In good company

Missoulians will often tell you, with a mix of pride and rueful head-shaking, that our town has more not-for-profit organizations per capita than anywhere else in the country.  I don't know if that figure is verified, but I do know it certainly feels true.  Drop a glass of wine at any social gathering here (odds are it will be a potluck), and you're just about guaranteed to splash at least one non-for-profit employee, director, or board member.  Maybe a few. 

We sometimes joke with people, as we explain why we've returned to Montana, that we just thought there weren't enough non-profits or coffee roasters in the town yet.  It gets a good laugh.  But the great thing is, that glut of organizations, which might seem a strike against locating our here, is also the very reason to land here.  Because, amazingly enough, as we've met with people working for and running so many of these other non-profits, one theme emerges:  they want to help, and want to see us succeed.  Maybe it's because no one else is doing quite what we propose, or maybe it's because they like the coffee samples we give them. Maybe it's because we offer to help them too (Noah donates prints to the benefit auctions of quite a few of our local non-profits).  I think it's just part of the culture here, people wanting to support other folks also trying to do good work. 

Our latest round of supportive enthusiasm and offers for help came from a young couple who have created a small non-for-profit organization to run student travel courses (sound familiar?).  They run 1-2 courses a year taking college students to the Indian Himalaya through Nature Link, their organization, granting credit through the University of Montana.  (their org website, student testimonials, and lovely photos from courses, are here:  http://www.nature-link.org/ ). 

We met them over beers at a local brewer (also something of no shortage in Missoula) where we talked no only logistics and advice, but also the excitement and reasons we all want to run these courses.   It can be good, when we are spending other hours trying to get internet connected to our office in the Toolshed, or cramping our brains trying to understand what accounting software will work best, to sit back and talk with likeminded people about the impact an experience like a travel course can have on a student.  To remember that the kids get so much more than they bargain for, that some are completely transformed and empowered, that their presence and perspective can mean a lot to the host family too. 

Our first course won't be till May, at the earliest.  That's a long way off, but conversations like these, remembering what a great opportunity we can offer, will help us get through those details of how to offer it.  I'm grateful for the good company, the community of support. 

Making space for home

It's been quiet on the updates recently, because it has been anything but quiet in our daily activities.  After two months in the Toolshed, four months since we packed up and left our Treehouse home in Oregon, the end of the four-month move arrived in a big burst.  We've been moving. And moving again, and again and....it's a bit complicated. 

It was a bit of a Rubic's cube of a puzzle; our office rental and storage unit rentals in town expired at the end of October, but the cottage was not quite ready for us on the first of November.  So things from the office got stacked temporarily in the chicken coop, while most things from the toolshed moved to the house...then office things into the toolshed, storage unit boxes (containing a lot of our office books and Noah's prints and art materials) went into, well, first several piles on the lawn.  Then split between goat shed, chicken coop, and corners of toolshed.  Luckily none of the animals for which these spaces are named are actually in their locations yet! 

Finally, late last week we started to move into the little cottage house, wtih great delight at things like warm running water and a sink for dishwashing.  We haven't been this clean in months.  The place is small, efficien, and very bright; we're excited to have such a sweet little house.  As soon as we started moving in, though, we realized a few challenges and a lot of work lay ahead. 

The bedroom is in a daylight basement, the base of the house, and had a very cold, hard, and hard-to-clean cement floor, so project #1 was laying a new bamboo floor.  Then painting the white walls a warm yellow.  It also, um, had no closet.  In fact, after moving in boxes and bags of books and clothing, we looked around this sweet little place and realized we had no place to put any of those things!  So the last week has been a craze of building:  long bookshelves for the living room, a bread-baking station to extend the skimpy counter space of the kitchen, a table to feed the cats on, save from Malaya, clothes storage, shoe shelves for the entryway....and a closet rod/ shelf for the bedroom.  There's still a lot more to do, but with books unpacked, a couch to sit on, bed to sleep on, and food stocked in the kitchen, we are at least starting to feel a bit, well, at home. 

More photos to come as we clear out the last boxes and truly settle in, but a few for now.....a glimpse of how we have been making home:

Noah hard at work putting together the butcher-block 'bread baking station.'  A good place to knead bread is a key part of our home kitchen.  In the background is the cottage where we, finally, are living!

The final product--the bread station!  (Never mind the chaos of still-full boxes in the background.) This is all reclaimed lumber:  a maple top and some reclaimed 2x6 timbers from Home ReSource, our local building materials recycling center, and barn boards from the sides from a stock piled in the barn here on the property.  Working with these materials makes design and sometimes leveling and alignment a bit challenging, but the results have been great.

