Author / Sixer

by Sixer

Naturally, the Garden

I might not know where I plan to be in five years, or what path my career will take me by 2030, but I not only have plans for my 2020 garden I have already bought seeds.

2019 saw growth for myself, as gardener, in two ways: first, I was finally able to start sprouts successfully, managing to keep alive three Okinawa sweet potato slips and about two dozen seedlings. True, many didn’t survive transplanting, but the fact they died outside of the house, from something other than me forgetting to water them, feels like a level up. I also kept much better records than normal. Not perfect records. Not even complete-but-lacking-significant-details records. No, they petered out with the warming weather, leaving me little insight into how my garden works past May. But this is still significantly more information than I’ve ever captured before. I’m excited to improve further in these areas, and to add a few more to my tool belt. Top on my list to try out in 2020 is succession planting, which will require a number of changes in my attitude (and additional care in transplanting seedlings). Also, I plan to devote an hour a week, every Sunday morning, to garden tending – maybe if it’s on my calendar it will actually get done. And maybe if I keep up with it I won’t be so prone to negligence come June.

So, those are my two 2020 personal goals. My goals for my garden are even more ambitious. I really, really, really, want to eat more veggies this year and somehow this desire keeps getting tied into my garden plans. To be able to provide a good portion of my food needs from my own front yard is the distant Ultimate Goal that all other yearly goals point towards. To that end, this year I want to effectively use the spaces I’ve already established, rather than introduce more spaces I do nothing with. I do need to buy more soil and supplements to build up my first box’s soil, and I want to try out a few grow bags this year – especially for my sweet potatoes. But my growing plans are still as audaciously unlikely as ever. I’m starting a butterfly section near my front door which, to start with, is going to have bronze fennel, orange milkweed, and whatever extra marigolds I get to germinate. I also might stick a ground cherry in there, if I have space. Long term, I hope to have zinnias, cone flowers, and perhaps another perennial with the power to entice butterflies and bees (but not wasps). I’m also going to stick marigolds, ground cherries, kale, and lemon grass in my lower front window bed, which has historically been neglected. Both of these areas have uncertain to outright awful soil, and are going to be wedding nightmares. Scheduled weeding will be a must.

The main box is going to be my Succession Planting Learning Arena (SPLA).

  • Season one, spring: Kale, lettuce, beets, radishes, carrots, string beans
  • Season two, late spring: Cucumber, tomatoes, basil, marjoram, marigolds, okra, cilantro, string beans, carrots
  • Season three, summer: Peppers (sweet and spicy), nasturtiums, okra
  • Season four, late summer/early fall: Winter radish, squash, carrots, lettuce, kale, beets, cilantro, garlic (from grocery store bulbs)


And then, finally, in the half barrel I’m trying out …… peanuts! They should be a lot of fun, especially since I went ahead and ordered the striped variety. Extra peanuts and peppers will, hopefully, go into grow bags.

Even if I fail miserably to reach my goals, it’s going to be a very, very yummy year.

by Sixer

Granola

Where did it start, this search for the great granola? A few years ago, for sure. Sometime before I stumbled across She Who Eats’ amazing blog, with its thorough analysis of flavours and ingredients. I used her matcha granola as a template for years, whenever I got tired of thinking about breakfast and wanted something quicker. I needed granola when I was making my own yogurt, as an excuse to continue the exercise. And then, just this year, in February, I had the idea for a granola bar. The idea . . . well, it was a good rough draft we shall say. But not something publishable. And anyway I found the best wheat cracker recipe shortly after and that fixed me as far as on-hand snacks went.

But still. Granola.

It ought to be so simple – crunchy clumps of goodness. Not too sweet, not too bland. And yet it stays out of reach, with recipes resulting in a kind of sugar coated crumble: great for sprinkling over things but not quite satisfying to eat. Too sweet, really, for breakfast every morning, or for an early evening snack. Not even Cooks’ Illustrated could break the mold of mediocrity. So when I decided to go off wheat this month, and therefore give up my beloved crackers, I knew something had to change. And so I changed it. The result: practically perfect. I mean, there are changes I have to make, and also changes  I want to make. But the basic essence of this is golden. If you have an afternoon, please try it out, make it your own, and tell me how it works for you.

