I’ve been in a frenzy of food preservation here at LivingSmall. Saturday I pulled and washed and cut and blanched and drained two six-gallon trash cans full of endive. I then wrapped the blanched endive in towels to squeeze out the water and sealed it in bags using my vaccuum sealer and froze them for later this winter. I also shredded the outer leaves that looked okay but not really nice enough to put up for winter and I’m experimenting with making sauerkraut from them — we’ll see how it works out. Right now, it looks like wet salty leaves…
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Because it’s Friday, and because we ate and drank just a tiny bit too much last night at Patrick’s Posthumous Birthday party (which was delightful and jolly and because our friend Jim hung Patrick’s picture on the restaurant wall, it sort of felt like he was among us) — this morning LivingSmall brings you that staple of the exhausted blogger: a list of links. Hugh Fearnly-Wittingstall expounds on the joys of hunting mushrooms (and I wish I lived in England so I could have gotten the free mushroom guide with my copy of the Guardian). If it ever manages to…
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You’ve probably seen by now that Madeleine L’Engle has died. Despite having been the kind of kid who could walk between classes with my nose in a book and never bump into anyone (I also became very quick at taking tests because we were free to read after we were done), I was never a big fan of A Wrinkle in Time. As a kid, I had a horror of stories where things turned into other things — Alice in Wonderland, for example. Perhaps it’s because I had the kind of life where 180s were all too common, where people…
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Grist links to a piece on urban gardening and the class divide that still plagues the sustainable food movement. The article covers why the folks who run the Food Project decided to keep selling in their own neighborhood and not at the fancy downtown market where they could make more money, and perhaps assure the sustainability of their own organization. Steve Sando tours industrial bean fields and comes to understand why people are so astonished at how great his beans taste (really folks — his beans are delicious). I ordered several packages of beans from Steve last spring when we…
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Let’s all try to go out and affect some kind of change today — no matter how small. (Me, I’m still trying to figure out how to recycle that plastic — can’t do it in Livingston, so I’ll have to check next time I drive to Bozeman. Otherwise, I’m mailing it to one of you who has plastic recycling in your town …) From “All My Habits are Bad” the Salon interview with A.M. Homes (via Bookslut) Do writers have a moral obligation? Oh, I think all human beings do. So if all human beings have it, then writers have…
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The San Francisco Chronicle had an article a couple of weeks ago about pastured chickens, followed closely by this article in the NY Times questioning whether “cage free” as it’s practiced in chicken houses around the country is really any more humane than battery chicken. I’ve been buying eggs for a couple of years from a local outfit called Willow Bend Eggs. They are the most astonishing eggs I’ve ever eaten. They’ve ruined me for all other eggs. They’re brown, and large, and the yolks are the deepest marigold color you’ve ever seen and they stand up all perky and…
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Since I seem to have lost the day to a series of lighting fixtures I put up (don’t even ask about the screw with the stripped threads, and the hacksaw, and the swearing …), here’s some Friday Links to keep everyone entertained: Had lunch today with another Livingston Blogger: Go check out Livingston, I presume Found an interesting piece over at Ethicurean on the sort of small meat processers that we depend on around here. I’m planning to buy a lamb this fall from my dog groomer, and without Sheep Mountain Processing, I’d be sunk. Check out Postcards from Cowboyland …
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I haven’t had a chance to read Barbara Kingsolver’s new book, Animal Vegetable Miracle yet (it’s still out at the library, which I’m trying to use more because if I fail at living small, it’s on the book front), but the sheer volume of press it’s getting has had me thinking that it was time to revisit Joan Dye Grussow’s earlier book on the same subject, This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader. One of the things that sold me on this house was the big, if fallow, vegetable garden in the back yard. Eight children grew up in…
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We’ve been having a little dispute here in Livingston with a local developer — he accused those of us who disagree with him of being victims of “class envy” — oh, and he called us stupid too. We were a little pissed off, and I wrote a letter to the editor of our local paper. Looks like it’s been picked up out there on the internets — go have a look: “Class Envy” in Montana: The Ameya Preserve Saga
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A few groovy new sites I found: Leslie Land, the GreenGrower: check out the instructions for building a gorgeous twig garden arch in her blog. The Daily Green: has a piece on an upcoming scientific paper on colony collapse disorder. Also, in the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert writes about colony collapse disorder and her own experience keeping bees. There’s also some great footage of the pulley system she’s devised to try to keep the bears out of her hives.