Let's Go Inside...Before it Becomes a Construction Site

First of all, I cannot believe it has been a month since my last post. All I can say is that my job ate my life while my department went through some changes. But look! I survived. And I am here to commit the sin of blogging again.

In my last post I walked/stumbled you through the garden and yard surrounding our condo. For the sake of later clarity and to vent (just a little) let’s go inside.

When I first moved in with Jason, our giant condo didn’t feel so spacious. In fact, it felt downright tiny. There were people occupying those rooms upstairs. Namely Jason’s brother and a nice young man named Andrew. Well, we think he was nice. Truth is, we really had no idea. He worked nights and would come home before we were awake in the morning and then leave while we were at work. It was like he was never here. We called him the Perfect Roommate. My mother called him the Uni bomber.

Other roommates, like Glen-from-Brooklyn and Dustin-from-New Jersey became like members of the family. Glen and Jason made sauerkraut together and Jason taught Glen the art of outdoor grilling. Dustin helped to plant and harvest the gardens, brew beer and cook meals. He became a real, cherished friend and when Jason and I got married, Dustin was one of two witnesses who signed our Ketubah.

Anyhoo, roommates came and went and while they did, Jason and I relegated ourselves to our bedroom and then shared the downstairs with the others. Since we didn’t have room to play with inside, most of our energy was spent on the gardens. And when those rooms freed up it was like a dam burst. Suddenly we had space to do thing, and with that space came projects.

Once the roommates were out and my stuff had been liberated from the garage, I set up what is known as the Girl Cave. In this room I keep my sewing, beading, knitting, wrapping, reading and writing. That sentence certainly makes me sound like a project producing busy bee, but in truth it’s where half-finished projects go to die. Anything that I am currently working on can likely be found on the couch, in my car, in my purse or on my bedside table. In short, the Girl Cave overflows a bit.

In turn, Jason has what he refers to as the Man Cave, or as I call it, the Garage. Within, you can find hand tools, power tools, new tools, old tools, borrowed tools and even tools that need fixing. There are truck tires, two lawn mowers, shovels, a BMW motorcycle he has been tasked with selling (for inquires, email Nicole at nec.cohn@gmail.com), antlers, deep freeze, defunct Kegerator and yet another functioning fridge filled with beer. Miraculously, my car still fits.

Jason’s space also has a tendency to overflow into the house. I find measuring tape on the dressers, levels in the living room and hammers on my coffee table. Work boots get left in the kitchen, box cutters wind up in the wash. It’s all part of living with a man who has a compulsion to build and create.

And February is our absolutely worst month. By now, it has been about six months since we have put the garden to bed and the resulting produce up. Sure, we love the first few weeks of freedom from watering, weeding, tilling and mowing, but after a while, it does start to get old. All of the small home improvement projects that were put off during the summer and now long finished, leaving me happy to curl up with a book and Jason with an incurable itch.

So, as somewhat of a warning, the next project will be built in shelves all the way down our long front hall. Jason’s step-father will be coming down from Great Falls to help with the construction and will likely be staying with us for a couple weeks. My mother has been asked to create stained glass panels for the windows. I will be doing the cooking, cleaning, bar tending and necessary first-aid. And while this project makes me very, very nervous, I will be thrilled to have more cabinets and storage in our house. Pots, pans and crockery are currently being “displayed” on random shelves and counters.

That, and I am hoping against hope that it will distract Jason from his most recent idea of building a shed out back. A big one. With electricity, windows and a loft. As he was reading over the brochure about sheds much too closely for my comfort, he looked up and said “Honey, if we insulate it we could even rent it out”.

Oh my.

Wherein I Tell You About Our Dirt

Before I take this blog and dive further into all things gardening, cooking, building and fixing, I should probably explain the lay of our land. Meaning, our little corner of the subdivision and the gardens that have sprung up despite our close proximity to neighbors, dogs, condos and (gasp!) college students who drive entirely too fast.

Our condo has a fenced in backyard with a 13 x 50 veggie garden, a 3 x 5 herb garden and flower beds all along the side of the house. Previously, the backyard garden was where we planted everything from lettuce to tomatoes and even a failed crop of corn or two. For me, it was plenty.