Flurries

We just passed the milestone of two full months of Toolshed living, and as the seasons continue to tilt, we are having a variety of types of flurries here on Sundown Road lately. 

Flurries of: 

:: snow 
A winter weather advisory for the area this morning, and fast enough snow showers this morning to build up just a bit.  Just enough to make us rush through cleaning up after breakfast cooking (when snow is piling up on the olive oil and the salt, it's a different sort of cleanup!).  As we pulled a tarp over some half-finished construction projects, Malaya kept jumping on it and snapping at snowflakes.  She's putting on the fluff in preparation for winter. 

:: building
More compost bins (one very special one we won't discuss just yet...).  A platform bed to hold a brand-new locally made wool and cotton futon made, by special request, without flame retardants.  Note: this took

:: learning and planning
How deep are the underground irrigation lines?  Where are all the sprinkler heads?  How can we use the existing system for new garden space, but make it a bit more efficient? 

:: connections
When we mentioned the coffee roasting at a MUD* workshop last night, the woman running it said "Oh, I know who you are.  I know all about you--I just knew we'd meet at some point."  A dynamic and passionate local-food advocate with her hands in all kinds of good stuff, and a self-described "do-er, not talker," we are sure she's going to be a good ally and resource.

:: upcoming transitions
Including the most anxiously-awaited move into the cottage!  The farmhouse renovations are supposed to wrap up this Friday, with a cleaning crew scheduled for Monday, and the beginning of the grand housing shuffle on Tuesday.  We'll help Anita move from the cottage to the farmhouse, we'll move our living from the Toolshed to the cottage, then we'll move our office from in-town (and storage unit) to the Toolshed.  Next week may be a flurry of moving, but I am looking forward to finally settling in indoors.  


* Missoula Urban Demonstration  Project--a local sustainable living resource organization that hosts classes on all kinds of practical skills, and also runs the tool library that allows us to borrow,rather than buy seldom-used tools like a jigsaw or sawzall or caulking gun (just to name a few, lately)

A time of precious sunlight

Please forgive the absence of posts lately--it's been farm-to-be work time here for the last several days.  We drove back to Montana last Sunday hauling some 15 gallons or so of apple juice pressed in Oregon last week, and ever since have been fully immersed in trying to get systems set up here on the place.  We're still in the toolshed, but taking advantage of some nice fall day weather to get stuff done outside.  Our friend John is visiting from Wisconsin, we've put him straight to work....a new metal roof went up this morning on a great old pole building we refer to as the "goat shed."  It's support timbers are sound but shingles had blown off ages ago, and one more winter would have done in the wood on the roof.  We're aren't sure, really if goats will be the first thing it houses, but at least now whatever lives in there (not us, thankfully) will be dry! 

It may be quiet here for the next few days again as we build nest boxes and roosts for a chicken coop, dig garden beds and plant garlic, and, um, run a small workshop on Permaculture this weekend.  And of course, we'll be composting, as always.  Noah is officially compost king this week, because he won the wager we had of how hot the compost would be when we returned (the measured 136 was closer to his 140 guess than my 130).   

Currently On The Road

Team Toolshed is on the road.  We left Monday morning (cats staying behind, of course; we are grateful for Anita taking care of them for the week).  It's a combination of work and family visiting, a week on the road.  A few snippets from the trip so far:

Montana is an early morning start, straight from the bed to a down jacket, the cold metal of the roof racks bite fingers as we load the car in slowly brightening fog.  Gallons of extra veggie oil fuel cram the trunk, and containers for buying more in Portland. The wildfire smoke seems to be creeping back in, so it may just be a good time to get out of town. 

Idaho is easy.  We breeze through the skinny part of this state on veggie oil in the time it takes to have a few conversations: another debate about pigs, scheming over tractors, cover crops, speculating about compost.  

Washington is still smoky, but bright rabbitbrush in bloom lines the roads through the Palouse country.  We are headed for Quincy, a small town in the middle of fields watered by the Columbia, with blue labels on the fences informing drivers what is growing in each field.  My favorite reads "PASTURE: HORSES."  While Noah interviews a bean farmer and consolidator, Malaya and I wander a strange region of ag warehouses and offices.  Tons and tons of food are being gathered and stored here--apple trucks loaded with the giant wooden crates come and go, but the whole complex has no living plants except the green grass in the adjacent cemetery, so we walk there instead.  Diesel fumes, smokestacks, and acres of mysterious cement buildings are all somehow part of the food system.  It's a bit large. 

