A week on Parker Pond

Every year Jon's family rents a camp somewhere in Maine for a week-long family vacation. So, we spent this past week falling in love with Parker Pond in the Belgrade Lakes. It was a week outdoors in magical forests, swimming off of our rocky knoll, hiking, paddling, fishing, and hand crafting for everyone.

Before the trip, Erin found Natalie Chanin's website and books, and reminded me of a project I have wanted to do for years since Merry gave me Natalie's first book: The Alabama Stitch Book.
This is a picture from her book of the skirt we both planned to use as our template:

We made stencils, and laminated them at home before cutting them out with an exacto knife. The night we got to camp we started stenciling our jersey skirt panels with textile paint we made from acrylic paints and textile medium.
And then we let them dry, and basted the two layers of each panel together.
We spent days in the woods around the camp. Kathy was the first to begin crafting inspired new spots for the fairies to live...
complete with stone pathways and a silo for grain so the fairy animals will be well-fed all winter.
Nanny, Mary, and Bob came on Monday to celebrate Dick's birthday with us, and enjoy the pond...
and Jon and Erin got right to work catching crayfish. Not surprisingly, Jon quickly re-discovered that they pinch, and it hurts!One of the most wonderful parts about the camp was how peaceful it was. No motor boats. No float planes. No neighbors nearby. It was just us, the beavers, loons, and fish on 65 acres at the tip of the pond.

We built camp fires every day...

hoaned our knife-sharpening skills in style...
and explored in our canoes.
Nate caught more fish than I have ever seen anyone catch... mostly perch, who found their way back into the pond, only to be caught again on the next cast. Apparently memory isn't their strong suit.
Erin and I stitched during spare moments around the campfire, or when we all sunned ourselves on the rocks by the water. (And for curious folks: we stitched around the borders of our stencils, and then cut them out carefully, leaving a painted border that prevents fraying, and allowing the underneath layer of fabric to show through.)
Jon and I got up at 5 one morning to canoe out in search of otters...

We didn't find any, but we did see two beavers paddling in the early morning light. They slapped their tails at us, and dove down. Inevitably, they would pop up in a new location and do the same stunt all over again. We eventually left them to continue on their way... (can you see one of their faces here on the left, along with its watery trail?)
We also sat to watch a mama and papa loon feed their baby as the sun rose. They both dove for fish while the baby stuck his head underwater, watching them. When they popped up with a snack, they would paddle over and pass it on. I was amazed at how quickly they could catch fish, and also at how much that baby ate!

I have always loved the way droplets make waves on the water, and how canoe paddle splashes form little balls that skim across the water untouched before rejoining the pond again.
On our way home we found a big beaver dam, but it seemed that no one was home.

Later in the day we all adventured a ways down the pond to an area of conservation land where there are great hikes...

...even the Hooties came!

We pulled our canoes and kayak ashore, and off we went...

The woods were full of moss, and ferns...
and so many interesting mushrooms!
Who uses these black q-tips, I wonder?
and did you know that the bumble bees also work indian pipe? We didn't!

We ate our picnic lunch overlooking the lake...and on the way home we found a great big grandfather oak tree...
Erin made Jon this delicious whoopie pie... we are in Maine, after all!
and we paddled home again...

to enjoy the afternoon sun on the point...and make sailboats for the frogs...
Jon and Dick both brought their favorite stumps, and we had wondered why... until the morning that Jon split his and started working, and working, and finally a shape appeared...
Kathy, Erin, and I spent an afternoon tie dying...
Here's just a small sampling of the many things we made!
We spent lots more time making houses for our clever fairy friends...

there were twig ladders,trees, chimneys...

flags...

and Dick even made a fairy mine!

Thankfully Erin's fairies will also have plenty of food and a well for water to share with everyone!

In the afternoon, Jon taught me a new game that is a tradition in their family. Have you ever played it? You each stand on opposite ends of the canoe, and you bounce, trying to knock the other person off. Apparently the goal is to stay standing, even after the other person bails. It seems impossible, because the whole canoe rocks and tips when one person goes down. Legend has it that Dick can successfully remain standing, no matter how much the canoe dips and sways.I thought it was loads of fun, and an easy way to get in the water too!
Sadly, Jon and I had to leave camp a day before everyone else, and we really didn't want to go! But, we had to come home for class and work respectively. Plus, we hear there's a hurricane brewing, and we're all curious to see what happens back on the farm...

A trip to Moosehead Lake

On Monday, we headed up to Greenville to visit with the Heyerdahls and the Mizrahis. Kerry, Ross, and Saia were there to greet us before the Heyerdahls arrived, and instantly we were back to our normal routine of laughing, cooking, singing, and bouncing from room to room.We got to spend three amazing days cuddling, playing games, chatting, kayaking, eating delicious food, and swimming in the chilly lake.
Unfortunately my camera died as soon as I arrived, so there aren't many pictures of the splendor to share, but we made good use of our time together, and we stayed as long as we could before heading home this afternoon. It's always so hard to leave!

Adventures on Blueberry Hill

I imagine this little guy is saying "There's nothing to see here... Nope. I'm a stick. A boring old stick. I swear! Nothing interesting at all!"

So, here we are in Vermont, where Mum always makes the most beautiful tiny boquets for our table and window sills...
Because it's blueberry season, we're doing lots of picking for the farm stand. When enough berries have been harvested we still go down and pick mummy berry. We have found it easiest to drag tarps to pick them onto, since they fall off the bush so easily.

