took a day off from work to complete them and submit them. City has approved, now it needs to go to the county.

After that, we're looking at concrete and footers. We're laying down concrete & rebar, then putting cinderblock on top of that. The windows will be framed with lumber, of course. We don't have lumber yet. We still need to go get that.

We need to get the cement in the ground soon, however, before there are no days where the ground's not frozen. SO cross your fingers for us, please.

Update on Greenhouse Project & Unexpected (and Rather Biblical) Blessings...

SO, we have the windows. We are in the process of figuring out how to acquire our other needed supplies--cement, cinderblocks, lumber. And we've gone to the city to figure out what sort of permit we need (pretty much just a general one, which we're combining with the permit for our fencelines.)

I admit, this project is weighing on me. I want to get it done before winter. I want to start growing veggies as soon as our outside-garden dies. But in good news there, we have tomatoes, spinach, lettuce in abundance, lots of beets, lots of badishes (my word for the wierd oblong radishes we chose to grow this year) carrots, squash and even a couple of watermelons (right now about baseball size).

This last week, I canned/dehydrated 2 boxes of pears, 2 boxes of peaches, and a few pounds of apples.

And then a big surprise came over the weekend. A neighbor brought home 100 dead pheasants/partridges in the back of his truck from his friend's bird-shooting ranch. He needed to find people to take them and eat them or he'd throw them away. You know the one way to get my ethical vegetarian husband to be willing to use meat? Tell him you're going to waste it otherwise. He went over and claimed 25 lbs of partirdges and pheasants, mourning over the fact that people would just go shoot for fun & then throw away birds like they're garbage. He and I spent our date night deskinning/defeathering, dismembering, disemboweling and decapitating these birds. And now we have a lot of meat in our freezer.

The funny thing is, we'd just had a conversation the week before about how our girls are looking a little peaky & tired, & they're perched on the edge of adolescent growth spurts, and I (after much stewing internally) told Jeff I felt we needed to add meat into the diet. Just sparingly... once a week, in a stew or casserole or something. But I've felt like this is right. JEff's counter argument was that he felt that meat would do more harm than good. They pump those chickens so full of hormones & antibiotics. He felt our girls would be in danger of breast cancer and other ailments if we started exposing them regularly (instead of rarely, at others' houses or at ward parties) to meat.

I guess this was Heavenly Father's way of answering my prayer.

It seems kinda old-testamenty to me.

Our Dream Project--we're doing it!

Do you all remember when I posted about our confusing, scary and often strange journey to finding our home?

I talked briefly about how we've dreamed of building an attached greenhouse onto our home, and how this house provides the perfect structure for that. Well, we thought of it as a long-ways-off project, because even estimating using the cheapest materials (polycarbonate sheeting, and the thought of doing it that way, attached to the house, makes me shudder) we estimated the project would cost around 15,000. Well, again, I feel like some prayers have been answered. Glassing in our east/south porch would provide two sources of financial relief for us. One is, we eat a lot of vegetables, and up here, they're expensive. If we grow our own all the way through winter, we'd take a large chunk out of our grocery budget *and* more importantly, be self-sufficient.

The other benefit to an attached greenhouse is heat. Our home is not what they call passive; able to operate without electricity to heat and cool. But we'd like to take it closer to that. Our floor is heated by hot water in tubes connected to a boiler that can be fed by either electricity or wood. We love that. But... heating our house in winter still costs a lot. Having an attached greenhouse, and the stored heat that this would bring to our walls, would make a big difference.

I've been saying prayers now and then that we can get this project off the ground sooner rather than later. Our budgets are pretty tight, and there are a lot of things we'd like to do. Get a real lawn going, for instance.

The other day, Jeff drove by a glass store in town and saw they had glass windows at a steep discount. 4'X4', 2'X4', 2'X6', all for ten dollars each. Most of them are sliders, so they can be opened. It was an *amazing* deal, and Jeff quickly got out our sketchup models of the house and designed and moved things around until he came up with a plan using those window sizes. We estimated the other materials we'd need--cement, ciderblocks, lumber & plywood. And then we went on down and picked up 32 windows. For 10 dollars each.

They were salvaged from a complex that had been remodeled in a town a ways north of us. They're not perfect, but they're perfect for our purposes.

We estimate that our cost for the structure is going to be around 1,000. That's a much better number for us. Doable, in fact. IN fact, we are going to try to get it done before the ground freezes this winter. That means a busy few saturdays for us. But in the end... we'll have our greenhouse!

(it's not going to end up looking as nice as this, I don't think. And it won't be a stand-alone building, it will be framed by our porch. But that's the general idea we're working with.)

I'm excited because this is also a project that has been a source of joy and exhilaration for Jeff and me to plan. We love growing stuff. Love plants. We're planning on square-foot garden boxes all along the south side containing things like lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, carrots, potatoes, celery, cabbage, onions, squash etc...

all the stuff we use. But we are also planning on hanging some awesome strawberry planters on the posts from hooks we'll install. I have a seed packet of alpine strawberries I've been saving for a long time.

We also have big plans for other sorts of things.

We actually already have 2 avacado trees. We grew them from pits starting about 6 years ago. ... they need to be planted somewhere.


Our other plans are to create these garden boxes/other fixtures and planting devices so they are close to the south/east walls of glass away from the house walls, put in a mist/drip irrigation system, and then on the side closest to the house, we'll put sand down and do a path of black or dark flagstone, which will soak in the heat. We're also considering stripping the isulation on the wall until about 2 feet up and painting it either black or another dark color, so we have a wall that brings the heat more into the house.

I'd like to grow some plants to fill in the cracks of the flagstones as well. One possibility is irish moss, which is edible and a good thickener for raw food dishes--gels and puddings and such.

Another is elfin thyme, which grew in the flagstones of our front yard where I grew up. I love it.

I also want to put a small nest of orchard mason bees inside. They are known not to sting. They don't produce consumable honey... they're just for pollination.

Jeff plans to grow some dandelions in our lettuce garden, so even during the times of year where there aren't enough tree or vegetable flowers, we'll have dandelions for them to use as nectar. At least that's the plan. Grandiose, perhaps. And the outside structure might go up fast, but the inside stuff will probably come around 2 things at a time... probably we won't finish it all inside for a couple years. But in the meantime, we're excited to finally be building it. Hooray for not deciding things are improbable, and for asking for help and getting it.

I feel pretty blessed.