We know White Salmon, with our good friends, dinner, and bed, is south on 97, but we don't quite know how far.  A traffic back-up near Toppenish appears to be from an accident involving an apple truck. The vehicles have been dragged off the intersection, but a galaxy of smashed apples remains on the pavement. 

Dropping down hills into the start of Oak tree country on the Yakima Nation, wild horses graze ont he side of the highway. Lights flash when we let the downhill get to fast, but the officer is hiding a smile behind his grey mustache.  Holding the license, the worst we get is a warning: "You're going to have to take it down by about 10 miles an hour, or we'll make you brush your dog." We promise to behave.

We make it to the Columbia Gorge in dark, tired and grateful for friends to take us in. 

The time of first ice

We are feeling the shift here, the tilt away from sun and summer.  Each day is about eight minutes shorter than the last, and we've already been caught by surprise by a few early sunsets.  Noah and Malaya ended a bike ride last week in the almost-dark; it somehow snuck up on us all. 

And it's noticeable, the effect of those shortening days.  Not just a few drifting leaves now, but a fall of them.  A few nights ago we got the first rain in well over a month, which turned to slushy snow in the early half-dark morning. I am most grateful for the clarity that came back to the air after that, as the wildfire smoke finally blew out of the valley and the fires settled down with snow in the higher hills. At the edges of forests on Blue Mountain and Mount Sentinel, a fringe of white is still visible in the shade.  The hills that for weeks we could hardly see are again clear and defined--and now the smoke has lifted, I notice the larches are starting to turn yellow. 

It's not just changing colors and air clarity, though.  This morning when I woke up I found a solid layer of ice topping the water left in our plastic dishwashing tubs.  The soup pot left in the tub after last night's cooking was frozen in place.  It's a thin rim of ice, so far, but the cold is definitely creeping in. Indoors, Mabel and Hershey are clinging more solidly to the bed with each cooler night, burrowing under the covers and refusing getting harder to budge.   

Our toolshed is still pretty cozy, but getting cooler,and the outdoor kitchen and shower are becoming a bit more, um, refreshing.  We've taken to heating some water in the electric kettle to add to the dishwater,and even sometimes using the propane stove to heat a large water pot for showering (pretty luxurious). The semi-outdoor life is evident more in cold fingers than in sunny cheeks now, a contrast to when we moved here in late August. 

It's a time for burrowing in a bit.  We think we will be moving into the cottage house within the next few weeks, which will be especially welcome after after a few more icy mornings.  Till then, we'll take a cue from Mabel, soaking up some warm outdoor sun during the day(even in chilly air), and nesting under an ever deeper layer of blankets at night.

View of the paper birch through this morning's layer of ice.

The Toolshed Roast

This morning we looked at our coffee supply and realized we were down to just one more morning's worth of beans.  That means that, in the midst of all the rest, it's time to roll out the roaster again and roast, at least for ourselves.  It's been a funny discovery in this summer (and now fall) of moving, that the roaster, the process of roasting, even in new and less than ideal locations, has been a familiar and comforting thing.  It makes a place, whether it is an awkward summer-rental apartment or a tool room off of a garage, feel a bit more like home. It has been good to do something that feels familiar and normal, and have it go well. 

The last roast we did, we offered mail batches to our past supporters, and mailed out boxes right before heading to New York.  That was our first roast at the farm on Sundown, and it was a bit of a celebration of finding our new place.  We called it the Toolshed Roast, and included some of the story from the very first nights of our arrival there.  This is the text and image from the label:

When we tell friends and new neighbors that we have moved to the small farm on Sundown Road, we don't generally let on that at the moment we are actually living in a toolshed. It's cozier than you might think, but we can't recommend it for everyone--cooking off a propane stove outside, carrying water in five gallon jugs, running our fruit dryer off borrowed power, the continual sweeping from the dry yard which the animals track through our various zones from the outdoor kitchen into the sitting area and bedroom corner. The proximity to horses is another matter. On a recent evening after dinner with neighbors, we followed the path through the pasture back home, only to find ourselves surrounded by horses. With one hand on the dog, and another on the horses, we just had to talk our way through the matter, both softly and strongly.

This roast is just like that, soft and strong, from our friends in Papua New Guinea, who dig down, working with the community to build up their own farm, really from the soil up, just the way we work here in Missoula, Montana. So, to celebrate our temporary living situation, until we move into a real farmhouse, the toolshed roast is good for simple work, or when you need a bit more. It's been tested over coffee with neighbors, running meetings, designing our new chicken coop, and talking to horses.