Simple Goodness Blog

Happy Easter everyone! With Easter we celebrate the victory of life over death and dwell in the possibility and promise of miracles. We had a beautiful day celebrating the day with all of our family and eating all of the things. We hope the same for you and yours! Speaking of having faith, the last frost date is a long standing point of contention between farmers and gardeners and our Lord. We await Spring with building apprehension, wanting to get started with planting, but must wait for that last frost to pass or risk losing it all. It takes a lot of faith and patience to wait and we're like toddlers in a line, anxious to reach the front. Getting to the point of feeling comfortable about when we plant starts in the greenhouse and when to transplant them in the ground is a long term goal of ours. Most backyard gardeners and farmers alike who we know still feel nervous about this. We hem and haw and wait a few more days but at a certain point, you just have to scatter those seeds and hope for the best. Mother nature is unpredictable, and she doesn't hold her "word." This year the stakes are even higher because we're growing far more than ever before. Last year's kitchen gardens, raised beds, and garlic experiments were so successful that we've doubled, or possibly, quadrupled down on planting. We're growing many more plants than last year, but we mostly stuck with the same types. We picked the veggies and herbs that worked best and were most popular last year to repeat. In town, I'll be planting another big Kelly kitchen garden with plenty of tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, lettuce, peas, kale, carrots, rhubarb, and herbs to keep my kitchen stocked. I've loved having fresh food the last two years from my garden, and since I've begun learning to preserve, can and freeze our garden produce we've had fresh food almost year round. (If you're new to these things and want to learn but feel intimidated, please go back and read this post from the archives: I think i can can can. Bottom line, I felt the exact same way two short years ago.) On the farm, Venise is adding onions to her potato and garlic. She grows these three in raised bed rows they till in the field. These crops have similar seasons and growing requirements so they pair really well together. She will also grow another kitchen garden in the four big wood & metal raised garden beds that they built last Spring, filling them with similar veggies and herbs to mine. It's key to his productivity to keep Farmer Ross flush in home canned pickles and spaghetti squash, after all. Also at the farm, we're pairing up and growing some of the herbs, edible flowers and vegetables needed to make handcrafted, farm fresh cocktails for the Happy Camper Cocktail Company, my (Belinda's) new "garden to glass" cocktail catering business. All told, we had about 300 seeds to start in the greenhouse and will direct seed quite a bit more after that elusive "last frost" date. Ed Hume Seeds has a good page explaining the importance of last frost date and how to calculate it. They also have this handy chart showing an average last frost date for tons of cities in Washington state. We're using the Buckley recommendation as our target date for planting our starts and direct seeding. We both ordered seeds from Uprising Seeds this year, an organic seed company local to Washington. We've heard great things about them and are excited to be growing varieties that are tried and true in our region, since weather and soil have huge fluctuations place to place and therefore a big effect on the success of crop varieties. I'm also growing Floret Flower's flower seeds for my yard in a final attempt to fill in the huge, empty dirt "garden beds" we inherited with our home. While the Kelly house has some beautiful, old established plants like 20 foot tall lilacs, the majority of the beds were empty, tilled dirt when we moved in and I'm really tired of weeding dirt patches. A big, beautiful, but easy to maintain flower garden is the thing of my dreams lately. Besides making the bees happy, I aspire to drink whiskey lemonades on my porch while admiring the blooms. It's going down this year, Lord as my witness. Spending time in the greenhouse with the kiddos on the first day of Spring was the perfect welcoming of the new season, and just may need to stay a tradition for us. That is, if the timing works out this year. We planted varieties that instructed us to plant seeds indoors anywhere from 4-8 weeks before the last frost, all at once. By many people's standards we're doing it wrong, and by many people's clocks, we're late to planting. It may be blind naivety, but since we've had success in year's past with doing all direct seeding and planting very small starts in the beds, we're not worried about having a few less weeks for the starts to develop. We'll probably be harvesting our first plants and eating our first cukes a couple of weeks later than others, but we're okay with that too. We've got the patience and faith to wait. In farming, motherhood, and life in general these traits, and a little naivety, have served us pretty well.

