The power of the sun
September
gave us 6.2 inches of rain over 10 days. The days that didn't
rain were generally cloudy, so I put off doing laundry until we both
ran out of the essentials.
Tuesday, I gave in and washed anyway. Three big loads of laundry
later, I had filled up the clothesline and moved on to draping clothes
on the grape trellises. I didn't even get to our bedding before
running out of both laundry detergent and space on the line.
Four hours of clouds later, it started to rain. I scurried around
and gathered up damp clothes, then draped them all over the house while
a quarter inch of water fell on our garden. Wednesday turned out
to be the prettiest sunny day in a long time, so I carried all of the
clothes back outside,
flipping clothes over halfway through the day so that every one finally
dried all the way through. Just this once, I think if I had a
clothes drier I would have used it. (Good thing I don't have one!)
Despite the astonishing amount of effort required to get there, we have
enough clean clothes to last us for our entire week long
honeymoon. Most of the posts for the next eight days will be
auto-posted --- saved up topics we never got a chance to serenade you
with during the height of the growing season. The farm will be in
the able hands of my brother, and we plan to not even check email for
most of the time. So if anything looks funny on the site, I
promise I'll fix it when I get home!
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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