HELLO I HAVE A NEW PROJECT.

Welcome to Slapdash Manor

Dear friends,

To start with, I rent the bottom floor apartment of a house in a city called Pawtucket, in a state called Rhode Island. I’ve been here for seven years now. I don’t love being a renter – who does – but it’s a good place in a really lovely neighborhood and I like it well enough. I had aspirations of buying a home here for a few years – at last, a non-tiny yard where I could plant things in the ground?? I can hang stuff on the walls without thinking about my security deposit??? No walls or floors or ceilings shared with neighbors????? I’ve never lived in non-multi-unit housing as an adult! What is that even like!

Things have changed. When I first moved to Providence, houses were screamingly affordable – not by the standards of rational people, but by the standards of Massachusetts real estate, whence I moved from – and it felt very possible to buy a home I’d love. Then a bunch of stuff happened and long story short, housing costs in this area are ridiculous and the dream of home ownership has died within me, a sad, protracted death that took several years to really sink in, but here we are. (Upside, because I always find an upside: I no longer give a fuck about my credit score! It’s a fake made up thing anyway!)

So I’m here for the duration, I guess. Like I said, as places go, it’s pretty good. The neighborhood is cozy and walkable. I have half of a tiny yard to garden in, shared with my neighbors and their small kids, and I have a plot in a community garden nearby as well. The summer farmer’s market is a five minute walk, and there’s a gorgeous sprawling cemetery a little further away. There’s an ice cream place that’s open year round. These are the positives.

The negatives include an incredibly small and dated kitchen, which has turned me into a deranged organizer and space saver. Terrible closets. The soil in the backyard is compacted to the point of being impenetrable, so the gardening happens in containers and raised beds. There have been MULTIPLE pipe leaks from upstairs over the years. I could go on.

Not long after COVID lockdowns happened, I decided that my aspirations of urban homesteading shouldn't wait until I have the right kind of house and the right kind of space. I got back into pickling and jam-making. I learned all about fermentation techniques for food preservation and started making my own fermented vegetables, as well as my own kombucha, tepache, kvass, ferments ferments ferments, I’ll ferment anything. I started approaching gardening with an obsessive focus on maximizing space, while also cultivating as many native plants as possible.

Also? I'm not rich. In fact I'm barely scraping by. But trying to garden and preserve and make do and mend brings me so much joy. I thought, why wouldn't I bring this project to all of you?

I've spent the past year exploring possibilities for sharing my stupid homesteading with you, including developing a series of paper zines and/or a YouTube channel. I might still do these things, but I also realized that at the core of it is my urge to just write stuff. As I've always done.

To disclaim: I am not an authority or an expert on being a person with a house and a yard and a kitchen. I know a lot, but there's a lot more I don't know. I make lots of mistakes. I try to have fun with that.

What this IS is a series of diary-esque regular posts about my efforts at gardening in a yard that is mostly shaded by a huge fucking oak tree and with the worst dirt ever. It is about my obsession with fermenting things and pickling other things. It is about being broke a lot of the time and sporadically employed and trying to find ways of being in the world even when the world is not a place many of us want to be in. My therapist recently told me that I am in some kind of nervous system shutdown, so I'm doing things to wake up my vagus nerve or whatever, and I'm apparently not allowed to kick the nerve really hard and tell it to get fucked. So I've gone back to DRY BRUSHING for LYMPH HELP and I'm supposed to put the sun on my face in the morning, yawn, eyeroll eyeroll, but really it's probably working.

ANYWAY, I'm aiming to post twice a week and I'm not promising the posts will be good according to my own standards (truthfully I'm probably going to hate most of it). They will at least document what I'm doing in my fake homesteading efforts because I haven't found a lot of people who are broke and living in cities and trying to develop these skills despite all the obstacles, and who aren't doing it to be lauded as an expert or for some kind of tradwife kink.

This is essentially a journal of my domestic life. Welcome to Slapdash Manor, which made me laugh a lot when I thought of it.

This seemed like a good idea for a logo? The rhubarb is coming in hot. Despite the leaves, poisonous to nearly every other creature, being a delicious snack for possums.

Today my upstairs neighbors discovered that a bird – a house finch, I believe – has built a marvelously beautiful and perfect little swirl of a nest in the wreath on my front door (technically a Halloween wreath but we don't need to discuss that).

I was initially delighted, and then I read a bunch of Reddit threads from people asking if they should move a nest on their front door (I guess you shouldn't if you don't want a tragic end), and a bunch of people talked about BIRD MITES, which apparently infest bird nests and can also infest your house if the nest is on your house, and everyone says they're the worst thing ever. So I guess I'm gonna spray the gap around the door with permethrin and hope for the best.

House finch eggs!

THAT SAID, I am still delighted by this gorgeous little nest and its encased occupants. The parentals fly off right quick whenever they sense movement, and I'm hoping all the humans in this house can make efforts to give the nest space while its eggs cook and then the babies fledge (this is likely to take a month or so).

The last time I had a bird nest in a space where I could watch it, a couple house sparrows had settled into the rafters of the deck for the upstairs unit. The eggs hatched and I had cacophonous peeping for a couple weeks until one day I came out to find the nest empty and in disarray. I hoped this just meant the babies had flown off, but my instinct said that the big blue jay who had been nosing around had something to do with it.

Let's not dwell on that. I still love and defend blue jays.

I also dropped some more plants and seeds in one of the raised beds.

Here's a visual aid.

I feel like I should note that I annotated this image with absolutely zero plans of ever letting anyone else see it, and I hope that I can continue to offer y'all visual experiences that are minimally influenced by intentions of doing the thing that will look professional/polished. I'm not working that hard!!!

So the celtuce and the pak choi were started indoors using my AeroGarden (RIP that company 😢). Also the runner beans. Those grew from seeds a friend sent to me a couplefew (???) years ago and I didn't actually expect them to germinate but heeeere we are. I have read – also on Reddit, which seems to be my go-to for questions these days – that seed starting in an Aerogarden can be kinda dodgy, given that the Aerogarden is a hydroponic system. And I guess taking a plant that's used to hanging out in a big bin of water and suddenly packing it in soil makes the plant go a little crazy. (THIS IS A METAPHOR FOR SEVERAL THINGS.) The solution is evidently to overwater the transplants for a bit, giving them space and patience, until they figure out how dirt works and how to survive in this new place. (!!!!)

So far, so good on this. Maybe. I don't know. The celtuce seems to be fighting to live and the pak choi is as plump as ever and doesn't give a fuck. Both of these are new varieties to me so I have no experience to draw on.

Okay! That's a first post! I cannot express to y’all how much I dislike just jamming out a blog and not obsessively editing it for days, but I feel like I need to chill the fuck out. I hope I can keep this up because I miss writing dumb personal shit on a regular basis. I figure my next post will be a sort of garden tour so y'all can see what I'm working with. Please tell me if there's anything in particular you'd like to hear more about?

Love you all,

Lesley