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…

 Rose ended up with no less than two birthday cakes because a consensus was never reached about whether the cake would be strawberry or raspberry.  It served the dual purpose to ensure left-overs, as someone around here is very greedy with other people’s birthday cakes. This is one of my favorite grain-free cakes – It…

Yesterday Ethan caught three little rabbits near the garden.  We are not sure what to do with them.  We had caught one little wild rabbit years ago (eating my garden!!) and he did not take well to captivity.  We could release them (to go eat my garden) but….   (caution, snake picture) There were actually four…

We had a crazy birthday weekend.  With Rose’s seventh birthday coming up on Tuesday, the celebrating has begun.  She requested going out to Satchel’s  for pizza for her birthday dinner.  We did that on Saturday.  We hardly ever go out to eat, maybe once a year, so it was our yearly stop by Satchel’s, the…

  We got bees about four years ago after we attended a top-bar hive building workshop and built our own top-bar hive.  Unfortunately, we didn’t know that the hive had to be completely level or the bees will draw their comb funny and the frames will not be able to be removed.  We got busy…

This is turning out to be our best and most ambitious fall/winter garden so far.  We got some major garden work done over the last week.  There are three beds that are manured, hayed, planted, hooped and netted.  The hoops look so nice and professional – definitely a step-up from the ugly pvc pipe hoops…

This yellow thing is the bin we get literally a ton of spent barley grains in every so often.  The girls thought it would be fun to play in. After only a few minutes, Clothilde decided she was bored and climbed out. Even though it’s almost as tall as she is.  Isn’t that terrifying? I…