The $500 idea

Posted on 05/16/2013 by Melissa

Hello world! Whew, it’s been a while…

When I sit down at this blog after a long hiatus like this (not the first time, mind you), I feel like I’m 12 years old, staring at a blank diary page after I neglected to write for months. I would look down at the diary and feel this huge expectation upon me. The pages saying to me: Well, where have you been? Fill me in on the past three months of your life! Surely you must have something to tell me?

And thus, this blank blog entry feels a lot like that. As though I am expected to recap everything that has happened in our lives since where we left off. Before the changes in our day-to-day lives and this amazing new adventure owning ReThreads really began. Back when I didn’t know what it was like to work 70 hours a week and we still spent the majority of our time together. As though I could just slowly turn the dial through these past few weeks and months, sharing and savoring the funny and beautiful moments, fast forwarding past the difficult ones.

But… (tell me you didn’t see this coming) I’m not going to do that. When I was 12 I picked up the diary out of the blue because I wanted to gush about my latest crush or how my best friend and I weren’t best friends anymore. I didn’t want to take on the task of bringing my diary up to speed from where I last left off. BORing. Then, as now, I had something pressing on my mind, and that’s why I came back. To share this juicy tidbit. This new passion in my life. Perhaps then, as now, I found it more suitable to live in the present rather than dwell on the past?

And so, here it is. The reason I’m back: to share an idea. It’s an idea in infancy right now, not yet a well thought out idea. But it’s still an idea worth sharing from the start. And a joint one at that. (As some of our best ideas tend to be!)

The basic premise is that we are going to spend $500 locally, on things that help grow our community and our selves. And we’re going to blog about it.

Here’s the story that led up to the idea: Due to a strange set of circumstances that nearly left us homeless, Mark and I were forced out of our most recent apartment and we received $500 in compensation for the inconvenience of having to move earlier than expected. At first we thought that the money would go a long way toward helping us furnish this new apartment and make it more homey and comfortable than the previous apartment. The last one always felt temporary to us, and thus we weren’t inspired to really make it feel like home. And even if we had been so inspired, there wasn’t much time: Have I mentioned we’ve been a little busy with a new baby in the family. Now, though I’m still just as busy at ReThreads, we’re more inclined to settle into this apartment and make it feel special, so we’ve been shopping for furnishings that feel like “us”. This would be a great way to spend our newfound moolah, right?

Right, except that home furnishings are things we would have bought eventually anyway. We’re both always keeping our eyes peeled for secondhand items to bring home that serve us functionally or aesthetically. And occasionally we buy new: we covet rare trips to IKEA like the cheap college kids we apparently still are (somewhere deep inside?). Buying furniture and artwork might be on our to-do list, but this new money won’t really be noticed if we just put it in savings and wait until the right pieces come along… That is to say, it’s like every time I receive cash as a holiday or birthday gift. It’s very very appreciated, but I don’t usually spend it on something I really want or will remember into the future. It usually just goes into the bank and ends up paying bills or some other nonmemorable purchase.

So we shifted our thinking, and wondered how else the money could make an impact in our lives, and maybe other peoples’ as well. After all, IKEA doesn’t really need our money. How can we have fun with this $500 and engage with our community at the same time?

Nearly every day it seems we learn of a cool new organization in Charlottesville, or local project that needs support, or fundraiser event that we want to attend. Or someone who could use their day brightened by a bouquet of flowers. So we decided that this is how we’re going to spend our money. Intentionally. On local products and services. Paying forward kindness. Treating ourselves to a class or event we might not have otherwise. Putting 100% of the money into the community, in a recordable way. As in, recording it on this blog as we go. What lessons will come from our $500 adventure? What new experiences will we have? What richness and beauty will we see in this community?

While we work out the groundrules of our little $500 challenge, here’s my question to you: If someone handed you $500 right now, how would you spend it? What would you do to make the world a little happier, your community a little stronger, yourself a little richer?

Living The Random Life

Posted on 10/24/2012 by Melissa

Nearly every day Mark and I exclaim to each other how random our lives are. Those of you who know even a little about us probably recognize the truth in this statement. One day we’re renovating a house in Vermont, the next we’re farming veggies in Virginia. But then before you know it, Melissa’s back to doing some renovating in Vermont while Mark is exploring a hippie commune in Central VA. A month ago we were couchsurfing with a crazy cat lady in New Jersey and attending an Indian wedding, and today we were less than 30 feet from one of the coolest Jersey cats -The Boss – as he played a free concert in Cville.

(Coincidentally, we also had a close encounter with the last well known celebrity who took that same stage – His Holiness The Dalai Lama – about two weeks ago. A smile and wave from HHDL sent a wave of emotion and gratitude throughout my whole being in a way that even Thunder Road can’t touch. Sorry Bruce.)

These days our random lives get even stranger. Well, maybe it’s not stranger than a hippie commune; I’ll let you be the judge.

