The new year started off with a bang this past week. The peach trees decided it was spring, and burst into bloom. The chickens and ducks are leaving eggs lying around everywhere. One of the black hens keeps trying to come inside and lay an egg in the kitchen. And last week we had FIVE…
Category: Homesteading
A Small Silence
Thank goodness that fall is here. This summer was such a long, hot, moldy, unhappy struggle. I feel like I lost so many things, and floundered around and failed. There was never enough time or energy to do what I wanted and needed to do, never enough to go around, things breaking, and heaps of…
Summer Harvests
I’ve had several in-person interactions with people lately that have really, really sucked. One of them involved one of my oldest friends, and we have parted ways. It was a long time coming – he never respected me, not since our days together in high school. For so many years he constantly criticized me –…
The Brag Garden
It’s taken me so long to put this post together – I have had a very shaky internet connection lately and the uploading took forever – but here it is at last – and while I was in the process, the garden has changed so much, from the straw-mulched infant garden stage to flourishing and…
Elsa
Although Hurricane Elsa was not much of a hurricane once it reached us, we got a lot of rain. Lots and lots and lots of rain! Three weeks before the official storm, we were also pelted daily with rain, rain, rain. Every day was dark and cloudy, and the sun only occasionally shone silvery white…
A New Herd
The goats have been keeping me busy – we slaughtered the three male bucklings from this spring, and suddenly we have lots of meat and lots of milk. Kefir, yogurt, cheese, too. It is such an abundance as we have not had in several seasons. It feels heady and happy – every meal is a…
New Milk Custard Pie With Mulberries
This post is not timely, unfortunately. A while ago the mulberries were finished fruiting, and the season for new babies is nearly over. But the truth is this post is a difficult one for me to write – because there was trouble this season, and people who don’t live with this kind of thing –…
Radishes With Miso Tamari Sauce and Sesame Seeds
The peach trees are blooming profusely in the orchard still. I’ve watched each of the ten trees one by one be ornamented with delicate pink blossoms, and then the slow, graceful dance of lacy green leaves unfolding. So quickly the flowers fade and are gone, but for these three weeks or so I am enchanted…
Three – A Birth Story
Two of my eight mama goats this year were due to kid last week. I didn’t write down the exact day I turned the buck in with them (a healthy goat carries her kids exactly 150 days. It isn’t like cows who have a 20-day window), but it’s easy to see when they are ready,…
Three Hot Sauces
Once again this season – this whirling, swirling season of new gardens and homeschool, birthdays and busyness and expectations, has picked me up and crushed me like a hurricane from the Gulf. Every day feels so, so busy – every moment so very, very full. I feel like I’m suffocating under all the work. Some…
A Garden Tour Spring 2020
Can I show you my garden? This is, beyond a shadow, the most beautiful, flower-filled, viney, better-homes-and-gardens, fairy dust, glossy magazine centerfold, rockstar, dreamboat, fairest-of-them-all, wish-upon-a-star, garden of dreams garden than I’ve ever grown before…. I took first-planted pictures to include, so you can see how it has grown! Here it is now: These are…
The Odd Bits: Blood Loaf
Just after we moved from my childhood home to a lonely neighborhood, i started having panic attacks. A month before we had moved, I got eight new silver amalgam fillings, triggering a severe kidney infection that didn’t respond to antibiotics, asthmatic bronchitis that i didn’t fully recover from for years, and a heart arrhythmia. I…
Toadstools And Fairy Rings 