Glorious Granola  – adapted from She Who Eats

  • 3 cups of oats
  • 1 cup of pumpkin seeds, the roasted and shelled kind
  • 1 cup of sesame seeds and sunflower seeds (in whatever proportion you wish. My sister requested less sesame)
  • 1 cup chopped dried fruit (I used mango and ginger. You’ll probably want to increase this to two cups)
  • ~ 1/3 cup sugar (I used Jaggery (which comes in chunks – I blended it), so this number is something of a guess)
  • 1/2 cup oil (you can probably reduce this to 1/3)
  • Vanilla Extract
  • 1~1 1/2 cup brown rice (hot from the pot, or else microwaved with a bit of the oil)


Put oven at 250 degrees and toast the oats for about 30 minutes

Mix together all the fruit and nuts and sugar (Obviously you can put whatever of these you want in – the above is just what I had on hand. I would probably put the sugar and any other flavorings right into the rice mixture next time). You can put some of the oil here, but this too I think could be put all in the rice mixture. When the oats are almost ready, blend the hot rice, oil, and vanilla (and possibly salt) until a smooth, thick liquid emerges. It takes a minutes or so. Pour this over the nuts et. al. Add the hot oats and mix it, mix it, mix it. You want everything to be perfectly combined. Press it into the bottom of a lipped pan. Go and wash the vessel you blended the rice in before it cools and becomes glue.

It takes about 50-65 minutes to bake. Halfway through pull out the pan and flip the granola over, breaking it up a bit into chunks, to ensure it dries out on both sides.

Let cool and enjoy!

by Sixer

On a Snowy Morning

 

It’s not the first snow of the winter, but it is the first snow of the year.

A thin blanket for a cold, cold beginning. There is something sad about it – is it the gray clouds which even now hover over the new-made world? The occasional gust of the wind, making the lonely chime sound its solitary note of cheer? Maybe it is the slight wish that this present had come not so close to Christmas, not so close to a time when presents are so plentiful.

I am off today. Off because of the snow. Yesterday was my first day back, and today is, now, another day off. I will enjoy today, but I will feel a bit guilty about it. I think this sums up my relationship with joy fairly well. If there really were a cosmic balance, a giant scale by which happiness and misery were dolled out,  what would I have in store for me but misery, in this life front-heavy with blessings? Misfortunes have been like lemons in a pie. How sweet, still, the sum of the parts!

2017 has been a well balanced, wholesome year. Less pie and more biscotti-with-whole-wheat. The theme has been, sometimes too overtly, community. This was the literal theme for my church’s women’s committee (“living in the light of community“). And the inferred dream of all the up and coming adults in the area. Two different bible studies were started this year, each at a different church. Each by different personalities, with different life experiences. Yet each established with the desire to build relationships with more people, and to build more people’s relationships with God. In the midst of all this, the Geekette established a new weekly tradition: dinner, Stargate, and excellent conversation. All theses things have been a peculiar kind of blessing for me. A direct answer to a prayer I made in 2015.

Answered prayer is kind of like a fulfilled wish list at Christmas. You look at your new treasures and wonder “Now what do I do with you?” Often, I think, when we ask for things – spiritual or otherwise – we only imagine having or receiving and we fail to fully think about using or living with. And this has been my experience with community this year. In bible studies, home, and at my church, I have suddenly found myself in that net of relationships that extends far under the surface of every group, like tree roots. Or mushrooms. And now that I am finding myself a part of it, I wonder what I’m supposed to do. What does a root do? It gathers what is necessary to grow and nourish the tree. Not by creeping up to the surface – which is rather my instinct, to find the light and be visible, to be the tree – but by functioning where it is placed, whether that’s rich or poor, loam or sand or clay.

Or, to summarize, though this year has been the year of community, the lesson I think I’m supposed to learn from it is the same lesson I have always resisted learning. Be still and wait.