Over the past week or so we’ve found ourselves in these various situations:

Participating in an online property auction, preparing ourselves to be the new owners of a condo with amazing views. Five minutes later: the auction over and us condo-less. We took turns convincing each other it wasn’t really what we wanted anyway. After all, unobstructed mountain views are overrated.
Driving through a hard hat construction zone for new commercial space on the outskirts of town. The development happens to be where the new Trader Joe’s is going in (woohoo!) and also happens to be where my baby got a job. The two may, or may not, be related. All I know is I’d like to see Mark in construction boots and a hard hat.
Loading ~500 books from a beautiful estate just west of Cville into Jenny-the-Truck for later sorting and selling. Similarly: helping a ~~young woman~~ certified hoarder move out of her apartment Yep, we’ve got a new moving business going, using my trusty truck as our pack mule.
Chasing dragons*.
Missing Vermont = buying stock in Green Mountain Coffee Roasters.
Hiking to an apple orchard at the top of Carter Mountain – a local tourist attraction this time of year – and hitchiking our way back down.
Enjoying Ethiopian cuisine (a first for MM).
Attending classes at a fancy schmancy expensive gym. When we work out there we regularly look at each other and say “Who are we?”
(Melissa) Applying for a job at a metaphysical book store. “I meditate regularly” and “I have some knowledge of crystals” are phrases that had never made it into a cover letter until now.
(Melissa) Editing a book. Not one that I wrote, mind you. That’s coming – one day.
(Mark) Living to see the day when Melissa was willing to step into an AT&T store and seriously consider buying a smart phone.

All this is, in part, a way to bring you up to speed on our lives. After all, it’s not all that long ago that we broke up with the idea of running an acre farm at the Local Food Hub, and – in truth – questioned whether we too were breaking up. A lot has happened since then. We’ve had many months of processing, conversations into the wee hours, alone time with much personal growth, tears of joy and of sadness, speaking from the heart, and truth seeking. We lost each other and found each other again, feeling renewed and rejoicing for the love that was still underneath it all. We’re here, in Charlottesville, starting anew with ourselves and each other. We have all kinds of questions about what’s next and very few answers. I’m learning to love the questions.

This post is also a way of re-inventing this blog (yet again) to focus on the relationship side of the equation since we’re no longer in Vermont renovating our 1920’s “shack”. Though, the renovating topic may have its fair shot in the near future – especially if I move forward with my bright idea to get crafty with some thrift store furniture, or if we accidentally buy a fixer-upper in a property auction. You never know with us.

Stay tuned.

(*The dragons weren’t real.)

Changes at the house

Posted on 08/03/2012 by Melissa

A lot has happened since I last wrote on this blog. Like enough to fill up an entire novel. Which, maybe one day it will (one can only hope). But for now I just want to tell you about some of the changes going on here at the house in Burlington.

For those of you who are confused about why I’m back in Burlington – What happened to the farm in Virginia? – I direct you to a totally vague, not-helpful-at-explaining-anything-blog-post about leaving the farm. Funny, it has a parallel blog title to this one. Shows how creative I get with blog titles, eh?

But back to what I was saying. There have been some changes. And our house is all the better for it, at least in my opinion.

Let’s turn to the evidence. Project #1:

Which now looks like this:

Okay, sure, it’s not a big deal. The back door to the porch is now red when it used to be green. But it is a big deal when I realize it’s once again a way of making the house “ours” instead of “the last guy’s”. We have always disliked the green on all the doors and love the Barn Red color from our local solid waste management agency – made from local recycled paint! If you recall, we made the same change to the front door not long before leaving the house this winter. It’s amazing what a change a little paint can do to transform a space – or a doorway!

I got to learn that lesson – about the transformational qualities of paint – more than once as I did quite a few little painting projects while in Burlington over the past few weeks. Here’s another:

To this:

Don’t the stairs just look cleaner and newer? It’s basically the same color (blue or grey, depending on who you ask) but now it’s harder to notice all the imperfections, all the warped, worn, and aged edges. It’s nothing that will stop and “wow” you, but maybe that’s a good thing when it comes to stairs from your garage into your living room?

And then there’s the mailbox, which also got a new makeover. From this tired old fella:

To this younger, cleaner mailbox. Doesn’t it make you want to send us some mail?

By the way, see the shockingly gold (and ugly!) color of the door handle in the photo above? File that under the “one day I’ll be painted black too” category.

There have been other changes, bigger, more dramatic changes (in life as well as at the house), but those will have to wait until another blog post, when I have faster internet connection and more photos at my fingertips. For now I hope you forgive me for the quick updates as I jump back into the diy/renovation blogging world. Thanks for joining me on the journey!

Lessons from the Country

Posted on 03/25/2012 by Melissa

There’s no doubt about it. We’re living in the country now. Don’t believe me? Check out our latest acquisition.

Okay, I know buying a book about living in the country doesn’t necessarily mean you live in the country, just like we weren’t actually homesteading just because we used to read books about homesteading (from the comfort of our suburban Burlington house.) But this time I mean it: we’re living in the country now, and boy do we have a bit of learnin’ to do.

I’ve already mentioned some of the things I love about country life (like stargazing, waking up to the birds, and beautiful landscapes). Of course there’s also the fresh air, wide open spaces, quiet solitude, and amazing wildlife. But there are also some challenging things about country living, as we’ve been learning these past few weeks. Here are two of the most recent lessons I’ve learned:

#1 Making Friends in the Country is Hard

Not only are we living on a farm so far from the neighboring properties that you can’t see them from our cottage, but we haven’t yet had many opportunities for meeting new people in the area (other than the awesome Local Food Hub staff). All that will change in about two weeks when the local farmers’ market starts up and we get to interact with more people on a more regular basis. Given that I am occasionally a social butterfly, I’ll admit that I’m chomping at the bit for this day to come!

In the meantime, here are some of our recent ~~friends~~ wary acquaintances:

Though I don’t have good photos of them to include, it’s worth a mention that there are also plenty of spiders, wasps, and mice in our everyday lives. It’s hard to accept them as friends, but I know I do need to accept them as part of country life.

On the cute and cuddly end of the friend spectrum, last month we met one-week-old goats. This is me feeding baby Lucy:

Unfortunately the goats aren’t on our farm so there’s no long-term friend potential there. But we do get to spend a good portion of time each day playing with (and getting jumped on/knocked over/licked by) Sully, the resident farm dog and my new best friend in the making.

