But no matter which village we belong to, we are trying to fit in and become part of the community. And we are grateful that the communities have welcomed us.

That type of daydreaming is useful and fun, but the next step is a little more difficult: where do we put what? Some of the decisions are already made for us. We didn’t stump the area to the left of the driveway (as you look out from our front porch), so that will remain a wild meadow. We’ll throw down grass and let that compete with the ferns and other naturally occurring plants while keeping an eye out for saplings that might threaten to crowd the driveway again. I’ve dubbed this the “hippie garden,” a place where we can experiment with whimsical features like a gazing ball, yard art, or even a small pond. We might also use it for an area to put our chicken house, if or when we get to that stage.

To the right of the driveway is the much larger expanse of land that runs from the house to the cabin, with a second “field” further off to the right of the house. This second field was an unexpected but welcome outcome from having the area stumped and graded by our contractor, Bob, who really is “an artist with a bulldozer”, as our forester dubbed him. Bob opened up level, firm, rich soil in an area that I, for one, assumed would be too sloping and rocky to be usable. Turns out it was just a big pile of dirt waiting to be smoothed flat. We might use part of this space for a greenhouse or two, but there will be more room for planting as well.

Still a third area that we need to address is the steep slope directly in front of the house. Currently there are some wild blackberries growing there, along with some sumac and various other native…well, weeds. At first, I was trying to convince Rick that we should dig up the weeds and keep the berries, but after getting snagged in their sharp thorns while harvesting the small, somewhat bitter fruits I think it would be better to tear out all the plants and start fresh, either with a variety of cultivated berry with a better taste, or with an low-growing ornamental evergreen like juniper that wouldn’t get out of hand and crowd our amazing view.

Needless to say, we have some ideas but we’re not quite sure how to proceed. Where do we plant the various crops? How large of a vegetable patch should we carve out the first year? Where will the berries go? Do we have a good spot to grow our own hops? (We both have a keen interest in home-brewing.) Luckily, between Rick’s contacts that he’s developed through the Vermont Master Gardeners, our neighbors who have been gardening on a large scale here for over twenty years, and the knowledge we already have from other gardens, we have some good resources to tap into. It just may take a while before we really learn the quirks of our land and this new growing climate.

While it isn’t necessarily as exciting as the logging part of the project, if you are interested, you can watch the excavation on the webcam.

If you have sheep you want to graze in our field next Spring, contact us.

The picture here was taken early this morning as the crew was clearing the spaces necessary for the chipper truck, and other machinery. Since then the process has sped up considerably. We have taken the “before” photos, and Sarah has shot some video footage we hope to upload soon. We will document as much of the process as we can. This is only the first step. The next is for a bulldozer to come in to push all the stumps into a ravine, bury as much as possible, move the bigger rocks to create a retaining wall below the leach field, and finally level some of the land. After that it is up to us to start a cover crop to get us through the winter. In between, we will take a soil sample to see what we will need to do to make our new fields as fertile as possible.

Watch the webcam today if you can stand the carnage.

Update: We made a short Quicktime video (with music!) from the footage we shot.

Green Up Day
The first Saturday in May is traditionally Green Up Day in Vermont. Rick postulated that Earth Day is just too early up here to be able to get out and do much. In April, the ground could still be partly frozen and covered in snow, making it difficult to find garbage to pick up, or start a garden, or plant a tree. But come May, Spring has finally extended northward, allowing Vermonters to get to work.

On our first Green Up Day, Rick and I got a lime-green trash bag from the Tunbridge town office, which we filled with trash we gathered from our road. After taking an inventory of the items we collected, I considered putting forth a proposal that Green Up Day be renamed “Pick Up After Your Redneck Beer-Swilling Neighbor Day”, as over 75% of the garbage was beer cans and bottles.

There were a few plastic soda bottles, some styrofoam cups, a bottle of baby lotion, and one can of motor oil, but it was obvious to me that if someone had curtailed his/her habit of tossing empty beers out the window of their car, there would have been significantly less trash to pick up. Be that as it may, I enjoyed hunting for garbage on a beautiful day, and plan to do this more often than once per year. The only downside is that the fluorescent green trash bags are accepted at the transfer station free of charge on Green Up Day, but we’ll have to pay to drop off trash on other days. Still, it’s a small price to pay to keep garbage off the road and out of the streams.

