Crystal Madrilejos

The Creative Coaching sessions I’ve been doing have not only been helping me improve my approach to how I work, create and live, but they’ve also been helping me work towards big goals. One of the first homework assignments Kathleen had me do was to describe in detail my ideal dream day. She encouraged me to put in as many details as possible, down to what I was wearing and eating. I was pretty descriptive and was able to knock out two solid sheets, single spaced no less. I’ve obviously thought about this a lot.

I won’t go into every single detail, but since I was also required to make a Pinterest Board around what the day felt like, you can see some of what would look like by viewing my Dream Day board here.

The three major things that my dream day included were: A custom built house on a permaculture homestead, homeschooling our kids and somehow combining these two aspects into a sustainable business model.

So yeah, really big lofty goals! Like, huge life-changing, uncharted-territory-for-me-and-my-family type goals. Even though attaining all these would be a dream, they are in the distant future and I’m actually appreciative that I am not in a position to make these things happen right now. The nature of these goals requires a lot of learning and discovery, and for the time being I’m in a great position to do just that. There are a lot of things between me and my goals that are outside of my control that I have to just work with at the moment, but there’s a part of me that thinks the Universe is giving me this time to not only prepare, but figure out if this is the right fit for me and my family.

I’m fortunate that I currently have a great job that not only supports my family but keeps me grounded. It’s helping me grow as a designer and creative decision maker and I’m always learning new skills that will help me down whatever path my future takes me, homestead or not. It also lets me put into use the problem-solving tools I acquire and allows me to implement new approaches as I continue to find the best and most effective way for me to create.

It’s all a process and I’m learning new things everyday. Like I said earlier in the post, I won’t share my entire dream day, but here is an excerpt of what I wrote and found especially dreamy, it’s a cross between a Portlandia parody and Kinfolk Magazine, which will, in reality, probably end up looking more like Doomsday Preppers but whatever:

“We all wake up early on the homestead because there are chickens that need tending and veggies for harvesting, compost that needs turning, gardens that need watering. We all have our jobs to do. The kids start their school day early because the way we live is a huge part of their education. They learn by doing, by understanding the connection our lives have to our surroundings, to our environment, to the way we choose to live consciously.”

I’m sure there is something to be said for the fact that I didn’t portray my dream day as one where I sit on the beach all day. I’m just too practical, I guess. What does your dream day look like? Does it look like work, but work that you love doing? Does it look like a vacation? Does it look like Rivendell or The Shire (man, that’s a tough one!)?

xo,
c.

I mentioned in one of my previous posts about how I had to create an “Ideal Dream Day” for my creative coaching session, which is basically what I’m referring to whenever I talk about mine and Andrew’s goals.

Our goal is to build a self-sufficient, sustainable, Permaculture-based homestead for our family. I’m putting this out there, which isn’t something that Andrew and I usually do. We’re both of the sort where we don’t like to voice desires/wishes/plans until we feel like there is proof of being able to follow through with it. We’re usually not ones to make superficial claims – the whole “say what we mean, and mean what we say” thing. Though this is really more descriptive of Andrew and less so of myself. I’ve been known to get dramatic and use the words “never,” “ever,” and “always” when things get heated. But, I try to be aware of it. Anyways, side-note!

For a long time, Andrew and I have wanted to build a home for ourselves. We just couldn’t ever see us living long-term in something that was not our own. Something that we didn’t get to consider every aspect of. For the amount of money it costs to own a home, we couldn’t resign ourselves to having to make compromises. Of course, we’re realistic. We will have to make compromises even if we build our own home, but they will be compromises of our own design. What Andrew and I want is nothing elaborate. We want something that is sensible and smart.

After all these years of dreaming, we’re about at the point where being able to take action is visible on the horizon. We’re still a long ways off, but it seems like a real possibility. So, in the meantime, we’re doing what we can to research and learn about what it will take to build our homestead. Getting smart, as I said in a previous post.

I’m looking forward to sharing what we learn here! Any advice or tips from those of you who are out there building your own or have built your own homestead are welcome.

Coming up, I’ll talk more about the “Ideal Dream Day” that I came up with for my coaching session. It’s, dreamy to say the least!

Above is an image our backyard at the place we currently live. Pretty dreamy to wake up to everyday. That’s our house directly to the right of the barn, slightly obscured by the tree. (Not the house on the far right.)

xo,
c.

