The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon May 8th, 2009

When we came here, we knew we wanted to grow our own food, and we had sneaking intuitions that we might want to grow other things.  Gradually, I’ve been both excited and delighted to discover precisely how much we can and do grow – but figuring this out has required that we overcome the prejudices we were raised with, the first being “things area always and only just one thing.”  That is, when I began planting, I thought “these are my herbs, these are my vegetables, this is to eat, this to season it, this for beauty.”  Each thing was divided into its place.  It has taken me a while to overcome that habit, and herbalism has been one of the primary instruments of doing so – they were a living reminder that plants are almost never only one thing, even to we simple minded humans.

The side yard of my house is about 1/10th of an acre, with a birch tree (there used to be two, but unfortunately they are not long lived), a young pear and crabapple, grassy areas where the kids play, and a bunch of garden beds.  For us, this is the proverbial kitchen garden – just a step out the door from my kitchen, I can watch the boys playing under the birch from my window, and step out to clip some rosemary or pick basil leaves and come back to a pot on the stove. 

This area includes a stone porch, where we sometimes eat, and at this time of year holds the flats of plants waiting to be transplanted, a small courtyard garden where I grow tender plants with shelter on three sides – here’s where my Maypop runs up the wall, where my quinces, apricots and dwarf peaches are.  

On the other side of the path runs a sunny garden full of salad ingredients, some self-watering containers of tomatoes and greens, the long asparagus and rhubarb bed, and a few other odds and ends. 

Along the grass are a few other small trees and shrubs – a dwarf sour cherry, a couple of hazels, and here was where I established my official herb garden, when I first moved in. It was  a culinary herb bed, filled with the usual perennial things – sages and savories, three or four thymes, greek oregano, giant lovage, tarragon, catnip for the cats, sorrel, more chives than any sane household could actually eat.   The bed is made with old cinder blocks found around the house, and I each year I fill some of the small holes in the side with dianthus, johnny jump ups and portulaca, which look lovely all summer.  A few other of the holes hold pesky culinary herbs – various mints, chocolate, spear, pepper, grapefruit…and lemon and lime balms.  A cluster of tea herbs takes up a corner – bee balm and betony, mostly.  For a long time I also tried to cram in the annual herbs, since this was THE HERB BED, but it never worked that well – we wanted more basil than that, and the perennials disliked having their soil disturbed while I attempted to cram in the other plants.

So eventually, the annual and biennial herbs (and I grow a lot of them) moved to the salad beds, rotated around and integrated with the rest of the plantings.  Here is my basil plantation, with six kinds at present.  My caraway and cumin plants kuve there, as do shiso, parsleys and tender sages like pineapple and honeydew, which I grow from cuttings from the old plants each winter.  The cilantro and dill are mixed in everywhere, attracting pollinators and going in any free corner.  And I grow some uncommon culinary herbs, most of them perennials in other climates but since I’m short window space, I grow them as annuals - rau om, papalo and dittany of crete.  Other tender perennials live in the house in winter, looking increasingly grumpy about it, until they move out to the porch for a full dose of sun – rosemary, lemon verbena and curryplant among them.

So I’d always grown a lot of herbs. But until four or five years ago, I didn’t think much about herbs as medicinals – or rather, I did – I used them, and purchased them, but I didn’t grow most of them.  I’m embarassed to think how long it took me to notice that instead of buying red clover blossoms for tea, I could just pick them out of my pasture, or that the red raspberry leaf tea that I was taking in late pregnancy could have been made from the scores of red raspberry leaves growing under my spruce trees.  I was somehow intimidated by the whole project of figuring out when to harvest, when things were medicinally active, and how best to use them.

But as I looked into the uses of the herbs,  I found that I was growing a surprising number of medicinal herbs already, simply out of fascination with the plants.  For example, I wanted to make marshmallows out of marshmallow root, simply because I thought the kids would find it fun.  It was no real trouble to start them from seed, and they love our wet climate, so quickly I had more marshmallows than anyone would want to eat, and I still had the plants as gorgeous ornamentals, happily self seeding around the property.  I had cranesbill and hollyhock in my ornamental gardens, and calendulas in the window boxes.  Milk thistle grows wild in our fields and the previous owners had planted maidenhair fern, lungwort and lady’s mantle around the north side of the house.  

I wanted to make good use of the plants around me, wisely, safely, thoughtfully, but I admit, I also was fascinated by the plants as link to a past – the history of human use of botany entrances me – how did they know to use this?  What process of observation, transmission of knowledge taught us these fascinating things?  Why did someone carry these seeds across an ocean, or replant natives in their dooryards?  Is it worth trying to make nettles into fiber?  What do real marshmallows taste like?  Did my great-grandmother use the pennyroyal in her garden for fleas or to prevent pregnancy?  I will never know some of these things, and others only when I get around to it (still haven’t tried the nettle fiber), but I can’t help thinking about them, as I rub my own pennyroyal leaves on my skin to see if it makes any difference with the midges. 

