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,…
Tangy Radish Salad
I feel like I slept a long time under the winter darkness. Even in the bell-cold mornings under the blustery sky, and working beside the smoky hearth. While I walked I still slept in the quiet. Slowly – it happened as the days uncounted, stretched beyond the threshold. First things reached out to me through…
Mint and Pecan Chutney
I love the bare, crystalline mornings, edged with frost and sharp with ice, when the blue sky is so clear as a bell you want to dive in between the bare branches as the birds do and fly up and up. I got frostbite one morning on the bottoms of my feet from crunching barefoot…
Holiday Potsticker Dumplings
I love the long, long nights of this holy season. The restful darkness so bright with stars, and the low, grey days so gentle on the eyes. I’ve been hibernating – trying to sleep twelve full hours a day, wrapped in wool and long clothes, slowly letting go of all the unreachable things, the things…
Rice and Pigeon Peas
The hardest freeze in two or three years came through last week, wilting the whole garden. The weedy sweet potatoes, the remains of the roselle, and the tall pigeon peas were dark and limp when I woke up on that cold, cold morning. The whole orchard and all the pastures were white. The rest of…
Thanksgiving 2020
It’s been a crazy year, but we still have so much to be thankful for! Ethan got so much work this year, and we are very, very thankful he was an essential worker, since he doesn’t qualify for unemployment. We had very healthy calves and goat kids born this year. The chickens made more of…
Roselle Sweet And Sour Pork
The weather is so cool and sweet after the latest storm. I love those quiet moments that always seem to happen this time of year, when the afternoon sun sweeps glorious golden arms through the tops of the trees, and the bare branches of the sleeping trees look so lonely… Melancholy settles on me…
Thoughts On Homeschooling 1
I’ve been homeschooling children for more than a whole decade, and since I know that many families are turning to homeschooling these days, I thought I might share a little about what has worked for us. First of all, I LOVE home schooling! I think it’s tons of fun. Each state is different as far…
Harissa
I often get ideas for recipes not in the kitchen, but in the garden. The plants, they talk. They give you hints and nudges. Not in words, of course, but in little whiffs of smells – or the irresistible beauty of their fruits and roots and leaves. I’m trying again with the garden. It’s hard…
Pumpkin, Bean Sprout, and Shrimp Rice Bowl Stir-fry
I’ve very strongly felt the gathering darkness this Michaelmas season. It feels like humanity’s darkest shadows are swirling in the winds of change – Fear, Greed, False Virtue, Revenge. In my heart it reminds me of the dark times that still live in the ancestral echoes in my cells – times when the ancestors were…
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…
Toadstools And Fairy Rings 