Intentions

I intend to accept and work with the fact that a lot of the planning that Andrew and I need to do towards our goal at the moment is research. There are items on our list that are currently not within our control or not plausible for the moment. But what we can do (something that Andrew and I used to always say) is we can get smart. We have to learn everything there is to know about what we want to achieve so that when the time comes, we can hit the ground running. I have a few items that I have on my to-do list that have to get done work-wise, but today I intend to spend at least some time just learning. Also, one if the things that I realized in last week’s intentions/reflections was that I have this tendency to view things that I really want to do as things that are “special treats” and can only devote time to them after I’ve taken care of my “responsibilities.” I love to read and I love to research things that I find valuable and interesting, things that inspire me to move towards my goals. So these things usually fall at the end of my priority list because there are always other things that “need” to be done. But in the grand scheme of things, the work that Andrew and I put towards our ultimate goals in life, are more important than most tasks that seem to take up the majority of our time. So, with that in mind, I intend to try and change my perspective in regards to things that I view as priorities and things that I view as “nice-to-haves.” Because i’m sure most of the time, I confuse the two.

Reflections

I did spend a lot of time today reading and researching. Not a ton, but more than I have in the recent past. I’ve always been an avid reader, and this is the first year of my life that I didn’t read a bunch of books. I think I managed one, maybe two? I’m currently reading “A Pattern Language” by Christopher Alexander and his colleagues, which I’m finding to be really engaging. And also, “An Introduction to Permaculture” by Bill Mollison, who is considered the father of Permaculture. So in that regards in did have some success in sticking to my intentions today. Something I realized today is that I have a really hard time pulling myself away from work. Especially when I have a problem that needs resolving. I can’t just walk away and come back to it. I work until I feel utterly frustrated or until something else comes up that forces my attention away. Even though there is a rational side of me that knows that taking a break would be good, I just can’t seem to stop. And it was extra frustrating today because I knew that I wanted to spend some time reading and the only thing standing in my way was this one problem that I couldn’t just let be for the time being. Something I need to work on.

Past Posts
Week 2 Mantra: I Have a Plan – Day 2
Week 2 Mantra: I Have a Plan – Day 1
Mantra: Reflections on Week 1
Introduction to Creative/Life Coaching

xo,
c.

Our gardening season is coming to an end. At least the majority of the growing part. We still have some things to harvest, but even with this crazy weather (that is causing tiny watermelons to sprout!) most of our plants are done for the season.

I thought it would be nice to focus on each variety that we decided to grow this year and give them their own posts instead of one super long post. That way, I can go into more detail about our experience.

Overall, this year has been a wonderful success that I’m going to attribute to the addition of a deer fence and raised beds. Even with our one groundhog incident, we still had a great harvest.

Acorn squash and one watermelon.

We got a good amount of acorn squash, though this was our first year growing them so I don’t have much by comparison. We grew Organic Sweet REBA (Resistant Early Bush Acorn) variety and they performed well. I didn’t realize at first that these were going to be a bush variety (despite the name!) rather than the vining type, so they got pretty crowded and huge!

Here they are as babies, nice and neat and tidy.

Here they were full size! Yikes!

I was a little worried that they weren’t getting pollinated when I noticed some of the squash were falling off before fully ripening. I did some hand pollination after some research and chalked it up to the fact that we got them into the ground really early.

Okay, I just remembered that we did have issues with chipmunks and squirrels digging things up, which resulted in this. But didn’t seem to effect the plant too much.

We haven’t eaten any yet, so I can’t vouch for taste. I did trade one for eggs with a friend and she said it was still good despite being slightly unripened. We will see as the cool weather ramps up and we get into fall cooking. Last Thanksgiving, Andrew made an acorn squash soup for our family – I think he spent like $20 on acorn squash alone. Not this year! Will post updates once we’ve opened one of these guys up.

xo,
c.

Between work, family, freelance side projects and trying to stay healthy by exercising and getting good sleep – I’m maxed out. Any free time that doesn’t involve one of those things I listed, goes to the garden, but even with a lack of free time, this year has been going surprisingly well. I’m going to attribute the success to all the work we put into it last fall! Go, us!

If you forgot, this is what our garden looked like around mid-June.

Here are some new shots of stuff in the garden:

Green Beans – I think our trellis is a bit small. Or maybe we just planted too many plants. We have a tendency to do that.

