Conquered and Hung

Have you ever really wanted to do something but fear held you back?  Does your perfectionism hinder you?  I used to be proud of being a perfectionist, but the reality is that setting high subjective standards for yourself and others can lead to all sorts of problems - pride, when you believe that you have attained your goal, and depression, when you fall short of your expectations.  The fear of  failure will often steer a perfectionist away from trying new or challenging things. 

old dining room window shade

Rolled up and secured with a chip clip

Fear can be such a nasty thing, and I desire to conquer it.  Maybe that is why Yahweh gave me an unexpected opportunity a few weeks ago.  No, I did not jump out of an air plane or throw myself off a mountain.  Thankfully Jesus is full of grace and mercy and usually gives us small lessons before the big ones come.


Actually the rope on the dining room window shade heaved its last load.  It was some early version of a pleated shade with no insulation and almost paper thin.  It did help tone down the hot glaring sun rays that stream through our window, but it was on its last thread.

I don't know about you, but I think that replacing window treatments is an inconvenience.  New window dressings always make a huge impact in a room, but that is why it is so stressful to pick our the right covering, and it is often expensive unless you make your own curtain, shade, or blind thingy.


I should also mention that I have been an admirer of roman shades for a very long time.  I have read books, blogs, and websites on how to make my own roman shade.  I should be an expert by now except for the fact that I had never actually made a shade.  Several years ago I bought fabric to make two shades for my kitchen but chickened out and found someone to make them for me.  They turned out o.k.  After waiting four weeks and slapping down $300 I decided that the next time I would make my own!

My first Roman shade

So I embraced the moment and set my mind to the task at hand.  I decided that I would find inexpensive fabric and accept the results of my humble endeavor to cover my window.  JoAnn's had upholstery fabric on sale for $6.99 so I bought 4 yards.  Because my window width including the trim is 63" I had to make two side seams.  Matching the fabric pattern took some time, but I am happy with the results.

ta-da, a fully functioning roman shade!

It took two days to measure, cut, and sew the fabric and lining, and it would have taken only one day to attach the hardware and hang the shade if we had not had company coming for diner.  I have not calculated the total cost, but I know it is less than $100.




I am still not an expert, but I am more than just a dreamer, and fear did not hold me back.  Thank you Lord for the opportunity! 

Here are two very helpful Internet resources if you need a little encouragement to fight your fear and make a Roman shade:
I found this blog on Pinterest, Alissa from 33 Shades of Grey does a great job of showing the basic process.
Blog tutorial

The following link leads to actual video footage from a business website.  Sailrite sells fabric and hardware.  I watched this video several times!  It is very thorough.
How-to-Make-a-Roman-Shade-Video

Summer Garden Progress

first harvest - peppery radish

After July Fourth, summer finally arrived.  Temperatures began to hit the high nineties.  Through most of July I could sit outside in a skirt and sandals and not feel cold.  At the beginning of August it became too hot to eat lunch outside on the deck, but cool enough to enjoy our evening meal Al fresco.

beets, carrots, radish, beans, lettuce & spinach

Higher temperatures mean garden growth - yeah!  I have been able to harvest lettuce, spinach and radish from my seed garden.  Surrounding the seed beds with chicken wire did prevent the chickens from scratching all six beds up.

I managed to surround most of my squash plants with various assortments of wire fencing to deter total poultry invasion.  Now that the tomato vines and pepper plants have fruit on them we had to decide to keep setting up makeshift plant enclosures, or just put up a fence that completely surrounds the entire garden.  Since time and money are limited we decided on a temporary fence that encompasses the entire garden plot.  So far 3 foot high wire fencing and wooden stakes are working just fine.  The chickens seem a bit disconcerted that they can no longer take dirt baths right next to my cabbage plant or peck away at my tomato vines.

cucumber and squash 

I have been able to harvest zucchini, and crooked neck squash should be ready this week.  We also managed to make an asparagus bed right in front of the cucumber trellis.  Hopefully, if the warm weather holds, we will get a decent tomato and pepper harvest now that the chickens can't get to them.

gooseberry, squash, tomato & pepper plants

Right now my tomatoes are the size of marbles, but maybe in two months they will be ready to eat.  I planted three squash plants that self-seeded from my compost pile.  I think that at least one of them is a butternut squash plant.  

Sometimes it is fun to be surprised! One year we had cantaloupe plants grow from compost seeds and they produced small but yummy melons.  We saved the seeds and grew them for several years at our last garden.

pots on the back patio

I purchased the geranium plant in the above photo last summer at Ace Hardware for $1.  It along with its two sisters survived the winter in a sunny window.  The hummingbirds just love these geraniums.  I stood just about a foot from this plant and watched a hummingbird insert its long, narrow beak in several of the blossoms.

