Friday, April 8, 2011

Living the Dream

I asked for an adventure and I got one. We arrived in Eugene last Wednesday and drove straight to our rental property. What a dump!! I could live with the fact that all of the rooms were so small that we would have been bed shopping for three twin beds and all sleeping in separate rooms. I could have lived with the fact that the house was extremely old and that it had character. I could not live with the fact that the house was so dirty that there is not enough Pine Sol and Bleach in the entire country that could get that house clean. My husband said it best when he said the only way to get that house clean would be to use a wrecking ball. The house still had the couch on the front porch, which made me laugh when we saw the pictures, but I assumed that it would be gone by the time we got there. We broke the lease that night and went to a hotel. The only thing that mad me sad about that house was that I was losing my urban farm on a 1/4 of an acre two blocks from downtown, but not sad enough that I wanted to move in.

We went and looked at rentals the next day and ended up in a newer development on the West side of town. The houses are six years old and it seems that almost all of the houses have kids in all age ranges. I am still in the process of unpacking as the first POD showed up on Tuesday and the other one yesterday. This process has made me realize that we have way too much stuff and we need to start downsizing it. I have a new household rule, if something new comes in the house something old will have to leave.

We went and looked at chickens last weekend and we will be getting them when I get back from our trip down south in June. I have already been looking at coop designs and once we settle on one that works for our yard my husband will start building it. The garden planning is underway. I started some pepper, romaine and pea seeds on Monday and the only seeds that haven't germinated are the peppers. I bought a little Burpee greenhouse for the counter and it seems to work quite well. I am learning that I am in a completely different gardening zone than I am used to. My peas that I planted in January were four feet tall and starting to flower before we left, I left them for our renter to enjoy. It is still too cold here that people are just starting to plant seeds inside. I had already picked a couple of blueberries from our bushes before we left California. They all made the trip here in my car, but I am afraid that the rest of the fruit may suffer from the cold before they have time to mature.




Here is a new picture of the garden. My husband has stated that I can't start working on the garden beds until I have the whole house unpacked. I will be working night and day because I am very excited to get going. I layed down the boxes to try and kill the grass and weeds. We are going to build raised beds along the fence line and hopefully if I can score some free windows we will turn a couple of the beds into cold frames. Territorial Seed's headquarters is 20 minutes from here and my son and I have a date next week to go pick out our seeds.