On Friday, I wired the last payment on my house. I own my own house. No one can make me move, ever again, if I don’t want to. For someone who went to six grammar schools and moved pretty much every 2 years until I was 35, this is huge. This has been the primary goal of LivingSmall since day one. I moved to Montana because it’s beautiful of course, but primarily I moved here because I could buy an inexpensive house. A house I could afford to pay off. For anyone looking to achieve similar goals, consulting with experts…
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I’ve decided that the time has come — as much as I like the decorative aspects of my current garden design, it has several crucial drawbacks. This design is based on 6-foot lengths of lumber, so the big square boxes are six feet square, while the triangular beds are all based on six-foot right angles. Here’s the diagram: (Sorry about the photo quality.) While I love the decorative aspects of this design, it has several practical drawbacks. The biggest of which is that I can’t reach across the beds. Once I got chickens, I wound up fencing the outside perimeter with…
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Thanks to Michael Ruhlman and his bread baking app for the iPhone, I have nearly mastered the baguette. Out here in the sticks, we don’t have access to the kinds of artisan breads that I could get even at my not-swanky supermarket in California. I live with a man for whom good carbs are really crucial — and who loves loves loves good bread. I’ve been making the no-knead bread for ages (as my many posts on that subject attest), but it needs a long lead time and an overnight fermentation. There have been a few times recently when I’ve…
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Last spring when I had backyard greens to spare, I put up several quarts of “green soup.” And boy, am I glad now. It’s winter. It’s not that cold, but it’s grey and windy and grey — and nothing is growing in my garden and yet, down in the basement freezer, there are quarts of this lovely soup, made with my very own greens. A saving grace. Green soup is very easy. Wash and chop greens of any variety — most of last springs’ soups were made with a mix of broccoli rabe, komatsuna, spinach, and mustard greens. In a…
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Chicken feed has been a problem lately. When I first got chickens, I bought regular commercial feed from the feed store where I bought the chickens — they carry the Nutrena brand (which is Cargill) and Purina. Regular layer feed runs about $16 for a 50lb sack, and scratch is about the same. Then a new feed store opened in town, and they carried a local organic feed and scratch milled just north of here in Fort Benton called Big Sky Feeds. This is a photo of their scratch mix — and here’s the label: — wheat, sunflower seeds and flax (although…
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I woke up the day after Christmas and decided that after ten years, I couldn’t stand my kitchen one more day. That it was time. Time to paint the kitchen. My kitchen is the last frontier in this house. For almost ten years I’ve spun my wheels and lived with the kitchen as it was when I moved in. Kitchens are problematic that way. You think, well, if I’m going to paint I have to move the appliances, and if I’m going to pull out the appliances, then I should do the floor. And if I’m going to do the…
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My kitchen is the one part of my house that has still, after almost 10 years, not been renovated. It’s one of those tricky cases — if I pull the appliances out to paint, I might as well replace the floor. And if I’m replacing the floor then maybe I should have that problematic weird wall pulled out. But I don’t really have the funding to do all that, and well, the kitchen works surprisingly well in it’s unrenovated state, and so, nothing gets done. Sigh. It can be helpful to consult experts before diving into a big project like…
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For some reason, the annual consumerist frenzy of “Christmas” seems even more dissonant to me than usual. It’s clear there’s a class thing with the Christmas frenzy — there are people for whom the once-a-year pile of stuff under the tree is really really important, and there are people for whom it’s not. I have to admit, I grew up in a family who mostly believed in keeping it simple at Christmas. And although as a kid I was bummed by my parents’ knee-jerk rejection of anything like the “toy of the year” as consumerist claptrap (well, there was also…
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My first post-deadline, post-travel weekend and although I was woefully short on new fiction pages produced, I did get some long-neglected house-and-garden tasks done. First of all, I’m feeling sanguine about winter because, at long last, we got our whole pig! It took a long time this year because, well, the small packer/butcher operation we buy from sold more post-fair pig specials than they had pigs. So we had to wait for them to get more local pigs (they promised me it wasn’t a CAFO pig), and then for them to make the delicious hams and bacon. There’s nothing like…
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With apologies to my blog readers who have seen this bread before, but after several years, what I find interesting is how the weather affects my bread baking. I can’t get a decent loaf to work for me in the summer when it’s hot, but when my kitchen goes back to it’s usual 65-70 degrees, I can make a bomber loaf of bread. This is the no-knead bread I’ve been making for years now. Three cups flour (this is one cup each of King Arthur bread, all-purpose and whole-wheat flours, with a nice sprinkling of Bob’s Red Mill Dark Rye…