Categories
homestead QoTD thinking big

There is no substitute for fire

“Television often gives focus to a room, but it is nothing but a feeble substitute for something which is alive and flickering… The need for fire is almost as fundamental as the need for water. Fire is an emotional touchstone, comparable to trees, other people, a house, the sky. But the traditional fireplace is nearly obsolete, and new ones are often added to homes as ‘luxury items’. Perhaps this explains why these showpiece fireplaces are always so badly located…

Less monotonous and less abstract than flowing water, even more quick to grow and to change than the young bird… fire suggests the desire to change… it magnifies human destiny; it links the small to the great, the hearth to the volcano, the life of a log to the life of a world.”

“A Pattern Language” by Christopher Alexander


🧣🧦: I like layers with my layers. So most systems at our place have backups or partners. We have an electric heat pump that keeps our home at “I hope you brought a couple of sweaters” warm. But to get truly toasty in the fall and winter and spring, we turn to our woodstove, Calcifer.

🍞🥓☕🧼👖🚿🐔: Besides heating our home, our woodstove has baked our bread, made our coffee, served up nice crispy bacon, and offered sweet blueberry cakes. The spent wood has become lye, and then soap to wash our dishes. The ash is added the chickens’ dust baths, used to fight parasites. I’ve made drawing charcoal from wild grapevine in its embers. It bakes potatoes, toasts marshmallows, and warms stew. Sopping wet clothes hang lazily around it, and with no effort on their part, are soon bone dry. Snow set out in buckets has melted down to emergency water. Because when the power goes out, the fire still works.

🤔: I don’t think woodstoves are necessarily The Answer To Energy Needs For All. Firewood is renewable, but complicated. But in the woodstove, the fire’s energy is visible and precious. It pushes me to use less, and think about it more. And that’s just not something I get from staring deeply into my thermostat.

Wherever you are folks, I hope you’re snug and warm.✨

~Kate

Categories
birbs homeMADE products

Birb’s Eye View

🐦✏️: This is a little winter wren that is actually not a winter wren but instead is a Carolina wren. Because I got aaaaaallll the way through drawing a winter wren and then read that most winter wrens move out of Ontario for winter. 🤦‍♀️

🍄❄️: (In my defence, I ran into a winter wren in the woods here just a few weeks ago. Though I guess a few weeks ago the woods were also full of oyster mushrooms and not snow.)

🐦🔁🐦: Fortunately I was just a brighter belly and an eye stripe away from a Carolina wren — who *does* overwinter in Ontario. And who is also super adorable, and is also a sometime resident of our woods.

🖨️❔: This artwork is intended to be printed up as this year’s Maker’s Dozen holiday card. Though I’m having trouble finding a local printer with recycled (or FSC at minimum) cardstock. It’s really put a WRENch in my plans. Any recommendations in the Quinte West area welcome! 👍

Hope you’re having a great week folks!❄️🐦🌲

🙌🏳️‍🌈: And thanks to the incomparable @wellpreservedcreative for reminding me to quit playing colour wheel roulette and just look at colour theory when I’m stumped. (*Rogue colour choices remain my own.)

~Kate

Categories
baking baking

Snow Cake – 2022

A family tradition, to mark the first snowfall of the year. A white cake with white icing.

☃️🌨️: It’s a love cake to snow. It’s like if a love letter were edible. It’s a celebration of snow and winter. The cake (or cupcake) doesn’t have to be fancy, though it can be if you like.

🌈❄️: The particular kind of cake and icing isn’t important. It can be decorated with sprinkles or chocolate chips or not at all. Some years I make my snow cake playful, some years experimental, some years nostalgic.

💝❄️: It’s a cake to bake up and savour that feeling you have when you’re a little kid, and you throw open the curtains one morning, see that first blanket of white, and shout: “IT SNOWED!!!”

I still do this. (Just ask Neil 😉) And I plan to keep doing it until the day I die. I hope the snow sticks around here as long as I do.

And if the Snow Cake tradition sounds good to you, if you remember that feeling, that delicious “IT SNOWED!!” feeling — or if you’d like to — you’re welcome to join in, with whatever sweet snowy treat your heart feels like baking up. ❄️🎂

Have a wonderful weekend folks! Happy Snow Cake Day!

~Kate

Categories
foraging fungi mushrooms

Aw shucks, Neil found oyster mushrooms!

