Well, the dogs are on the mend — Ray’s stitches come out on Friday and I took Owen off to have his dressings changed today. I wish I’d had my camera with me — that external fixature is quite something. My little FrankenPuppy. His Fenatyl patch is also off, which is making him a little less groggy — thank goodness we have the mysterious “anaglesic elixir” because he’s still intermittently uncomfortable. In other news — the tomatoes are getting their true leaves down in the basement, although I didn’t have the germination rates with the pepper seedlings that I’d hoped…
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During my blogging hiatus, I did a lot of little projects — and one of them was cleaning out the vegetable beds in prep for planting. I still need to order compost but I’m waiting for my new fence to go in because I want to build a new raised bed. But I spent a glorious warm Saturday cleaning out the dead stuff. I’ve learned the last couple of years that although it looks messy all winter, it makes more sense to clean up in the spring instead. If you also plan to clean your whole house, these quality home…
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It’s that time of year again! Time to start the seeds. This is the fourth year I’m set up to start seeds in my oh-so-fancy basement seed starting lair — I have two germination mats — they’re the 2-flat size. Because it’s chilly in my basement, without them, I don’t think I’d get much action. You can’t see it here, because I hiked it up so I could work on the bench, but there’s a cheap shop light with full-spectrum tubes hanging from a ceiling beam. Once the little guys sprout, I’ll lower it — they do best when the…
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We’re having a real winter this year — four inches of new snow yesterday, 25 degrees and grey skies today (but at least the wind isn’t blowing). This is the first winter since I’ve lived in Montana that I’ve really wanted to jet off someplace warm for a shot of sunshine (or is it the first winter since I’ve been here that I haven’t gone to California for work?). My bulbs are just barely starting to peek up out of the ground — the last couple of winters have been so warm that they all bloomed early. The silver lining…
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Bookslut picked up on the indelible image of Wendell Berry mucking out his composting privvy by pointing out this really interesting interview over at Mother Earth News. Some of his points seem a teeny bit dated (Green Acres? Who has watched Green Acres in 25 years?) but as always, it’s the way Wendell Berry champions those old, unsexy values of work and fidelity and discipline and the hard work of learning a craft. Which sounds very grim, but like the monastic rules, it’s the idea that through discipline comes joy. For instance: BERRY: It’s like having a milk cow. Having…
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Funny the way synchronicity works — I’ve been thinking a lot about how skills like learning to knit, or sew, or garden, or cook — skills some of our mothers (or in my case, my grandmother) discounted as being the kinds of skills that keep a girl tied to a domestic existence that stifles other opportunity — are for me a fulfilling way of refusing to cede control of my basic lifeskills to the corporate behemoths that seem to have taken over our lives. If I can sew a skirt, I’m not entirely beholden to clothes made in factories. If…
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Look at my new pruning saw — isn’t it beautiful? The most beautiful thing about this pruning saw is how well it works. I’d been using a hacksaw, which was really arduous, but this baby, with it’s many sharp teeth made short work of the overgrown golden plum tree, the overgrown local plum tree, and the last of the two weedy ash trees that were taking over my garage. See what I did with my new saw? It was a very productive weekend. Now let’s just hope for one of those springs we sometimes get where the weather sets up…
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It was nice out yesterday — at least for a while — it got up into the 40s, and the sun shone briefly, so I got much dog poop cleaned up, and then, as sometimes happens this time of year, the pruning bug hit me. First, I took on my plum tree — which is really a group of four or five trunks, all of which grow parallel to one another and sort of form one “tree.” The last two years I’ve had not only a huge glut of plums (these are the little local plums) but many of them…
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It happens every year about this time. We start getting a little more daylight and suddenly things I put up months ago, and had no interest in, start appealing to me again. I have tons of mint in my garden, and all through the growing season (which is long for mint, it’s both hardy and invasive) I usually go out and grab a big handfull to stuff in my morning pot of tea. By the time fall comes around, and the mint gets weedy and starts to die back, I lose interest in mint in my tea. But every year…
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My love of Joan Dye Grussow‘s work, particularly This Organic Life, is well documented on this blog. Her experiences over the years growing and storing most of her own food was absolutely inspirational to me when I built my garden, and it’s still a book I go back to again and again. This video has been kicking around the blogosphere for a while now — it’s Joan Dye Grussow, Michael Pollan and Dan Barber of Blue Hill discussing ethicurean issues and trying to figure out how to eat in ways that are good not only for their health but for…