Will You be Joining us Again?
Well, it’s officially time to start talking about the 5×5 Challenge once again. I’ve had a lot of people excited about doing it again this year and more that watched last year and are ready to jump in and start a garden this year. I’ll be using my raised bed outside the front door again for this challenge, this year I’ll be growing different vegetables. I haven’t decided which ones, perhaps you’ll have suggestions.
This year we’ll hopefully be joined by a few members of the tiny house community, Tiny House Magazine will be running an article about the 5×5 in the next issue.
This year we’ll continue with the same schedule, Wednesdays will be the challenge days. The posts here on Chiot’s Run will focus on garden education, tasks to complete in your garden, and updates on my 5×5 garden.
Who’s in? Did you do the challenge last year? Are you a new to gardening?
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A Clean Slate
We finally started painting here, a much needed task indeed. The walls show their long life and aren’t really colors that suite our tastes. For years, we’ve painted colors on our walls, this time we decided things would be different.
I have a few boards on pinterest filled with ideas for the home, probably none of them will ever come to fruition, but some of them will inspire changes around here.
We wanted to create a blank slate. Everything will be white – classic white, the ceiling, the walls, and the trim. The bedroom was tackled first, it took 4 gallons of paint to cover the blue walls and trim in this large room. The floor is painted subfloor and will be painted black. Hopefully we’ll get a very large seagrass rug that will cover most of it and soften the surface.
Funny thing is, we painted this room first because it was our bedroom and now we’re thinking staying in the smaller room because it’s darker and cooler being on the north side of the house.
The nice thing is that now this room is going to become my sewing room and probably a guest room as well. We’re definitely excited to see something finally come together and organized. It’s starting to feel less like a college dorm around here.
What’s your favorite wall choice?
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Cultivate Simple 63: Stew 6.0
This week it’s a Stew episode so you never know what you will find. First we discuss Home Improvement and share some tips that we have learned (most the hard way). Then we discuss our process for making big decisions in our life. We have a doozy of a decision coming up so we have been going through this process all week.
Home Improvement
– Having the right tool
– Prep is key
– Don’t rush
– Sweat the small stuff
Big Decisions
– Discuss
– Anticipate
– Calculate
– Decide
– Don’t look back
Brian’s Geeky Corner
Check out If This Than That. Organize all your online activity and make various services work together.
Books of the Week
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:04:06 — 44.7MB)
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Quote of the Day: Louisa Jones
“Sometimes potagers begin the season in strict formality and end up romantic by September! And sometimes, of course, the wild, romantic style is simply a fallback position for the tired gardener, when weeds get the upper hand.”
Louisa Jones – The Art of French Vegetable Gardening
This time of year it’s easy to imagine our perfect gardens, the ones we’ll have time to weed. Then it seems that come July/August those dreams fade away to simply keeping the weeds from going to seed.
Ideally we could find a place somewhere in the middle. A semi neat garden with a few weeds, no doubt, visiting gardeners are more comfortable when they spy a few weeds. Just like people are often more comfortable in our homes when they are a little cluttered and look lived in.
Do you like to maintain a weed free garden, a semi weed free garden, or do you let things get really “romantic”?
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A Labor of Love
Yesterday we celebrated a birthday. When I asked Mr Chiots what he’d like for a birthday meal, he said “Lasagne”.
It was a slow meal, a very slow meal. It all started way back in the fall of 2012 when we first moved to Maine. I planted garlic in the back garden. This garlic was harvested this past summer and it seasoned the sauce and the sweet Italian sausage that used in the lasagne.
The next step towards reaching this meal was starting onion seeds in January. Then in March seeds were started for tomatoes and herbs used in the sausage and the sauce.
I canned this sauce last fall, it’s perfect. The tomatoes and herbs are roasted for many hours in a low oven. The result is a deeply flavored sweet sauce, with none of the acidic bite of a sauce made with fresh tomatoes.
On Thursday evening I made a batch of ricotta cheese with Jersey milk from a local farm and lemons from Lemon Ladies Orchard. I procured whole milk mozzarella, parmesan and romano at the local co-op. I also purchased mushrooms to add to the lasagne.
The hens provided eggs for the pasta, King Arthur Flour provided the flour.
I wrote a post on Eat Outside the Bag about making your own pasta if you’d like to give it a try.
Mr Chiots ended up eating three servings, so I guess he thought it was delicious. The good thing is, there are only two of us, so it will take us a few days to eat up the rest of the pan. I always find that lasagne is much better when reheated.
It’s certainly satisfying to see all the different ingredients that were grow and raised right here coming together to form a delicious meal. For my birthday I always used to request chicken and dumplings, luckily, another meal with ingredients that can be mostly grown or raised right here.
What dish do you request for your birthday meal?
