First sign of spring and zipper practice

Well, around here anyway. Remember how we planted that pea? The seed has germinated!


Let's take a closer look, shall we?


Can you see him there in the middle? I even forgot to turn the sun on for him yesterday. I think I might be enjoying this grow bulb almost as much as my little green friend here. And I think this is the first time I have grown anything myself since we stuck carrot tops in some water in Sunday school when I was 4. Hooray for new life!

In other news, I had a fun day of zipper practice last weekend. I started out with a mess of inherited 7" zippers (not the right size for the Cynthia Guffey zipper technique, she recommends using a 9" zipper):


I made 10 faux mini skirt back samples, marked tailor tacks and clipped, notched, etc. I did 7 of them, the first 3 using copies of the checklist I made from Cynthia's zipper book so that I could walk myself through the steps. When I ran out of checklists (my print cartridge croaked), I kept missing one step and kept having the same problem, so I learned something once I thought about it for a bit and realized why the steps have to happen in the right order. I also identified which steps gave me trouble and where I need to be more careful to hit it just right. A very good experience. I have 3 more to finish my practice; I'm going to do at least one of them by hand. I have also devised a way to practice waistbands, so that's my next task that I'm setting for myself. Now I just need to make myself a detailed waistband checklist. I love the checklist!

Takin' the Snap Pea Challenge

I am not a fan of dirt. But I have become a loyal reader of Jenna Woginrich's blog, Cold Antler Farm, in which she recently issued a challenge, and I heard the call. Here's what I did this morning in the name of eating local and taking control of our food supply.

I got The Professor to bring me in some supplies. Compost:
Vermiculite:
Peat moss:
(Not eat moss. That would be gross).

Some rocks and a pot:

I mixed up the first 3 ingredients and got this:


I put it in the pot:



I took a seed from the pack:



Just one little seed:


I laid him on the dirt:

He's there in the middle, can you see him?

I put some more dirt on him and gave him some water:


I built him a ladder:


I installed some faux sun:



And I've welcomed him to his new little home next to me:

Here he is on Day 1.

I'll take another photo when he looks like something. Stay tuned!

And a huge thank you to Jenna, because if she hadn't issued the call, there is no way I would have spent part of my Sunday messing around with dirt on the kitchen floor.

Second harvest of the day

Some potatoes, a little more broccoli and another cabbage.

He grew all this stuff from seeds people! Well, the potatoes are grown from other potatoes, but how incredibly cool is it that he took seeds and turned them into food. Are we going to live on what we can grow? Not any time soon, but it's a nice supplement to all the money we spend at the farmer's market, and if next year we can grow more, and the year after that a little more, so much the better. This soup is going to be pretty darn good.

And while I chop mountains of vegetables (carrots, leeks, jerusalem artichokes and collards done, onions, potatoes, broccoli and now cabbage to go), The Professor is outside building a pathway to our side door, taking advantage of the warm (albeit wet) weather while we can. I better get back to it, but I am just so excited about food being produced this late in the year that I couldn't contain my excitement for even a moment.

We grew carrots

Well, The Professor grew them. I had nothing to do with it. But weren't these a lovely surprise to get from the garden today?

Here they are fresh from the yard:


And here they are all cleaned up and ready to be chopped up for soup:


We managed to get some food from our front yard this year. Among other things, we grew tomatoes, a couple little heads of broccoli, two wee cabbages, some peas (delish!), and a mess of rogue tomatillos that were mostly left to die on the vine because I didn't know what to do with them. So not a lot of food, but some, and I didn't do a good job of chronicling our efforts at all, mainly because they weren't our efforts but just The Professor's efforts. He didn't do such a great job of chronicling either. I have photos of some of the stuff we grew around here somewhere, and I will try to put together a post with a little more information about our first year with veggies in the front yard. For now, though, I've got soup to make.

My trip to City Hall

Yesterday afternoon I chanced to read an email from Green City Blue Lake, a local non-profit promoting sustainability in Cleveland and beyond, and I found out that there was a meeting today of the Cleveland City Planning Commission to allow public input on a proposed ordinance to allow (and regulate) the keeping of small livestock within the city limits: chickens, ducks, rabbits, bees, etc. Because this issue relates so closely to our food supply, I knew I had to attend, and I am so glad that I did.

I haven't been downtown too much since I moved to the Cleveland suburbs about 5 1/2 years ago, so just getting dropped off at City Hall by The Professor was enough of a new experience. The security at City Hall is not at all intimidating: a guy looked in my bag. Feh, no big deal. My only other municipal building experience in Cleveland was at the Police Headquarters where I went to fight a parking ticket (broken meter), and they had sent me through a metal detector and my bag through an X-ray, then confiscated my knitting needles. This time I took a crochet hook, and I got a fair bit done on a little project bag during the course of the meeting.


The City Hall building was beautiful and stately, with a huge atrium and broad stairways, and I wished I'd had my camera with me to take a picture of the beautiful marble water fountain I passed. When I sat down at the meeting, I noticed that I was feeling quite jittery. I think municipal buildings make me nervous, or maybe it's being anywhere near the workings of government, I am not sure. I was glad that I had some yarn to keep me calm.

I was surprised at how many people stated their names and then copped to owning illegal chickens and bees. I suppose that as of today their flocks are probably legal (depending on the size of the flock, because the ordinance did have some restrictions), but still, yipes. Actually, I think that was what had me so jittery, now that I think about it. Even though they said many times during the meeting that these ordinances are enforced on a nuisance basis (like, they aren't driving around looking for illegal henhouses and busting the owners, carting them away in the paddywagon; if you keep chickens and you don't keep their area clean and your neighbors complain, someone comes out and... I don't know, but you get in trouble), it still freaked me out.

At the very end of the meeting, I finally screwed up my courage, with the help of the guy sitting behind me to whom I confessed my fear of speaking at the meeting and who vetted my whispered version of my input and told me "Yeah, they need to hear that." My input was simple: I just thanked them for considering more liberal legislation for livestock ownership in the City because they would be setting an example for the region and leading the way for other areas, our suburb for instance, to follow suit. Now I just need to find out who, if anyone, is leading the charge to get a similar revision to the ordinance in front of our City Planning Commission.

And for tonight's entertainment...

The Professor and I are going to learn about native plants of Ohio with the Cleveland Permaculture meet-up group. Woo hoo!