Big City, Little Homestead

Living rural in the city is great – you can do it, too.

Page 6 of 17

Space pants and other clothes on a bed
Space pants! and socks and stuff.

Clothing minimalism, 2020 and beyond: The capsule wardrobe

November 16, 2020 / / 0 Comments

This post is a bit of a departure from usual topics! The pandemic has brought a lot of people home and made them appreciate a few things. Some of them are obvious, like decluttering (my low-key favourite!) and home decoration (that too) and house plants (I’ve got lots of those). One of the many other home-bound themes, though, has to do with the clothes we wear…and aren’t wearing, as we’re not going out in public much these days. In fact, we’re wearing a lot of

Schlep-wear, schlepwear | house-schlep clothes. 
1. No-longer-stylish or imperfect yet comfortable clothes you only wear at home, to preserve socially-appropriate clothing for repeated use and greater longevity. I changed into my house-schlep tights as soon as I got home. I slung my work pants over the back of the chair for Friday morning.
2. Stained or worn out clothes worn over other clothes for the purpose of getting dirty while working on household or outdoor projects. I split the seam of this pair of pants, so now they're schlep-wear for the next time I paint.

I must say I was surprised and a bit annoyed to read about people feeling the “need” to buy house-schlep clothes, as in, the ultra-comfy casual wear that found a new market this pandemic. They can spend the money if they have it, but didn’t they just overburden all the charity shops by getting rid of too much (too fast: all at the same time), and now they’re buying more? This is ironic. Or just poor decision-making.

I hope that merchants are selling their overstock, the stuff previously going to waste in this incredibly wasteful industry. Otherwise, workers are in the factory at great risk to themselves right now, or at their sewing machines at home, merely to supply a frivolous need.

Because in my view, people were already wearing house-schlep clothes. And there’s a ready supply of second-hand clothes both online and in charity shops, even if in-person shopping is a limitation. Even for pyjamas, you don’t need new house-schlep clothes because…

Downgrading is the obvious option.

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Pandemic Project: The Drag Queen/Cowgirl porch-garage

August 30, 2020 / / 0 Comments
Ecological landscaping, green driveway

Well before the pandemic, I realized I was becoming a neighbourhood fixture, the person who sits on their front porch every day*, watching the world go by. I first started doing it outside, in an Adirondack (Muskoka) chair at what I called “1 Elation Way.”

* not every day, just often enough

I then moved the chair just indoors at the corner of the garage door, because I needed a tad more privacy while reading my books and papers and supervising the bunnies. (Also I was getting a bit too much sun, it’s not always pleasant to sit without shade.)

Since forever and anon, my garage looked like this:

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chickadee at portal of nest box
See, it's occupied!

New project: build a nest box for sparrows, bluebirds, and chickadees!

May 1, 2020 / / 0 Comments

It’s been on my to-do list for a few weeks to build a couple of bird houses with the scrap wood I have leftover from other projects, and so finally I did the job just in time for spring migration.

In fact, by May, it’s almost too late — except that some species breed more than once. Those birds who arrived earlier already have young, but those just arriving are getting ready to make a nest. A ready-made niche is often accepted — and that’s what I’m going to provide!

And so can you. Do it this weekend!

“Using Old Wood To Build A Birdhouse” is a into a new kind of post here called a Project or Portfolio post. I decided it this was a nice way to do it with a picture gallery, and I could centralize all the DIY projects that way. (It’s also been a hugely popular blog post).

Resource: NestWatch’s All About Birdhouses has everything you need to know about different birdhouses and nest boxes for different types of birds, and also how to set them up with a nest camera!

Cornell Lab of ornithology

Update: A necessary amendment to the bird houses

Portal protectors! These metal aperture guards keep other birds and animals from excavating the holes to the nest box, as happened to me late one fall because of a squirrel. I repaired the damaged sparrow row-house the following spring, like so, but also, the sparrows really like the new orientation of the end-cabin, and I’ve had successive families being raised in it:

The bird house, repaired
The first portal was too destroyed, but that doesn’t prevent my changing it for the better!
With new portals in a new orientation that the sparrrows actually prefer
The sparrows absolutely love the new orientation, and I now have a flock that visit it year-round

I applied the same portal protector to the two bird houses I made for the above DIY project, and you can see the pics of the results there, too. You can buy them at this link (non-affiliate, I make no commission).

In 2025, we have the prospect of a fourth year of Chickadees raising a family in the chickadee box. They’re very discreet, until the nestlings get noisy.

We have the confirmed fourth year of noisy House Sparrow nestlings being raised in one unit of the multi-row-birdhouse sheltered above my own front door. They’ve successfully fledged every year!

And we have active House Sparrow nesting activity for the third year of the bird house on the corner of the back deck, which had previously seen at least one year of fledges.

Build your bird houses, naturalize their placement, and wait. The birds will come!

Lastly, come winter, you can turn the nest boxes into roost boxes, to help out any birds needing a place to crash overnight in the bitter cold.

Dark-eyed Junco; Feather Friendly
The Dark-eyed Junco is a winter resident. The dots you see on the glass are bird-strike prevention tape (Feather Friendly)

Preparing the garden and house for winter

October 14, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Formerly, this post was about

ripening your green tomatoes,

but I didn’t have much more than a social media slug to say about it — it was actually the shortest blog post I’d ever done. So if you still have tomatoes in the garden, they’re going to go to waste, unless you do this:

Pull up the plant in its entirety and hang it upside down in your garage or cold cellar.
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Mission

My mission is to spread appreciation for ecological resilience and encourage you to live a little closer to the land. I want people to take actions that increase the beauty, biodiversity, and climate-change readiness of our towns, cities, and regions. That begins with people who own property, but includes anyone who can just go forth and do something at hand, from planting a public space to persuading a company to create green space. 

Image credits

© myself, unless credited otherwise; all rights reserved. View my available photography  on Unsplash.

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