Our first summer living together I would get off of work at 5:00 PM and be home and in the garden by a breezy 5:10 PM. I would grab a glass of wine and do a little weeding while picking lettuce, onions, radishes and whatever else was ready. Jason would come home and do some more weeding while I grilled. He would even pick little bouquets of flowers for me on occasion. Within a short hour we were eating our home grown vegetables in front of our tidy weeded and watered garden, glass of wine firmly in hand. Oh, how spoiled I was.

And while I was perfectly content and proud of our little backyard garden, Jason was bothered by the empty lot that sat directly next door to our building. The lot was a tangled, weedy mess of overgrown grass, rodents, rusty rebar, discarded concrete, people’s garbage, broken glass and dog poop. It sat smack in the middle of our subdivision surrounded by homes and condos with neat and tidy yards, making it stick out even more. I managed to look past it, but Jason was deeply annoyed.

We would drive by and he would bristle at the mess. At the time, we were trying to sell our condo and he maintained that a lot like that wouldn’t make it any easier to get out of our place. He bemoaned the fact that a sidewalk didn’t run through it and thought it offensive that the owners, or anyone else for that matter, hadn’t done anything with it. I tried to reason with him and explain that empty lots are just that—empty. Eventually someone will buy it and build on it. But he wasn’t listening to me and there was nothing I could say to get him to drop it. And because it was still early in our relationship, I didn’t know just how seriously to take him when he said he was going to clean it up. I honestly had no idea what he was capable of.

Jason called the owners of the lot and got permission to work on it. He enlisted the help of a neighbor (who really had no idea what he was getting himself into), borrowed a back-hoe thingy, found a contractor who needed the fill dirt, and before spring was over, the lot was cleared of debris and nearly flattened out.

He then proceeded to plop a 50 x 60 garden smack in the middle of it.

That second garden, what we call the lot garden, is now where the bulk of our food is grown. The backyard garden is now our kitchen garden. I went from a garden of plenty to holy-crap-how-the-hell-am-I-supposed-to-weed-all-of-that? Add to the mix that I have a full time job that takes way more of my time than that first summer together and you have two very messy, very wild gardens. Last summer I tried to keep up with it and failed. Yes, we did get more food than we knew what to do with, but was it pretty? Nope. We don't use pesticides so weeding in a manual process.

This summer will be our third season in the lot garden. The owners are far from wanting to sell from it, meaning that we will be lucky enough to give it another go in just a few more months. And while I am excited, I'm also a little bit freaked out to tell the truth. There's a lot of work waiting for me out there. But when I'm still grabbing homemade pickles from our pantry and potatoes from our crawl space/root seller deep into winter, it somehow feels like it's more than worth it.

I've included some pictures of the lot garden from 2009 and 2010. Enjoy!

What Lies Beneath

When I first started dating my husband, he said he was "a bit of gardener". I thought this was a great connection because I to was, and still am, only 'a bit of gardener'. When he first showed me his house, he pointed out the backdoor to a spot in the snow-covered fenced-in yard and said that was where he planted vegetables every year. How cute! A little backyard garden, I thought. One like my mother's, maybe? A 4 x 4 or maybe an 8 x 10 if he was ambitious. But when spring came and the snow melted, a 13 x 50 swath of cold, wet mud was revealed. He said he was 'a bit of gardener'? He lied.

Jason started gardening as a kid. He kept a garden through most of his teen years and then as soon as he bought our little condo he started up again. Me? My mother kept a garden and I poked in the dirt when the spirit moved me. It was never really more than that. I was content to stretch out in the hammock or steal away to my room with a book. But when I was living in Lander, Wyoming before I met my husband, I read Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. It's a lovely chronicle of a year where her family grew all of their own food or bought it locally. To my surprise, it inspired me and made me want to one day have a large garden of my own. For me, having a garden just seemed like having a home. And then when I married Jason, I realized that you really do have to be careful what you wish for--it just might come true.

And like my little buried wish of wanting to be a backyard farmer, we have a quiet little crop of garlic hiding under the snow in our backyard garden. When our neighbors saw us pulling out the onions and knocking down the corn in our lot garden this fall (more about that particular garden later--yes, there are two of them), they thought we were done for winter. Done, as in nothing to do whatsoever. And I guess that on the surface, with the snow covering everything, it would seem that there was nothing going on under all that cold. But garlic is a fabulous little surprise you can plant in the fall and then harvest in late spring in Montana.