Though the same, in looking back, I seem to see a nuance to this message which I have never noticed before. Or, perhaps, noticed only by its absence. The root does not wait, inactive, but rather waits through action. Its stillness is the quietness of living, content, not the motionlessness of death. And the waiting is not an impatient desire. An hourly frustrated expectation. The root, in its slow absorption of water and nutrients,  experiences the tree’s future second by second. The waiting is not for something to happen, but for what is happening to continue. The stillness is not in defeat, but in complete assurance that victory is present even here. Even now. Does the root have a certain point to which it desires the tree to grow? And does it chafe and fret if the tree grows slanted, towards the sun, or twisted in the wind, or thicker than its estimated girth? To wait is to live not just in expectation but in the daily fulfillment of that expectation. It is not a hope based on the whim of wishing, but one proved each day. Best seen in hind-sight, of course, but still there to be seen if one looks. To be still and wait is to look for God and to see Him, and to live looking and seeing.

I’m hoping that 2018 will teach me about friendship; about reciprocity, and thinking of others, and thoughtfulness in general. But if the lessons on being still and waiting are to continue I would not mind either. What once I considered boring I begin to find enticing. The meekness that once seemed incapable I now suspect is the most confident of all. If I could be still, in living; if I could wait, in the midst of achieving; if I could thread each day through the weft of God’s promises, instead of tossing them away like stray ends, or storing them up against some coming time – what need would I for pie to make life’s lemons sweet to me?

by Sixer

Na’ No’ Yo’ Normal Novel Writing

For some reason I really wanted to do NaNoWriMo this year – that crazy, month long sprint to 50,000 words. And every time I brought it up amongst my literary friends – and got the appropriately literary version of “meh” as a response – my intention doubled. Forget that I didn’t know which novel to work on, forget that I have three or four other projects going this month, forget that I’m up to my eyeballs busy. The only voice that really got through to me was the quiet one in the corner who, really, just wanted to cast on and start knitting. This gave me pause. Long pause. And though I kept up the gun-ho optimism, and signed in with a placeholder novel, my plans for November started to seem a bit desperate. I cast on for a cowl on Saturday (and have done nothing with it since, naturally) and today I realized what I was going to do about Nano.

    1. I will not be participating in Nano
    2. I will be writing

I’ve been reading teacher blogs at work lately ( . . . . I have no excuse for this ), and one I’ve come to adore is Michael Pershan’s Teaching With Problems, he talks in one post about writing slowly and well and deeply, and that makes me think about what kinds of writing I take enjoyment in. Not what I enjoy reading, although it’s interesting to think about how the activities are connected, but what I actively enjoy the process of crafting. I like research writing. I like writing about nothing while talking about things. I like snappy, funny, clever writing – but I tend to like it in flashes: warm, merry darts of sunshine amidst a subaqueous canopy of words. I liked my review for Princess Passes, and normally I hate reviewing, and I love my response post to the first chapter of tea table talks. I like thinking out loud on paper screen, and being prosy and vague in ways that you simply aren’t supposed to be in fiction or emails or text messages. So for Nano I will be writing. No, I will not subject you to a post a day, but I think one a week is a challenging-but-still-doable-well goal. I will aim for quantity (becasue that’s easy to measure) but focus on content (becasue that’s what we’re all here for, right?).

So here’s to the words to come, and the thoughts they might inspire.

by Sixer

Whatever May

. . . . There is something about the month of May that begs for puns. No other month is so open to them. Sure, you can March over to April, but once you have done so you’re out of it. May has a bit more range.

But I’m not really writing about May. Nor am I writing about writing, if you can believe it, nor Spring, nor plans future, nor any such wishy-washy excuse to ramble. No. I am writing about a belt.

