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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Here it is — my first sweater. It only took me four years — well, it really only took about a month of actual knitting — I started it a couple of times and had to pull it out a couple of times but finally, it’s done. I’m wearing it now. It’s cozy and heavy and although the sleeves are a little long, it actually fits and the proportions are right — I’m going to do another one in this same pattern but using Becky Weed’s gorgeous wool she mills over at 13 Mile Ranch. This will be my locavore…
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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…
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My milk delivery came yesterday. The thing with buying milk from a real cow is that it’s not always the same. This week I pulled nearly a quart of cream off the top of my gallon, and the cream is thicker than it’s been before. Almost like English cream — slightly lumpy. This might be alarming except that I know my cows (well, I know my cow-lady). I took the leftover cream from last week and mixed it in with the creme fraiche I already had going (I bought a tub at the local gourmet store to use for starter).…
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I’m about to go log in to my job at the Big Corporation, the job that I’m hoping will see me through whatever impending financial doom is rising on the horizon, the job that isn’t my dream job, but which I like nonetheless. As much as I’d love to be able to write full time, it’s good to have a real job, especially for a writer — it keeps me engaged with the world outside my little circle of writers and artists and handymen and hunters and ranchers trying to make a go of it selling milk and eggs and…