Since Belinda posted about her exciting Happy Camper Cocktail updates I figured it was time to post a winter farm update. Winter is a pretty slow time on the farm which is good because it gives us time to catch up on projects we don't get to during the busier seasons. This winter Farmer Ross has been focusing on selling some of the extra equipment we have laying around which will give us the room and funds to buy some new equipment. One of our most recent purchases included some refrigerators and freezers we bought to store our farm produce and meat. Our local grocery store went out of business which is a pretty big bummer, but it allowed us to make some really great purchases without having to drive all over the state to pick them up. We were REALLY late getting garlic into the ground this year (we planted February 6 and normally plant in November) which meant that about 2/3 of our seed spoiled so our harvest will be much smaller this year. We weren't too upset because we had already decided we want to try to expand our horizons and try some new crops so we feel like we were left with a manageable amount. I spent a small fortune at Uprising Seed Company buying seeds for the farm and garden. Uprising was recommended to us by other local farmers and I love that they are located in Bellingham, Washington. All their seeds are Open Pollinated, Certified Organic by the USDA, and grown by small family farms in the PNW. In addition to the warm, fuzzy feeling I get by supporting local farms, I love that the seeds they select to sell have been tried and tested by farms who are in the same growing zone as we are. This year we chose to send our female goats (does) to the breeders a little later than in the past so while everyone else is posting pictures of early spring kids, I am eagerly counting down the days until May/June when our kids will start coming. However, we recently learned that our herd queen EB is now a grandma! Ginger, EBs daughter, now lives with one of our fellow 4H families and she had triplets last night. Just like EB she has a strong mothering instinct and delivered with ease. One of the little doelings (the one with the spot on her rear) is going to go to one of the other 4Hers in our club so we will have mini EBs all over the place. The pigs are growing like crazy and packing on the pounds. They outgrew their original pig pen so we spent a couple of weekends building them new digs. Like all things you do for the first time, we learned a lot. Now that we have our first round under our belt we are feeling very confident about our ability to do it again and again. I promise to write a whole separate post about our lessons learned raising pigs but the gist of it is there is a LOT of mud and they are VERY enthusiastic eaters! And probably the coolest thing that has happened on the farm recently is we had a calf! Our Red Angus, Big Mama, surprised us with a winter calf! When we bought her there was a little communication breakdown somewhere along the way and we thought she was due this summer sometime so we were a bit surprised when she didn't come up to eat one night and instead stood in the back bellowing. Farmer Ross being the good farmer he is, went back to check on her and found her cleaning up a fresh calf. Since Big Mama isn't very tame, we decided against bringing her in the barn and instead brought the barn to her. Cows are usually pretty smart when they calf and will find a sheltered area that is on high ground. Big Mama found a nice dry place under the trees to welcome her calf so all we had to do was provide some straw to help keep it warm until she could dry it off. After checking if it was a girl (heifer-which it is) or a boy (bull) Ross and I spent a couple hours sitting under the stars in the John Deere Gator, drinking a couple beers and watching the wonder of it all. Within a few hours, the calf was up walking around and the rest of the herd was greeting her. The next day we were able to get a few more pictures although Big Mama didn't want us to get too close so we let her have her space. We are planning to wean her a little early (4 months) so that we can start halter training her early and she can make an appearance at our local county fair. That's all for now. As the summer approaches we will be much busier around the farm so there will be many more pictures coming your way!

This road we're on feels like a long one recently. Over the last couple of weeks there have been ups and downs, which to continue the already on the verge of being over done metaphor, can be described as: dodgy rest stops (the fear that grips you when your husband insists on operating a saw in a terrible mood), armed protest road blocks (the ongoing discussion on liquor licensing), finding a dairy queen in the middle of a dessert (a full set of 1960's gold leaf cocktail glasses for $2 each at Goodwill!) We keep chugging through it all, hills and valleys, and I know we'll get there. My eye is on the destination as this journey throws challenges our way. The trailer is slowly making progress towards the much anticipated "after" picture. Throughout this process we've had to weigh a lot of considerations that are new to us, as experienced home renovators. This time, in addition to those that we are familiar with such as budget, scale, how it looks, and what materials we can easily procure, we also have to worry about there is weight distribution, endurance and waterproofing of materials and function factors much more than we are accustomed to. We've done a considerable amount of reinforcing the original wood and metal structure. As you can still see in these inside wall pictures, the framing is very lightweight and thin (this thing is basically a bologna sandwich on wheels, propelled by hope and angel wings. I do not understand how these travel trailers can be in such good condition after this long!) This made these campers ideal for station wagon towing but is a concern for us because we're adding some heavy cabinets and the freezer for our kegerator that need to be supported by these feeble walls. The materials have also been an issue. We obviously are not