Part 1: How to Grow Food to Feed You and Your Family for a Year

Are you interested in growing enough food to feed you and your family for a year? It has been a goal of mine for years, and it is a milestone that I am excited to share with you. For me, it’s been an incremental process. I’ve been gardening for ten years now–from a couple of…

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….

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…

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…

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…

Legacy.

What will we leave behind? What characteristics, trinkets, furniture, work, or pieces of land will define us? What knowledge will we bestow? What work ethics or heart will pass through us to future generations? I am making yogurt out of semi-expired milk and cooking hiziki seaweed on the stove while thinking about these things. This is…

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…