Gradually, I started harvesting what I had, and reading more about how best to process the harvest.  But other than the surprisingly large number of herbs that I had lying around, I wasn’t precisely sure what should go in a medicinal herb garden, were we to grow one.  The problem has been innate good health, something that I don’t claim to be complaining about.  My boys are no more immune than anyone else to the usual sorts of colds and injuries (although we’ve had only one broken bone so far, which IMHO, is pretty good for kids who essentially live in trees like small apes ;-)), nor are Eric or I, but generally speaking, we’re a healthy bunch.  While I could see the obvious benefit of garlic and chamomile, what else? 

So that required we think about our overall health, and our overall goals and expectations from a lower energy future.  Now it is hard to know what you may need as you age, but it is possible to make some useful guesses.  Eric suffers from a mild irregular heartbeat for which he’s taken hawthorn for years, so that was easy – time for a hawthorn bush.  I get urinary tract infections now and then, and while we already had cranberries and garlic, some bearberry wouldn’t come amiss, and moist acidic soil, we’ve got.  Eli already takes flaxseed and evening primrose oil as a supplement, so growing those was no great trouble.

  Basic remedies for the kinds of things active children and farmworking adults are good too – calendula for rashes, jewelweed for poison ivy, comfrey for bone poultices.  Chamomile, catnip, dill seed and peppermint for upset stomachs.  Valerian and catnip for the occasional sleepless night.  Elderberry and rosehips for colds.  Maypop and borage for anxiety.  California poppy for pain relief.  Mullein, plantain and nettle already grew aplenty around the property, but I started encouraging them, making sure not to scythe down the mulleins that grew along the driveway, and encouraging them to go to seed.

Thinking ahead, I knew that someday I’d go through menopause, so that means plenty of sage, which is fine, since I like the stuff already – I used to avoid it in large quantities, since it can dry up breastmilk, but that’s no longer an issue.  The day will come when Eric may actually have to think about his prostate, and our nettle patch awaits.  Thinking forward to times when it might be more difficult to afford or access modern medicine, I wanted to make sure that my herb gardens included medicines to treat things that ran in our family – gotu kola and ginko for memory loss as one ages in Eric’s family, willow and cayenne for the arthritis that runs in mine, and motherwort for heart issues.

 Then there are the critters – they use herbs too.  My goats are wormed with an herbal formulation that I don’t try to duplicate, but I know its major components, and try and keep some of them – wormwood and pennyroyal – around.  We put garlic in the food of almost all the critters, and find that in improves their health.   

Well, that’s quite a list already, and the process of getting comfortable with all these herbs has been a slow one – because we’re healthy, I haven’t always had much occasion to use them, but the good thing is that alcoholic tinctures do keep.  Moreover, most of the plants I learned to like for themselves – oh, the elecampanes do try to take over, and I can’t quite convince myself that lungwort isn’t ugly, but even if I never need black cohosh for anything, who could fail to appreciate its bottle-brush beauty, or the autumnal purple waves of joe pye weed?

The habit my herb gardens had of overflowing into things not officially labelled “herb garden” was what led me to think about the possibility of growing herbs on a larger scale.  I have been wondering with what to replace the CSA – I don’t think I’m going to run one again, at least during the summer.  I loved doing it, but the time requirements are too intense while writing as well. And while I love animal agriculture, love working with the animals, I don’t ever want to be just one kind of farm, and if I have to test my heart, at the root of things, my greatest passion is the growing of green stuff.

So were herbs a possible answer?  Was there any market for the things that do very well in my climate?  I realize that we’re to cool and moist to get the highest levels of capsacin in my cayenne peppers (although we do ok), or the best essential oil levels of thyme, oregano and lavender, things that like it hot and dry and evolved in mediterranean climates.  I can make the conditions on a small scale, using my cold frames in the summer, or adding sand to make my lavender at least moderately happy, but not on a large one. 

But what about things that find our cool, moist soil useful? Obviously, that includes marshmallow, but also meadowsweet, boneset, joe pye weed, wild bergamot, valerian, liatris, blue vervain, mint, angelica, black eyed susan, burdock, cardinal flower, catnip, comfrey, elecampene, elderberry, goldenrod, mullein, nettles, potentilla, self-heal, cranesbill and viburnum?  For a long while, I’ve been mulling over how much work to invest in adapting our property, a part of which “lays wet” – should we drain it?  The cost has been somewhat prohibitive, but moreover, it has troubled my basic sense that my relationship with the land ought to be about getting the most out of what it does well, rather than forcing it into something else.

And thus came the generation of a new business idea for me – that perhaps, just perhaps, it would be possible for me to make some money sourcing plants that in many cases, either already grow here are grow easily in our conditions.  Instead of trying to grow vegetable row crops in places that lay wet, perhaps I could grow medicinal crops that thrived in those conditions.  So I asked around a little, and to my surprise several people expressed enthusiasm for a local source for some of the herbs listed above. 

