Mustard is a perfect condiment for summer: Make your own from scratch!
My son-in-law Chris is nicknamed Mustard! So of course I had to ask him if he had ever made mustard. No says he. So that determined me to explore the topic myself. I’ve always liked rough textured mustards but 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…
The Railroad and the Catalogue
From the late 19th century till well into the 20th Montgomery Ward and Sears supplied Americans on the farm and in small towns with all the tools for self-reliance but nobody was fooling themselves with some idea that they didn’t…