A Productive Day on the Homestead

I was out in the garden bright and early yesterday morning and got the broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage starts planted. It looks like I am growing enough food for a family of eight, but the piggies on the other side of the fence will be happy to eat any excess.

Just as I finished planting, it started to rain. Wonderful timing! The husband had gone to check on one of his jobs, so I headed to the garage to finish putting the 1541 together. It is quite the beast:

Thank goodness for the Juki Junkies video or I would have been lost. The machine did not come with a manual, for some odd reason. I downloaded one off the Juki website. I tried to print it but our printer choked on it because the manual is 96 pages in five languages. I have to get a couple of sewing patterns printed at Kalispell Copy this week, so I’ll just have them print me a copy of the PDF at the same time.

I’m hoping to fire up the machine and try it out this afternoon. I need to catalog the supplies I have on hand—I do have needles and some thread—and make a list of what I have to order. The factory makes sure the machine can sew before it is shipped, and it arrived with a piece of heavy vinyl under the presser foot with some stitching on it.

The husband returned from the jobsite, got the tote that we use for pig feed, and headed to a local farm to have them fill it. We buy a thousand pounds of feed at a time and the farm loads it right from the grain bin into the tote. When he got back, he unloaded the tote from his truck with the forklift and hauled it over to the other property to drop it off by the pig pasture.

I had remembered that there was a currant bush still in the old herb garden, so I dug it out and moved it over to the big garden with the rest of the currants. I did some weeding around the berry bushes and put down new cardboard from a stack I had saved in the greenhouse. The cardboard is great for keeping weeds down around the bushes and the previous layer had almost completely disintegrated.

After lunch, the husband tackled the herb garden demolition. We put that garden in when we built the house in 1996. A few years later, the husband doubled the size of it with a second, separate garden for vegetables. The veggie garden had raised beds. Over the years, everything rotted and disintegrated and the plants took over—herbs on one side and quackgrass on the other.

I asked him to take down the fencing between the two gardens to make one big garden. The whole area needed to be leveled, too, as there was more dirt on one side from the raised beds.

He brought in the track loader and started the demolition.

I love to watch him work. He went back and forth, pulverizing the vegetation and leveling the ground.

When he finished with the track loader, he rototilled the whole garden. “Now you have a blank slate,” he said. We will put down billboard tarp for this summer to kill whatever is left underneath and I will redesign and replant it next spring. I plan to put down new weed barrier, new gravel, and install new beds.

By then, it was time to clean up for date night. We have a stack of gift cards to local restaurants courtesy of some of his customers who like to show their appreciation for his work. I made reservations at a place in town called Mercantile Steak. This is a newish business, in a location where several restaurants have been before it.

We will go back, definitely, although their menu is not friendly to people who don’t eat wheat. I just need to remember that and plan accordingly. Our meal started out with a popover hot from the oven, with chive butter to spread on it. The husband wanted to order the onion ring appetizer until our server mentioned that they were fried in a cilantro batter and I had to remind him that he thinks cilantro tastes like soap. (I, on the other hand, love cilantro.) We got mushroom toast, instead, which was fabulous—sautéed mushrooms and roasted garlic on crostini. He ordered the smoked prime rib for his entree. I am not a huge fan of red meat, so I opted for the blackened halibut. It was done to perfection and served on a bed of farro risotto. Farro is a kind of wheat, so I didn’t eat that. We finished off the meal with dessert. He had cheesecake and I had the peanut butter and chocolate mousse. I was stuffed by the time we rolled out of there, but the entire meal was excellent. A storm was rolling in, so we opted not to go to Lowes or Home Depot and headed home instead.