We are still in the experimental stage, exploring what grows well, and what there’s a market for.  I want to make absolutely sure that I know how to produce herbs that lose as little as possible in processing.  And it isn’t clear to me on what scale we will do this – this year is all about exploring markets.  We’re also exploring whether we can grow some of the more useful woodland herbs in our woods, with minimal disturbance of the current denizens.

Around the herb beds, as I imagine them will be wet-soil tolerant food plants – we’re not interested in monoculture here. I’ve already planted swamp white oaks along the borders of the property, and have cranberry bush viburnum everywhere.  I want my property to grow food at least as much as it grows medicines.  I’m also starting to sell herb and vegetable starts – mostly as a way to compensate for my absurd overplanting habit. 

My herb garden started out as a 4×6 cinder block bed, and it has somehow expanded to include the rest of my side yard.  That might not be so remarkable, but it also now includes the meadows where I harvest my clover and the creekside from which I take the raspberry leaves.  It includes the fields that once grew my CSA vegetables and the pastures where I compete with the sheep for the chicory.  It ranges under my children’s playset, where the jewelweed insists on growing, and in that weird soggy spot near the old burn pile where there’s a ton of yarrow, which isn’t supposed to like wet places. 

When I moved here, I imagined that farms are made up of discrete lines – here the pasture, there the field, there the garden.  And they can be.  For me, I think blurred ones work better – the goats help clean up the garden in the autumn, and keep down the grass before we can get it all in.  We grow grains in the garden, and our field crops may turn out to be herbs.  We wildcraft very carefully, on our own property, but also try to increase populations steadily, blurring the lines between wild and tame.  And we are trying to tame our own impulses to subdue and reshape more than strictly necessary, to balance the need for lines, fences, will and limits with the desire to do what the land can do willingly, and within its own bounds.

Sharon 

• garden , herbs
• Comments(34)

Sharon May 7th, 2009

The first year we lived here, Eric’s job was half-time, and we (Eric, me, Eli, new baby Simon) lived on 17,000 dollars a year.  About half of that went to our mortgage, since we were trying to pay it down quickly.  $3K of the remainder when to replacing the well lines, which exploded the first time it froze.  It was very little exaggeration to say that we had no money. 

What we did have was time – despite the fact that I was pregnant or had a new baby, Eric was teaching only about half time, and I was home with the kids, claiming to work on my doctoral dissertation, but really not doing any such thing.  From our efforts to substitute time for money came a whole lot of good things - first our gardens, then our small CSA, which made a big dent in our budget.  And a whole lot of barter.

In those first few years, we bartered a number of things - babysitting for our kids, a time-shared vehicle with another family, vegetables and gardening help for help with other projects, eggs for firewood.  I remember experiencing every transaction as a breath of air – here was something that I could not afford in dollars, but that I could fairly and honestly obtain for my family and offer something good in exchange – and know that although we couldn’t afford credit card fees and borrowing, we had a measure of credit that didn’t come with fees – the good credit and relationships that came with barter, and that meant that neighbors were willing to go out of their way for us, because they knew we’d do the same.

We have a bit more money now, but we still barter a lot – for example, I barter the use of our large pasture and day to day sheep tending work for lamb, help with fencing and wool.  I have gladly bartered my books for other author’s books, and happily accept barter for participation in my classes (although many people still use paypal, since it can be hard to barter long distance).  I still feel that sense of gratitude whenever I have a bartered relationship with someone – the idea that we could function out of the money economy is a great joy to me. 

Which brings me to the marvellous Barbara Ehrenreich’s latest essay, which is just a delight – in it she properly takes aim at the idea that the newly unemployed should work full time at job hunting, and argues that this is keeping us artificially passive.  She offers a list of useful things one could and should do with their time, now that they are unemployed, to which I’d like to suggest “get as far out of the money economy as possible.”  Now this is not a magical panacea, and for households with a single earner, or multi-earner households where all earners are unemployed, at some point, someone is going to have to get a job if at all possible, even if it is a crappy one.

But until a job appears, the reality is that there are things one can do to minimize one’s dependency on the formal economy – and those things include thrift, subsistence labor (ie, making, scavenging, growing, preserving, fixing the things you would ordinarily pay for), and barter.  Frankly, I think that these are more productive and better things for the world as a whole than many of the things we do as jobs, and to the extent that it is possible for one to spend one’s unemployment fighting for justice or even just growing beans (ideally both), I think that most of us do less harm this way, and a great deal more good.

Moreover, I think that the loss of our time, and the trade we’ve made of time for money hasn’t always been a good one for us – it makes us more passive politically and dependent personally, and the first things lost when we lose time are human relationships.  We simply don’t have time to depend on one another – so we move further and further into the money economy, where money acts as a shorthand for what talk and meals together once did for people.  We become more dependent on the public economy as a whole at each step. 

