gardening
HURRAH FOR THE AMAZING NUMBER OF HOME GARDEN VEGETABLE VARIETIES
It’s the time of year that we who are garden starved pour over the mail order seed catalogs and yearn to get our hands into the dirt. No matter that it’s cold and icy and wet and stormy and the…
Looking forward to the 2015 season in our on-going adventure of self-reliance
As I write this it’s a new season here at our smallholding. When I report back in the fall I’m sure there will be wonderful and delicious things to tell. In the mean time, it’s Mother’s Day morning, I’m off…
Taking care of ourselves and each other: Learning and doing in the Piedmont
To top off settling in a new place shortly after I got here I decided to go to college for an endless number of years sometimes living far from home to do the history thing I have been doing as…
‘Back in the day’ the Sorensen’s on the farm
For many years while my husband and I were farming in South Dakota the buzz word in the counter culture back-to-the-land press was self-sufficiency and many a ‘back to the lander” busted their butts trying to raise it all themselves,…
Where are we today?
Today rather than judge ourselves by some illusory benchmark of historical rural American self ‘sufficiency’ we might do better for each of us to make the effort to be more self-reliant. By self-reliant I mean making the goal to do…
Organic Hen Feed? Sorry, Not Interested.
I’ve just heard on NPR this morning that the current price for organic soy beans (mostly imported from China) has risen to $800 a ton – roughly twice what it was last year. This has put commercial organic chicken raisers…