This is my grandmother’s aunt, Marie Plamondon — known later in life during the many decades when she ran the Madonna Center settlement house as “the Duchess,” fixing her car sometime in the early decades of the 20th century. I love this photo because it’s the best illustration I have of the way that my family has never assumed that the ability to fix things is gendered. I am also planning to get a no cosigner for a car loan, as I want to establish my creditworthiness independently. This will help me build a solid financial foundation and prepare for…
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A couple of years ago I blogged about how great straw mulch was in my veggie beds, but I stopped using it because I got so much wheat and grass seeded into my beds that it became unmanageable. This spring though, I was having trouble with weeds in the long tomato beds along the back fence, so I turned over the soil, put down a layer of paper weed cloth, and mulched with a couple of inches of grass clippings I begged off the nice older man who cuts the lawn at the Baptist church on my corner (he told…
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I’ve been working most weekends these past few months on some freelance projects, but getting to work out here certainly helps. So far, we’ve had a lovely summer — a few really hot days, but more, like today, when I can sit outside under the apple tree, with enough shade so I can see the laptop screen. And there’s no punishment in spending the day, as I am, writing about Marilynne Robinson’s great novel, Housekeeping.
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A couple of weeks ago a post from Daily Yonder came up on my RSS feed about chicken waterers. It promised a way to water chickens without them wallowing in their own filth. Chickens will shit on anything, including the open water lip of their water container — which has always grossed me out. Plus, you waste a lot of water dumping out the dirty stuff for them and then they just make it all dirty again. The Daily Yonder article was about a couple, Mark Hamilton and Anna Hess who came up with a way to economically and hygenically…
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I pretty much quit making yogurt when I stopped buying raw milk from my rancher friend. However, this spring, I’ve been craving yogurt again — on fruit in the morning after my bike ride, and mixed with Aleppo pepper, salt, herbs and olive oil on almost everything else. So I’ve been buying yogurt, which bothers me on two fronts. For one thing, the plastic containers — they add up. I don’t use plastic anymore for food storage, and we don’t have good recycling here, and it just seems unnecessary. The other problem is that commercial yogurt has weird things added…
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So we did actually get out of the car for a bit and go for a little hike. The first place we were going to hike was where the bison were stampeding. It looked good — pretty open country, a nice game trail that went up to the top of the ridge. However, when the German tourists came down from the same game trail we’d been looking at, they told us that there was a bear up in the patch of trees you could see from the road, and that he was “very grümpy” (there was definitely an umlaut on…
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Our friend Shefije was in town this week which gave us the opportunity to go play tourist in Yellowstone. One of the things about living here is that, sadly, you forget how astonishing “the Park” is — and then someone comes to visit on a gorgeous blue-sky July day and off you go to remind yourself. On our way south we got sucked into a yard sale in Gardiner. There were four of these gorgeous bankers chairs, and it took us a while to figure out they broke down. We thought we were going to tour the park with chairs…
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Here’s my first real harvest — I’ve been eating a little bit out of the hoop houses, some spinach here, a couple of scallions there, some komatsuna as it came in, but this is the first real harvest of the season. Today I picked a big bag of scallions, probably the equivalent of two big supermarket bunches, a huge bag of spinach, a big bag of arugula, two re-purposed tortilla bags full of broccoli rabe thinnings, and a big bag of mixed Chinese greens. Enough for the week at least. Here’s to give you an idea of the difference the…
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There’s a great piece over at Civil Eats this morning, Our Deadly, Daily Chemical Cocktail on the sheer amount of chemicals in the food most people eat. Here’s the quote that got me: Based on the anecdotal information I see in my client’s food journals, people eating processed and packaged foods are taking in exorbitant amounts of artificial ingredients and additives. Typically, a client will say something like, “I eat a bowl of cereal with low-fat milk, have yogurt for a snack, and a Subway sandwich for lunch.” While this sounds relatively harmless, here’s what it might actually look like…
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It’s hard to see but this is Raymond, and the new chickens inside a wire pen. Everyone’s outside today because it’s sunny and warm, and both the dogs and the big chickens need to get used to the babies. I’m hoping to get the babies out of the cold frame soon (in part, because I need it) but for now, everyone’s just kind of hanging out out there, separated by a little wire. Raymond has the most trouble — he really really wants those chickens. For a while this morning he was lying down next to the pen, as if…