Aren’t they adorable, if only in an alien sort of way? These are the babies who live just over our front door. I’d been a little worried about how affective an incubator the mama phoebe had been able to be, flying away as she had to every time we went in or out our door. But fine enough, I guess, cause I noticed these little mouths this afternoon.

The last few days (weeks?) have been crazy here (more on that later), and the next few days (weeks?) will be crazy, too. For all of you who read this blog as a break from your hectic lives, I feel ya. It turns out Headquarters and my fellow residents here provide me with enough little surprises and updates to pull me out of myself and life’s craziness for moments of simple pleasures, too.

As much as Headquarters may seem to be in the middle of nowhere, we still get some pretty fabulous visitors.

The other evening, a van pulled into our driveway and out popped our friend Holly and her family, all carrying grocery bags full of plants. And not just any plants, but my favorite kind of plants. The perennial kind that make food.

There was a big healthy lemon balm, 5 raspberry plants and a whole bag piled full of strawberry plants. These were all splits from someone else’s garden in town, given to Holly, and then shared with us.

I got the lemon balm and raspberries into the ground the next day, but I was feeling a little overwhelmed by all the strawberries (in particular, the making of new beds or expanding of old beds to put them in). To the rescue came our next visitor, Mara.

Mara is an old friend of ours from Seattle. She was in Nebraska for a wedding and took the extra drive out to see us (did you know HQ is only an hour outside of Omaha? no joke). Besides the fact that she loves being outside and working in the dirt, Mara is also one of those people who’d always rather be doing something than sitting idle. So we spent the morning together, chatting while she ripped out grass and nettles and I plugged in strawberry plants. A job that might have taken me the day was done in no time.

The end result is a new section of our land is starting to take shape. The flat, sunny area southeast of our house is home to blueberries, asparagus, and now raspberries, strawberries, and hazelnuts. Besides the asparagus, none of it is producing yet. But doesn’t your mouth water just thinking about it?

Over the previous few years we’d been shifting to ‘natural’ hair and skin care products. Some of which had less chemicals, some of which were locally/independently made, most of which didn’t really do the job as well as traditional products. So we were starting from a somewhat lowered benchmark. We already didn’t use much soap in the shower, washing only our faces, armpits and nether regions because I had been told by a dermatologist this would help control eczema. But we stopped using all lotion, A stopped putting products in her hair, we stopped using any shampoo or conditioner, and we stopped washing our faces with soap.

Now, everyone’s skin and hair will react differently, but we found that after a few days (or weeks) of excessive greasiness our bodies evened out and found an equilibrium of not too dry, not too greasy. While complete removal of products was not practical, we found we could target the problem areas with solutions instead of treating everything equally and therefore causing more problems.

I use olive oil on wet skin when I get out of the shower for my dry skin. A uses sunscreen on her face for moisture as well as sun protection. We both use vinegar and baking soda on our hair every month or two to remove smells and build-up. A still uses deodorant religiously, prone to zoo smells as she is, but I only use it on special occasions. And I use a special lotion for scaly spots when my eczema flairs up. But that’s about it. Our shower is very empty of plastic bottles.

The reduction of bathroom products was motivated by a few things. It’s just simpler. We’re not trying to impress anyone, or even fit in, so we can set our own standards for beauty. Also, in small stores in small towns it is not easy to find the specific scent of specific product of specific brand of whatever that you’ve come to love. It was easier to just not need them. Plus, that saved us money. And finally, it was less strange chemicals and cleansers that we were putting down our drain and therefore into our water supply. And when things cost less, are good for the environment and take less work, we like that.

And then, pretty quickly, we despaired. A whole lot of weeds came up, but not much else, except for partridge pea, a beautiful little prairie annual, but it didn’t have time to go to seed before winter came, which meant it was unable to reseed itself, meaning no more partridge pea in our prairie planting. That one success wouldn’t be repeating itself.

They tell you to expect the first year of your prairie planting to not look like much, but ours looked like nothing. And we could come up with any number of things we’d surely done wrong to make its failure certain. A whole lot of work (and money), and we would need to try it all over again.

This year it is still mostly weeds (as pathetically pictured). Pennycress and shepherds purse are the dominant species at the moment, both vigorously self-seeding weeds that show up first in the spring and are already dying back. But we no longer think our little prairie restoration is doomed.