I’m particularly fond of barter because while it is often not possible to pay the property taxes that way, barter can cover an awful lot of other territory.  It is astonishing what barter can bring about – and while I like barter networks and other programs, and can see their advantages, I am particularly passionate about barter that takes place in human relationships – because I think it kills two birds with one stone, not only does it save money on the particular exchange, but it helps us give up our general dependency on money in place of community.  I see all the uses of internet barter networks, which give you credit you can use with people for what you need, even if the person who has the other thing doesn’t need your resource.  And yet, direct barter – the oldest form of human exchange, in which my eggs and your honey meet one another, has something special going for it.

And that is the reality of human exchange – in monetary exchange, and I think by necessity to an extent in barter networks, things have  a fixed valuation.  This is convenient, of course, but it also changes the nature of the relationship.  When your eggs equal on “barter buck” or “credit hour” you are shopping for the best possible bang for your buck.

But when you and your neighbor who have a relationship are figuring out how many eggs a week are worth a cord of firewood, something more is at stake besides the precise exchange – you have entered into a relationship that can’t be commodified fully, one in which you have to talk to each other, have to interact.  And this is always just the beginning – someone who eats eggs will probably keep wanting them.  Someone who heats with wood may want more firewood.  The relationship will be based on two things – your perceived equity (ie, it was fair) and your pleasure in the relationship – this is also true with some kinds of shopping, and is why people like going to farmer’s markets and hate Walmart (in part).

But the thing about barter that I find true is that it brings out the best in us for the most part – because it is never possible to full equate eggs with logs, because they are fundamentally not the same, in barter, you are never fully sure that the price paid is a fair one – you can’t be.  And what I see in barter relationships is a turning around of economic exchanges – because we want fairness even in ourselves mostly, because few of us like to beholden, or to look cheap, we find ourselves feeling as though the relationship is never fully even – at its best, both barter participants always feel that they got the better of the deal, that they paid too little, and thus, “owe” a little on next time.  Instead of *getting* the best bang for your buck, barter becomes about *giving* the best bang for your time.

One of the things that worries me about our present economic situation is how very vulnerable we are in our total dependence on the formal economy – and we are taught to look only there for our security.  So when the formal economy fails us, it seems that there is nothing left, that all that remains is the empty rote of enacting participation that we cannot truly succeed in.  I don’t claim that barter will save us from poverty – it won’t.  But it may save us by offering us a kind of livability that the formal economy when it cracks and fails cannot.  What we may get back in this crisis, difficult as it is, is time – and the chance to use time instead of money.

Moreover, it offers us credit we can afford – when I and my neighbor make those first tentative gestures towards exchange, we are at first still caught in the monetary economy, still calculating what is fair.  But after a time, we are in relationship in such a way as to know that we can trust one another not to take advantage (and it should go without saying that if anyone does, that’s it for the relationship), and thus, the valuation of things change – a good exchange is one where you feel you are invested already in the next one, relieved from the pressure of the money economy, because your credit ”is good with them.”  In a society where credit is disappearing, this may be the only kind we have.   

Sharon

• economy
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Sharon May 5th, 2009

Hi Folks: For them that were wondering, here’s the syllabus for my upcoming food storage class, starting May 19th.  I’ve still got spaces, so email me at jewishfarmer@gmail.com if you are interested.  More details here.  The class is online and runs six Tuesdays from May 19 to June 23.  Each class will include instructions for hands-on activities you can use to practice different techniques.

Tuesday, May 19: Introduction to Food Preservation, Setting Up a Basic Food Storage Plan; Planning for the Harvest; Food Storage FAQ

Tuesday: May 26: Water Bath Canning, Grains and Beans; Storing Coffee, Tea, Milk and Beverages; Do I need a freezer?; Buying Clubs and Other Strategies to Get Neighbors On Board

Tuesday June 2: Dehydration;  Preserving Herbs and Spices, Tools and Techniques, Where Heck do I Put All this stuff?; Cooking from Storage

Tuesday June 9: Fermentation – Kim Chi, Sauerkraut, Yogurt, Kefir, Beer, Sourdough and other pleasures.  Budget food storage.  Sources and Ideas for Stocking a Pantry.  Meats.

Tuesday June 16: Pressure Canning; Salting;  Storing Non-Food Goods; Holiday Food Storage; Food Storage with Children, Special Diets

Tuesday June 23: Season Extension and Root Cellaring; Preserving with Alcohol; Storing Medications; Community Food Reserves

Cheers,

 Sharon

• Food Storage , challenges
• Comments(2)

Sharon May 5th, 2009

I must thank a particular reader, who I will leave anonymous, for this series.  I got an email from a reader praising my work very kindly and in terms of great enthusiasm, and stating that she felt that various famous national magazines should be carrying my work.  This was all very flattering, until she got to the main point of her letter, which was to offer me constructive criticism about my “obsession with the housewifely virtues crap.”  She asked that I stop “wasting myself” writing about food storage and preservation, cooking and parenting  and write more of the “public intellectual” pieces that she so admires.  She cited several examples, and hoped that I’d take the message in the spirit in which it was intended, because, after all, it was for my own good.

