I wish I could tell you what I’m working on at the moment, but it is a (shhh!!) Christmas surprise for someone.  I have knitted this pattern before, back when Clothilde was wonderfully immobile and still in that cute stage where they are extra chubby and can’t crawl anywhere.  Needless to say, I am finding…

 We discovered this lovely stranger crawling across the pasture the other day.  It had silvery twinkles all over it.  It was a Luna moth. When I was a child, my dad and I raised a bunch of Luna moths from eggs.  Of course my dad did most of it, but I helped him gather sweet…

  This weekend we said goodbye to Meathead, and hello to beef.  It was a huge amount of work – far more than we had anticipated and we are all sore and exhausted.  I have pictures from the harvest (slaughter?) day following, just a caution in case you are sensitive… Meathead was Geranium’s baby, born…

The Daikon radishes and Chinese cabbage were ready in the garden, indicating that it is high time for a batch of kimchi.  Luckily we also had some Trinidad spice peppers left over from before the first frost.  Here’s what I put together: 1 head of Chinese cabbage, shredded 3 Daikon radishes, trimmed, washed and grated…

Brrrr…..it’s cold out there.  Last night it was around 38 F and we were forking the last bit of a load of horse manure onto another garden bed.  My face was so cold it was hard to talk.  The hoops and plastic have seem to have worked for frost protection. Only the tender nasturtiums froze,…

It’s been interesting getting back to doing my chores every day.  I get a lot of exercise.  Not complaining, I like the exercise.  It is grounding, practical, soul-nourishing.  I remember feeling restless living in town when Mirin was small.  We walked a lot in the evenings, careful to avoid the sprayed lawns, the dog turds…

We just finished a four-week math block for home school.  I like taking several weeks for a subject this way.  This is the first year I’ve been very organized with home schooling, and it is really wonderful.  I wish I’d been more organized before.  By organized, I mean I go through and do all the…

I finally went to the farm on Saturday.  It didn’t seem like I had been gone for very long, but everything was different.  The greens in the garden looked huge.  There were tinges of rusty brown in the pine trees.  A frost had put an end to the rioting fall flowers, leaving them delicately dry…

I was sorry yesterday that I couldn’t post a weekly garden update as usual.  The truth is, I haven’t seen the garden in almost a week and I have no idea what it looks like, although Ethan assures me he has been remembering to water it and that it is mostly still alive.  I’ve been…

350 lbs of rye on.  Everything is seeded except the garden. For two days I seeded in moonlight.  The last day we went out earlier and the sun was bright overhead and everything looked golden.  After two days of sowing in twilight with bats flitting overhead and the beautiful moon rising, everything looked so clear…

I’ll admit – we actually don’t know what the heck we’re doing out here on the farm.  We’ve had to learn everything from scratch.  Before this, the only animals I ever had to take care of was a cat, some mosquito fish, and zebra finches.  I thought cucumbers grew in the winter.  It’s been a…

 The first frost came through over the weekend and froze out the sweet potatoes.  We were hesitating to dig them up this year, because we always seem to do it too soon and they are teensy.  But once the tops were frost-killed, I figured I’d better get them out of the ground. The size of…