concerned with doing a restoration type project but we want materials that don't seem completely out of place and manage to keep some of the vintage charm of the travel trailer. Thus, our cabinets will have 60's style flat front cabinets with some super cool retro brass pulls I picked up on our Second Use Seattle trip, and the brass hardware theme will continue with period sconce lighting and faucets. The walls are the biggest conundrum of late. We decided to not replace the birch paneling and try something different. This will allow us a cost savings but also create a newer, fresher look and move away from the completely retro look of the original canned ham trailers. Troy found some sheets of composite material that are able to bend around the ceiling curves pretty well, are extremely waterproof, and were dirt cheap- $6 per sheet at Home Depot! We're apprehensive about the high sheen and what to do about the exposed screw heads on the ceiling but think that this is the best way to go, those concerns withstanding. The lower half of them will be mostly covered with cabinetry, bars, and the freezer so it isn't as much of a concern. I hope to wallpaper the top parts that will show in a fun retro style but still simple, clean wallpaper. I have never shopped for or installed wallpaper (just lusted over it in other people's instagram posts) so it is a new experience. Every time I make a decision I try to consider whether it makes sense for a bride to be, a retirement bash, a birthday party, etc. If the design is not universal enough to please our customers, its back to the drawing board. And finally, In a 15 x 8 foot space, the ability for two bartenders to move, shake, and stir as needed is critical. We don't want anyone waiting in a long line for their drinks! A couple of recent sunny days were the much needed breaths of fresh air in between this incessant Seattle rain & the wind that keeps blowing the tarp off the top of the trailer as Mr. Kelly works. Finally a chance to paint! I have always reveled at how a simple, cheap can of paint can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear and it came through yet again. The transformation is really encouraging, and frankly, we needed that. The bright white paint is like a clean slate on this old girl and gives her new life. While he was busy at work last weekend I took some of my favorite girls, a truck full of furniture & buffet styling supplies and dozens of doughnut holes to our first wedding venue open house at Trintity Tree Farms. They basically set up the day like a faux wedding, with 3 beautifully catered food stations (omg the cheese- I ate all of the cheese) by Sunshine's catering, photographers This Little Pic and Erin Perkins showing off their skills, a DJ playing a list so good that we looked at one another several times with eyebrow raised nods of approval (a good DJ is SO important and sadly, so rare at weddings), and us with our cute little example dessert display and banging outfits. Our awesome new t-shirts were made by buckley local screen printers One of a Kind Screen Printing and we all wore blue suede shoes without even planning it, which made the day an instant success in my book. (Ok I did tell them I was wearing a blue skirt but how amazing are my galpals that they then thought, "oh yeah hey I should probably wear my blue suede high heels…AMAZING") We then proceeded to lift & carry huge pieces of furniture through loose gravel and mud in our suede shoes 'cause we are boss ladies. (I know you are wondering, is there a vet around? Because yes, our cobras are OUT of control.) My cousin Casey and friend Gen did a fantastic job of helping me with set up, radiating their beauty into the room at large, and answering questions for the lovely people who approached us. We gave them info about our services, handed them one of my beautiful new business cards with beautiful logo (another prop given to graphic designer + cousin Sage) and sent the willing home with bags of doughnut holes. And THAT, friends, is why dessert buffets are the best choice for your event sweet tooth. Cakes are so pretty, and can be incorporated into the buffet, but not everyone likes cake, and options are wonderful. Favors at weddings have also gone by the wayside but you know what, no one passes up an opportunity for car trip doughnuts after dancing the night away. People also didn't pass up our cool t-shirts which we gave away to three new friends we met at the event, the aforementioned photographers and the venue coordinator who invited us, Brittny. I hope they're repping their Cocktails, Cake, & Happily Ever After tees regularly so the world can see what we're about and join us for cake + booze. I also hope to have more of these t-shirts and a couple of other designs for sale at my website and events in the future. Mostly, what I loved about this exciting day (I said repeatedly that it felt like the first day of school to be setting up our first expo display) was meeting the really lovely couples. There were several hugs shared between us and potential clients over the course of the day and some really great conversations. We talked business, but also about previous weddings champagne fueled dancing shenanigans, what cocktail describes you, and why doughnuts are better than cake. I love that I am in a business where these conversations are actually par for the course, and in fact are necessary explorations into getting to know the couples I'll have the pleasure of serving. I really can't wait to do events like this one in the future with the camper onsite. We played a slideshow of our inspiration pictures and a few pics of our own Happy Camper but I know it is hard to visualize what could be and the whole points of open house events set up like this one is so you don't have to. When on that lovely day the Happy Camper travel trailer bar gets in front of people, with her pretty white paint and shiny wooden bar tops and vintage Collins cocktail glasses in assorted white, black, gold, & crystal patterns, it will be the most Instagrammable, photographable picture on the planet and I am really, really excited for that day.