Bozeman, and much of Montana for that matter, goes straight from winter to summer with a barely-there spring in between. This is our first year planting garlic so we took the advice of Jenny at the seed shop in Belgrade and went for a fall planting. The roots develop during the winter and  most plants will be a couple of inches out of the ground even before all the snow has melted. There are more detailed instructions about soil levels and garlic types available online. The best resource I've found is Montana State University Extension Guide. It took us about an hour from start to finish to get about sixty cloves in the ground. Jason had already pulled everything from the garden and used the rota tiller to mix in compost from our lot garden. The result was a very rich soil that was soft and easy to work with. Each clove was buried about two inches deep and eight inches apart. Instead of buying straw to cover the plot, we used the dried corn stalks from our lot garden. Our backyard is covered in about a foot of snow from November until mid-April, so the corn was really only a precaution to help gaurd the cloves from getting too cold.

This spring, when the snow starts to melt, we'll go out to the garden and gently move back the snow to see if we've been successful. I'm anxious to see if it worked and while I'm not worried about deer attacking the young garlic (we don't get a lot of deer in our subdivision) I am worried my dogs will try to dig it up like they do our carrots and pototoes. In the meantime Jason and I both like knowing that even though it's winter, we're still gardening in our own little way. Even if it is hiding under the snow.

Happy Holidays from the Cohns!

And here we go...

It was recently brought to my attention just how odd my husband and I are. Jason and I make a lot of things from scratch. We garden--big time. We look at a piece of beat down, worn out furniture and immediately get excited at the possibility of refinishing it. Buy pasta? Why buy it when you can make it from scratch! We get a lot of joy out of making something. We like our crafts and hobbies. We take pride in growing a lot of our own food and feel good about buying the rest locally when possible. And yes, while we may be on a first name basis with the lady at the seed shop and my dogs are known by almost the entire staff at the Home Depot, we aren't fanatical about our do-it-yourself life. We like sustainability, we recycle and we do compost, but we're still going to buy a frozen pizza every once in a while and relax with a bottle of not-so-local wine when the situation arises. We just happen to toe up to the enough-is-enough line without ever really crossing it.

So we've decided to start a bog about it. Friends wind up asking us how we make or grow this or that all the time. Why not have a place where I can detail all of our little adventures in Suburban Homesteading? I plan on adding photos and commentary from Jason (yes, he does get a say in all of this) along with recipes and related articles with links to other authors. Topics will be everything I've listed above and then some. What we hope is that if someone has a question or has a project of their own they want to showcase, this will be the perfect place to do it. Or, failing my altruistic plans, it will be a place to have a good laugh.

Most of you reading this already know us. But for those of you who don't here's a quick introduction: My husband, Jason and I live in a four-bedroom condo in Bozeman, Montana. That's right--four huge bedrooms upstairs and one medium-sized room downstairs for the kitchen and living room. Pair that with a small backyard and we don't have a lot of space to work with. We're really country people who would love to get our hands on a good patch of land for all of our projects. But thanks to the housing market we are happily stuck in our funny little condo, in our funny little neighborhood on the edge of our funny little town. And even though our current set-up is really geared towards people who don't restore furniture, cook, can, garden, work on cars or enjoy multiple random hobbies, we just can't help ourselves and do it anyway. We're those people on the corner. The one's the neighbors eye with dual parts curiosity and nervousness.

My husband is the real doer in the house. Jason is a hydro-electric engineer and has been with the same company for ten years. He's compulsive when it comes to fixing things. His aunt will tell you that one of her earliest memories of him was walking in the house to find a three-year-old Jason working diligently on the TV with a butter knife is one hand a recently liberated TV part in the other. I joke that if the world ends, Jason will try to rebuild it.

And while my husband can fix or grow anything, I'm the one that can break something just by looking at it. I'm the one that likes to bake, cook and tag along with my husband on all of his projects. I'm only handy by proxy but I enjoy it all nonetheless. When I moved to Montana three years ago I thought I would only be here for a six-month long internship. I wasn't expecting to meet the man of my dreams, marry him and make Montana my home. It all sort of came as a shock to me and I'm still getting used to it.

So here we are: a  newlywed couple living in a modern American suburban homestead. Let's just hope no one loses a finger.