Where This All Began

I woke up early this morning! I went to bed at about 1:30 am and then this morning at about 5:15 am I woke up. I considered going back to sleep but decided I wanted to stay awake. And now here I am an hour later, blogging.

When I was little, we lived on a ranch in Southeastern Arizona. Originally we lived in the antique-pioneer house. It was adobe and the ceiling in the living room was gone. My dad has always been a pack rat so one of my earlier memories are of a little trail through the living room to the woodstove in the back corner. My mother tried many times while they were still married to de-junk it and make more space for living. She also tried to make it more livable and prettier since it is, and always has, been falling apart.

My dad still dreams of buying the ranch (he owns a small share of it) and renovating what we now call "the old house," but he has never really done anything and probably never will.

When I was a few months shy of my second birthday, we moved to Salt Lake City for awhile where my sister was born (exactly one week after my birthday, ironically). Then we went and lived with my grandma for awhile. My mother refused to move back unless my dad got something better to live in. He found a trailer. The house was bigger (but not really living standard without some work and money that we didn't have), but the trailer was better.

I liked living on that ranch. We had a garden, dogs, goats, and horses. The neighbors (the only other inhabitants of the ranch) had the same as well as cattle and chickens. My best friend (she was born a few weeks before I was and was the daughter/granddaughter of said neighbors) roamed everywhere. We played in the creek when it ran in early spring (from off of Graham Mountain) and in the hot summer we would run barefoot from shade spot to shade spot (since we went barefoot almost year round due to the short, mild winters).

There was an outhouse off to the side and back of the yard which we never used because for some reason bees lived there (no idea why...). My dad's kids from his second marriage would come to visit and of course my best friend and I would follow my older sister and her friend (my friend's aunt) everywhere which of course annoyed them no end.

I loved it when we got to bring the baby goats in the house (for whatever reason) and feed them milk from calf bottles and following my dad around as he did the "chores." (Feeding the animals, watering the garden, milking, straining the milk, etc.) When there was a day when we butchered, I would go inside and sit under the cooler where I couldn't hear anything. Then when it was over, I would come out and watch my dad chop up the goat (hung from an obliging mesquite tree) into tasty bits of chevron.

I remember one night when I was three or four, my dad was going to go out to the outhouse to get honey from the bees and I wanted to come with. He didn't want to take me, so he told me that the bogeyman would get me. I knew he was teasing, but even if I hadn't I wouldn't have been afraid (my idea of the bogeyman: man in all black wearing a ladybug suit). I insisted so he took me with him (the bees were all asleep, I think), so he finally gave in and we came back with lots of tasty honey.

When I was almost seven, my mom decided she was fed up with my dad and moved out. We moved to a less secluded (the ranch was miles from any kind of neighbor and I loved it) place with two acres and a trailer. From then on out, all the places we've lived, we've never had much more than a garden, a few cats and the occasional dog. So I would pretend. When I was younger I would go out to bring home the (imaginary) cows with my imaginary older siblings (I'm the oldest of my mom's kids) and ride my bike pretending it was a horse. My sister wanted to play Barbies. I wanted to play Farm.

When I got older, we moved to Northern Arizona and when it snowed, I'd go and check on my pretend farm animals to make sure they were safe from the snow. I wanted to plant a garden but I never could remember to water anything I planted and when I wanted to do more than plant a seed and water it once or twice, I had no idea where to start anyways. I devoured the Mother's Children section of the Mother Earth News (we have years of back issues).

After I got to be 12 or 13, I kind of forgot about it all until just before my sixteenth birthday when I started looking at our old Mother Earth News issues. That's when I decided "that's what I want to do." And when I ran out of issues, I decided I wanted to see if there was anything on the internet. I googled all sorts of phrases containing the words "country," "farm" and "rural," but I never found anything until I googled "homesteading." That's when I found Homestead.org and A Homesteading Neophyte. I was so excited when I discovered people still do this and that, even better, they blog about it.

And after reading through two or three blogs, I discoverd that no one ever really started blogging until after they'd been doing what they were doing for awhile or they bought property. I wanted to know about it from before all that. So I decided to write my own blog. And here it is. :)

This Time I Really Did Want to Blog

I was on my normal don't-feel-like-blogging but then the keyboard just stopped working. Again. So there was a week or so when I wanted to blog but couldn't because of the whole thing where keys "U," "Y," "M," "W," "C," "J," and a few mutinous others were refusing to do their job. That is, put a letter down when they were pressed. I still managed to chat with friends on Facebook between our two broken keyboards and the on-screen keyboard. But it was slow going and now that we have a new keyboard, I'm reminded that now I can write my thoughts almost as fast as they come.