We built this so that the beans wouldn’t crawl on our deer fence. But what are they doing? Crawling on the deer fence (you can’t see it from this angle, but on the back side of the trellis the vines have started to spread to the deer fence.) Nature, you know? It will find a way!

Tomatoes are doing great this year, but our trellis/staking is dismal. What. the. Hell! Every single year, we end up looking like fools with our tomato situation. We think we have it under control, only to realize – we don’t. These things are taller than me but are falling all over the place. I don’t know why we always try to do something different when it comes to staking when there are tried and true methods for growing tomatoes. I just ended up staking them this past weekend, which is what I should have done from the start. Always trying to reinvent the wheel. Next year, we’ll get it right from the start.

The groundhogs must have been lying in waiting to get into the garden. Today, I left the gate open for 10 minutes while I went inside and in the meantime a little groundhog snuck in. Andrew looked out the window and there it was grazing in our garden like it was nobody’s business.

Of course, in the short amount of time it was undetected, it was able to eat 50% of our salad greens. Andrew went out and it got scared and ran under the small space under one of our lettuce beds that is against the side of our porch. Andrew’s Dad always has groundhog traps on hand because they are quite a nuisance around these parts. We set the cage in the path to the garden gate, in hopes that it might be enticed by the watermelon that we set as bait.

We had to wait awhile before it would even come out again. We tried to scare him out of the hole so we could get his into the trap, to no avail. By chance, Andrew and I were standing inside the house by the window and we saw it start making its way out but it walked right past the trap right into our flower bed. It then proceeded to ravenously eat everything in it’s path. I mean, it was going at it like it hadn’t eaten in weeks. Andrew was like “We need a plan and we need to make a move NOW.” I held Quil inside the house because when quietness is of the utmost importance, he’s like a bull in a china shop. Apparently, Andrew had some sort of weird plan because he grabbed these two things: the Bumbo and the Bilibo.

He went onto the front porch and had the wherewithal to at least wait for a car to go by to muffle the sound of his footsteps so as to not scare the little guy back into his hiding spot. But that seems to be the only part that goes according to plan. All the while, I’m inside the house watching the groundhog feast on our garden. I can’t see Andrew because he’s on the front porch and I’m looking out the side window into the garden. All the sudden, I see the Bilibo fly by and the groundhog darts toward his hiding spot behind our lettuce bed. Next thing I see the Bumbo go flying by, narrowly missing the critter before he burrows back into his hiding spot. Andrew comes back in and I’m like “What happened? Did you panic?!” No, he didn’t panic. He just missed.

Needless to say, the groundhog hasn’t come back out since. We finally did the smart thing and cornered him in there with the only opening, going right into the trap. So when he finally gets over the ordeal and decides it’s safe to surface, if all goes according to plan, he will get trapped in the cage with some watermelon to keep him company until we can take him elsewhere.

If anything, we totally blew that groundhog’s mind. A shovel, a broom, a stick, a rock. These things, yes. But a Bumbo and a Bilibo? Probably the very last things it could have ever imagined having to encounter in this situation. And he’s most likely the only groundhog in the world that has ever seen a Bumbo or a Bilibo since I can’t think of any other instance these two things would intersect with its life.

We will see in the morning if our little trap worked. Updates to follow.

xo,
c.

My birthday gift from my Mom. A fig tree! It’s desperately in need of a larger and better-looking pot.

Butternut Squash

Cinderella Pumpkins

Strawberries, Pac Choy, Acorn Squash, Sugar Baby Watermelons and in the far distance, Tomatoes.

The side of our house that faces the garden. Not the ideal place for maximum sun exposure, but it saved us from having to fence in all four sides of the garden.

Potatoes, Kale, & Carrots

Kale

Potatoes

Pac Choy

Acorn Squash

Herbs & Amaranth

This was an offshoot of my Dad’s Thornless Blackberries that he gave us to plant.

Mini-trellis and wood stumps for bed edging.

It’s getting there! We put up the bean and pea trellis’ today after I took these photos. Will post more photos soon.

xo,
c.

Oh, hey there! Meet our new garden addition. As I mentioned in my last post, chipmunks have been using our garden as their own personal nut repository. So I got this guy in hopes that he would scare the bejeezus out of those little guys so I don’t have to resort to drastic measures. Just look at those crazy eyes, and his head moves too!