I actually rather think I did take it as intended .  And I took it precisely as I take the largish number of emails I get from people who think I should stop trying to write policy, theoretical or intellectual pieces that were “too long” and “boring” and just concentrate on giving people practical advice that they can use, while leaving the big issues to the grownups - that is, I laughed.  And being contrary, I went off to write precisely the sort of piece my correspondent hates.  So I thank her for the inspiration.

The thing is, I am a housewife.  I like to think I’m a bit of an intellectual, but much of my day to day life is that of mistress of the house – co leader with my husband (whose title also implies binding to the home) of a household.  This is  true regardless of whether I work professionally or only in the domestic sphere – I believe that holding house, with all its connotations of making a comfortable place to live, thift and all that other stuff is good and important work, which I have to do no matter what else I do.  Yeah, I write, but I also do laundry.  IMHO, the idea that these things are fundamentally split – that the life of the mind happens at the computer, maybe in the garden, but never, ever, while folding clothes, seems wrong, and kind of demeaning to all of us, male or female, who would rather not have the laundry piled up on the floor. 

I think the choice not to find domestic life interesting is, in fact a choice.  That is, I don’t find that laundry or dishes are inherently less interesting than, say, the annual business report – we have decided they are, but because we have done so, there’s probably actually much more to be said about how to do the dishes quickly and well, or how to manage laundry well than has been.  The reality is that these things matter – they take up our time and energy and money, and the flow of those things – resources, time, personal and fossil energies, are important.  I keep waiting for permaculturists to start writing books about domestic management, because I think this is territory insufficiently explored and of a great deal of use.  Until they do, I’ll put it on my agenda.

So I thought I’d write about the problem of clothing management, which I must admit is one of the banes of my existence.  For a couple of adults with no children, this may seem like a minor task, although I hope I may have someting to offer even then.  But since I live in a house with four growing kids, a very limited clothing budget, no time to shop and not much inclination to do so, I’ve had to get fairly good at all of this, despite my inherent lack of organization.

I do all the laundry, and all the clothing management in our household – we share the domestic work fairly evenly, but I like doing laundry and Eric doesn’t, and he does floors in trade.  I also purchase all the clothing, almost all from yard sales and thrift shops – the only things I consistently buy new are pajamas for my oldest son, because footed fleece pjs (part of our “staying warm in a cool house” plan) in size 14 are hard to come by (although once in a while I manage to snag even these).  I also do all the mending, because I don’t like having to rip it out, and Eric is constitutionally incapable of not sewing the pants together or something.

Because sometimes the pickings in a particular size are abundant and sometimes not, I buy clothing three sizes ahead of my current maximum.  At the moment, my youngest son is wearing size 4T, and Eli is wearing size 12, and I have yet to pass on the 2T and 3T clothes, so I have clothing in sizes ranging from 2T to size 18, as well as a small stash of baby clothes that I have held onto for sentimental reason.  This is a lot of clothes.  I keep a list of current sizes (I can then pass this list on to friends and family who will keep an eye out for me), and the sizes I am looking for (which also include clothes for my nieces and some friends’ kids) – thus, I can immediately find out whether I need a pair of size six snowpants or not.

In addition, I have two kids using diapers at least part of the time, and my family lives on a farm, so I do *a lot* of laundry, folding, mending and putting away.  Because my annual budget for clothing is quite small (we clothe the kids on less than $300 per year for all four of them – many years much, much less), I need to keep the clothes in good order, and be reasonably careful about management.  I admit, this is not my favorite chore – but it is important because it saves us a *lot* of money, and time.

The first strategy I found useful in terms of time management, was to convert from dressers to open shelving in closets for all of our clothing needs.  I personally find dressers annoying – if they are full, it is hard to get the clothes in and the drawers shut, and kids are constantly pulling things out of them.  Because the dressers were in their room, they got climbed on, which is dangerous, and left open and emptied out, which is annoying.  Plus, that meant that I was bringing clothes upstairs to put them away, and then downstairs to wash, which meant there were always laundry baskets at the foot of the stairs.  Suddenly, one day, it occurred to me that we had a long row of shelving in the laundry room, that was holding up stored items, but that would fit the kids clothes.  Now, I use open shelving for their clothes and ours, and am finally about to move *our* clothing downstairs, out of our bedroom, and into a closet with open shelving (an old bookcase has been used for this) so that I can put it away more quickly and easily.  The only clothes that go upstairs are pajamas, and we come down in them to dress.  This means no more searching, and less time hauling.  Obviously, we have the space for this, and other people may prefer to use dressers, but I don’t like them – I find seeing everything useful, and things less messy this way. 

