WINTER FARMING.

Every winter we get teases of Spring like we received this week, where the highs are in the fifties and rain holds off for a bit. It's good working weather. Maybe even perfect. And it's a nice time to start easing into the labor ahead of us. I pulled tomato cages out of the garden for hours. I mulched like crazy. I yanked the remaining plastic off the high tunnel and right now, as the rain is beginning to come back, I feel sore and fulfilled.We need these little tastes of the growing season to help get ready for the real deal––mentally and physically. We enjoy that we get to work just as hard during these periods as we will in March and April, but get to do so without the stress of HAVING to work hard. It's all the joys of hard work without the pressure. So when the Spring comes, and everything explodes, we will be well conditioned and ready. And over the next month or so, while the ground is still bare, we will take every opportunity to get out in the dirt and sun to prepare. The more we do now, the less we will have to do later. Off-grid farming like this––or more precisely, homesteading––requires that you are always working to take care of the future you. So right now we're taking care of our Spring selves by getting in shape, and getting the farm ready for several months of mayhem.- Jesse.

MESSY MONDAYS.

In continuing with our Messy Mondays series, here is our set-up for cooking down maple sap into maple syrup from last week......and here's what happened when we went for a walk and the oven mitt caught on fire.Good thing we didn't try this INSIDE the house!

ADVENTURES IN CLOTH DIAPERING.

When I call Hannah to check in, she tells me Further has pooped all over her, all over the couch, all over the bed, all over the floor––she's laughing while she tells me this, thankfully––and that she has started taking pictures because she doesn't know what else to do. (Don't worry, we'll spare you those photos). This was our first week cloth diapering and first week trying Elimination Communication. And it was a doozy.For the uninitiated, Elimination Communication, or EC, is a form of potty training. Babies often give clues as to when they're going to pee or poop––wiggling, stiffening up, it's different for every baby. And if you can learn to identify these clues you can habituate your baby to a sound (the hissing sound of peeing, for instance), and they will learn to identify that sound with going to the bathroom. Eventually, they will begin to hold it until you give them a place to go and the trigger sound. The end goal is that your infant will be able to use the toilet (with your help of course) and use less diapers. It makes sense when you really think about it - babies don't want to poop and pee inside their diapers. This is why they wriggle and squirm. But we train them to basically sit in their own waste, and then when they are older, we suddenly try to train them NOT to go in their diapers. Elimination Communication is a natural way of skipping that whole process and letting the baby communicate his needs with you from the beginning.But it's ambitious and it takes a lot of work. We've really only successfully got him to go in his little bucket twice. And once in the bath, but I'm not sure that counts. His favorite thing (besides staring at the ceiling) is to pee as soon as you put the diaper back on, which is lots of fun when you are having to hand wash them all. That is the point of the cloth diapers, though––so that you can tell as soon as he goes, and to encourage you to keep trying EC so as not to have to constantly wash diapers. Even still, it's a challenge.We're staying positive, though. Disposable diapers are just too wasteful for us, and EC just makes too much sense. It's a very old, very tried and true practice and one we're going to try and conquer. By God.- Jesse.

MESSY MONDAYS.

A couple weeks ago I wrote a post called "The Case for the Imperfect Homestead" in which I talked about how it is to look through the photos of certain books, or magazines, or websites and not feel inadequate as a farmer––to feel like your farm is hideous by comparison. Well, as one of our astute readers pointed out in the comments of that post: these farms I label as perfect are themselves imperfect––they, like us, just do not share the photos proving it. Touché––it's not like we share the mess either, the dirt, the unfinished projects, or the five-gallon buckets that pepper our yard like lawn ornaments. To know our farm through our blog, is to see a very curated version of our lives. In turn, we may create the same feeling of inadequacy in our readers that those other farms do in us. Which is the opposite of our goals with this blog.So with respect to that, we've decided to occasionally start sharing photos we wouldn't normally share––photos that will show the world we are perfectly human––photos "without makeup" so to speak. We want people to come here and be inspired. And if nothing else, we want people to come here and see that sometimes it's okay to be an utterly mediocre homesteader. So here's to Messy Mondays, where we'll give you the picture we would normally show, and then the unedited version.So here's a picture of the cabin:And here's the reality: