Making Fire in Winter

Apparently I’ve been neglecting the Simple Acre posts! Or so I’ve been told…. I wonder if there is a fine for turning in a late post, like the fine at the library?

So, here’s the late post:

It’s Winter! And if I’ve learned a thing or two about being married, it’s that wives like to stay warm. With that nugget of knowledge I’ve set about getting the house ready for some serious warmth this winter. Now, when this was a 6 room, cozy bachelor mansion I would lock up 3 rooms of the house and live in the kitchen (fireplace), bedroom (above the fireplace), and living room (has the TV and surround sound!). The other rooms were above the room that had the dog door! Brrrrrr! Old Man Winter would sneak into the dog door every day.

Well, with the passing of my longtime friend and canine-family-member, Bear (RIP), I set about redesigning the dog door…. I removed it. I like design projects that involve a hammer!

With the door removed I nailed studs in the frame, attached plywood to the outside, insulated in between the studs, and nailed some Hardyback 500 to the inside.

I spent the next day constructing a frame to stand the stove on. You can’t put a heat source onto hardwood floors. I built it out of some leftover 2x4s, leftover Hardyback board, concrete and flagstones from the ‘patio project’.

That took a night to dry. I carried it in, placed it in the room, put the pellet stove on it and cut the holes in the wall for venting. I connected the pipes, secured them to the plywood well over 6 inches from the exterior wall. You don’t want to vent a heat source between windows, under a window or closer than 6 inches from your exterior wall.

Now, if you shop around you can find a ton of high-grade hardwood pellets for $175. That’s 60 forty-pound bags. It’s the same space as a cord of wood and won’t taker the wife too long to unload from the truck. Guy’s remember to stick around and encourage her, so plan your trip to the pellet stove well before the Sunday game!

If you burn a bag a night, well, that’s 2 months of evening heat. With our fire place on one end and pellet stove on the other we’re able to use our hard earned $$ for other projects around the Simple Acre instead of mailing it to the oil companies. Filling a 275 gallon tank with $3.50/gallon oil is $975 (with delivery fee). That’s 5 and a half ton of pellet. As a bachelor I would drop 400 gallons into the tank during a typical Winter. As a bachelor I lived right in front of the fire-place with 2 labs. Like I said earlier in the post: I’ve learned that wives like to stay warm…. Well, after one month of testing I can say with assurance that the pellet stove heats up the far side of the house pretty well, kitchen has the fireplace, and the bedroom… well, there’s more than one way to make a fire in Winter! ; )

Inspiration Farm

Castle Creek Farm
A local farm we found recently when we were out driving around exploring. It's amazing what you can find in your own backyard.


Their honor system produce stand. Love it!


Their landscaping was wonderful! I can't wait to view the farm in the Spring and Summer months next year!


The chicken house that I would love to have.


The farm garden...fenced in to keep all the deer out. We need to do this for our garden.

Flying a kite

Can you fly your own kite? I've always been fascinated by kites. From a rocky take-off to soaring in a blue, breeze-filled sky I am enchanted with the pull and grace of the kite.

Several years ago I wondered into the Asbury Park Annual Kite Festival. Giant kites the size of small houses were being launched from the shore. They were anchored with chains and took precise control to master from a group of kite holders. Can you imagine being lifted into the air by one of those?

I bought a simple one-string kite from a vendor who happens to live not far from the simple acre. I opted out of the more advanced 2 string to start with a basic one string Delta kite. I've had a blast with it, too. I've taken the kite up to the reservoir and kited in the meadows around the simple acre. It got caught in a trash tree 2 years back... after some deft moves with the chainsaw the tree limb was down and the kite was safe! Well, almost: I still had to lift it from the tangle of limbs.... one tug and it broke! Oh no!!

I've been meaning to fix it... I have tried... it hasn't worked.

I'll get it up and flying... in time for next summer for sure! I really want to fly that kite again!

Several years ago a gal I briefly dated suggested I teach her how to fly a kite. I really wasn't interested. Since then 'flying a kite' has become a metaphor for making fun and meaning in the weird life we have: at least between the Mrs. and me. We've always been pretty good at flying our own kite. Now at the Simple Acre there are two kites flying.... or should be. I have found the gal I want to fly my kite with... someone who doesn't need to be shown how to fly a kite! yay!!

But I wonder: are we flying one kite? Like the multi-person kites I saw at the festival? Or are we flying our own separate kites together? After some pondering I decided that we have two separate kites... sometimes we're flying together and sometimes we drift apart... but we stay close enough to see each other and wend and wind our way back together. Sometimes my kite might have fallen and she can help me lift it back or sometimes our strings get caught and we have to untangle. Sometimes your partner's kite is in a tree and needs some help getting out.

Whatever it takes... I know that flying a kite with my best friend is better than flying it alone. Single string kite for me, too... this is, after all, the Simple Acre.

SGT

ps... can you guess which kite is mine and which is the Mrs?

Bread: the staff of life

One of the things we do well here at the Simple Acre is eat. A fundamental and important exercise in staying healthy is eating. We like to be a part of what we eat: growing and canning our own food is only part of that: making our own bread is one, too.

In my experience the idea of making bread is daunting to most people. When bread machines became popular in the 90s more people made bread: but they were limited to what they could put into the bread machine. Today there are many used bread machines for sale, most in pristine shape. Hopefully some people caught on to the joy of bread making….

I caught the bug over 20 years ago when I wished to recreate the indescribable smell the smells of freshly baking bread brought a city neighborhood. I was 5 or 6 years old and my parents owned a house in Germantown Philadelphia. Mom regularly walked past a corner bakery on her errands, which I accompanied her on. I can still smell the sharp, deliciousness that beckons, even today from within the green door of that neighborhood bakery.

