I’ve been remiss! I just realized I never posted about our winemaking endeavor; and it was begun in January. One would think I didn’t like wine that much! (One would be wrong.) It’s not wine from our own grapes, alas. Those, I can barely get to stay alive, much less produce fruit. This was a […]
Mid-April is pretty late for a blog post on seed starting, but then I seem to be late with absolutely everything this year, on and off the farm. (3 weeks til Mother’s Day and I’m only just now trying to put my pendants in local stores!) This one question, however, is vital and timeless: how […]
We are now 1/4 protected against groundhogs and marauding chickens. I love, love, love this gate. Because it is the main gate, I fancified it with an arch using a tutorial I found over at Casa Decrepit a long time ago. I figured, with the number of times I walk through there per day, it […]
I’ve been fed up lately with the rising cost of organic chicken feed. It’s gone up from $30 to $40, probably due in part to the storms and drought through the corn belt last year, which means that during their best laying months, my girls’ egg output is just covering the cost of their room […]
Of all the homeowner’s chores we have to deal with every year, raking up fallen leaves is probably the one we hate the most. It’s the chore we keep putting off long past the point of procrastination, because not only is it tedious, but there’s just so much of it, and we have so little […]
I got my ‘taters planted! Not too many this year – just a double row of Pontiac. Rogue Leek oversees planting preparations. It would have been twice or three times this many, but these were the worst sprouters I’ve ever had! Weeks and weeks under the grow lamps resulted in maybe one tiny little eye […]
A fence! My kingdom has a fence! Well-braced, beautifully stretched and impervious to groundhog teeth. It’s only 3′ high, but it’s bent out 1′ on the bottom to keep groundhogs from digging. We rented a trencher to dig the fence down, but the ground all along the fence line is a literal swamp, and we […]
We ran out of Quaker Oats Instant Oatmeal packets – one of Sofía’s regular breakfast staples – the other morning. Little paper packets full of mostly-sugar and fake flavorings that microwave up to an appetizing gray mush. Yum. They really aren’t that high in calories, even given that they are mostly sugar, and I thought […]
Last year we had a gorgeous, plentiful crop of peaches for the first time; a nice crop of apples too. That is, until the rainy summer brought canker, fungus and mold, and turned all my darling little baby fruits, fuzzy and pink with promise, into dangling dark mummies withered with mold. Mmmm, yummy. Rather than […]
That’s more like it, Spring. You get a gold star.