Recently, The New York Times wrote an op-ed about beans, A Boom Time for the Bean Industry. In it, staggering statistics like this show up: “Many canners and packagers are hiring staff or adding shifts to meet the surge in demand. Typically, Rancho Gordo receives 150 to 200 orders a day for its specialty beans….
Tag: farmstead
What To Plant Now: A Sampling of Spring Seeds
I’m getting lots of messages and questions about planting and that makes me so happy—think of all the adults and kids digging their hands in dirt! And think of the truly immeasurable joy of giving and receiving a hand grown bouquet of homegrown food…It’s enough to make you cry, quite truly, during these times. So….
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Video: This Wild Life – A short story trailer for Eating Buckets
What do you wish for? What keeps you up at night? Where will your heart take you? Brian and I ask each other these questions often because it keeps us curious and alive, but we don’t often get to combine words and pictures and think about these questions the way we were able to in…
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Photo Diary: Buckets and Buckets and Buckets of Life.
Everything around us is bursting with burgeoning, blossoming, gorgeous, incredible, inspiring, life-giving, life-supporting, life-affirming, nature-built pieces of art. From the blackberry blossoms to the clusters of Italian plums to the Braeburn and heirloom and Fuji and Transparent apples and Bosc pears to the greens and peppers and tomato blossoms, to the first fire-orange nasturtiums, and…
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Riding the tractor with dad.
Brian mowed the lawn this weekend, and I spent the morning mowing the far reaches of our property earlier this week. It’s been forever since we mowed the whole place, and I had an epiphany about the crazy joy of wandering through dappled grass and carving out play space and trails and platforms for…
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Endorphin blast.
We woke this morning to riotous springtime birdsong and sun–precious, blessed sun–blasting through our bedroom window. Our rooster was crowing his head off, surprising even himself with his bantam lung power, I am sure. The poor girls trapped in the henhouse were pretty grumpy when the kids finally arrived to let them out. We gathered…
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Making A Hugelkultur Garden
Hugelkultur (German for “gardening with mounds”) is a form of permaculture gardening that has been heralded as a way to end world hunger, because it offers sustainable gardening methods that require very little water: “Hugelkultur are no-dig raised beds with a difference. They hold moisture, build fertility, maximise surface volume and are great spaces for…
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Collecting seeds and planting dreams.
At the end of last year, I went to our local library and bought a huge stack of castaway magazines from their donation section for 25 cents apiece. I sat down with my husband, a couple of pairs of scissors, and a glass of wine, and snipped out all the images and words that called…
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A brighter light.
The days are getting longer–morning coffee is still imbibed piping hot in the dark, but the sun has made its appearance by the time the kids are off to school. Brian missed the early ferry to work today so we had a rare morning together at the marina with extra cups of fancy caffeine from…
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Garden planning.
I’m eating reheated shepherd’s pie and sipping hot tea with honey while browsing through the Sero Seed catalog and dreaming about spring and summer garden harvests. It’s time to start planning. I’m taking an inventory of what worked last year and I’m going to start building out our wish lists for this year. Then I’ll…