But the big question is, does it actually work? I think it’s still too early to tell. We haven’t had an ideal set up yet. The first day we got him, the chipmunks still went to town on our beds, but I don’t think we placed the decoy in a good spot. He was sitting on our porch and sort of lower down than I think is normal for owls?  So, I’m going to put him up on a pole to, you know, simulate real owl life. The past few days, I’ve been putting him in more prominent spots around the garden and it seems to help the beds that are in direct line of the owl’s sight. Hopefully, having him up in the air will help.

Scare tactics aside, Quil seems to like him and moves him around the garden for the fun of it. So we’ve got that going for us.

xo,
c.

Nature, you know? The vast wonders of her majestic beauty, punctuated by the biggest pains in my ass. First it was the deer, then the birds (yes, that’s bird crap in our lettuce bed but I’ve made peace with the birds, for the time being), and now chipmunks.

The birds at least have some purpose, other than pooping everywhere. They eat the bad bugs that eat our veggies. But chipmunks, what good are they? Cute, for sure. And whenever Quil sees a chipmunk running around in the backyard, he says the chipmunk is on his way “to eat pasta with grandmother.” Which he totally made up himself and is almost reason alone to pardon the creatures. But still, they are driving me crazy. They keep digging in our garden beds to hide their little nut stashes and in the process uproot any plants nearby their chosen spot. Holes like this in our potato bin:

And last night, one of those little brats knocked over one of my succulent pots on our porch and broke it. I just planted some flower seeds in another pot on our porch and they keep digging in that as well. I’m not even sure if the flowers will grow now since they’ve been disturbed so many times.

So, I did a quick little search and found that putting up a big fake owl in your garden is a common thing to do to freak those chipmunks right out. Now, that sounds all sorts of crazy. But I’m willing to try it. And I googled it and there are such things in existence for this exact purpose. I might just go all out and make my yard look like this:

There are some people on the web who say no amount of fake-owling will keep the pests out, but I’m going to give it a try since it’s cheap and requires a minimal amount of effort. Nothing worse than spending a ton of money and time on something that doesn’t work. I will let you know how it goes.

Wish me luck!
c.

What’s new on the homestead? Harvested some ramps from a friends property (pictured above – ramps as far as the eye can see), garden is underway, pond stocking is in progress, potatoes are sprouted, the reclaimed wood for the compost bin is nail free, a couple more raised beds have been built, and deer fence is almost up. Now, we just need the weather to cooperate! It’s been up and down the past couple weeks and I guess that’s why we have “last frost dates” – but man, am I itching to just get going with the warm weather already!

Today we started putting up the new deer fencing that was my gift to myself last year when I got a bonus at work. Who buys deer fence with their bonus? I do. It’s that important to me. With our past experience, it’s just not worth it to garden in our area if you don’t have either a dog or a deer fence. We don’t want a dog, so we went with the fence. I’m really, really hoping this does the trick because I love having a garden but the stress of the deer almost makes it not worth it.

I wish I had more pictures for you from the past few weeks, but I’m too lazy to upload them right now.

So here is a picture of one of our raised beds before we installed it last fall. You can see the basic construction in this photo. The outside rails are attached to four posts that will go into the ground so the bottom board sits flush on the ground.

After installing them, we put a layer of black weed blocking fabric, followed by a few layers of cardboard, a layer of leaves, a layer of alpaca manure, then another layer of leaves. This then sat for the past six months to kill the weeds and grass and also create the nutrient rich base for a layer of composted soil that went on top last week. If you can do this in the fall, it will save you a lot of work come spring (and summer, since it will save you lots of time weeding.)

Okay, so I know some of you are wondering why we used pine when it’s going to be outside and will eventually rot. Ideally, cedar would be the wood of choice since it’s naturally rot resistant. But Cedar is many dollars. We figured if we can get a few years out of these beds before they rot, it will have been worth the price we paid for the wood. I think down the line, we’re open to trying different things. We just don’t have the money for cedar ones at this point. One bed can run upwards of $200 – which is double what we paid to make ALL our beds.

We also didn’t seal the wood. And the reason being, we don’t want any toxic materials touching the soil that will be growing the food we’ll be eating. This is also the reason we didn’t use pressure treated wood, which again is rot resistant but also treated with chemicals. Here is Quil helping Andrew with the beds last fall. And by helping I mean, running around like a maniac. I just got him during a moment of stillness in this shot.

I will post more current photos of our progress soon, I promise!

xo,
c.