(You can learn more about Sully and see more fun photos of him over here on the farm blog.)

#2 We have to Drive Everywhere

Every grocery trip, pizza dinner, farm purchase, plant sale, or night out on the town means a minimum of 6 miles of driving if we’re going to the small town nearby. Most of the time it’s more like 32+ miles because Charlottesville is usually our destination of choice for shops and where we will deliver plants/produce throughout the season.

In Burlington we would often go a week or two without using a car. We walked to the shopping center nearby, biked downtown, and took the bus to work or school. When we did need the car (for a shopping trip to Lowes, for instance, for one of our many home renovation projects), we always made sure to combine errands to save on gas and time. Thankfully this means we’re no strangers to strategically planning our car trips to be as efficient as possible. But it is still strange to me that if I want to go anywhere off-farm, I have no transportation options other than my fuel-inefficient truck, Jenny. My poor (unnamed?) bike is sitting in the corner of our kitchen, quietly weeping. (While I would love to get out for a bike ride for fun one of these days, not only will it will necessitate some advanced planning to find a trail or country roads that are safe for cycling, it will mean leaving behind long farm to-do lists: seedlings that need watering, rows that need weeding, crops that need harvesting. AKA not gonna happen.)

I could have called this lesson “it takes a lot of fuel to get food from farm to table“, because really, that’s one of the bigger lessons we’re learning – not jut about country living, but about agriculture specifically. The fuel use in agriculture is not just on the transportation end – like when I deliver vegetable plants to a natural food store in Charlottesville in the back of Jenny’s cab (above) – but the farm production end as well.

We’ve both logged a lot of time on the farm tractors recently – tilling fields to prepare for planting, transporting things around the farm, random joyrides. Okay, I’m only kidding with that last one. Tractor business is serious business. We’re not super comfortable using all this fuel in the name of food production – something we’re going to continue to question this season as we challenge ourselves to grow with minimal negative impact on the environment. But the one thing I know right now is that the tractors sure provide for some great farm photos:

These two lessons only scratch the surface of what we’ve learned already in our ~6 weeks living in the country, and I have no doubt that there’s plenty more to learn… If only I could find time to write about it all!

Quiche Perfection

Posted on 03/14/2012 by Melissa

I love quiche.

I love the crust. I love the eggy, cheesy insides. I love filling it with veggies. I love the way quiche puffs up when baking and then slowly settles back down as it cools. I love quiche for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. I love warm quiche straight from the oven with a big slice of homemade bread. I love cold quiche as a road trip snack. I love having a failproof recipe I can turn to when guests come to town. I love baking mini quiches in muffin tins. I could go on, but I think you get the point.

We love food and we cook/bake all the time. Mark suggested a while back that I devote an entire blog page to our food creations, especially showing photos that have veggies that we grew. Love that man and his ideas. But somehow I haven’t gotten around to even one post devoted entirely to food. That changes now.

Of course, the photos really don’t do it justice. In fact, I wouldn’t blame you if you thought it didn’t look all that appetizing after these photos. But believe me, my latest quiche creation is amazing.

I’ve now made this exact quiche twice, and I’m prepared to make it again with very little arm-twisting. My recipe is a variation on this one with this crust. I’ve included my full recipe below. Enjoy!

Please post comments to let me know how you like my food-centered post as well as this recipe if you do try it!

A blurry shot of some mini quiches I made back when I had my muffin pan ready at hand. Sadly, these days no muffin pan = no mini quiches.

Amazing Blue Cheese and Broccoli Quiche Recipe

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons butter
1 onion, chopped
3 big cloves chopped garlic (if you love garlic like we do, add more!)
2 cups chopped fresh broccoli
1 quiche crust (recipe below)
4 oz crumbled blue cheese (about a cup)
1/2 cup shredded cheddar cheese
4 eggs, well beaten
1 1/2 cups milk
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
Over medium heat melt 1.5 tablespoons of the butter in a large saucepan. Add onions and broccoli. Cook briefly – four or five minutes at most. You don’t want them to get too soft or they will overcook in the quiche. Toss in the garlic at the end so it heats up but doesn’t turn brown.
Spoon vegetables into crust and sprinkle with both cheeses.
Combine well beaten eggs and milk. Season with salt and pepper. Pour egg mixture over vegetables and cheese.
Put the remaining butter in a dab on top
Bake in preheated oven for 35-40 minutes, or until center has set.

A few notes:
First of all, if you don’t think you like blue cheese (ahem Meghan), you may be wrong. I don’t really love blue cheese solo – a bit too pungent on its own – but it’s tempered by the eggs in this recipe and pairs so well with broccoli. It just works.

The funny thing is, the blue cheese was sort of accidental as we had a block of Grafton’s Duet (an 8oz block of cheddar + blue cheese) in the freezer from Cheese Traders – oh how I miss Cheese Traders – and I decided to crumble the entire thing into a quiche last week. Winner!

Since I didn’t have any more Grafton Duet on hand and wanted to make the same quiche this week – what better way to use up the rest of the broccoli in the fridge? – I bought a 4 oz container of blue cheese and combined it with the remainder of a block of cheddar that I had. It totaled about 1.5 cups of cheese in all, which was what the original inspiration recipe called for, only they said to use mozzarella. I’m sorry but this quiche would not be nearly as good with mozzarella.

If you don’t like blue cheese I’d recommend trying 1.5 cups of cheddar or swiss. Or mozzarella if you really insist.

It’s also worth a mention that I used very large eggs in this quiche, fresh from the hen house. We also still have a reserve of homegrown garlic, which made its way into the quiche. I can’t wait until this summer when the broccoli and onions will be homegrown as well!

