this was a wonderful doll house,  the chismar brothers lived in their
parents house all their lives, this was done  when the children did
the farming and never had the chance to find a wife, the brothers in
their best sunday suits had their picture taken, probably for the last
time while they were alive, if the suits still fit, they would be
buried in them,when i met them they were having ham and eggs, one
brother always did the cooking, while the other fixed things and
milked cows, they invited me in to sit a while,and of course they
lived in a very magical house, like so many others, and didn’t even
know it.I sat in the living room and on the table was stacked with
catalogs piled up to the ceiling, the one on the bottom was from
1898,as i looked around the ivy grew all around each room at the
ceiling,ending up into a very small pot, which their mother had
planted when they were boys,next to this was a beautiful piano from
the napoleonic period, with a fender from  a big ford truck leaning up
against it. I do have another memory of them, when they came for
thanksgiving dinner, one of the brothers had a  seizer and flipped
back on his chair and fell to the floor, my son thought that he had
died, but it was not time for his best suit…we miss them
greatly….the end

well. the garden is all harvested except for the lettuce patch.  I have had
two cast iron stoves come to  the house this fall, one is for the
dolls that live here and the other seems to just have moved in  and
taken over, I have had a kitchen stove in my life for as long as I can
remember, the first memory was burning my ear on the pipe upstairs in
the bedroom trying to hear what santa was going to bring for christmas
from the grown ups downstairs, never did find out…..my imagination
was always bigger than what would be under the tree,anyway, back to
the stoves, the doll stove needs a stove pipe before i can light it
up, a tin smith,Mr. walter Fleming, who has had his work in the white
house, will be making a small pipe for the stove. The big stove we
will call it jane green,is already earning her keep, I recycle
everything, and in the oven is all the kale and collards left from the
garden, they will be dried and put into jars for the hens grain this
winter. The tobacco crop was a very good one,It takes 100 days to
produce seed,and thousands of them i have put away,some will be for
trade with a few Indians on the morrow, we will place our goods on a
blanket and exchange for items we might want.I can’t believe that they
live in the woods not far from me, on the way to their home, tee pee
and all, I will collect stones from the riverbeds that have washed
ashore from the recent floods in Vermont, with these stones I will
work on a stone wall around the stove pipe, to keep the wall from
getting too hot. see you down the old dirt road.

i could not help myself, the magic of the seed, and one
must plant an eighteenth century garden if at all possible, I did
manage to get some broad leaf tobacco seeds and have a goode
crop,they are almost seven feet tall and are in full bloom, i am
hoping to have some seed for next year from these plants and many
other heirloom vegetables that i have planted. I am fighting for the
life of my beet seeds, it seems a fuzzy little mole thinks he can eat
the beet part and get away with it, but i have wrap’t wool and other
assorted things around this beet to see if he will give up the fight,
I am the only roundup around here,the seeds are almost ready to pick
and dry, the plant has at least a thousand seeds. Jefferson and
washington would of been proud of the tobacco plants, jefferson
planted for many years and charged many silk suits in Paris against
his crop,their version of credit worked well as long as he could buy
thousands of acres for very little money, they did not know about
fertilizers and did not have to as long as they were breaking new
soil. washington was not as successful with the tobacco and gave it up
after a few failures,from field to england by sea was risky business.

Tis the month of july,I should be eating beans and beets, but all was planted too late due to bad weather . I am still dying paper and cloth with the black walnuts.  I had dyed the envelopes and decided to dry them on the brooms,she watches me do this, she has seen eighty revolutions of the sun, and no longer sweeps. Mr. chucky Bates came over, who was to give me a lesson on how to sharpen a scythe, a implement used for mowing grass by hand.  It has a long curved blade and a long wooden handle, and has to be sharpened in a certain way with what’s called a wet stone.  This is held in your hand and you go back and forth in the front of the blade and hold it up against the back and sharpen it by keeping the stone tight to the scythe.  You then swing it in small swathes and move along  at your own pace and then have to rake it up after it was dry and put it in the barn for the cow.  When Mr. Bates left, I headed to a farm called the second chance,where they have fertile eggs since I have an old hen with three feathers that decided to be a mom, and needs some outside help.  Mr. Chance said,” that I would have to place two  eggs in the morning and two at night, until all were set, then count the twenty ones days till they hatch, and with some luck she will have some chicks to care for, I will let you know  what the results are, waiting for the dust to settle in the east.
Regards  Nettles   2011

The eastern black walnut is a species of flowering tree in the hickory family. The long male flowers are called catkins,and the short buds at the end of the branch are the females and will become the nut.  The honey from these flowers is very limited because there are not many of these trees left in our area,they are attacked by 64 diseases and 296 species of insects and mites,but with all this the great trees live on and produce a wonderful nut for dyes,inks, lumber for furniture,a bit of squirrel  food,and of course some firewood. I am told that it will attract lightning better than any other tree.  When I was growing up I was told when a child was born a grove of trees would be planted,this would become worth many shillings by the time the child reached adulthood,he then could have the money to purchase all that was needed to start a small farm, it is still true today, a friend of mine just sold two butternut trees and received one thousand dollars,she then went and bought something that would run on gas.