Dowsing Seminar
Once we filled up our bag, Rick whisked me to the Randolph Co-op so that I could attend a dowsing seminar, while he rushed off to the transfer station to dump our trash before they closed. Dowsing is the art/craft/skill of detecting information using more than just the five senses. It is often associated with the act of finding water or well sites below ground by using a wooden stick, but it can be used for purposes other than locating water. When it is used to find water, it’s not just to locate water, but to answer questions about the water source. A good dowser can determine if the water is adequate in pressure, water quality, and accessibility before the property owner pays for expensive drilling.

I really can’t do this art/skill justice without making it sound like some far-out, new-age baloney, but the hands-on experience I got in the class showed me that it is a technique that can be learned, through practice, by anyone. And our instructor gave us other instances where dowsing would be useful: in locating other resources such as minerals or oil, in tracing the path of a buried electrical conduit, or even locating lost objects, pets, or people. If you’re interested in dowsing, check out the American Society of Dowsers, an organization founded in Vermont in 1961.

CSA Farms
After a busy afternoon, we returned home and I began preparing a stir fry for dinner. Rick had found some information at the co-op about local farms, some of which accept memberships as part of their Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs. The idea behind CSA is that people pay a flat rate to the farm at the beginning of the season in exchange for a share of the harvest each week. The farmer benefits by being able to use that up-front cash to support the supply and labor needs of the farm, and the customer benefits by knowing that they will be getting their share of locally grown, and often organic, vegetables each week, at a discount from what it would cost them to buy the produce at the grocery store. This method also cuts down on the costs and natural resources needed to ship and market the foods. We’ve narrowed down our search to two local farms, and will probably sign up for one of them next week.

The unpacking and acclimating stuff has gone pretty smoothly, other than the confusion of trying to explain to the post master that mail addressed to our street address should be delivered to our home, and mail addressed to our post office box should be left in the PO box. Apparently this is a foreign concept, and is supposed to explain why some of our mail was returned rather than being delivered to either our house or our PO box. Eventually we convinced the PM that there was a logic to our request.

The small house projects have been just that, small. Sarah made a sign for the end of the driveway to help people find the house. I took karmic hits by murdering wasps in preparation of our housewarming cookout. We thought we had avoided this unpleasantness when we removed a half dozen unoccupied nests a few weeks ago, but suddenly the front porch was filled with the buggers …errrr…. buzzers sunning themselves and chasing the dogs when they were in the yard. With a planned cookout, it was decided we needed to address the issue, and so each morning over a few days while it was still cool out (and the wasps were inactive), I found myself crawling under the porch and climbing on the roof hunting for wasp nests.

Of course, when the day of the party arrived, it was raining. While we were luckily still able to grill, neither we nor our guests spent any time outside. The wasp murdering spree was still somewhat necessary as they were threatening to Haley and Mickey, but I still wish it could have gone down differently. We are surrounded by woods; why our stinging neighbors couldn’t find a nice tree to raise their broods is beyond me.

As for the party, we had a light turnout, but had fun nonetheless. Jessamyn and Greg brought over some yummy Vermont cheeses a professional cheese-buying friend of theirs had given them. Heather brought her friend Adrienne and a jug of Rock Art Brown Bear Ale, and I drove to Montpelier to pick up our mate Mike since he doesn’t have a car.

Picking up Mike was also an excuse to drive the new car. Last month we took the Subaru to our mechanic for what we thought was going to be a tune-up, only to be informed that the car has all sorts of issues. We respect Chip’s opinion, and he suggested we consider trading the car in now before we blew a head gasket. The other option was to help him put his daughter through college and have a lot of necessary work done. We had other reasons to consider selling the Subaru, including needing four-wheel drive and not just all-wheel drive, but Chip’s diagnosis accelerated the process. So we headed on down to Shearer Honda in Rutland and a week or so later came home with a Honda CR-V that gets better mileage than the old Subaru, and has many more safety features.

