Thursday, February 20, 2014

Projects in Progress

Rest in Peace poor little celery plant
There are a lot of ongoing projects at the Sheffer homestead. It is tempting to only report on the ones that are in the "somewhat" to "fabulously" successful range. However, that wouldn't really give an accurate picture of life around here. It's been a mixed bag. We've had failures, struggles, and successes in a pretty even mix.

First off, we start with very sad news. Today, the celery was pronounced dead. For 38 days, it struggled against the odds (since it was being raised by Sarah) but was unfortunately removed from all life support to go to the big Compost Pile in the garden. Through its death, it will bring new life to other plants.

The dreams it had of being a wonderful nourishing plant will continue on long after its death. This poor plant's sacrifice will be an example for all future celery plants. There will be a day when we have conquered the deep questions of the Celery Project, and we will prevail!

(Note: Yes, the picture just looks like dirt. That's really all that there is to see. We held out hope that something.....anything would grow. Once it became apparent that there was nothing left living in the pot, we did have to finally give up hope of this project working out for us.)

Also on the failure list, we have to put just about all cleaning and organizing. We have both been pretty emotionally spent lately and not had the energy to get it all done. The dust bunnies are in danger of reaching alarming size though, and Sarah is really tired of the pictures and paintings being propped up in a corner instead of on the wall. Hopefully this will be able to be moved into the "making progress" category soon.

Sarah has begun work on a couple of new growing projects. Last week, we planted pepper seeds in hopes that they will be able to germinate. They did come from store bought peppers, so we are hoping that it will be possible to get them to grow. There's no picture of that project right now since it's only been a week, and there's not too much interesting about egg cartons full of dirt.

Also in the grow project works is an attempt to grow lettuce from leftovers. The stumpy bottom just went into water today, and we'll have to see how it goes.There's nothing much to report except that despite using a lettuce knife, there's a little brown on the tips of some of the leaves.

Ongoing in a non-growing related area would be the efforts to produce a delicious, 100% whole wheat sandwich bread. So far, the sticking point has been the sandwich part. Sarah has been struggling to get the bread to look like anything other than short stubby loaves. We continue to hold out hope that "this next loaf" will be the one where the magic trick is learned. Since some have followed the saga on Facebook, there will likely be a posting here that explains what actually finally worked (if Sarah ever learns).

Day 54
Finishing on a high note, there have been some project successes. This last week we were able to actually eat some of the green onions that we grew ourselves. We are still hoping that we can get some of the bigger stalks to go to seed, so we have more to work with. In the interim though, it was pretty gratifying (and super convenient) to be able to grab some fresh food that we grew ourselves right on the kitchen counter.

Also in the "W" column goes Sarah's efforts on the car's power steering. Sure, all that it needed was some power steering fluid, but as someone who doesn't know much of anything under the hood, it's a pretty big deal. Hopefully, the car will stay fixed from now until we decide to get something new (to us). Car repairs add up really fast!

Projects currently on hold until warmer weather arrives are the basement, the Man Cave, and the Comet.

God Bless!

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