A Garden for the Birds (and the Bees) – Part 3

I can pinpoint my intense love for plants to when I was in high school. I was particularly interested in medicinal plants. My mom had given me a little space in the garden that I could plant whatever herbs I wanted. Mullein, comfrey, wormwood, rue, hyssop, sweet woodruff, mugwort, and horehound were just some of…

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Living in an (Almost) Tiny Home

It was once thought that bigger was better. People were buying up these giant homes providing at least a 1,000 sf per person. The tables have now turned since the housing bubble popped. Tiny homes have become the new McMansion. People are protesting the monstrosities of the 4,000 sf home by living in 244 sf…

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I am NOT an Urban Homesteader

There is always somebody out there bitching about urban homesteaders. Usually it’s a woman bitching about other women that choose to grow vegetables and preserve their harvest. Sometimes it’s some dude bitching about urban homesteaders being elitist and out of touch because they don’t want to eat the corn-and-soy-laden-pseudo-food. Why don’t those stupid locavores just…

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When Technology Goes Away

Yes, it’s been over a week since my last blog post. No, we did not fall off the planet. Well, we did fall off of the world wide web though. Our internet went out last week. Since we’re probably the last household without smartphones we were cut off from the world. More so because we…

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Canning Tomatoes 101

We do a lot of canning here, especially with tomatoes. We harvest several hundred pounds every year with most of it being preserved. This year I’ve been getting a lot of questions about canning and tomatoes seem to the most popular. Tomatoes are the gray area of canning. They’re not quite acidic enough to just…

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Meatless —day

My guess is that the beef lobby hates us. If you hadn’t heard, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association FREAKED out when a USDA internal, online newsletter mentioned the words “meatless Monday.” Apparently that’s the equivalent of saying an incantation to bring Satan, himself, up from hell. We are those people that usually prescribe to Meatless Monday. And…

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