Last summer I planted those red geraniums on this shelf pictured above which graces our front deck.  The hummingbirds were just crazy about those red blooms.  This summer I planted sweet potato vine, coleus, and fuchsia on the front deck shelf.  I just love this combination but the hummingbirds aren't attracted to it.  Next year I will try to satisfy my love for stimulating container plants and please the hummingbirds too.

Transplanted

We seven Ankenys have been living in our house for a whole year!   I am so thankful for what we have been able to accomplish in twelve months.  In fact, while I was perusing through my poetry journal, I found a poem that I wrote while we were in the process of getting ready to sell our house back in March 2017.  This poem helped me to reconcile all the emotions that I was feeling while we prepared to make a new start.  We did not now if or when our house would sell and where we would eventually end up.

Uprooting
by Racheal Ankeny 

Fifteen years and more,
Here we live,
Roots plunging deeper, children sprouting taller
Blossoms abound. 

Planted, watered, fertilized
Are we.
Fathers, Mothers, Brothers, Sisters, Cousins
Surround us like a forest with outstretched branches. 

Here we have grown.
Celebrations and happiness we have known,
Also suffering, sadness, and grief. 

To this house our wee ones we brought,
All healthy and vibrant with life.
Five seedlings carefully sheltered
Beneath 523 S. Elder Street's eaves. 

Can roots grown too deep?
Ours feel dry.
They're likely to shrivel,
Only different soil will satisfy. 

We seven have waited,
Praying for Yahweh's direction,
Hoping to find a way. 

It's time to uproot!
Carefully we dig and pull.
Painfully, excitedly separating,
Choosing what to leave.

To our Lord we look,
And set our gaze North.
Full of hope, anticipating adventure,
Anxious to venture from the encircling leaves. 

By Him the future is held,
The soil he has predestined for us,
To be planted, watered, and fed
All over again.

Cherry Pie - from tree to table

Esther took this photo of Lillia wearing Eleanor's sweater that I knitted 😊

Up until July 4th it felt like spring up here.  It was breezy, but mostly warm with scattered showers.  The cherry trees gave us our first fruit of the season.  We have two small cherry trees at the bottom of our hill.  Last year, when we moved in, the cherries were full of worms, but this year we harvested them before the annelid invasion.

Lillia and Eleanor picking cherries for pie.

I don't know what variety of cherry we have, but they are on the sour side; which is perfect if you want to make pie.  I picked up a cherry pitter at Ace Hardware, which was disconcerting because I am pretty sure that I gave the exact same contraption away right before we moved.  How was I supposed to know that my very own cherry tree was waiting for me?

Doesn't it usually seem like the ripest ones are just a bit out of reach?

The girls gathered together to start the process of making homemade cherry pie. 

We ended up with about  eight cups of cherries.

While the girls picked, I looked up cherry pie filling recipes on Pinterest.  I found a recipe that called for lemon juice, cornstarch, sugar, butter, and almond extract.  I did not have corn starch so I substituted arrowroot starch and the filling was too watery, so I threw it in the fridge and wrote 'corn starch' on my shopping list.  Then I found my pate brisee recipe and blended the flour, water, butter, and sugar together to make that fabulous concoction called pastry.

I was able to thicken the filling with corn starch and I even threw in some tapioca pearls for good measure (who wants a runny pie?).  I rolled out the the chilled dough and remembered how lovely it is to work with gluten.  After assembling the pastry and filling in my glass pie dish I placed the pie in the oven.  After about fifty-five minutes - voila, beautiful, buttery cherry pie.

A rustic and rewarding Lordsday treat

 At the beginning of July cherries and service berries were ripe and ready to be picked.  We found plentiful amounts of service berries just down the hill from our property.  We picked several pounds.  They were juicy and sweet, almost like blueberries, but with seeds. 

patriotic berry tart

A service berry and cherry tart seemed like a natural outcome to all our berry picking.  Lillia made the tart crust and I made the filling.  It turned out to be the perfect patriotic treat on the Fourth of July.

Plants, Planting and Planted

Shady bed under the oak tree

The title of this post aptly describes the condition of my outdoor space. It seems as though we may have displaced one quarter of the rocks on our property to rebuild flower bed borders and make pathways. I added this rock wall to our shady plant bed next to the house.  It helps to define the flower bed, but unfortunately creates a rather sharp corner for the avid roller-bladers that fly down the sidewalk.  There have been several roller blade accidents.
Esther and Eleanor helped me transplant 'vinca' and 'snow-in-summer' to this bed for ground cover.  I also transplanted some ferns but the dogs have pretty much annihilated those lacy beauties.  Clive's new name is "Fern-smasher".  Doesn't it sound like a name from Roald Dahl's The BFG?

