Harvest, preserve, retreat indoors

I'll be honest, at this point, I feel like this post is almost exclusively to relieve the guilt that I have about not blogging for the last hmrhsmchsomething months by offloading a bunch of pictures onto the internet to fill the space and save my words-ed out brain from having to write too much, so I can get back to the sanding and drilling and polishing and cutting and pressing and sewing and cooking and webmastering and Airbnbing.

Not that this is news to me exactly, but it turns out that it's actually really difficult to continue maintaining the "do 100% everything with our own two hands" thing and keep up with it all when we ceaselessly add more things to the pile because we're loathe to choose one thing over another and will just do all the things until we die instead so long as our time and energy and health and razor-thin budget will allow. Surely there are diagnoses for this sort of attitude, but who cares (not us)? We couldn't afford to hire out if we wanted to anyway and I fear that we would somehow be taking something away from ourselves in doing so. So sometimes long-overdue writing goes by the wayside, a casualty of our reluctance to dilute our efforts, and a casualty of my frequent desire to sew and sand and strum instead of write. Until we either become Doctor Manhattans operating outside of the bounds of time and space, find a way to add more people who value productivity and independence far more than their sanity to the project, have some huge financial windfall land on us, or some combination thereof, here I am, blogging once every hmrhsmchsomething months.

I make magnificent excuses, don't I? At least lengthy ones. 

The good news is that, while I may be garbage at weekly or even monthly blogging, I am less garbage at updating our social media presence! So if you thirst for more snippets of our work and life, you can mosey on over to Frontier Industry, LLC on Facebook and/or our Instagram page and keep up with our far more frequent updates there about what we're fussing with in the garden and kitchen and workshops and new products as they're completed and posted. 

So, what about all of those pictures I was talking about, eh? I'm such a liar when it comes to promises of conciseness. 

The bulk of the last few months was occupied by slowly putting the garden to bed - harvesting, composting, and doing the first cover cropping that we've tried out so far, though that last thing didn't happen until quite late in the season and will probably wind up being minimally effective, especially considering the very cold November that just passed. And, of course, the preserving! We planted so much more this year and though we shared generously with interested passers-by, friends, and neighbors, we ended the season with a truly monstrous amount of collard greens and kale, resulting in the crock pot going nonstop for the better part of two weeks, cooking them down by two-gallon-sized batches into prepared greens for the freezer. After that it was the seemingly endless task of washing, chopping, blanching, and freezing the beets, carrots, and parsnips. But after a month in the kitchen, we end this year's garden with a full chest freezer, another milestone in our endeavors to be more self sufficient. 

The next hurdle may well be our impending adventures in trying to finally buy the land that we've been farming for two years now, but I'm not even slightly prepared to begin knowing where to start on that one. Detroit real estate is many things....simple and straightforward is rarely one of them. So we'll save that bit for the springtime.

kale
parsnips

And one last minor plant-related development: we finally got our indoor hydroponic garden set up! Having a few of these set up in a sunny spot indoors is a perfect way to preserve cuttings from plants that did particularly well outside this year, not to mention a good way to have a kitchen herbs on hand throughout the year!

In addition to the effort of wrapping up the garden for the season, we've been busy in the workshops, Matt turning out a batch of the Metropolis mods (the first time he's ever been able to do a proper run of them to be put in the store for immediate sale, without the 2-4 week long turn around time otherwise!), and me working on as many new items of clothing as our budget for fabric will allow, in addition to expanding my own work with wood to include jewelry and knickknacks and whatnots, using the leftover wood from Matt's work and other collected materials from my meanderings. We've been expanding into new techniques and materials in both fabrics and woods, which keeps things creatively interesting, but is also in pursuit of chasing down a niche in which to work that is creatively inspired, practical for our own purposes, and can find us a larger market so that we can leverage ourselves out of the "hopefully we can pay all of the bills this winter" category and into something a little more reliable.

If we can keep up our hustle, perhaps this time next year we'll be set up to work with a serger and some high-performance, high-durability technical fabrics in the sewing shop and maybe even a desktop CNC in the workshop for speedier turnaround on mods (not to mention all of the other amazing stuff we could dream up with a tool like that). It's exciting to feel like maybe there's some surer footing growing under our feet, that maybe there isn't a futility in trying to find purchase for our creative pursuits. Maybe we can make this artist thing actually work out. For now we're happy just to have the vintage tank of a sewing machine and band saw and estate-sale-please-just-get-this-off-my-hands drill press and the sander and our dusty and calloused hands....for now. So much for hibernating! I think it's going to be a busy winter...

Detroit: A New Frontier

A few months ago, in early April, as we and the rest of Detroit were sill shaking ourselves awake from the brutal, endlessly cold and snowy winter, we hosted an Australian couple, newly married and on their honeymoon traveling across North America. Laura had been working in video production for years already, but had recently started accumulating material that she had shot and produced fully on her own and wanted to work on a project in Detroit. We said "of course, we'd be happy to help however we can!"

To be honest, we didn't really know what to expect. We've had other guests interview us, photograph us, take video here or there. Sometimes we've gotten something back, most of the time we've never heard anything about it again, which is just as well. Neither of us is particularly comfortable calling attention to ourselves, and the idea of being the subject of a chapter in a book or in a documentary is vaguely uncomfortable anyway, because the medium and the tone is no longer in our control. But Laura was great, earnest and sincere in her desire to capture the Detroit that she experienced here in early April, happy to let us ramble our way through the story of how and why we ended up here, why we think Detroit is a special place right now, without demanding that we try to give a broken explanation of what happened to Detroit (that story is too complex for us to do justice in telling - there are whole disciplines devoted to dissecting and explaining the nuances of American race relations, politics, industry, real estate, collapse; and we are not those scholars). But we felt at ease with Laura, and she was happy for us to just talk about what we knew, what we had experienced here, rather than trying to create a piece that would deal with all of Detroit's issues, knowing that there were plenty of those around already, to greater or lesser effect. She just wanted us to tell our story. So we did, and all of our nervousness that despite all intents, we would still come across as ignorant, white-knighting hipster transplants to the city turns out to have been unjustified. She did a great job, she made us look better than we probably think of ourselves as being, and she got some wonderful, haunting, misty early spring footage of Detroit to boot.

So, here it is, another part of our story. We hope you like it. And, of course, check out http://laurabrain.com/ for more of Laura's excellent work, too!