On of my friends is turning seventeen on Sunday, so I'm baking a tasty chocolate cake for him that I'll bring to tonight's movie night. It's all chocolate chocolate chocolate, luckily when I asked him if he liked chocolate cake (AFTER buying the ingredients, mind you) he said "duh," so I was relieved. He doesn't like green, but the letters are still going to be green because green is like frogs (and also looks good with brown), and his nickname is "Froggy."

Hopefully this cake will survive to be eaten. In January my group of friends threw me (and another guy whose birthday is three days before mine) a birthday party. One of the cakes never got to be eaten. Instead, Frank started a cake fight and then we ended up sticking candles into a stick of butter and decorating the butter with sprinkles and then having him blow those candles out (along with mine since I kind of disappeared when they decided to sing happy birthday).

But Frank isn't coming so she won't have the opportunity to throw cake and I don't think it will occur to anyone else. :P

Next, I'm going out to the garden to water, weed, and take pictures (okay so it's 100F in the shade and 85F indoors...still...) :P

Sucking Eggs

I found the strangest thing in my garden yesterday afternoon. It's a tiny little egg, not much bigger than a quarter. There's a tiny little crack thing in it and it appears that the insides have been sucked out. I found it near this hole in my garden that I think is from some sort of animal. I'm just not sure what kind of animal it is. I wonder if the animal is an egg-sucker of some sort? What kind of animals suck eggs anyways?

This is a picture. It's kind of fuzzy because the camera doesn't do close-ups very well ever since the flash broke, but it's okay. The round, flat, gray object is a quarter to show the size. And fuzz or no fuzz, the little dent where the egg got sucked out is a little bit visible. It's on the right half of the egg; kind of at the top.

Ironwood Farm Project

I have new blog to add to my blogroll! I just finished catching up! Whoo-hoo!

This blogger's name is Jenny, and her blog is called "Ironwood Farm Project." She has two children, a boy and a girl, which she homeschools in an unschooling way. She and her husband live in New Mexico on a 10 acre family farm in an off-the-grid strawbale home (I know all of you are green with envy lol) which is featured in this article. She does Flamenco as a hobby and is working on living sustainably. They have cattle, a pair of pigs, sheep, bees, a garden, and various poultry. Her husband had an awful accident involving his thigh and there are complications at this point. They are also planning on making a living with their farm at this time.

So off with you now! Check them out!

Beginning Steps to My First Garden

Last night I had a lovely dream about sheep. I dreamed I had eight sheep and five of them were pregnant. And they had cute little lambs. It was a homesteading dream, or else I wouldn't have mentioned it in this blog.

You probably know from my blog description that I am a teenager who wants to be a homesteader. If you know what homesteading is, you probably know that most teenagers (at least the ones I know) want to be fashion designers and doctors and actors and authors and veterinarians and brain surgeons and singers, and artists, and archeologists. All those subjects fascinate me, yes, but I want to be a homesteader. I want cows and sheep goats and chickens and a garden and cats and dogs and children on a nice size piece of land in the Rocky Mountains where I can live a life that makes sense to me. Right now I'm learning as much as I can about cooking and sewing and crocheting and other domestic chores as well as more homesteady things like gardening and animal husbandry. Most of my experience in the homesteady things up until now has been book learning and blog reading.

I am still working on that, but now I have decided to plant a garden. I figure now is a good time to start when I have a ton of time on my hands (and I'm graduating this spring even though I just turned seventeen last month, so I'll have even more time on my hands, soon). I don't want to do animals just yet because I'm going to do college and and the job thing before I do the homesteading thing and it's a little difficult to take care of a dog when you're busy with college and all that fun stuff. At least you could leave it home and ask your mom to take care of it (I don't have a dog, just so you know).

My mom really doesn't know the first thing about chickens. She likes cats and tiny dogs. The one time I had her take care of my chickens (because I was at youth conference for four days), she didn't give them any water and they started eating their eggs to compensate. So any animals I have from now on will be at a time I can take care of them. Now back to the subject I'm writing this post on: gardening.