Basic Quiche Crust Recipe

Ingredients:

1 cup flour
½ teaspoon salt
¼ cup olive oil or safflower oil
¼ cup ice water (just put a few ice cubes in a measuring cub and fill with cold water to just under 1/4 cup)

Directions:

Beat oil and water with fork
Add flour and salt and mix with fork
Press into 9″ pie crust or cast iron pan

Notes:
I used to use a butter crust recipe and I like this one much better. Plus, it’s less work!

I’ve tried it with both olive oil and safflower oil and prefer the olive oil (though it makes it much more expensive for me since I only have pricey organic olive oil in the house). You could try canola oil if you have it in the house (for me, safflower takes the place of canola oil).

I used a mixture of half whole wheat and half white flour (1/2 cup of each), as I tend to do whenever a recipe calls for flour.

I haven’t tried rolling out the crust – I simply press it into the pan but you could try rolling it if consistency in thickness is important to you.

One Year Later

Posted on 03/10/2012 by Melissa

So much can change in a year.

A year ago this week Mark and I took our first trip to Charlottesville together. The trip was a much anticipated – and deserved! – vacation from the recordbreaking winter in Vermont. When we left, there were still several feet of the white stuff on the ground, and it wasn’t about to end anytime soon. Here’s what our house looked like around that time.

Some of us were genuinely grumpy with the weather. Not that I’m naming any names.

It wasn’t just that we were sick of being cold, and the winter darkness, and the shoveling. It’s also that we were literally worried that the roof might collapse (turns out we didn’t have to worry as our attic roof was structurally overbuilt, but we were worried nonetheless). We also were itching to start gardening, and it was hard enough to even think about garden season let alone start seedlings indoors when our backyard looked like this.

We really thought spring would never come.

So imagine our surprise when we took our vacation 500 miles south and found daffodils blooming, community gardens bustling with people, and farmers with their hands in the soil! In March! With no snow on the ground! And no dreaded mud-season!

One year ago today I began picturing myself living in Virginia, and for the first time, and I kind of liked what I saw. Of course Mark and I had talked about it before then – he had been looking at Virginia real estate online for months prior to our vacation. But I never really gave it much thought. Because when I did think about it, it made me sad. Say goodbye to Vermont? Leave the house that we had put so much energy into renovating?

Being the sweet guy that he is, Mark wanted to ensure that if we did ever move to Virginia it was as much my idea as it was his. In other words, no forced relocation or ultimatums. Gentle prodding? Yes. Coercion? No. Mark simply let Virginia speak for itself.

Over the course of about a week spent in the Charlottesville area we visited some of the many places that did the talking – loud and clear.

First, there was Edible Landscaping, an amazing nursery that sells only edible plants that can grow in this region. Like figs and peaches and tea plants and peanuts and artichokes and almonds and pecans and lemons! (Yes, lemons and other citrus will grow here, if they have a protected greenhouse.)
We toured around wineries, meaderies, and breweries, and we attended a local homebrew club meeting. Of course, a great beer, wine, and homebrew scene exists in Vermont, too, but the number of breweres in VA, combined with the state tourism push (especially along Nelson 151) ensured we caught the Virginia craft beer buzz. We even won a prize from the homebrewers: ten pounds of English pale grain that we had to figure out how to lug home to Vermont with us.
We visited properties for sale that had garden/farm space measured in acres, not feet. And they were affordable-ish and close-ish to Charlottesville, which was more than we could find in the Burlington area.
And we met amazing people everywhere we went – not only through the CouchSurfing community but also through daily wanderings and conversations. Of course there is no way to compare VA and VT here. We find great people everywhere we go. (Law of attraction, perhaps?)

But above all else, there were two defining moments from last year’s trip: Viewing a particular property that was on the market, and visiting the Local Food Hub’s farm in Scottsville, that we now call home.

Let’s start with the Local Food Hub first, shall we? Through our pre-vacation research we learned of the LFH and thought it sounded like the kind of place we’d like to learn more about. They support local farmers, grow their own food to supply local schools and the food bank and were similar to Burlington’s Intervale (in fact, modeled on the Intervale in many ways). We got in touch and arranged to take a brief visit.

On March 9th, 2011, we met up with the Food Hub’s Marketing Manager – Emily Manley – who explained the nonprofit’s mission and projects, and gave us a tour around the farm. We saw wide expanses of beautiful farmland, low tunnels protecting crops from the nightly drop in temperature, as well as intimidating Virginia clay. We met farm apprentices who were digging in the soil to prepare for imminent potato planting. We wandered into the greenhouse to find happy, healthy seedlings, and noted that the mushroom logs looked nearly ready to bloom.

I immediately compared my situation to theirs: Potato planting? We’d have to wait for the snow to melt and mud season to pass before we could dig into dry enough soil to plant potatoes. Greenhouses with seedlings almost ready to go in the ground? We hadn’t even started most of our seedlings yet since the ground wouldn’t be ready for them for months. Oh yes, the land was speaking to me. Despite Virginia’s contentious red clay, the land looked way more appealing than the four feet of snow in our backyard.

At the time, we could not have fathomed that one year later the happy seedlings in the greenhouse would be our happy seedlings, and the hands digging in the red earth would be our hands. We had no idea that Emily and the rest of the LFH staff would welcome us into the Hub with open arms.