Neil went to the woods to cut down buckthorn and found 3 pounds of oyster mushrooms. *3 pounds!*

This is *one* of them. Well, more like a mother mushroom made up of a few. The biggest of his haul were ~20cm each. Some we’ve nommed fresh, but most I’ve dehydrated and popped in the pantry.

He caught a wild mushroom and it was thiiiiiiiiiis big! 🎣🍄

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📸🍄: Mood lighting courtesy of holding the mushroom under the light in the range hood. Use what you got. 👍


Hope you’re having a great week folks!

~Kate

Categories
amphibians birbs

The Night Shift

Owls and salamanders 🦎🦉🍂
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🕯️🍂: A little before midnight last night, I went for a short candlelit walk. There’s always a lot to do this time of year, before the cold and icy thrall of winter. But right now we’re perched on that point between light and dark and warm and cool, and I try to make moments to go notice it.

🦎🚪: When I got back to our front door, I found a little friend sat on the door mat. A blue-spotted salamander. As perfect as it could be. A nocturnal critter that enjoys the damp and dark, its hunt was just starting up as we wound down for rest.

👶🐈❓: When I crouched down to look at this blue beauty, I noticed a call repeating in the night air. A bit like a child, a bit like a cat — a Great Horned Owl. In the autumn, their calls become more prominent and frequent. Now is the owls’ time to court and set territories, before they make their winter babies.

🌜: Life doesn’t end at nightfall or pause for the cold or wet. The lead roles are taken over by a new cast, but the story — the story never stops.
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Have a great day slash night slash day folks! 💙
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👣📝: I am only holding the salamander to move it away from the front door where we come and go and come and go — aka a High Squish Zone. I popped them into a nearby pile of logs and we both went on our way. 👍

~Kate

Categories
fungi homeMADE homestead mushrooms

Mushroom log comes to FRUITion… 3 year update!

Categories
D-I-Why Not homeMADE thinking big

Failures: Past, Present, and Future?

Failures: Past, present, and future? I fail all the time. Up, down, sideways. Also, I don’t believe in failure.

That is click-baity though because of course I do. I’m a present day human. I’ve been trained my whole life to believe I fail at every turn. As a female, I fail just waking up as a shape. That is, of course, garbage, but here we are.

⚽🐍: Okay, so here we are. A world of moving goalposts, and impossible ideas of “perfect”. But next comes the choice. The choice to suck the fear of failure right out of it, like a toxic snake bite, and spit it away.*

(*My analogies are getting grosser, and also I think you are definitely not supposed to do this. “Cutting and sucking the wound only serves to increase the risk of infection.” Thank you for coming to my snake bite PSA.)

🥔📺: I believe I failed only when I don’t try again. If something didn’t “turn out” immediately, and I sat down to wallow in TV and potato chips. Now everyone needs recoup time when the seed doesn’t grow, the sides aren’t square, or the code is borked. Potato chips are tasty, and sometimes there’s an inspiring tutorial on YouTube. But fall down 7 times, get up 8.

A bruised ego can heal, and come back tougher. Letting your ego get bruised can be like training for a fight — kicking a coconut tree to toughen up your shin, a la Van Damme.**

(**OKAY THIS IS EVEN WORSE THAN THE SNAKE BITE THING. Don’t kick coconut trees kids.)

🍐: Yesterday I tried making pear jam. It didn’t set cuz there wasn’t enough sugar. Fail… But now delicious goop for my oatmeal.

👩‍💻: I coded a layout that didn’t resize correctly on every device. Fail? No, just needed some tweaks. Now I know more.

🎁: I’m trying a new way of long-term potato and pear storage. Will it work? Shrug! Today might be the first day of a long slow fail. I hope not. But I won’t regret the fail if it comes. I’ll regret not trying.

Maybe I’ll end up with a box of sprouty spuds, and a mushy mess of pears. But maybe, maybe I’ll be biting into a luscious pear in the dead of winter, savouring the taste of trying.

Here’s to failing and trying again, to correct handling of snake bites and respect for coconut trees.

Have a great week folks.❤️

~Kate

Categories
D-I-Why Not foraging homeMADE wild inklings

Junk Art

Junk art! What do a box of cat food, a bit of sumac, offcuts of wood, and a smashed photo have in common? This hummdinger of an art piece!

📏🐈: First upcycled + DIY picture frame… complete! I made the picture frame from scraps I recut on the table saw/by hand, a piece of broken glass I recut, and cardboard from the boxes from Oliver’s cat food + Neil’s office chair…that I recut. Recut, remix, reward! 💚 (See previous post for parts prep.)