Mummy berry is a fungus that affects the blueberries. You can see some on the upper right of this branch- it makes shriveled, hard, and often white berries instead of the big fat blues we crave.
The life cycle of the mummy berry is interesting. Those hard white berries fall off onto the ground, and sometime in the springtime it makes mushrooms, which shoot off spores, which infect other berries later on in the season. Because of this we pick the mummies and burn them. Composting them would just allow them to grow, and we don't want that!

Thankfully there are WAY more good berries than mummies, and it doesn't take long to pick a few gallons.
With some of these Jon and I have decided to make E.M. You may remember E.M. from my Argentina blog (60daysinargentina.blogspot.com)- it stands for effective microorganisms, and it's something we used on Mama Roja regularly. All you need to do is take organic local fruit (with skins), put it in a container, put some sugar on top, and allow it to ferment. In Argentina we used a 5-gallon bucket of fruit and 2.2 lb of sugar. When I did the math, that was about 1/2 cup of sugar for our one-gallon glass jar of blueberries.
We then put a cloth over the top with a rubber band around it (because you want this process to be aerobic, but don't want bugs getting in there) and we'll leave it in a dark place for 3 or more weeks until it makes lots of great probiotic-rich juice. You pour off the juice and drink little bits of it as a healthy bacteria boost for your system, and leave the rest to continue making more juice. When it stops, just add more sugar (as long as there's fruit pulp there still) and it will keep going for up to a year sometimes.
LakeFest is this coming weekend, so we had a chance to carve some local water critters for kids to make block print prayer flags with at the festival.
Here is Jon's muskrat...
I carved a river otter and a painted turtle...
and then this bull frog...
and Jon did this awesome spotted salamander too! It was so fun that we found it hard to stop!
We found a couple of birch trees at the top of the hill that needed to be cut out of the hedgerow...
So Jon cut them down,
and we measured out pieces to make our loft with. We're hoping that once it is built it will look like a birch forest inside the yurt.
Amazingly, we got those two entire trees in (and on) Jon's car before we headed home!
Oh, how I love Vermont, so lush and green and full of life. Every time I come back here I never want to leave. How blessed we are to have two such wonderful places to call home!

Recent homesteading adventures of all sorts

One of us is less of a morning person than the other. Can you guess who?

So, we have been working on our floor, silently. The floor that has taken months and months. If you recall, we had a pitch problem after our platform sat out in the full sun under tarps for weeks before we got our yurt raised. We finally scrubbed and scraped all the pitch off, and then sanded it smooth. Because we were determined to finish our floor in the least toxic, and most natural and local way possible, we made our own floor oil/finish by mixing 3 gallons of walnut oil with 1 pound of beeswax. We first heat-treated the oil by stirring it at 160 degrees (F) for 30 minutes, and then chopped up the beeswax and stirred it in until it melted. That worked beautifully and gave our floor a lovely finish. It did not stop the pitch, however, and we still found ourselves in a bit of a sticky situation. So...
we eventually got everything we needed to make our own shellac. Did you know that shellac is made from bug spit (essentially)? Yes, so we got dewaxed platinum shellac flakes (apparently they must be dewaxed to seal pitch) and very pure denatured alcohol (nearly methanol-free; apparently methanol is the nasty stuff) and let them soak together for 24 hours.

We made 1.5 pound cut by mixing 3 pounds of shellac flakes with 1 gallon of denatured alcohol, letting it sit until the flakes dissolved (stirring a few times throughout the day helps a lot), and then adding the other gallon of alcohol after straining out any organic solid matter through cheesecloth. This covered our floor 2 1/2 times. Now we're just waiting on some pure citrus solvent so that we can make paste wax to protect our lovely shellac finish. Apparently shellac is what everyone used to use in old houses until the 1920's or so when it was replaced by polyurethane. It turns white when it gets wet (coasters are meant to keep these white rings from appearing on shellacked tables, for example), and waxing it helps to prevent this.Meanwhile, we've been busy with other things. In an effort to eat up our overflowing garden full of zucchini, we made zucchini chips in the dehydrator with salt and pepper (and curry powder on some). They were great! We also took a tip from my mom and steamed some and then pureed it and froze it to use in making creamy soups this winter. Zucchini is so versatile and lovely, isn't it?
In case you were wondering, Jake has had some lovely naps...
Jon is nearly finished making our toilet, and it's gorgeous!!! You can see the box to the left of him, and here he's painting the top of the box with shellac.
Kathy, Erin, and I picked, shucked, and processed five wheelbarrows full of corn.
It took all day!
And Kathy and I made a delicious corn and zucchini salsa along with black beans, tomatoes, onions, garlic, and lime basil from the garden...
Beets are being harvested...
and rainbow carrots too!
and two days ago Jon and I started moving furniture down to the yurt! It doesn't look like much yet, but just wait. Soon, we hope it will! We're just trying to figure out the floor plan at the moment, and having things down there helps a lot. It's amazing how big everything is in our tiny little space! Straight ahead on the right you can see the folding screens which are marking what we envision will be our bathroom walls. The kitchen is just to the right (you can see the island piled high with stuff)...
We'll see how it all unfolds. Right now we're taking our magic carpet to Vermont!