During our recent trip to Seed Savers Heritage Farm, we found some amazing books in their bookshop. The Tallgrass Prairie Center publishes a guide to prairie restoration as well as a guide to seed and seedling identification. And in these, as well as some other stellar prairie restoration books, we learned just how completely pitiful the first year of a prairie planting is supposed to look. And rather than just saying so, there were pictures of the nothingness that we should have expected, well matched to what we actually have. And how one goes about evaluating their prairie planting through seedling counts, to see if your nothing is the right kind of nothing. And pictures of the tiny little seedlings we should be expecting in order to distinguish between first year prairie plants and weeds. And the knowledge that many prairie plants take 3 to 5 years before they’re much of anything. Some prairie seeds aren’t even likely to germinate until a few years after they’re planted!

With this new knowledge, we’re feeling much much better. I’m not completely convinced that we won’t need to put down more seed in our beginning prairie, but I’m feeling much more convinced that what we have is in fact a beginning prairie and not a failure.

In the close up shot, while you can see the round flat seeds of pennycress coming in from the bottom left corner, the fuzzy plant centered near the bottom just might be a black-eyed susan (a prairie plant). And the plant just above and to the right of it just might be a coneflower (another prairie plant). And the yellow thing in the upper left corner, well that’s a dandelion. Still, it’s a start.

While the apples you get from a store or orchard or your back yard have seeds in them, those seeds don’t tend to germinate well, and if they did, they often won’t grow into apple trees that bear fruit that would resemble the apple you originally ate. And apple trees take some time to grow (and some of them years and years and years before they produce fruit), so it would be really lame to go to all the work of fostering a tree from seed only to end up with lame apples. I say this, but we here at HQ love experimenting, so we’ve totally got some apple trees growing from seed that are about 6″ tall at the moment. Who knows! None the less, even experimenters like ourselves don’t count on seeds to grow good apple trees.

Luckily, plants are incredible. It turns out, if you take a piece of branch from one apple tree, you can attach it a different apple tree, and if you’ve done it right, it will keep growing. (Pause here and be awed by that.) Grafting takes advantage of this. You take a little baby apple tree, maybe a foot high, that you know does well in your climate and soil type, and that will make the size tree you want (dwarf, semi-dwarf or standard). This will be your root stock, the below ground part of your soon-to-be new tree. Then, you clip off a small branch of new growth from an apple tree whose fruit you like, such that the diameter of the branch matches the diameter of the trunk of the rootstock you have. This is your scion wood, the above ground part of your soon-to-be new tree. You slice off the top of the rootstock at a steep diagonal, slice off the bottom of the scion wood at a steep diagonal, and stick the two together so that they match up. As long as the thin green layers just underneath the bark (called cambium) of both make good contact with each other, the two will grow together. For added stability, you make a notch in both sides to keep the two surfaces from slipping, and then wrap them with a rubber band to hold the two together and seal the whole thing with wax to keep moisture in. If all goes well, you are left with the perfect roots matched with the perfect fruits, all in a new two-in-one tree.

I learned all this at a grafting workshop at the Seed Savers Heritage Farm a little bit ago, where I got to not just learn it in theory, but graft some new apple trees for Headquarters as well. And the three little apple trees I took home with me are now budding out just as they should, and I’ve got them planted in the ground. So far so good!

So here is where this is really really really exciting. We are spoiled when it comes to apples. We lived in Washington for a decade, and while the state grows lots and lots of nothing special apples that fill grocery stores across the country, we discovered Jones Creek Farms at a Seattle farmers’ market, and they have a thing for great apples, of lots and lots of varieties. While they’ve got plenty of kinds you’ll find elsewhere, they’ve got lots we’d never seen before and never seen since (check out their variety list here). Before I met Les and the other awesome folks from Jones Creek, I didn’t even think I liked apples. We went weekly, tried them all, brought lots home, and fell in love with some varieties that we simply must have again, even though we are far, far away from their Skagit Valley orchards.

Well, if I want an orchard here at HQ with lots of great heirloom apple varieties like the kinds at Jones Creek (or the Seed Savers Heritage Farm), I’m not going to be ordering them from traditional nurseries. And I couldn’t afford it anyway. Instead, the one big apple tree we have here at HQ has plenty of sucker growth, from which I can easily (as in, with my handy digging fork in a matter of seconds) harvest root stock. And I can get scion wood through the mail through the Seed Savers Yearbook, or hopefully from writing really nice letters to the folks at Jones Creek. And when the two combine… apple paradise here at HQ.

Granted, it will still take years for any of these tiny trees to bear fruit. But man, when they do, even if I’m no longer here to enjoy it, it will be brilliant.