🎨🌱: I painted the hummingbird with inks I made from plants: buckthorn, wild grape, avocado pits, goldenrod, sumac, grapevine charcoal.

♻️💪: So satisfying to bring it all together in something more than the sum of its parts. Upcycle for the win!! Have a great weekend makers!

📺: “Junk art” is a reference to Beau Miles’ “Junk” series on YouTube. Highly recommend, two thumbs way up 👍👍

~Kate

Categories
D-I-Why Not homeMADE thinking big

Bending Time

I’ve had to wait years to become a patient person…

🚍⏳: And being a maker can require a lot of patience. Parts take time to arrive, solutions don’t always work as expected, repairs take a few tries, experiments don’t succeed on the first go. It can be a long ride on the strugglebus before you get to that final destination, Euphoria Station.

🧐⏰: My secret to being a very patient person is that I cheat. I can wait years if I have to, but I stuff those years full of many things, with many different timelines. So as one project is rolling off the finish line, I’m usually popping three new ones in the queue.

🔨🍇: Nature goes at her own pace, and so do third-party parts suppliers. So while I’m waiting for a part to arrive, I start a cordial infusing. I might only find one oak gall that morning, but that evening I can add a few more stitches to a repair. Strip the bark for a basket handle, install a faucet, save a seed, start learning how to fix a lamp. Not every day can include a completed project, but most days advance one — or five. It’s all in my new imaginary book: The Impatient Person’s Guide to Making Slow Things Go Fast.

(Though I’m capable of waiting a long time if necessary, it has to be for *good reason*. I once took a personality test whose conclusion included the phrase “Don’t waste Kate’s time”. I’ve never felt so seen by an inanimate algorithm…)

🎨🌳: This is an upcycled picture frame in progress. I don’t have any frames for the wild ink art I make, in part because I’m determined to make them. So I’ve held on to a big piece of broken glass for years — waiting for me to make the time to buy a glass cutter and learn how to use it. And find the right offcuts of wood and rip them with the table saw. Now I’m waiting on the little tabs to hold everything in place. It’s been a long wait, but Euphoria Station is only a few stops away now. I can see it.

🙃⌛: I’ve backed into being a patient person by way of being a determined one. So if you’re a determined but impatient person like me, there’s hope for both of us. We can’t actually cheat time, but we can change how it passes.


~Kate

Categories
fungi mushrooms

Don’t trust your gut (about mushrooms)

I don’t trust my gut.

🧠: I mean, my gut is wonderful. And it has a lot of essential and often critical information to share with the group. But it also has a pact with my brain to run their decisions past each other.

🤪: Because when it comes to mushrooms, my gut might be hungry, and therefore not thinking straight.

🍄🌳: I came across these mushrooms in the woods a while ago. They are quite a bit like the oyster mushrooms that grow nearby, but my gut said they weren’t oysters.

🤪🍽️: The next time I walked by, my gut had changed its mind. Y’know what, it said, our regular oyster mushroom tree might be spent. And maybe these *are* oyster mushrooms, and just don’t look like what you’re used to? You don’t have your books with you, maybe there’s some variation or exception you’re not remembering… So I was like, okay gut, let’s settle this. And I brought one back to the house for spore printing. Tag brain, you’re up.

🍄⏳: The photo in the centre of the top row, and the large photo beneath, are the same mushroom. *Exactly* the same mushroom. One day later, but now having released its spores to paper. Oyster mushrooms have a white spore print. And while colour perception varies from person to person, I think we can all agree these spores do not look like newly fallen snow. They don’t even look like snow that’s fallen on a gritty city street, been driven over for several days, and is now compacted in the gutter with bits of asphalt in it. This here, this is a brown spore print.

🍄🌨️: The far right of the top row is a less intentional oyster mushroom spore print that I happen to have right now. An old oyster log I have was fruiting, and I pulled a couple of small mushrooms off it a few days ago, and laid them out to dry. As the mushrooms dry, they release their spores. Their very white snow-fallen-on-a-frozen-lake spores.

🍄⛔: I don’t know yet what the mushroom at top left, top centre, and bottom enlarged is — I’m strongly leaning Crepidotus — but I know for certain what it *isn’t*. And in mushrooming, knowing what isn’t is nearly as valuable as knowing what is.

“Science is magic that works.” ~Kurt Vonnegut

🍄❤️: Take care of your gut. Don’t let it wander the woods alone. 😉

~Kate