The Adventure

Greetings Readers,  

!!BIG NEWS!!

My husband and I just bought our first house together, on 1/4th of an acre.  I spent the past few weeks frantically putting in a veggie garden before it became too late in the season for such an endeavor.  You know I am freaking out about having so much space for gardening, and about actually owning the land and being able to do whatever we want with it.  There is so much to love about the house... the solarium, the saltwater pool, the safer neighborhood, the green belt, and especially the 15-minute walk to get to the state park.  There are some things not to love, but we are methodically eliminating those and loving the home improvement process.

A wide-angle view of the east side of the house in fall, before the purchase

The gardening has begun!

So far I've planted 7 tomatoes, 3 peppers, 3 types of basil, 3 blueberry bushes, 3 huckleberry bushes, 2 blackberry vines, 4 zucchini, a sage, a chocolate peppermint.  Starting from seed are a melon, some lemon squash, 3 types of beans (red, green, purple), radishes... and a myriad of other seeds that did not survive the wrath of the neighborhood cats.  My worm compost bin is not currently up to snuff, so I used plenty of store-bought organic compost and fertilizer, and I removed about 2 cups of cutworms from the soil before planting.  Already I am noticing that there is actual SUNLIGHT here, and the tomatoes are growing with ridiculous speed in the heat.  The place already has some fruit trees: a pippin apple, a plum, and some sort of citrus (please be a Meyer lemon!), plus some volunteer oregano and a whole smorgasbord of flowers, and 2/3rds of it is on an automated drip system which is heavenly.  I've begun to fill the solarium as well, and the newest addition is a 3-year-old Buddha's Hand citron tree.

A life change hangs in the balance.

I'll be honest... time for blogging right now is extremely limited.  My commute + workday went from 12 hours to 11.5 hours with the move which is an improvement, but with all the work that needs to be done on the house I am bursting with blogging inspiration and drained of time.  But never fear!  As was planned a few years ago, in a few months I will quit my regular day job, and dive head-first into a new type of job:  home maintenance & repair, puppy-raising and family-starting, beer/mead-making, crafting and starting up an Etsy store, and getting hardcore about the garden.  Yes, in other words I'll be a housewife trying to make a few bucks on the side from her hobbies.

Wha?  Why??

I am aware that I will be switching from a low-pay very-high-stress job to a lower-pay possibly higher-stress job, but deep down it feels right.  Plus, in my current job, if I were to keep working with a baby, 100% of my take-home pay would go to commute/taxes/daycare (NOT cheap in the Bay Area), so it does not make financial sense to stay when we start a family.  Switching careers will mean living more frugally, cooking from scratch almost all of the time, and propagating my veggies and herbs rather than buying a bucket-load of seedlings and seeds every year... but hey, doesn't that sound like great blogging material?  I shall go from being a scientist in the lab to a scientist in the home, overdoing and over-thinking every single project for your amusement.

An example of home science!  I measured an ecuadorian hermit crab pet to determine its age: ~ 14 years old.  Science rules!!

And so...

There will be a plethora of topics covered between the two blogs, Leaves In My Hair (for gardening) and Leaves In My Cup (projects, recipes, everything else) in the nearish future.  I will attempt to get in a blog post here and there until I am able to focus on doing it more full-time... so perhaps once every week or two?  Please subscribe, and then you will be sure not to miss a sporadic post.  With the new house, there is so much for me to learn, and so many projects to tackle, and soooooo much potential!

Looking forward to the adventure,
- Kendra