Cluster of peony, day lilies, iris, and ground cover
above the shady bed

I carefully crept down to the dark woods on our property to find delightful green fronds.  I stabilized my footing between rocks and fallen branches on a slope and gingerly slid my spade into the forest floor to snatch a few ferns.  Once I filled my shallow bucket I laboriously skirted through the bracken up the hill making sure not to disturb the clumps of soil and pine needles that anchored each fern.

When I found my way back into the sunshine I giddily began to plant my botanical treasures.  I checked on my transplants throughout the day and they looked healthy, but the next morning when I woke up my heart sank.  Two plants out of the five still looked like they had a chance but the other ferns were just a pile of broken stems.  My sadness turned to anger, "Why do Corey's dogs (FYI: I usually refer to Clive and Willa as Corey's dogs when they are naughty)  have to lay in my flower bed?"  GRRRRRR!  My animosity did abate as the day withered, but Corey did hear about Fern-smasher when he got home.

Corey worked with the dogs that evening to try to get them to understand "get off" and they are starting to figure out that "get off" means remove your doggie body from the patch of dirt that you are standing on.  That will be an ongoing process and will require much patience as well as some fences.

We remade this rock border in front of the deck.  Two huge orange poppy
 clumps are happily growing here.  I sowed wildflower seeds between them.

Here's a peek at my garden

Corey rented a rototiller and worked for two hours on this grass covered swathe of earth.  As you can see there are a lot of grass roots in the soil.  We will have a lot of hoeing to do to eradicate all the grass.  We were able to transplant raspberry starts and I planted all the veggies that I had started from seed this winter.  Hopefully, Lord-willing, we will be able to harvest tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, squash, melons, cabbage, carrots, radish, lettuce, beans, and scallions after the weather warms up.  I have really low self-esteem as a gardener because of several years of failed attempts to bring new life into my neighbor's empty lot, but that is a different story.

This chicken wire fence is protecting my seed beds from chicken and dog invaders.

Corey has been trying to keep my spirits up.  He says that the soil is so fertile here that he could cut of his foot, plant it, and regrow another one.  Hmphhh, I am not so sure about that, but his humor did bring a smile to my face.

Fern-smasher the Terrible -  who knows what he is sitting on right now?

The Hen is in the House... and so are the Roosters

Agnes is eating in peace.

May was a busy month here at Haefen.  Corey was able to finish the chicken coop so now our hens and roosters are safe and dry.  It took them a couple of weeks to figure out that they could walk up and down the ladder to enter and exit the roost. Once most of the cluckers solved that puzzle we started letting them explore our property.  Now they are definitely free range chickens.  They scratch, roll in the dirt, and find shady nooks to rest in.  Once the sun begins to disappear they make their way back to the roost to settle in for the night.

Before Corey could finish the roof a rain storm blew through and the chickens got a bit wet.

This is the roost with the perch removed for cleaning.

The roost opens on the outside of the run for accessible cleaning.  We just installed composting stalls along the garden shed wall right next to the roost which is very convenient.  Corey made a removable perch so that the kids could easily remove all the soiled pine shavings.  Eleanor can efficiently accomplish clearing out the roost by herself.

the finished chicken house - 21 chickens are safe and dry.

In addition to settling the chickens we also saw a lot of baseball games and even traveled to St. Marie’s and Pinehurst to watch some little league baseball.  All of our children increased their knowledge about the Great American Sport, and they play together at the bottom of our hill.  Isaac enjoyed hanging out with the other boys, and says that he will miss playing games.  Over all it was a great experience and we will probably sign up next spring.

We also were blessed to have two visits from the Grandpas and Grandmas.  My parents arrived during the middle of April and Corey’s parents showed up towards the end of the month, with about five days in between my parents’ departure and Bruce’s and Greta’s appearance.  We were able to visit, watch baseball games, trim trees, chip wood, sew doll dresses, and hem clothing.  A very enjoyable and productive time.  May was a great month here at Haefen.

Frank and the hens are enjoying some scratch time in the newly chipped wood.

Birthdays and Baseball

We were unable to fully participate in the April Birthday Extravaganza this year, but it still seemed like a busy month.  Since our extended families have seven birthday celebrations in April the pocket book can feel a bit tight, but the social schedule usually abounds with activity.  We celebrated Asa's, Eleanor's, and Lillia's birthdays by dining in restaurants of their choosing, and enjoying scrumptious home-made confections at home. 

Carrot cake with a scenic buffalo motif made by Lillia

ice box cookie log made by Lillia

cheesecake by Mom 

the handsomest Hawk, Red Wing, Iron Bird on the field

Along with three birthday celebrations we have also been enjoying little league baseball games.  Right now Isaac's team, The Hawks - oops, I mean the Red Wings, no wait, now their the Iron Birds  have won 4 games and lost 3.  They have been on a winning streak.  Isaac is one of the few boys who have not played before, so some of the boys are pretty good.  Isaac, Asa, and Corey have been able to take pleasure in some baseball bonding time while Isaac gets some extra practice.