The second thing I do is to try and keep myself from going nuts and laundry from eating my life is to keep laundry to a minimum – even our minimum is a lot, of course, but if I can keep it down, this is more time for other things I like better.  That means that I double check my kids clothes before they go into the laundry – my kids have a tendency to throw things in even if they are rewearable.  My husband, on the other hand, has a tendency to overstate the rewearability of clothing, so the stuff he gives me to be put back on the shelf gets a quick look over and sniff test to see if I share his basic opinion that the pants will go one more day. 

We replace most disposable items with cloth ones, so this adds to the laundry.  To cut back on the laundry, we have oilcloth tablecloths, air out things that simply need a bit of airing and try to remember to change into work/play clothes before we start running about in the yard.  I really should become an apron person, but I haven’t been, but it is a wise habit to pick up.

Shopping at yard sales and thrift shops takes time, of course, so I try and plan for it, particularly since I don’t shop on Saturdays, our Sabbath, which is the biggest yard sale day here.  Many of my local sales have a Friday preview day, and I try and go then, and our area has a history of town-wide sales, often lasting a whole weekend, and these are great sources.  Sometimes we take the kids, but except for Isaiah, who has a natural talent for spotting bargains, they get tired quickly of sorting through unorganized piles of clothing, so I plan several times a year to go alone and leave the kids with Eric.  Although we’ve got a good local Goodwill, there’s much better thrift and consignment shopping near my mother in Boston, and I try and stock up there once or twice a year.  I also happily accept other people’s cast offs, passing on anything we can’t use to others. I occasionally shop at consignment stores, but these usually have higher prices, so I use them mostly for hard-to-find items.

Out of season and out of size clothes is kept in labelled bins, one for each size (18 mos, 12, etc…).  Shoes are kept by size on shelves – yes, we do pass on shoes here – the best research I’ve found suggests that the old “shoes are so personal that you can’t pass them on” thing is a myth.  Twice a year (usually April and August) I do a full sort out of the bins, a job I loathe, and reorganize the kids shelves.  I do a little of this at intermediate periods as they grow out of things. 

Having four kids, and also two farmworking adults, I’ve become passionate on the subject of buying clothing that really lasts.  Most children’s clothing lasts at most, through two kids (this is true of most children’s goods, too), but I’ve a few brands where I consistently am able to pass things on through all four.  Lands End sleepers, for example, don’t suffer regularly from either broken zippers or worn out feet.  While Hanna Andersson is mostly a girl’s supplier, the occasional boys item I’ve gotten from them just wears and wears.  It isn’t always a matter of high-end stuff lasting better, though – Gap clothing wears out extremely quickly, I find, while cheaper Carters stuff lasts and lasts.  When you shop, look at how it is put together – do you see any signs of fraying, or wear?  How are the zippers, buttons and seams?    When buying children’s pants, because my sons are all (except Asher) entirely buttless, I have learned that adjustable waists are essential – otherwise, they will be running around with their underpants hanging out.

Mens clothing tends to be tougher and more durable than most women’s clothing, and being six feet tall, I can wear a lot of guy’s stuff – in fact, because I have freakishly long arms, I find they fit better.  I no longer am sufficiently hipless to wear men’s jeans easily, but I routinely buy men’s shirts, and find they hold up to tough wear better.  Men’s t-shirts are often made of heavier cotten, their flannel shirts usually have heavier cuffs, and I find the buttons are even sewn on better – worth checking even for smaller people than I.  I can often find mens Carharts and other work clothes at yard sales and thrift shops, but almost never find women’s clothes.  I do find women’s surgical scrubs, though, and these make excellent (and comfortable) work clothes as well.

I will say, however, I find skirts to be more comfortable than pants for many enterprises.  Wide ones have good stretchability, and I can even climb trees in them (if I wear a pair of cotton shorts underneath).  They are lighter and cooler than most pants in the summer, but more comfortable to garden in than shorts, since they provide some knee protection (here I am not speaking obviously of miniskirts).  In winter, layered over leggings or long johns or even light pants, they are warmer than pants alone and less bulky and more flexible than pants and long johns.  I have “work skirts” as well as dress ones – denim is good, as is heavy cotton, and find they last better than most jeans or work pants.

Eli, my oldest, is a magnet for stains.  Unfortunately, he also looks just gorgeous – I mean angelic and astonishingly handsome – in white.  Thus, I can occasionally be tempted into buying something white or cream for him, on the theory that I will keep an eye on him.  This is almost always doomed to failure, and I am trying to stop doing it.  Generally speaking, I rarely buy anything white, cream or pale yellow for any of my kids, except the occasional “shul shirt” which gets put on immediately before we depart for synagogue and taken off the minute we get home.  Eli, unfortunately, gets his prediliction for stainage entirely from his mother, who is a notorious slob, so this is good advice for me too.

