New Toys and Time to Work on the Garden
Happy March, everyone! It certainly started like a lion this year. It was 50 degrees and beautiful yesterday, and today we woke up with an inch of snow and blustery 20 degree weather. Winter in the northeast, I guess. You never know what's going to happen from day to day.
Every year, we try to do a No Spend January, when we only spend on bare necessities like food and toiletries. It helps us to reset our thinking, after a long holiday season of shopping and spending. We did very well this January. Not only did we not buy anything unnecessary, we also worked on eating down our pantry and spent very little on food too.
The other nice thing about a No-Spend-January is that it gives us a lot of time to think about what we do want to buy or spend our money on. It's so easy to impulse buy something you think you need, and you may later find out that you didn't need it at all, or that something cheaper would have done the job just as well. As we have many purchases to make for our homestead, this time and space to think about it was helpful for us.
Once February came, and our no-spend challenge was over, we bought three new toys for the homestead. The first thing I ordered was a new bread machine:
I make bread at least once a week, often twice a week, and I make bread to give as gifts as well. I have worn out three bread machines over the last 10 years! So with that in mind, we decided not to cheap out on this one, and bought a Zojirushi which is the best bread machine on the market as far as I'm concerned. I'm still getting used to it, but I do like it very much. It's clearly much better made than anything I've used before.
The next thing we got is more a necessity than a toy. We bought a countertop RO (reverse osmosis) water filter. We are still unsure what to do about the well at this point. Everyone we ask tells us that you don't know what you will get if you dig a new well, and that it's better to keep the well you have if it's working ok. The problem with our water is that it has a lot of iron and manganese and it doesn't taste very good. However, it's also very shallow, and a whole house water treatment often requires creating a lot of waste water to deal with these problems, and we don't think our shallow well would be able to handle that.
So until we have a better idea of how we want to deal with our well, we decided to get this machine to filter our water and make it good to drink:
It's very simple to use and works quite well, so I'm really pleased with that choice. It was also a lot cheaper than a new well!
The third toy we bought has been a big help for Chad. It's a manual log splitter!
The wood we have delivered is good hardwood, and it's quite cheap, but the downside is that the logs are pretty thick. Our woodstove has a small fire box, and it works better to have pieces that aren't so big around. Chad also splits wood with a nice splitting maul:
But in the middle of winter, when it's 10 degrees outside and the snow is a foot deep, that becomes much harder. The manual log splitter allows us to have an easy way to split logs right in the basement. You swing those long handles back and forth, slowly pushing the log toward the metal wedge, until CRACK, it splits with a pop!
Someday we will probably have a power splitter to split wood we cut from our own property, but this one will continue to be helpful in the winter when we don't want to get outside.
Chad's very favorite part about the log splitter, is the warnings in the manual. They tell you to NEVER let anyone ride on the splitter! And under no circumstances are you to leave in unattended while operating!
Speaking of winter, we sure had a cold, nasty winter this year. Here's a picture of our indoor/outdoor thermometer during the last cold snap (before we turned the heat up for the day):
We have had some much warmer weather since then, up into the 40s and even the 50s! And it has my heart all aflutter with the idea of spring. I have even gotten out and worked in the garden! Chad and I worked hard the first week it was in the 40s, and got out every day to set up the garden fence. We wanted to get it done before the ground thawed.
I even got a little bit of raised bed building done in my veggie garden, before the soil got too mushy. The beds in my garden need to be raised up, to drain off the water that runs down the hill.
You shouldn't dig in your garden until it's really dry in late spring, or you can badly compact the soil. However, it was actually like ice pellets, not wet at all, and I figured I wasn't doing any harm since it was still frozen. But by the end of the week, the ground was beginning to thaw enough to actually get muddy, and I had to call it quits. Before I did, I got to see that my garlic is beginning to come up!
Velvet on the other hand is literally watching the clock, waiting for spring to arrive.
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