Deer Isle Hostel Blog
This is the last blog entry I’ll make for this year. The hostel year is coming to an end for now, the summer guests are long gone, the lobster traps hauled, the B&B’s closed and the island empty and quiet. I’m about to leave and go home to Sweden for a while, awaiting spring and a renewal of my visa. From my old writing desk in my parents’ house, I’ll do whatever I can to bring the hostel forward. Hand made and traditional and back to basic in all its glory, but Internet sure helps a great deal in times like this.
Dennis will keep working. Finish of the windows and the exterior. Work it out from there.
We’ll keep adding pictures on the photo-page, so do check in once sometime and see how Dennis is doing.
Til next spring, I wish you all a warm winter.
Anneli
Deer Isle Hostel October 2008
We’re on the window page, week after week. We’ll stay on that very page for a while now, putting the casement windows together piece by piece. 6 windows and 14 pieces per each window, in the frame alone. The lumber have been picked out, planed, the pieces cut and sanded. One by one. To this, we’ll add close to 150 panels of glass in the sashes, piece by piece.
It is a work of art, the building Dennis is building. We’ve heard it over and over again from all the visitors that has passed through this past summer. Even if we had the money we couldn’t buy windows like this. Handmade for scratch, with hand forged hardware. The time and energy and love that goes in to these windows can’t be bought and that right there I guess sums up so much of our work. That no money in the world could do it for us.
Bear with us through the window project and remember the hard work next year while enjoying the view from the 2nd floor.
Anneli
And so finally the ice around the windows broke and Dennis and I once again got back to carpentry. The six big windows are being built and assembled, using white pine from the area and hand tools to cut the joinery to hold them together. The smaller windows that are already installed get their last coat of paint this week.
We cleaned the hostel garden up last week, yanked the dead tomato plants and cucumber vines out of the ground and covered the beds with seaweed to let it rest until next spring.
Anneli
As the island is getting more and more colorful by the minute, the hostel year 2008 slowly is coming to an end. My return ticket to Sweden is bought and paid for and Dennis is trying to clear the list of things that needs to get down that involves a helper.
Already we’re talking about next year, next year that will be for real. It dawns to us once a while that this mad summer that just passed was but a dress rehearsal for what will come.
Planned opening is in June, 2009 and looking back at the passed 7 months and forward on the coming 12, it’s easy to see some do’s and don’t’s. We need to bring the building to a point where it’s possible to host people in it. We need to bring the farm from a one/two peoples home to a home for many. We need to let people know we exist. We need to have helpers here.
It also begins to dawn on us that it has to be a compromised opening for next year. We’re talking about 6 guests for the first year. As a training session, before we leap for the whopping number of 8. We’re finding corners to cut, corners that won’t affect the hominess or the comfort of our hostel but corners that will save us the time we need for the bare essentials. We need beds for our guests to sleep in, a kitchen to cook food and toilet/bath facilities.
Most of all, it dawns to us that we’re about to open a hostel. The building that for so long has been a mere project, something we talk about as work and chores and walls and roof and windows will actually be somewhere for people to come to. Something that people will look for, find, enjoy and talk about. That right there, that someone out there soon will deliberately get into their car, on their bike or on the bus and COME TO US. That’s just as scary as thrilling.
Til next week,
Anneli
The first of October and a vast majority of the work around the farm is being done in preparation of the coming winter, much of that happening in the kitchen. And as I wrote last week, are gardens have produced as much as we could possible ask for, especially since one of them is a first year garden. So we’re keeping busy in the kitchen, trying to keep up with the harvests. We canned beets some weeks ago, and saved some out in the ground to let them grow and store as they are. Beets and carrots will do good buried in a bucket of sand and kept in a cool place. Soon enough we’ll harvest the leeks and put them away in the same cool place.
On a trial and error bases, I’ve been fermenting cabbage to make that keep through the winter too. We have way more than we can eat right now and Sauer kraut is one way to preserve it. You just shred the cabbage, add salt and push it down real good in a glass or ceramic jug, keep it pushed down and covered and let it sit. Add garlic, red pepper, ginger and other veggies and you’ve made KimChi, a Korean variety of Sauer kraut.
We’ve canned tomatoes too, as much as we could before we ran out of jars. We dry a lot of them too, place them out on oven sheets and screens and let them sit in the sun or close to the stove. They are as best when not fully dried, and I’ve put them in jars with oil, rosemary and garlic. Yum!
Food processing
Then we have the apples. The whole island is like one big apple orchard, and there’s so much more out there than we could ever deal with. We taste the different kinds to see what they might suit for, and we bake, store, dry and eat.
We’re grateful not only to live on Deer Isle, but also to live off Deer Isle and meal after meal we can prepare with produce and fruit solely from the island.
Til next week,
Anneli