20 years ago I opened Lauries Bread Book in my kitchen in Hoboken determined to try my hand at bread. 4 hours later my kitchen resembled the aftermath of a Civil War battle, and I was looking at something that smelled nothing like the bread of my youthful memory, but slightly resembled a loaf of bread in shape, if not color. I discovered it tasted pretty good when toasted.

Today, making several simple loaves of whole wheat bread are an afterthought. And aside from a few clean pans drying in the sink rack there is almost no evidence I was baking, except for several golden white or brown loaves of whole wheat or oat bread cooling on the kitchen counters.

At the Simple Acre we bake bread in a variety of ways. I love my convection oven. Betsy has her bread machine she’s dubbed R2D2 (sadly, this is the closest she’ll be to a Star Wars Geek, unlike me…). Sometimes she’ll combine R2’s mixing services with the heat of the convection oven. This morning I’ll be eating the fruit of yesterday’s labor in the form of toasted raisin bread. Yum! Yum!

What’s next? The earth oven. Having helped a farm finish up their earth oven project one October, and eaten the first breads out of it’s hearth…. I got hooked. I have cut down the straggly remnants of a tree left by the previous owners. Over this stump I will build a stone foundation connected to the patio by a gravel walkway. There will be a small patio surrounding the earth oven altar. I call it an altar for now because I’m OK with the first earth oven to be knocked down or destroyed by winter ice and water. However, a second and better oven could be built on the stone foundation, or altar, if you will.

Within a month I plan on eating fresh bread baked from our own earth oven. Stay tuned.

Betsy and the Simple Life

I wanted to take a moment and introduce myself. Many of you might know me as MaryDeluxe from the blog, Welcome to DeluxeVille, that I have been writing for a few years. Here on The Simple Acre, you will come to know me by the name of Betsy.

Since in real life, I have moved from DeluxeVille to The Simple Acre, my sidekick Sean and I thought it might be fun to write a blog together about the adventures we have on our one little acre of land and the simple lifestyle that we are building. Simple living is a term that can mean a lot of different things to different people. In my opinion there are a lot of different ways to live a simple life and no one way is better then another or right and wrong. For me, it's about being satisfied with what I need and not what I want.

To keep my life simple, I ask myself often... Do I need that or do I just want it.

I need food and we enjoy growing our own in the back garden. I've been growing my own veggies ever since I bought my own house many years ago. There's something to be said about looking out your window and watching a plant grow from a tiny seed that you planted in the dirt. Harvesting tomatoes, beans, zucchini, peas, and a variety of other veggies in the Summer months and getting to enjoy them again in the cold, dark months of Winter is extremely fulfilling.

I need clothing and have always had a passion for thrift shops, second hand stores and auctions. Why spend all that money buying brand new, when vintage is just as fashionable? Vintage never goes out of style and designers are always looking to the past to get ideas for the newest trends.

I need shelter, a roof to cover my head and walls to keep me warm. We don't need or want a big house next to another big house, next to another big house on a tiny plot of land, on a street that looks like all the other streets, in a community that have rules on what color we're allowed to paint the front door.

I need love. From self love, a trusted friend pet love, to unconditional "I'm not wearing any makeup today" husband love, or even a yard sale "I saw it first" friendship love.....everyone needs real love.

Sometimes the wants do win out over the needs. I'm not perfect and I do splurge on some fun materialistic things from time to time. The key is, I try to always splurge wisely! After all, it's a simple life I'm living here and not a life of deprivation!

The First Post

Welcome to our Simple Acre. When I think about why we decided to name our home, Simple Acre, I realized we have both chosen a lifestyle that most people wouldn’t see as ‘simple’. We split and stack wood to help with heating the house for winter. We till a garden, plant, grow and can our own produce to eat the rest of the year. We compost our kitchen scraps, do our own landscape and have several other projects in the works: building a home for chickens, an earth oven, and eventually a forge.

How did we start on this lifestyle? Speaking for myself, I just fell into it. When I moved out of the New York City area (Jersey City) in the 90s I landed in a ‘still rural’ area of the Delaware River Valley. I took on a part time job milking cows, baling hay, helping on horse farms. I had fresh milk, and a good supply of hay for my dog kennel. Eventually I turned part of the yard into a garden. Why not? It seemed like a total waste to throw away good food scraps into a plastic garbage bag, so I started composting. I read that chickens help a garden prosper in their own special way by eating pesky bugs and turning them into compost, so, chickens soon arrived!

I was tilling, building garden fences, chicken runs. Through trial and error and a lot of experience and mistakes I learned how to build a straight fence, protect my garden from rabbits and other small critters, protect my chicken flock from hawks and their feed from rodents. I learned how to split wood, let it dry properly, then stack it properly and smartly (I’ll need to get to it in Winter). I learned to pay attention to the soil, the wind, and came into tune with the hours and temperature of daylight.

Betsy has her own story, different, but similar in some ways to mine. What we share is a desire to make our own life on our land: to utilize our Simple Acre for something other than a quick lawn mowing, aerobic work out. It’s a place to relax, to grow food, flowers, frogs, fish and fowl. Neither of us would have been able to start our home in this direction without our previous experiences. We’re bringing those experiences together to build our own Simple Acre. Our ideas, like our experiences are similar, and different in other ways. This is our opportunity to share our passion for a certain, offbeat, but grounded lifestyle, learn new ways to make a home with each other and build new experiences.

This Simple Acre is the foundation for our home. It will reflect what we value in our lives, and how we choose to live.