I have felt the darkness so close to me this season. Not darkness that blinds you while you struggle, but darkness that covers you like a soft blanket; peaceful, restful darkness – darkness with a gentle heartbeat, where you can rest and dream. It was right after Thanksgiving I began feeling the quiet and the…
Category: Homesteading
Creamy Oyster Mushroom Soup
The night of the first frost I came home from the market, unloaded, and then in the dark began pulling big sheets of frost cloth over the plants I hoped to save. The wind whipped around me, tearing at the edges of the cloth as I scrambled to secure it down. The campers who had…
LATE SUMMER VEGETABLE GROWING AND EATING GUIDE #2: Bitter melon
Most people I’ve met who have had a culinary adventure with bitter melon share stories of horror. When I first tried to feed it to my family years ago I got the same reaction I get from trying to feed the piggies something they don’t consider food: outraged squealing and disgruntled criticisms. I didn’t grow…
LATE SUMMER VEGETABLE GROWING AND EATING GUIDE #1: Late Summer Asian Cucumbers
Let’s be honest – the late summer garden vegetables are gorgeously colorful and tasty, but they are definitely unusual. For a long time, I thought nothing would grow this time of year, and it rested in my gardening mind like a deep winter of sorts. That was before I discovered the wonderful selection of vegetables…
New Season
This world of dewIs only the world of dew —And yet…..oh and yet….. – Issa Kobayashj, written on the death of his little daughter I had to move very hastily last September, and all our stuff has been haphazardly stored at my parent’s house in Gainesville, waiting for an unknown time when I am not…
Sky Blue Sticky Rice With Blue Butterfly Pea
I just love the wild and twisting shapes, the intense, slippery flavors, and the bright colors of the late summer garden. A good late summer garden in Florida should look and feel like anything could happen, like a loud Saturday night party scene. The crickets and cicadas blare their loud music day and night, and…
The Bad Dog
I’ve been having some adventures lately with the dog. She’s incredibly sweet and well behaved and affectionate – but like all livestock guardian dogs, she has the inbuilt vice of absolutely loving to abandon all duty and run away. She doesn’t go far. She mostly creeps across the road and sits under the neighbor’s trampoline….
Breakfast Parsnips And Bacon
We are in those baking hot, long sun days now, the hard drought time of the early summer when even the wild plants wilt and long for rain. At my new farm, the dry afternoon wind blows through the herby meadows and smells fragrant and good from the wild croton and the skullcap. This year…
Green Monster Pancakes
I feel like this is a spring in my life… So many new beginnings… it makes me feel young again. I remember how difficult it was to leave my old farm behind – even afterwards more and more things from my old life have been shed or liquidated. It feels so distant now, like the…
CRISPY SESAME GARLIC EGGPLANT
The first frosts of the winter have come through. I am missing the woodstoves I left behind in my old life, but I remember, too, when we had first moved, and nothing was finished yet, and the slow process over eight years where life felt more and more comfortable. Little details, like which direction a…
The Sacred Mother
Being in this new place, I am still getting to know this new piece of earth, and all the plants and the animals that live here and were here before us. Starting over all fresh, I can see the way the land shifts to me with how I live, the ways I walk, the things…
Pork Meatballs With Persimmon Barbecue Sauce
I always feel a rebirth this time of year here in Florida – the winds come through and blow away the heavy, moldy, damp, boiling hot summer and bring fresh, cool mornings and bright fall skies. The crushing vines the ruled the garden wither back, and tender new things grow in neat rows in the…
Toadstools And Fairy Rings 