This strategy for clothing management is almost certainly easier if you have children and a spouse who don’t care much about what they wear.  This is mostly true in my family.  Eli would prefer strongly to wear nothing, but if forced to wear clothing, will tolerate my choices.  Simon would prefer to wear his Harry Potter shirt (Goodwill) every day, but accepts that this is not an option philosophically, and doesn’t much care otherwise.  Isaiah does have strong opinions about his clothing, and insists on being involved in the selection process – but also is willing to do the work.  Asher has strong opinions about pajamas, which must be pink (not really hard to do at his size), and about underpants, which should meet the same criteria.  Eric doesn’t much care what he wears, although seems to have a preference for things with holes in them .  I realize that some of this will change as the first four hit their teen years, and anticipate this with some trepidation.  Those who have people who care will either have to teach them to find their own stuff, or prepare to spend more time or more money.

So far, my kids are pretty comfortable with passing things down to one another – they occasionally are disappointed when they outgrow a particularly beloved item, but generally we make a big deal about the fact that they are growing, and getting bigger, and everyone is excited about it.  The kids like to hear the lineage of the clothing they wear…
“This shirt came from cousin Jake, and then Simon wore it, and now…” or “Remember, you helped me pick out that jacket at…”  At one point, five year old Isaiah asked his GNew York City Grandmother, who is not a thrift shop shopper, “Wow, Grandma, did you get this at Goodwill?”  Despite the general laughter, I was glad that my son thinks that good things come from thrift shops.

I should add that the reason my kids are as well dressed as they are, and I am able to do this is also due to the kindness of family members, who often buy my children high quality new clothing for birthdays and holidays.  The kids do get a few new things every year, and are very excited by them.  My sisters and mother also track sales and visit consignment shops and yard sales and pick things up for my kids – more eyes help in this project.  We are also the recipient of a great deal of generosity from my mother’s neighbor, my step-sister in law, my friend Elaine and others. 

I hate to sew, and for a long time “mending” actually meant “taking the clothes and putting them on the mending pile and waiting for the child to outgrow the item while feeling guilty about not ever fixing them.”  This is not a good way of saving money or making good use of things.  I have now managed to mostly fix this problem, by making a simple rule – I cannot knit until I have mended one item in my pile.  Since I love to knit, this forces me to get the sewing over with, and mostly keep up with it.  I have tried to divide the work of mending with Eric, but he is so spectacularly awful at it that this does not work.  I do make him iron on patches on jean knees, which is lazier than proper patching, but does the job.

I do not do zipper repairs well, and it is astonishing how often zippers are the thing that fails on an item.  What I’ve gotten in the habit of doing is cutting the zipper out, adding a strip of some heavy fabric scavenged from another item of clothing, ideally a bit with a nice heavy seem on the edge anyway, and cutting button holes in it, and attaching buttons.  I find this much easier than replacing the zippers.  I’ve also gotten good with Rit and other dyes for white shirts that have permanent stains or yellowing on them.  Amy Dacyzyn’s _The Complete Tightwad Gazette_ has a number of wonderful strategies for repairing slightly damaged clothing, and making it look good.

Socks and underwear do wear out rapidly, and while I will darn homemade or high quality socks, I draw the line at darning my husband’s sweat socks, which he buys in bulk – he purchases ones that are slightly imperfect.  They last until they get turned into rags, and by the time he stops wearing them (remember aforementioned prediliction for holes) they usually are undarnable.  I buy all the kids socks in white when I can, so I don’t have to do much matching - just grab two of comparable size.  I actually don’t personally believe in matching socks - during high school and college, I used to wear dramatically mismatched socks all the time, and I still like them that way.  Saves time and energy to just dump them in the drawer or an open basket and grab by weight or juxtaposition of color.  Eric likes the opposite strategy  - all white or all black, so they all match.  The kids like to pick their own socks, and seem to have gotten my genes for mismatches. 

We rotate clothing by what we are doing.  On days when we are mostly in the house (or for the parts of them that we are, say when I’m working at the computer), I usually wear Pajamas – but they didn’t always start out as pajamas – when shirts, sweats and loose cotton pants become too ratty to wear in public, they are moved over to the “pj” pile.  The same goes with sweats, tshirts and soft long sleeved shirts for the boys.  Or they are put into the “work/play clothes” pile, to be worn on days when we know we’re not going to be seen by anyone.  I try to remember to change into these clothes as often as possible to preserve the good ones.

Thus, a new shirt and pants arriving for Eli’s birthday, would at first be worn only for school or synagogue.  Gradually as wear began to show I might get lax about it, not bothering to change him out of it after school.  By the time they were passed down to Simon, they might be unfit for the nicest days, but perfectly suitable for regular days.  By the time they hit Isaiah, they would be “play clothes only” or maybe pajamas.  Odds are, before they hit Asher, they’d have become rags, diaper wipes, rag rugs or quilting fabric.  I’ve even experimented with making paper out of old clothes too thin to use for rags or quilting.  If all else fails, natural fibers can be composted – this is why I buy mostly natural fibers, although I’m fond of the judicious use of polar fleece, as long as they are making it.