I can not fully remember life before the belt. I thought of it barely two months into my new job, as my boss casually pulled pliers, screw drivers, and wire strippers out of the pouch that clipped to his own belt loops. His phone handily mounted beside it. His multitude of keys dangling from a carabiner on the other hip. I myself ran back and forth from whatever tool room was closest, and struggled not to walk so far from my phone that I couldn’t hear it vibrate. I have no pockets worth mentioning, and exactly zero functioning belt loops. To acquire either would mean radically renovating my wardrobe and, even more, abandoning the haphazardous collection of silhouettes that constitutes what might be termed my style. Doggedly I struggled on, all the while dreaming of the perfect belt. A work belt. A belt of pockets and loops. And then, finally, after a year of minor frustrations and inefficiency, I buckled down and made it.

Oh.

That was in September. By November I had stopped pretending any kind of civilized fashion sense and had started wearing it out all places, even to church. I wore it to a wedding too, over my Little Black Dress (my excuse was that I was also playing the bartender and so, technically, since I wasn’t a guest, I didn’t have to be in full formal attire). It’s quite amusing to remember that the number two reason I hesitated to make it in the first place was feared self conciseness about how it would look. Pooh. Practicality once again has ground my vanity into the dust with a contemptuous laugh. Besides, I’ve gotten compliments on it. Not just “how cute” either, though those are nice, but the slightly more grown up “how clever.” The only draw back to the later is I can’t really remember how I made it, and so can’t be sure if it was really clever or some combination  of luck and an uncured predilection for hoarding.

The belt has saved me a lot more than missed work emails and a few thousand extra steps to track down tools. I made a vow to myself last year that if I didn’t show some initiative and make something useful, sewing wise, by the end of January, 2017, I would pack my sewing kit up and give it all away. The belt was a such a success that even if it hadn’t been followed by two much smaller creations the room would have been spared. In a lot of ways it seems like such a minor victory, when my goal is always public-acceptable clothes, but if I stop and think about it, even a well made shirt would only be worn once a week. The belt gets worn six or seven times that.

Okay, for those who care about such things, here’s a very non-technical write up of my process for making it, as far as I can remember. The material I used was the waistband and part of the pant leg of a pair of second-hand capris I purchased four or five years ago. The original intention was to make a skirt, but honestly I bought them becasue the buttons were so cute and I loved all the little details. I had some extremely complicated ambitions for the belt originally, but by the time I’d completed them the plan had been reduced to two rectangles. The top rectangle was both longer and taller than the back piece. Since there was a flat felled seam running about two inches from the bottom of my fabric, I decided to make that the bottom edge for added strength and structure – this also brought the tops up to a similar height. Serendipity. I’m not sure if I actually realized I would need a 3D structure in order to really fit things in these pockets, perhaps I hit upon the idea of tucks simply becasue the  top piece was so much longer than the back and I was too lazy to cut it, or maybe it was because folding the felled seam down to the bottom edge created an excess of fabric that had to go somewhere. Either way, once I had the pleats down everything else was history. The inclusion of the pants’ coin pocket was another conceit of accidental brilliance. I included it becasue it was too cute to toss aside, but it has turned out to be indispensable for holding mini USBs, quarters, screw heads, and VGA adapters.

The hard parts were all in attaching the binding and cleaning up the edges of the waistband – I had hacked it off without really thinking a whole lot about how I wanted it finished and didn’t really leave myself much space for seam allowances. I ended up binding it with fabric from the leg. It works, becasue of the nature of the item, but is neither professional nor elegant. The pocket strip, too, was a little tricky to attach to the belt, and the depth of the pockets meant there was more weight in them than my original seaming could hold. I ended up supplementing it with safety pins until around December, when I went over it with enough stitches to keep King Kong tied down. I have a multitude of plans for remaking these, and most of them involve a strip of only three pockets – more space really is less, I’ve found. For a more sophisticated interpretation I would love to make a zippered pouch on the underside, perhaps in the band itself, for passport like things which shouldn’t be openly advertised.

Already this belt is showing signs of, shall we say, excessive love. My flawed but pretty bound edge has been worn open in a half dozen places, and in one of the places I reinforced with extra stitches the fabric itself has given out and formed a hole. Strangely, I’m not really saddened or alarmed by these ominous signs. The knowledge that this garment can be, if not recreated, at least replaced is rather delicious, and though I might put it off longer than is really wise, I’m still looking forward to the challenge.