Defining moment number two: viewing a particular house on 12 acres of land that had everything we were looking for. (Mind you, at the time I still didn’t know I was looking for anything in Virginia, but after seeing this place I was fairly convinced I would find it here, whatever it was.) The house was in our price range, 20 minutes from Charlottesville, and had existing farm buildings in good condition. This place had us dreaming about starting our own small farm (and B&B?) within the first five minutes of setting foot. In fact, the house and property got our creative juices flowing to the point that we were ready to make a bid, and so we did. Only then we learned that there was already another bid on the house, and it had been accepted. We were quite literally a day late… (not sure about the “dollar short” part).

We saw other properties before and after this one, so why did this make such an impact on me? Maybe it’s because, unlike most of the other properties we’ve looked at, I was able to picture myself living there, starting our farm business, renovating the house (minor renovations – the house was in great shape), and spending time in Charlottesville. Maybe it’s because, once we decided to bid, it was an intense, and often draining, emotionally engaging process. We made up stories about the other people who had placed a bid. Maybe their bid was dependent on financing, and it would fall through? Maybe they would think it over and decide it wasn’t the place for them after all? Maybe it was someone from out of state just buying up cheap land to re-sell it and we would have another opportunity to get our hands on it?

None of those things happened. After several very emotionally draining months of back-and-forth with our realtor, we learned that their sale eventually went through. We were bummed. Since then we haven’t found a property as good as this one in terms of location (location! location!), quality, infrastructure, and price. That, plus the fact that this house was symbolic as my turning point in becoming open to moving to Virginia, and we have ourselves a place to which no other property can hold a candle.

Thus, we found ourselves today, a year later, driving past said house and dropping a note in the mailbox for the current owners. The letter said something along the lines of: Hi. We’re jealous. Call us if you want to sell your house. Only a bit longer and more narrative-driven.

We didn’t expect anything to come of it, but figured it would be nice to see the house again, one year later. Maybe meet the owners. (Only they weren’t home, hence the note in the mailbox.) And I’m glad we took the trip out there. It offered a chance for some reflection. Now that a year has passed, I could see it with new eyes. The trees in the orchard are still ugly and stunted, the neighboring houses look kind of trashy. And I bet the 70s carpeting and linoleum kitchen flooring is still inside the huge house. Yes, it still had some appeal, but maybe I need to trust in the universe’s message: that house isn’t the place for us.

The truth is, we have found our home in Virginia, albeit temporary, thanks to the Local Food Hub. Last year’s vacation literally changed our lives. No, we didn’t get that particular property but I think we got something even better: the chance to farm and learn, to grow as food producers and as people, starting to put down Virginia roots together at Cottage View Farm.

Feeling at home at Cottage View Farm

Posted on 02/28/2012 by Melissa

We’ve been at the farm exactly two weeks and it’s slowly starting to feel like home. I’ve got a functional work-at-home office, Mark has his stereos and internet TV set up, and we have art on the walls. We even have a decent stock of staples in our kitchen pantry like dried beans, rice, and bread flour.

And we’re starting to get into the swing of things around here.

I get up with the sun, not only because I’m now sleeping without an eye mask (so the light naturally wakes me up), but because my job first thing every morning is to let the chickens out of their coop. By the time I get there – around 6:45am these days – the roosters are already crowing and the hens are waiting by the door. No more lazy sleeping in for me – I’m up with muck boots on before 7am every day. And what a beautiful time of day it is.

We’re also learning a ton about the operations of this existing farm, and planning out our own one-acre plot, which we are calling Cottage View Farm.

Why Cottage View Farm? Well for one thing, the view is great from here.

Our days are taken up by things like seeding plants in the greenhouse, recording germination dates, ordering supplies, calling/emailing restaurants and grocery stores that might want to sell our produce this summer, and other miscellaneous farm planning. We’re also taking time to explore our new town (Scottsville, population: 557) and get up to Charlottesville (~16 miles away) every once in a while.

We also spend a lot of time thanking each other, and the universe, and the Food Hub, for getting us here. And we keep reminding ourselves that this is real. We’re living and working on a real farm, not just our pretend backyard homestead in Burlington. And it is a dream come true.

Personally, I’m in awe of something every day. And I’m trying to make sure I don’t take for granted the newness of it all. Last week, we started thousands of seeds in the greenhouse. Four days ago I saw my first black widow spider. Yesterday we both drove a tractor for the first time. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?

This blog has always been a fun way of keeping a record of our journey together, and I plan to continue it in some form. But we’ll be sharing the majority of our farm-related news and photos on the new website for Cottage View Farm. (It’s still a work in progress right now, and I may do some double-posting on both sites for a while, until I find the right vibe.) One thing you’ll notice if you check it out, Cottage View Farm’s website is a very photo-driven site. We couldn’t help it with such beautiful things to share every day!

Why yes, I do celebrate my birthday for an entire month… Don’t you?

Posted on 02/26/2012 by Melissa

My birthday month started off with a bang. To those of you asking “birthday month”? I refer you to the title of this post. Why yes, I do celebrate my birthday for an entire month. Don’t you?

To start it off, Mark and I took a nice bike ride to Mount Vernon on February 1st. I’m pretty sure this is the first year I’ve been on a long leisurely bike ride in February. And for that I can thank the nearly non-existent winter in these parts (and really, most of the country until recently).

Mount Vernon is, for those of you who didn’t major in American History, the home of the country’s first president, as well as a great destination for a bike ride along a beautiful path in Alexandria, VA. We had a nice picnic on the outskirts of the famous estate and wandered around the tourist shop inside. We would have paid the $15 each to go inside the estate as the “four acre working farm and gardens” sounded inspirational, until we realized that despite the fact that it felt like a spring day, it really was just the beginning of February. So we opted to forgo the tour until a time when the farm & gardens would be a bit more lush.

Knowing how much I love birthdays and surprises, Mark also had a few other things in store for me the past few weeks. Here are some of the random fun things I’ve been enjoying this month.