Everything else is going well. I am doing some web consulting for our town’s website, and Sarah has a job interview at Vermont Law School next week. Now that it is warming up a bit, our next projects are to build a fenced area where the dogs can run, sign up for a CSA membership at Four Springs Farm, and get ready for various visitors including Sarah’s dad in May. If you’d like to visit too, let us know.

We ended up liking Vermont—and mud season—so much we decided on the flight home that we really were going to sell our house and move.

The most difficult part of the transition hasn’t been the brutal Vermont winters—this one has been significantly more mild than usual, as we understand it—but acclimating to living in an apartment again. It may even be more difficult for the dogs. Let’s face it, when you’ve had a house, a yard, and a garden to poop in, it’s tough to go back to having to go for walks on a leash. Errr, I’m speaking about the dogs, mind you.

Back to us.

While Montpelier has been wonderful to us for these last seven months, we have been chomping at the bit to find our dream place. So, after even more driving around Vermont, we are all very happy to have someplace to call our own again. It’s a cute little 3-bedroom, cape-style house that sits on a mostly-wooded 10-acre lot with a brook running through it and a small one-room cabin.

Now, we just need to find jobs to pay for it. gulp.

* Perhaps our first opinions of Vermont had been skewed by the fact that we had such wonderful hosts who generously opened their home and gave their time to relative strangers. We’re still glad we’re here … so thanks you two!

When The Steelers aren’t playing a 1:00pm Sunday game, these afternoons are the perfect time for us to hop in the car and check out a new town for a couple of hours. Several weeks ago we drove over to Northfield. We enjoyed the quiet setting and historic “New England” feel, and had a blast spending too much time and money in the used book store on the green. The town also had some great views. For us, the major detractor was that Northfield is the home of Norwich University: while we admire the institution we are a little too hippiefied to feel at home in a town that is mostly populated by a military academy. It was a great town to spend a couple of hours in though.

Last Sunday, we headed over to Bristol, about an hour’s drive west-south of Montpelier. Bristol lies just a bit off of the major north-south corridor of the Lake Champlain valley, Route 7, and the proximity to Burlington and Montpelier drew us to the area. We tried taking a short-cut across the mountains via the Lincoln Gap Road but had to back track a couple of miles onto the more conventional (and paved) Route 17 when we discovered Lincoln Gap was closed due to fire. (It also looked like some trees had not been cleared off the road from the wind storm a week earlier, and that had us wondering what the people who live on Lincoln Gap Road do in the winter. Stay home I guess.)

At any rate, we eventually got into Bristol, parked next to the large town green (no meters!), and immediately snapped off a few pictures. It was sunny and beautiful so we strolled around a bit before checking out an eclectic Asian imports and weird do-dads store, an art gallery featuring the works of Vermont craftsmen (painting, sculpture, hand-carved spoons, ceramics, and jewelry), and then the Bristol Bakery & Cafe which had great soup and organic green-tea soda. We loved the area and felt comfortable in the town. It seemed large enough to be a town one could go to for errands, but small enough that the surrounding countryside would have the rural feel we are looking for. The one detractor of Bristol is that we are not the only ones who are enamored with it, and the property values are skyrocketing. We’ll keep an eye on it but wonder if we’ll be able to afford land and/or a house in the area.

On the way to and from Bristol along Route 100 (before the turn to Route 17) we were also reminded how much we like the areas around Moretown and Waitsfield. The towns are smallish and the surrounding fields and farms reminded us of England. The proximity to highway 89 is an added bonus. Again, the question of affordability came up, but for now we’ll add these areas to our list of “places we could live” and continue our search.

We’ve been busy. Busy with work, extra work, travels, The Plan, dog(s), friends, and all the other joys that life has to offer. And in case you hadn’t noticed, we haven’t been that great about updating. But since we had time to put in our garden on Sunday, we thought we’d share. It doesn’t look like much now, but there’s here’s a huge batch of garlic, some broccoli, two types of lettuce, chard, cucumbers, tomatoes, and a variety of herbs. The only thing missing is the peppers section, which will be put in place in a few weeks, after it warms up. We’re hoping the garden won’t take too much supervision this year….as long as we can keep Haley out of it.

Now our peas will have something to cling to!