The spring onions have come in, the chickens are laying again and I’ve been thinking about bodies. My yard is full of bodies — chickens and cats and the dog and myself. Himself, my love, likes the cats, puts up with the dog, but really does not like the chickens at all. Mostly because they shit in the yard. I clean up after them, but chickenshit is a factor in this space. It doesn’t bother me, but I grew up in horse barns, and mucking out was one of my first childhood chores. The neighborhood is full of bodies too…
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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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This is what I found when I opened the hoop house to water this morning — real greens! Greens I can eat! I am beyond thrilled with how well these have worked out this year. The binder clips have kept the plastic from blowing off, even in the worst winds Livingston has to offer (winds that cause them to close the interstate and run all the semi-trailers through town). The plastic has kept it warm in there through a couple of weeks of freezing nights. And I’m sure the fact that we’ve had three or four 70-degree days hasn’t hurt.…
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I hesitate to broadcast this to the universe, but we seem to have reached a state of interspecies harmony here at the homestead. Raymond, former chicken-killer, seems to have figured out that he can follow the chickens around the yard, wagging his tail at them, and making small whining sounds without actually having to kill them. It’s clear he wants them, but so far, he’s managed, even unsupervised, not to kill them. And here’s Owen. If you look closely, you can see chickens taking dust baths in the background behind them. Owie’s never killed a chicken, his current challenge is…
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Ever since last fall’s episode of food poisoning, I’ve been meaning to finish enclosing the garden. However, I had to wait for the ground to thaw, and well, the freelance life means that finances have been just tight enough that I didn’t want to go out and buy copper pipe. But this weekend, I finally got it done. I tried to come up with some solution other than more expensive copper, but since I’d done the rest of the trellis/fences that way when I built the garden (this is summer number eight — how did that happen?), well, I just…
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According to the BBC, the town of Mouscron, in Belgium, has 50 pairs of chickens it plans to give to residents as a way to decrease the waste stream. I have to say, my chickens have both significantly lowered my household and garden waste, and here in the arid west, they’ve exponentially sped up the composting process. Composting is a real problem here, because it’s so dry. Because there was an 8×10 concrete pad in the back part of the yard, that’s where I built the chicken coop. And because the compost heaps were already in that part of the…
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It’s supposed to go down into the single digits tonight, so this afternoon, despite the fact that it was only 25 degrees out, and snowy, I got the storm windows out of the shed, and put them up. Every year I forget what a colossal pain in the ass they are. I replaced all the old windows in my house except for those in the living room. They’re really old double-hung windows, so old that the glass is wavy, and I just fell in love with them. So I kept the clunky old wooden storm windows that go with them,…
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Ugh. So Saturday afternoon I thawed out some of last year’s antelope, marinated it, and made some skewers with a few onions out of the garden (for Chuck) and with onions and tomatoes and zucchini for me. Three in the morning and my sweetheart is not well. I’m a little rumbly in the tummy, but he is Not A Well Man. It was very very sad. And a long night. Morning strikes and he is still Sick Like Dog. He sits in the living room watching football and ignoring a cup of black tea while I go out back and…
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I’ve been meaning to blog about this for ages, but my vacation got in the way. We finally finished the chicken coop. Chuck built the actual coop part ages ago, but after Ray killed the hens, we had to enclose the whole space, which took a little while. And I’m proud to say that the only thing we bought for the coop was a roll of plastic bird fencing. Everything else was recycled. There is chain link fence along the bottom part of the enclosure and then I covered it with old twig fencing that I’d saved when I replaced…
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It’s been interesting, this “self-employment” thing. I must admit, I’ve taken a very big break — amazing how many things one can get behind on after working a real day job for ten years. I realize that most people work “real day jobs” for their entire career, so I’m not trying to be disengenuous, but before the Big Corporate Job That Vanished, I was a grad student and a ski bum and a raft guide and worked a lot of odd jobs and retail. I’ve worked since I was fourteen, and for most of that time I had more than…