An amazing chinese buffet lunch in Alexandria, VA, not far from where we were spending our days in late Jan – early Feb. This was the largest (and ~~cheapest~~ most affordable) buffet I’ve ever been to by far. Definitely worth $8 if you’re in the area and in the mood for only eating one meal for the entire day. Especially if you can handle the potential digestive upset caused by mixing raw sushi with spicy soups with fried foods with rich sauces with sweet fruit.
Rockin’ in style with new car speakers. Technically this was a gift for Jenny the Truck, but I’ll accept them in her stead as she couldn’t be here to accept the honor (and she doesn’t know how to type). You’ll have to ask Mark but apparently when I opened the box I didn’t react the way he expected. My reaction was more like I don’t know what this is but it looks like some kind of technological doodad. How lovely. But once he explained what was inside the box to this technophobe, and installed the speakers on a frigid morning before a long drive, I realized how much I really wanted nice speakers to go along with the new stereo ~~I installed~~ a friend of mine installed for me before I left Vermont. (Thanks again, Rocko!) Now thanks to Mark, I get to listen to my favorites like NPR, farm podcasts, and The Beatles without the annoying buzzing and crackling sounds coming through the old speakers.
Knowing that I’m on a preparedness kick these days (more on that in a future post) and that a working flashlight is always a good thing to have around the house, Mark surprised me with a solar-powered-radio-and-flashlight-and-cell-phone-charger thing that I had randomly added to my Amazon.com wish list at some point. This in addition to the other hand-cranked/solar-powered lantern we received from Mark’s mom for Christmas, ensures we’ll never be left in the dark!

Mark went back to the aforementioned lunch buffet one day without me (I do have work to do on occasion) and surprised me by bringing home a takeout container with some of my favorites like crab rangun, spring rolls, and veggie dumplings.
We caught some live music not once, not twice, but three times this month. As you can see, I’m taking my goal of seeing live music at least monthly very seriously.
While not specifically birthday presents, if you count Valentine’s Day and moving to the farm as part of the fun birthday month activities, this month has been more festive than usual. Here I am on move-in day, starting to unpack Jenny the Truck.

Mark knew that the short list of things I wanted before moving to the farm included a hat to keep the sun off my fair-skinned face. I had already treated myself to a thrift shop straw hat, but he decided to double my fashionable hat collection with a blue corduroy cap from the Gap. The blue brings out your eyes. Aww.

There has been one birthday wish I’ve been asking for, for at least a few months: to go snowshoeing on my birthday. In what has become somewhat of a tradition, I’ve gone snowshoeing on my birthday for the past two (maybe three?) years in Vermont. A few days before the big day, our new town of Scottsville received about 5 inches of snow. Would my snowshoeing dream actually come true!? I excitedly put on snowboots…

And headed out to take some photos…

It wasn’t exactly enough snow to warrant snowshoes, but the winter boots and snowpants were a welcome comfort. Here’s the sight I awoke to the next morning when I went out to let the chickens out of their coop.

Not a bad present. Thanks, crazy winter weather!

We had a fun celebration the night before my birthday, drinking wine and listening to loud music while baking up a storm in our new farm kitchen. I made an amazing chocolate cake recipe by Heidi Swanson (with a few of my own tweaks), and Mark made gourmet chocolate chip cookies. He also created a banana-peanut-butter-chocolate icing for my cake that was superb. For a guy who doesn’t like sweets, he sure knows how to please someone with a sweet tooth!
After the late night blast of wine and sugar I stayed up pretty late that night, so what I really wanted on my birthday was to sleep in. Mark gave me the best present of all by letting out the chickens at dawn so I could get some more beauty rest.
When I finally awoke, I felt refreshed and excited for the day. If my memory serves me, It’s my birthday! may have been exclaimed more than a few times that day. Yes, I am like a little kid when it’s my big day.
Funnily enough, someone else at our new home shares my birthday, so we had a nice big lunch celebration at the Local Food Hub office. The lunch was a surprise to me, and Mark did a great job of helping cook and prepare – generally playing it cool around me. I kept asking what’s going on? while I excitedly puttered around the house, knowing he had something up his sleeve. Did I mention I love surprises? Lunch was delicious, and a fun way to spend a bit of social time with our new friends at the Local Food Hub.

Later that day we took a beautiful drive in the country, went antiquing (what that means for me is looking at stuff I can’t afford, but dreaming of the day when I can!), and then hung out in Charlottesville for food and drinks.
Despite my wish for snowshoeing, on my actual birthday all the snow had melted and it was over 70 degrees! This was the first birthday I’ve ever spent wearing sandals!

Even now, after my official birthday has passed, it’s still my birthday month, and there continue to be presents coming my way. Mark recently ordered homebrewing supplies so we could get our brew on while living at the farm. He bought me all the ingredients I need to make a milk chocolate stout: one of my favorite beer styles/flavors.
Yesterday we checked out a cute thrift shop in Scottsville and found a pasta maker. Oh yeah! I meant to include make pasta on my goal list! Consider it goal 102.

The month’s not over yet, of course, but it looks like these gifts will keep me busy: I’ll be eating cookies and cake for the next week or two. When I’m done making homemade pasta I can wash it down with homebrew. When I need to check on the chickens in the dark I can take my hand-cranked flashlight with me for safety. During the day, I’ll protect my skin by wearing my new blue cap. And anytime I’m in the truck I can listen to the stereo and be reminded of all the sweet gifts my sweetie gave me this month.

Who needs snowshoeing when you’ve got all this?