Now is about right to start doing the garden thing. There's never a frost after Mother's Day (ironically, it has sometimes snowed for the last time on Mother's Day and then all melted away and been sunny and just like spring the next day, but it has never broken the rule), so anything I want to start indoors needs to be planted in March or April. Therefore planning is in February (or January if you're really organized and motivated, which I am not under normal circumstances).

I am doing a 20'x30' garden this year. I figure it's a good size. I'll be able to have some variety but not be overwhelmed. Plus it's already fenced off with four feet of chicken wire above the ground and 6-8" buried. And these are the plants I want to grow:

• Tomatoes
  
• Cucumber
  
• Zucchini
  
• Onions
  
• Garlic
  
• Herbs (haven't decided which yet, but definitely the kind for pizza/spaghetti sauce)
  
• Carrots
  
• Lettuce
  
• Some berries
  
• Maybe some flowers
  
• etc
  

This is far from an exhaustive list. It's just kind of a general idea, I may add some plants, I may take away some plants, I'll probably add more details and whatnot. You'll see. I'll post my plans as they develop and become more specific and specialized.

Damsels in Distress

So yesterday afternoon I was over at my friend's house playing DDR and her boyfriend called about 3pm. Well she was worried because he never calls during the day, only at night and, furthermore, he was supposedly quail hunting with his dad. She tried to call him back, but she couldn't get a hold of him. Three and a half hours later, he called back. He and his dad were stuck in the mud about fifteen miles away from us, he said. So she, the worried girlfriend got her dad to start up their big diesel four-door truck to go rescue the Damsels in Distress. I, the country girl who loves adventure, decided to come along (plus my I didn't wanna go home, although my sister did). We packed two ginormous chains and two shovels and set off with 40 miles worth of gas in the tank. Fifteen miles in, no boyfriend and his dad. Twenty miles in, no boyfriend and his dad. I used my cell phone (which was going dead) to ask him for more details. They're on road number five. Okay. So we're on the right track. Twenty-five miles in, and it's too late to go back and go into town for more gas.

Thirty five miles in, we found boyfriend and dad. They were on a hill eating jerky and sitting around a fire they'd made (that's country people for you!). We nearly got stuck ourselves on the way in. They'd never made it to where they were going to hunt. When we stopped where their truck was stuck, boyfriend came barreling down the hillside worried we're not going to recognize the truck just because it's his dad's, not his. It was dark, like eleven o'clock at night at this point. We attached the chains (and the cable boyfriend and dad had) between the lil truck and our big one. We got in the big truck and boyfriend got in the little truck. We started dragging. We were up on the side where it wasn't so muddy and were pulling from that direction. We slid into the mud pit. Boyfriend got out of truck and said that the keys weren't in the truck like he thought and so he went to go get them from his dad.

Boyfriend got keys and his dad came down. They got in the little truck and we dragged them out. We had them go in front of us in case they got stuck again. They started off down the road going twice as fast as we did coming up and we followed behind them. No one got stuck because it's so late that the roads have frozen over and so it's all good. We ran out of gas ten miles from home (twenty from the nearest town). Boyfriend and his dad came back to rescue us, in turn. Friend called her first cousin once removed (who is eighteen) and asked him if he had any diesel fuel. My phone had been dying this whole time and chose right then to bite the dust. So then she switched over to boyfriend's phone which was also dying but had more juice (probably because it's newer).

A round of phone calls were made and in the end boyfriend's dad and friend's dad decided to go into town in the little truck and buy gas. Boyfriend, friend and I sat in the truck and listened to an iPod that's plugged into the iTrip. We talked about random stuff and then a medium white truck came up the road. There was a misunderstanding and two men from friend's house thought that they were supposed to come rescue us and came bearing gas. They put the gas in the truck and showed boyfriend (who was sitting in the driver's seat) how to prime the gears or whatever it's called so that it wouldn't mess up after being all empty.

Boyfriend drove the big truck down the road with medium truck behind us. Then came little truck towards us with people's dads inside with more gas. We all pulled off to the side and everyone got out and stood around in silence. Then we all got back into our various trucks to head home. Boyfriend and dad in little white truck, followed by friend, friend's dad, and I in big white truck, with two men in medium white truck bringing up the rear.

When we finally got home, everyone was asleep except my lil sis (thank goodness, I hate my evil stepfather and my mom just refuses to accept it). I told lil sis all about our adventure, told her she missed out and went to bed.