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…

We had a huge day on Saturday when we held the annual group-birthday party for all three children.  It was a tea party (Rose’s request) and a cricket match (for Mirin).  There were grain-free cupcakes with three different kinds of cream cheese frosting, sandwiches, sprouted wheat cookies, pork and mushroom pate, salads, and of course…

We’ve been busy today with pumpkin carving, baking cinnamon molasses cookies for the occasional trick-or-treater, and costuming….. We ended up with Zorro, a tiny cowgirl, and some character from “Frozen,” which neither Ethan or I have seen.  Mirin and I did most of the pumpkin carving, of course, with strict directions from the little sisters….

The good news about the garden is that the eggplants have made a full recovery from being chewed down to stubs by the blister beetles.  It’s amazing how many pest problems can be solved by handpicking pests into soapy water.  That said, it was actually really hard to kill the blister beetles, because they looked…

Clothilde actually took this picture.  We had an exciting beginning to our day today, which I won’t describe.  It involved the toddler in the bathroom alone for a few minutes and lots of emergency laundry. Yesterday was our 8th anniversary.  Not too bad for having been married relatively young for our times at 22.  We…

Rose has been taking a break from milking lately, which is probably a good thing with how short the days are becoming.  Of course I miss our chats, but I am sure she will come back to it again. Meanwhile, Clothilde and I were doing the chores together and she ended up being very helpful…

It’s become a tradition every year at the homecoming parade that Mirin and Rose always return with a bag full of thorny prickly pear fruits.  There’s a huge, beautiful cactus that grows along the way, and Mirin always insists that they stop.  This is slightly uncomfortable for my mother-in-law, who always takes them – not…

I just had some thoughts recently about gratitude I thought I would share.  It came up in the Foundations Studies class I had taken through the Center for Anthroposophy (which I am not continuing with, for various reasons).  One of the spiritual principles one is supposed to live by is gratitude. My family was not…

  The Trinidad spice pepper bushes are loaded.  They are getting a little spicy around the seeds now that the weather is cooling off, but they are such delicious peppers, great for snacking on.   We planted another bed last week.  It’s mostly roots – parsnips, beets and radishes, with lettuce between.  It’s finally cool…