Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Jason Puts Up a Wall

Our Library is on its way to completion. Jason put up a wall near the entryway just before he came down with the stomach flu, Yuck! Poor thing... So, now I just need to put together the final bookshelf for the living room to finish our library.

Other things:

J built the compost bin higher

I am sewing more and more, mostly baby stuff and maternity items

Composting Toilet is still working out great, although J did switch to the city toilet during his illness. We are about to store the peat moss in a covered trash can to protect it from rain (not necessary, just something to make me feel better--I don't like the wet peat moss at the bottom of the bag)

The Garden is going pitifully well. There is still mesclun to pick. Turnips survived without any protection, although I didn't eat too many. J pruned the fruit trees a couple weeks back. I have started my Spring/Summer garden plans. They will be nice a simple to accomodate my pregnant state. I'm thinking, potatoes, sweet potatoes, peppers, radish, and beans, lots of marigolds and cosmos, and, if I feel up to it, some other things.

I've started started laundering my baby stuff. We are starting to implement a greywater environment, meaning, switching to greywater friendly soaps. First is the laundry detergeant. We found a recipe to base a liquid soap made from our bio-deisel supplies. We need to do a couple of experiments, but it looks easy enough.

Bio-Deisel, by the way, is going fine. Production is much slower in the wintertime, saved for warm weekends. We use 70% bio-deisel, 30% regular deisel in the winter, but we drive less too (summer we use 100% bio-D).
So, still, overall, throughout the year, we emit 10% of what we were with our old Nissan gasoline Stanza.

Well, I can't think of any other homesteading updates. I'm just taking it day by day with this pregnancy thing, and nesting when I feel like it. Housecleaning is kept to a minimum, but I am having bouts of deep cleaning too, which is always fun. "J, can I get rid of this? or J, can I build this?"

Oh, forgot to say, drying laundry outside on the clothesline still going fine. I just have to remember, watch the weather, although rain-washed baby clothes are great! (We've had our line for 2 years, now? and probably for the last year I have been using is regularly. I've only used the dryer 4 times in the past year...)

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