Living Our Farm Dream

Posted on 02/17/2012 by Melissa

Today I found myself shoveling chicken manure out of a coop when a curious hen wandered in and looked at me with a cocked head. “I’m just cleaning up your house, boss.” I said with a laugh. Mark, a few hundred yard away, was busy drilling brackets onto a 100’ high tunnel (think small greenhouse), happily dreaming of the tomato plants that will soon inhabit the warm enclosure. All of a sudden it’s as though we’ve found ourselves living other peoples’ lives. And we’re loving it.

Wait. Chickens? Greenhouses? Maybe I should back up and explain a few things.

Then again, maybe not. In my head I planned a long blog post about exactly what we’re doing, where we’re doing it, and the journey of how we got here, but I’ve decided instead to just jump right into it because, well, that’s how life is sometimes. It just goes too fast for you to keep up. Plus, family and friends and facebook followers already know the deal: we’re farming in Virginia for the season thanks to a nonprofit organization called the Local Food Hub.

So, with that non-intro out of the way, let me get back to telling you about living our new farm dream. Every day these days is a brand new adventure, with exciting projects and learning opportunities around every bend. I’m doing my best to approach each one with gratitude and a beginner’s mind. And a journalist’s notebook.

Here’s a quick recap of the past week:

Monday night, our first at the farm, was a bit of an adjustment. I, for one, adjusted my sleep habits – I no longer need a sleep mask to cover my eyes as there is no artificial light coming into our bedroom windows. This may not sound amazing to you, but believe me, I am thrilled with this aspect of country living.

Another nighttime discovery: We can see stars – lots of them! For a girl who grew up not 20 miles from the bright lights of Manhattan, seeing nothing but shining stars at night is an amazing, and unusual, experience.

We awake every morning to birds outside the bedroom window, fluttering about as though it’s almost spring. With daytime temperatures in the 60s most days, they’re probably right. [What a strange non-existent winter it’s been!]

Depending on which direction you look, views out of our cottage windows include over 60 acres of cropland (one acre of which is ours this season!), a greenhouse, a packing shed, educational barn, high tunnels and hoop house structures, and the Blue Ridge mountains in the distance. Yes, this is a working farm. And yes, it is beautiful. We get to watch the sunrise over farm fields, and sunset over an apple orchard. Idyllic is an understatement.

In exchange for renting the cottage, there are a few chores that are required of us each day. First and foremost, remember the chicken-poop scooping? The farm’s ~20 hens provide eggs for the farm’s owners and Local Food Hub staff, and it is now our job to make sure they stay well fed, watered, and generally happy. (Let’s not tell my new charges what happened to our backyard chickens in Burlington.)

We’ve ordered (and received!) most of our seeds for our one-acre plot this season, and will begin planting them in the greenhouse imminently. I can guarantee a longer post about our new seed babies very soon. Make that many, many posts about our many, many babies.

We’ve already been making connections with farmers in the area. On Wednesday we attended an event – one of many educational workshops hosted by the Local Food Hub – on the topic of Financial Management for Small Farms. We learned a ton about everything from direct marketing techniques to farm labor laws to bookkeeping advice. We also connected with some of the Local Food Hub’s partner producer farmers and were even invited to dinner by some other new farmers in the area. An offer I expect to take them up on very soon, now that we’re in major networking (and friend-seeking) mode.

This week we also took some steps forward in our marketing efforts for our new endeavor. We’ve applied to be in two local farmers’ markets this upcoming season so we can sell our produce directly to consumers in the area. One of the stricter “producer-only” markets (only people who grow their own food can sell at the market) required us to have a signature from an Ag Extension agent as proof that we are actually growing our own food. We met our local agent – Cathy – on Thursday. There wasn’t much to show her as nothing’s in the ground yet – heck, the ground isn’t even tilled up in our plot. But I guess we had trustworthy faces because she signed the application. That doesn’t mean we’re in the market yet – we’re probably on a pretty long waiting list of farmers who want to sell at the downtown Charlottesville market, but we’ve made an important connection to the world of extension offices.

We’re talking a lot about crop planning, recordkeeping, and organization for our farm plot. I have a lot of things to say on these topics, and most of them start with the words “I hope” as in “I hope we can plan out a good schedule for our crops and keep good records this season.” And, “I hope we aren’t too late getting our onion seeds planted tomorrow.” Here’s to hoping!

In addition to all the new experiences on the farm, we’ve also made time this week for two live music shows, volunteering at a plant nursery (including shopping for $60-worth of baby fruit trees), and exploring the local area a bit.

In sum, we’re loving our new farm home. True, it’s a big change from being homeowners renovating our house for the past sixteen months to being renters living on leased farmland. In the big picture this is only a temporary landing place for us and yet I’m feeling more settled and grounded than I have in a long time. We’ve found ourselves throughout this week commenting on how surreal the experience feels. How beautiful our surroundings are. How comfortable and inspired we feel on a farm. I can’t think of any place I’d rather spend this growing season (~nine months) as we put our energy into learning everything we can about small-scale sustainable farming practices, growing our own diverse acre plot, and basking in the beauty of this place.

It’s a hard life, but somebody’s got to do it!

15 Minutes of Fame / Being on TV

Posted on 02/09/2012 by Melissa

Want to be on a reality TV show? If you said no, I can relate. I didn’t either, at first. Then again I also understand if you said yes. I mean, everyone’s gotta have 15 minutes of fame, right?

Here’s our story.

When we bought our house in Vermont a year and a half ago we knew we had to do some renovating. The master bedroom/office/bathroom was especially troublesome to us, with nasty smelly carpeting in the office and bathroom, poor layout between rooms, and a dark bedroom awaiting some natural light.