The same is true of Eric’s and my clothing.  Nice stuff gets worn for synagogue or professional activities.  After a while, it gets worn to the grocery store, but not for the best occasions.  Eventually, it becomes either scrap, work clothes, or an extra layer under something else – if I’m going to give it away, I try to do it at the mid-point.

What we do with the scraps depends on the material they are made from – denim makes great quilts and braided rugs, flannel wonderful quilted duvet covers.  Wool sweaters can be unravelled and reknit, or they can be felted and used to make cut out mittens and hats or other items.  Old polar fleece pjs make great quilts.

I have a separate laundry bin now for “nice” clothes, because otherwise, if the laundry builds up for some reason, they can get buried under the other clothes, and aren’t ready when we need them.  I try to wash our synagogue clothes every Sunday, and have them ready to go, and to make sure that both of us have appropriate clothing ready and clean in case we have to attend a funeral or a short-notice professional event.  I know some people need these kinds of clothes five days a week, while others never dress up at all. 

I rarely iron.  In fact, when Simon was tested before kindergarten with a picture-words test, the only word he missed was “ironing board” and I laughingly admitted to the person administering the test later, that that was because he might never have seen one .  I hang my clothes out on windy days, and try and buy clothes that won’t need ironing.  The same is true about dry cleaning – I realize this isn’t an option for everyone, of course, but if you can avoid it, it is worth doing so.  For making clothing look nice, I think there’s nothing like line drying on a windy day – I sometimes plan my washings around them.

I wash everything, including diapers, in cold water, with a cold rinse.  We did replace our old washing machine with a front loader last year, after the old one began shredding my clothing, and I have to say that I have come as close to expressing love for an industrial appliance as I ever will with it – using less detergent, less water and less energy, it gets the clothes cleaner.  I also do some hand washing – I soak the clothes a good long time, give them a rub or squeeze, and rinse.  I do more of this in the warm weather, since it is a pleasure then, and the kids can often be persuaded to help, simply for the chance to get sopping wet.  No need to do major wringing – just hang and let it drip unless you need it soon.

I lived a long, long time without a personal washing machine, and I think if I didn’t have children, I’d probably hand wash or just go to the laundromat.  The investment in a front loader was worth it for our large household, but wouldn’t be for a smaller one. 

I try and do sheets every other week, but there’s a bit of bedwetting here, and it doesn’t always work like that.  There are rubberized pads that can go over sheets to keep them dry – that helps a bit.  My only other answer on this front is to keep praying that if the grid ever does do an extended crash, it is after everyone is fully toilet trained and done wetting the bed .

Ultimately, clothing is about keeping on top of things.  When our washer died last year, in the middle of the hottest, rainiest period of the summer, the laundry pile built up, I got mildew, and some of the clothes got holes.  If I keep organized, I can deal with the laundry in a matter of a few minutes a day – but if I let it build, I have to give it my time and attention on a much greater scale.

Sharon

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Sharon May 4th, 2009

It is definitely not too late to sign up to join this year’s challenge – just add your name to the comments and start posting, either here in comments or on your own blog.  I’m really going to try and do this every Monday for a whole year (well, yeah, we always start out things like this as optimists, right ). 

This was not my best week – I was in the North Country in the Adirondacks last weekend, got back late on Sunday, and left town again for Maine on Wednesday afternoon, and, of course, it is a tough time to be away from the garden.  Still, a bit got done.

Plant something: Broccoli, Cabbage, Peas (ok, Eric and the boys planted these), carrots, radishes, beets, parley, onions, chard, lemon balm, sage, thyme, chinese cabbage, komatsuna, early tomatoes, lettuce, saltwort, pansies, johnny jump ups, california poppies, regular poppies.

Harvest something: Chives, nettles, dandelions, rhubarb, asparagus, sorrel

Preserve something: Dried nettles and raspberry leaves.

Reduce Waste: Sorted out the apples from winter, and dried and sauced the last few goods ones, planted the sprouted onions for spring greens. 

Preparation and Storage: This was my best category, because while in visiting family I hit a library sale and managed to get us almost to a full set of Hardy Boys book (the old ones) – which actually is a prep, when you’ve got four book-addicted children ; and hit Savers for pants and pajamas for rapidly growing eldest for next year. 

Build Community Food Systems – Nothing in my community.  Can I count the two talks I did on _A Nation of Farmers?_ 

Eat the Food – Because we don’t use our fridge, going out of town means eating everything or taking it with us.   We managed not to throw any usable food out or let anything get wasted, which for us is pretty good.  But we didn’t cook much of anything in particular, since we didn’t want leftovers.

Not my best week, but I’ve got an entire week of gardening ahead of me to catch up!  Can’t wait!!!

How about you?

 Sharon

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