Here’s what we woke up to Sunday morning — a little over two feet of new, wet, heavy snow — the dog door was drifted over, as was the front walkway.I shoveled, and luckily my neighbor with the sno-blower did my front sidewalk because this was like Midwestern snow — heavy, wet, soggy — did I mention heavy? Usually we have fall, then winter. It’s one of the things I loved when I first moved up here — a return to four actual seasons — but this year we went from summer, to a 20 degree frost, to almost 3…
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Here’s what I woke up to this morning — yup, that’s snow. About four inches — and it’s supposed to keep coming down all weekend. Yesterday I woke up to a hard frost — I went to check the tomatoes and they were dead. Dead dead dead dead dead. So I pulled them up and threw their soggy carcasses into the compost. I salvaged enough late ones to make this big pot of frostbitten-tomato sauce. That’s the last of the tomatoes, a couple of carrots, and a sautee’d onion — later I added a can of Muir Glen organic…
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There’s a really interesting piece in this morning’s New York Times about the town of Hardwick, Vermont and the Center for Agricultural Economy. Hardwick was, like many small rural towns, emptying out — main street was full of empty buildings, and there was no way to make a living. Then a group of local agricultural entrepreneurs got together, meeting monthly, loaning one another money, figuring out ways to share skills and resources so that they all prosper. Their website says that their goal is programs that: …will recognize that the 21st century food system balance be tipped towards localization over…
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I’m having another one of those weeks at work where there is too much to do and not nearly enough time alotted to do it — So here’s a couple of links — Bob del Grosso contemplates the chicken-and-the-egg nature of cooking on a farm. And Shuna gives me hope that even though I’m currently in the weeds, there might be a way out …
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It’s all harvest all the time here at LivingSmall right now — I put tomatoes up this weekend in the terrifying pressure canner, and there’s all that kale and chard I’m going to have to deal with at some point — but in the meantime my Roma beans finally came in — they got such a late start I didn’t think they’d come through, but they’ve been producing like gangbusters for a few weeks now. I’ve taken to cooking them up in big batches, then freezing them into what I like to think of as hockey pucks. One of the…
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As anyone who has been reading here for a while knows, I’m no vegetarian (I tried in college, but I missed sausage, and lamb, and bacon, and cheeseburgers). But I have to admit that with rising food prices, and global warming, and my increasing unwillingness to eat meat that wasn’t raised by someone I know (which means I’m paying a lot more for meat) — well, I’m eating less meat. Mark Bittman wrote a rather inspirational post about this earlier this summer that got me thinking — it’s really easy to just slip into that meat-veg-starch dinner formula. And it’…
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So, in trying to find my mother an apartment that she can afford, and that isn’t a shoebox, and that is in a building that’s not just full of old people on oxygen, we wound up going to look at some buildings in Milwaukee. I hadn’t been to Milwaukee since my 6th grade field trip to the Stroh’s Brewery, and I remembered it as a grey colorless place, an industrial city full of tanneries and breweries and factories. Well, Milwaukee has certainly come up in the world. We looked at a number of very cool industrial buildings that had been…