life on garden time
Maybe you have websites like these your blog-reader. They are filled with instagram-tinted family photos and helpful recipes and they have cute tag-lines that always include the phrase: “journey to self-sufficiency.” These blogs focus on what one family is doing to become more healthy, self-reliant or economically and environmentally responsible. Sometimes the focus is on [Continue Reading...]
For the past five days I’ve been living in an unreal, unearthly limbo. I’m at a professional conference, in a 34 story hotel, in Chicago. I could easily have no idea what time it is. I certainly have no idea what the weather is like. My menus over the past few days read something like this: [Continue Reading...]
Two months ago, Erica posted comparison photos showing seedlings started in a south-facing window vs seedlings started under full-spectrum grow lights. The results were surprising to many readers (including me!) and at least a few readers invested in grow lights after seeing the difference light makes. There are a few reasons why windowsill started seedlings [Continue Reading...]
For Christmas this year I got a new coffee pot. Among the wonders it offered over and above our old coffee pot (in addition to working) was a fabulous keep-warm feature that holds a pot of coffee at steaming hot perfection for four hours! Amazing, what will they think of next? While I love the [Continue Reading...]
2011 was The Year of Additions. We added to our garden: new perennial bed, new mini-orchard, new chickens, two new coops for aforementioned chickens, and a couple new raised beds. We added this blog, and with it a sizable commitment and a wonderful community of like-minded folks. And late in 2010 of course, we had added this [Continue Reading...]
Chickens are not what you expect. Now don’t get me wrong, I love my hens. I love their enthusiastic productivity, their damn near egg-a-day fecundity. I love their retirement plan (soup) almost as much. But there are a lot of myths about chickens floating around out there, and they deserved to be debunked. Myth One: [Continue Reading...]
You knew I’d get around to this eventually, right? A set of gift suggestions for the homebrewer – or potential homebrewer – in your life. To make things simple for the non-homebrewer who might be purchasing these gifts, I’ve put together a dozen suggestions organized by your brewers experience and your desired gift price point. [Continue Reading...]
My dad, a capable man by any measure, a highly skilled Marine in his youth, a brilliant car mechanic and automotive diagnostician as an adult, and a generally handy-about-the-house guy, has long confessed that he does not know how to boil water. If a man of his skill and diverse competencies cannot boil water then [Continue Reading...]
Black Friday is just around the corner, and let’s just suppose that your idea of a good way to spend the morning after Thanksgiving does not include any of the following: Waking up at 4am to queue (I haven’t done that since the last time Pink Floyd went on tour). Receiving trampling injuries from someone [Continue Reading...]
If you had told me ten years ago that I’d spend part of my Sunday herding chickens through a vegetable garden, I never would have believed you. But as I spent part of last Sunday herding chickens through our vegetable garden, something struck me: herding chickens is essentially – perhaps entirely – probabilistic. Gently persuade [Continue Reading...]
The other night, over a glass of porter, Erica asked me how to make a sweet beer. It was a reasonable question – the porter in question is big, boozy, and sweet in the same way that a bar of Sharffenberger 62% is big, chocolatey, and sweet. “Put a lot of sugar in it,” I [Continue Reading...]
I used to pick up lunch at work. You know, a cheapo sandwich from Safeway, a burger from the cool indie burger place across the street, takeout teriyaki from the stand that seemed to have new owners every week. Back in the day, four years or so ago, I used to budget $6 a day [Continue Reading...]
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