Mark, ever the brainstormer, came up with an idea to change the floorplan by opening up the wall between the bedroom and office, put in 15-lite French doors to let in natural light, and put down oak flooring. Sounds great, in theory, but how would we make it happen? This renovation would be a bigger undertaking than either of us had ever done, and we really had no idea where to start.

Well, I did have one idea. Maybe we could get ourselves onto one of those HGTV shows where experts come in and do the renovation for you? I mean, anything’s possible, right? I checked out the Be On HGTV website and found that we were ineligible for most of the shows due to geographic location (many shows are filmed in CA or NYC. Nothing specific to Burlington, Vermont, sadly), or type of show (we weren’t property virgins or house hunters or the like). But we were eligible for one show on the DIY Network (a “sister network” of HGTV) called Renovation Realities. There was one problem, though. It wasn’t one of those tell-us-what-you-like-and-we’ll-do-it-for-you kinds of shows. No, this was a totally different kind of show. As their website says:

Renovation Realities is about the realities and drama of home renovation. We want to see the issues, the arguments and the real effects of taking on a project with a spouse, friend or neighbor. There is no host and no help: YOU are the star of this 30-minute show!

If you have a great home renovation project (which must include demolition) and want to share it with millions of people across the United States, you might be an excellent candidate. Your personality means everything on this show, so don’t worry if you’re not the greatest do-it-yourselfer.

We could practically guarantee we’d be eligible based on the above. Renovation project including demolition? Check. Issues, arguments, and drama while working on this project? Undoubtedly. But we would have to do the entire renovation ourselves? Millions of viewers? Scary stuff. Nonetheless, we were intrigued enough to want to apply and learn more.

Thank goodness they said you don’t need to be the best do-it-yourselfer, because we had little faith in our abilities in this regard. We would have to rely on our personalities, not our skills, to get them to like us. So we put together this application video.

(If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, jump ahead to minute 8:30 to see some funny outtakes.)

We thought the 10-minute video was cute and funny, while also being practical: answering all of their questions about ourselves and the renovation project. That’s a great combo if you ask me: cute, funny, and practical. In fact, I think that might be my new motto.

Sometime after sending in the application we were accepted for the show (!) and I posted this teaser telling you we would be on TV but not giving any more details. Truthfully, we had no idea what we were getting into and we were hesitant to share the news until we had a chance to go through the filming and get to see the show ourselves.

There’s a lot I could say about the week of filming – the nervousness before meeting the film crew, the wardrobe conundrums, the stress of living in a construction zone, the pressure to make progress every day. But looking back on it, the experience wasn’t as bad as either of us expected.

Here’s a few shots during filming:

In the end, five days of footage turned into a 20 minute show with a bit of repetition before/after commercial breaks. I’m guessing it’s only about 15 minutes of actual footage in the show. Turns out the phrase 15 minutes of fame is entirely accurate! Here’s the description of us on the show’s website, followed by a link to the entire show.

Mark Weber and his girlfriend, Melissa, are setting out to renovate their master bedroom in order to make it more of a master suite. They start off determined to get their renovation done, but from an electrical scare to battling with drywall, the couple ends up struggling to finish in time.

Clicking anywhere on the image above should open the Renovation Realities episode in the same window. You’ll have to click the “back” button to get back here. You’ll also probably have to sit through a commercial or two – sorry!

A few things are worth pointing out:

The “electrical scare” that was made into a big deal on the show, was really not a concern at all because, ultimately, we didn’t need to tear out that section of the wall.
Yes, we did get to the point of a communication breakdown at the end of the week of filming (as was captured well in the show). We felt we had worked so hard that week yet had very little to show for it. We weren’t even done with the demolition. We were exhausted. We had a construction zone for a living space. It would be months before we had things back to normal. It’s really no surprise that we weren’t communicating well.
There are a few hilarious Mark lines in there. “You’re such a hippie” is one of my favorites. “Tuck me in” is another. See if you can catch him saying it when he’s in bed with the nightvision camera on one night.

We thought the show would make us look like total fools. We thought the slightly staged shots and voiceovers they asked us to do would sound corney or be a mockery, but really, it wasn’t that bad. As far as “reality tv” shows go, this one did a decent job of staying true to reality: It was a stressful experience. We weren’t really having a great time. We didn’t really know what we were doing. All of that comes across during the show.

What you don’t see during the show is the weeks of work we put into the renovation after the crew left, so that we could complete the project for our own sanity AND our pocketbook (there was a deadline for “after” photos in order for us to receive the second half of our compensation for being on the show). We are proud of the fact that we actually did 90% of the work ourselves, relying on friends to help us when we needed a hand. But I won’t bore you with all those details. You can read all about the renovation process in previous posts here, here, and here.

The “before” and “after” photos are included at the end of the show, and in previous blog posts, but I’ll throw a few in here as well. The transformation still amazes us when we look back at it.

We went from this:

To this:

From this:

To this:

You might wonder why I’m even writing about all this, since we finished the renovation in the fall and we’re now over 500 miles away in the other V state. Well, for one thing, I thought it was time to post something in the namesake of this blog, which has been severely lacking in the renovations department recently. I also figured enough time had passed that we were over any (vain) issues about how the show turned out, and we were legally allowed to share behind-the-scenes photos and link to the show on the DIY website.

So there you have it. We survived our 15 minutes of fame. Will we become big reality tv stars? Ummm if it hasn’t happened already it’s doubtful. The show has already been airing on the DIY Network since October. Plus, we aren’t quite as cute and funny in the stressful reality show as we are on the laid-back application video or in person!

Want to be on an HGTV/DIY Network show? Check out all the shows they are currently casting, here.