I came across a  coat that was worn by the upper classes and slaves, the difference was the quality and construction of the coat,it generally was made of linen or wool, it was called a frock, well my frock needed the lining dyed so I went out to the barn and checked the black walnuts that I had gathered last fall to see if they were still good to use,going threw the winter had frozen them, then  thawed the shells off and turned into a liquid,so all was well with the dye, I just had to get a good fire going and a proper big kettle boiling to put the coat into so while the kettle is boiling I had to get the stainer pan in place and this is done by turning a stool upside down and using the legs to hold a stainer cloth that has been tied on each leg of the stool,you then can get a dipper and  strain what nuts are left and the husks that were on the nuts, after that is done the dye is ready to place the frock into the kettle,you have to stir every once in while so the dye will be even,this you won’t really know until the coat has dried. The coat has 32 buttons on it, it was a mans coat, but sometimes a women’s husband would be killed and she would wear his coat and keep chucking rocks into the cannon to be fired.

When you are working with this dye, wear gloves and hang the coat out to dry.

I ironed it with a cloth over the fabric so it would not have a shiny look to it.

Drying papers on the hearth

I just finished picking the rhubarb this morning and made a discovery,I had always wondered how  the patch grew and spread. I had never seen the seed pod that it sends up,fall and make new plants,but when I pulled up the seed pod, it was starting new little plants at the base of it, so I thought I should dig them up and plant in a new bed, not sure if this will work, but I will keep a watchful eye on it today is june and the strawberry’s are ready, so most citizen’s put the rhubarb and strawberry’s together for a pie.  I however won’t get the fire going for that, but I do have the fire going to dye some papers  to send to California.

I am heading out to the garden to finish planting the pole beans, I have planted the same seed for at least twenty years, the garden is now all raised beds, this is to keep the plants from being washed away from strange storms, and to keep the weeds out. ……see you down the dusty road, when it stops raining I am going to take some photos of my neighbors fence….could that be interesting? 

I have a friend name val,’ he said, why don’t you come and pick wild onions, so I thought , I would gather up one of the dolls and head to the woods,camera and basket and a garden fork, I would have brought the lamb, but I need someone to hold him down in the back seat of the car, I will tell you about him later. I had to look up some history about the onions and found out that they grow in different parts of our country and also in Canada, where they are now endangered.They are not as easy to harvest as some say, the ones I found grew mixed in with a hill of slate, which makes for hard digging, you have to be careful when pulling them apart, because they are not that big, they are a small bulb and a single shallow root ,they taste to me like a cross of onion and garlic, it is well known that a thick growth near Lake Michigan Illinois in the 17th century gave the city of Chicago it’s name, chicagou was the name the Indians called it. In Canada they are also called wild leeks, or ramps.When you find some, never pick all of them, it takes two years just to make the small bulb, dig the largest ones and leave a few large ones for seed and the smaller ones will be ready next year, they are only good to pick for a short time in the spring, then they will flower and produce seed.When I get them home I wash them, take one thin layer off the bulb and then make soup or freeze them for winter, I am going to dry the leaves,put them in small glass jars for eggs or soup.

Well, as Edith sittwell stands behind her stove, she is wondering what could happen next.  She ordered chicks with a friend, and he ordered them a bit too early, I have lost four of them to what is called sticky bottom, there are a few reasons as to what causes this,and they are too numerous to go into, the one that just died sang like a canary, this i thought was  most strange because, it was a chicken…..and because it sang it made me even more sad..”…when i die i want that chick back,” said Edith.  “I want it right next to that fat tiger cat i so loved, apparently in that place, all will get along, the lion and the lamb”. A few days ago before the last snow, or what we think will be the last snow, edith did sugaring with some friends, truth be known i came up with the idea, and my dear friends did most of the work, it seems to take a large canning kettle full of maple sap to make a pint of syrup, I can’t lift much because of my head injury, but I sang Christmas songs while they gathered the sap. This seem to make it much more fun, the down side of this story is that my friend used up most of his house wood to make eight pints of syrup and now finds the feather beds a bit chilly.  They are burning some new ash, with some old elm and as they say in new england,will have to do till spring,and that will have it’s own trials.  While America burns, we burn wood and turn water into liquid gold, this to was given to us by the Indians, the chief threw his tomahawk into a sugar maple and in a short time the sap was running, placed a gourd under the cut and caught the sap then  cooked some venison, and the meat got sweet.  I just learned today that the American Indians were named after the Indians from India………..where have I been! Later, on the old butler road…..yours Netty

I was working on valentines day and I realized that it was getting too late to do anything, so I had been working on these paper spring baskets, the large basket.

Instead of putting hearts I put vegetables, sheep and pieces of cake and the men are from an early wood cut.

Rufus Putman, he lived in Sutton Mass in the 1700’s, I came across a book at the Sutton library and thought you might like to read a part of a diary that he wrote.  Tuesday Ye  23 of March  1773
The wind still continued  N. W. was oblidged   to  ley still all day we  took our whail bot went  a letel way down the crick shot 3 alligators returned one board the sloop at  twel.  This was as he wrote it…..