So far, if those three little trees I brought home from the grafting workshop keep up the good work, we’ll have Belle de Boskoop, Fameuse and Ribston apples here (I dare you to find those at your corner grocery store), all grafted onto traditional nursery rootstock, in addition to our one old tree (variety unknown, but so far it has only produced three, albeit beautiful and big, apples). And I’m already experimenting a little. The picture on the right is a bit of extra Fameuse scion grafted onto a bit of rootstock from our old apple tree’s sucker growth (can you see where the color changes from green brown to grey brown above my hand?), before I’ve wrapped it. I did it today, when the wood surely isn’t dormant as it should be, but who knows?

By the way, if you want more detailed grafting instructions, Seed Savers has a webinar up here for free on grafting (I haven’t watched it, but I assume it will resemble the workshop I took). Or look here for the quick diagram version, from the West Virginia Extension folks.

We found this in our kitchen the other day. Our cat Edwin, the expert mouser, had it cornered among some jars we had sitting on the floor. We stole it from him, stared at him for awhile, then let him go back outside.

He’s a five-lined skink. He moves like a snake, and is about 7 inches long. You can tell he’s an older male because of that orange  he’s got on the underside of his head, and because his tail is not the exciting blue it was when he was younger.

We understand other people might be quite upset to find something like this inside their house. We thought it was awesome. I don’t want a skink infestation or anything, but we’ve seen skinks around HQ before, and they usually slip off so fast it’s hard to look at them properly. It was awesome to get to check one out up close and more leisurely. For us, anyway; I’m sure he was less then thrilled with the whole experience.

Now as you can see, I really like gray. But blue, green, orange, red, pink, and brown are also represented here. I like lots of colors. But there is a pattern.

A little color theory review. There are three aspects of any given color that make it different from other colors. And there are about three different words for each of those aspects, so don’t get too picky about vocabulary here. First there is the hue of the color, whether it is reddish or blueish. Second there is how light or dark the color is, how close similar it looks to white or to black. And third there is saturation, how glowingly bright or dim and gray a color is.

I like gray. And all those other colors I like too? I like them best when they have a bit of gray in them. Mmm, less saturated colors.

This is a phoebe. We have four resident phoebes at HQ (that we know of), and they’re my favorites.

They look simple, grey and white. They like to perch low to the ground on branches or trellises or even the tops of plants that stick up from the grass. They swing their tails all the time when they’re sitting, like they can’t help fidgeting. And they’re pretty slick flyers. They’re a type of flycatcher, and they catch their insect prey in midair, often swooping and hovering before returning to the same perch they started on. Ours have been catching a lot of moths lately, so we can see the pale powdery wings sticking out of their beaks when they land before the phoebes thrash them dead and gulp them down.

They’re not particularly rare birds, coexisting with people well in the country. That’s part of what I like so much about them. This is the second year I’ve had a pair (the same pair?) nesting in the rafters of my garden shed. Last year I got to watch them raise two clutches of young, and though the adults dart out whenever I walk in, they don’t seem to mind sharing the space with me. This seems particularly remarkable  as one of the things I often do in that shed is light the smoker I use with my bees, often getting the place pretty smokey before I head off for my hives. Last year, I remember the babies getting so big that they could barely still fit in the nest, their butts hanging off over the edges, before they finally took off on their own. This year, they’re using the same nest, giving it an early spring remodel before settling in.

Our new pair has made a nest in the light fixture right above our front door. Normally I’d say that was a bad idea, either because we’re likely to bother them too much, or them bother us (apparently swallows have nested there before, which like to dive bomb peoples’ heads when they’re nesting; not a good thing above a front door). But the shed sharing has been so peaceful, I’m not worried.

The pair by the garden shed are my almost constant companions while I’m outside working. Not only do we pass each other as we go in and out of the shed, but their favorite perches are on the steer fencing we use as trellises for our peas and tomatoes. They don’t like to perch too close to me, but their flashy insect catching flights often split the distance between us. I enjoy their company.

I love having flowers inside. And neither I nor K is picky as to what they are or how they are arranged.

Don’t get me wrong, there are people who make flower arranging an art, and we certainly have our favorites (Studio Choo, for example, makes us swoon). But when it comes to bringing the outdoors in, we’re just as happy with simple single stems and messy big bunches.

And I also often love keeping flowers long after they’ve passed their ‘prime’. Sometimes they become more beautiful in my eyes after they’ve started dropping petals.

So we’re getting into the habit of always having something in a vase, big or little, on our table. Nothing bought from a store, just something cut from the yard or garden. So far we’ve always had plenty to pick from.