life on garden time
A friend asked for some tips on packing lower-plastic and lower-waste lunches for her school-age son. This rather surprised me, since this particular friend is genuine cloth-diapering, Keystone XL Pipeline-protesting, etsy-craft-selling kind of girl. And in fact, when further questioned, it turned out my friend was already packing a pretty green lunch, but was looking [Continue Reading...]
We do chores around here, kids included. So the gift of not having to do those tedious chores is always appreciated. I’m trying to get the last of the holiday gift stuff together today – wrapping presents, stuffing stockings, etc. – and I put together some “Santa Slips to slip in my daughter’s stocking. These are [Continue Reading...]
The problem: your kid has a lot of friends, and wants to give gifts to every single one of them. With your money. Of course, it is absolutely wonderful that your charming and thoughtful child is thinking of his or her peers over the holiday, and you want to encourage this independent spirit of generosity. You just don’t [Continue Reading...]
It seems like there is this phase kids go through where they really want to imitate their parents. My 14 month old son is in that phase now. This’ll tell you all you need to know about how I’ve spent the last 14 months of my life: he just adores wiping up spills, sweeping and pushing his mini-vacuum [Continue Reading...]
I’ve been tending to two sick kids all day, and now that they are in bed, I’ll be honest, an original blog post just ain’t happening tonight. What is happening is a nice bourbon on the rocks and some reading. So instead of trying to pull a blog post out of my ass, I will direct [Continue Reading...]
Dirt. Dirt, dirt, dirt. When you garden, a certain amount of outside comes in. Fine. When you cook 2 to 3 meals a day on a stove (in pork fat, no less!) a certain amount of grease distributes in a fine layer over everything. So in my 7 years as a gardener and my lifetime [Continue Reading...]
The peak marathon of late-summer work in the garden is finally over. Oh sure, there’s clean up and garlic and cover cropping and all those other tasks, but there’s no urgency. The days are shorter and the tasks are less immediate. I’m still preserving pears and apples but the weekend-long sessions of salsa and canned tomatoes [Continue Reading...]
You know how you read the newspaper (or whatever passes for a newspaper in your world – for me it’s the Google news homepage and my blog feed reader) and by the time your coffee is tepid you’ve discovered thirteen new ways in which The World Is Going To Hell In A Handbasket? Like most [Continue Reading...]
As I sit here writing this, both kids just tucked in, a slew of new little boy’s toys to find a home for, and half a brightly colored, overly-sweet, train-shaped cake sitting picked over on the dining room table, it is one year to the hour since my boy was born. His was a fast labor: 90 minutes [Continue Reading...]
I made zucchini chips for the first time. They were easy, they were a hit, they made zucchini into something fun. Something really fun. Maybe too fun. This is how it happened. Zucchini Chips 1 medium zucchiniOlive Oil, for brushing dehydrator traysSalt, to taste Slice zucchini very thin. I used a Japanese slicer (like a mandoline, but better, [Continue Reading...]
I garden with kids. My 7 year old is a dream garden helper, when I can pry her out of her books and get her to help. (I have the nicest problems, truly.) She can thin seedlings, pick peas, weed and chicken wrangle. I really don’t know what I’d do without her. My 10 month [Continue Reading...]
As boys, we are taught to dream big. To throw the game-winning touchdown, to fly the Space Shuttle, to slay the dragon. The world is our oyster, we can be anything. Over time, the probabilistic realities of life and our own limitations get in the way. We grow up and take the jobs that our [Continue Reading...]
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