Adventures of an urban homesteader growing greens, preserving the harvest and tending a backyard barnyard
Modern homesteaders are often avid home-cooks, and I am no exception. In case you are too, I wanted to make sure you all knew about the podcast I’ve launched called Cookbook Club with my friend Sara Gray. We belong to a “real life” cookbook club and ever since pandemic life began it’s become a lifeline for me. Making delicious food, trying new recipes, and sharing
Incorporating a rain garden into our homestead allows us to weave natural processes into our backyard. We can still grow lots of food, keep chickens and bees – all the fun homestead-y stuff – but we can also devote a little space to help protect our urban watershed. Portland receives a lot of rain for nine months of the year and downspouts connected to the
This is the most well-thought through vegetable garden I’ve ever created. Take a look at the plan I created, get tips to make your own, and get a jump on the season while we’re all cooped up at home. 1. My Garden Goal My primary goal is to feed my family over as long of a growing season as possible. That means I’m choosing kid-friendly
You can easily substitute fresh pumpkin for canned pumpkin, but a couple extra steps are needed to ensure the final product is perfect. Follow these steps to ensure you end up with a perfectly roasted pumpkin that is superior in both flavor and texture. Selecting the Right Pumpkin Your journey to the perfect pumpkin puree begins with choosing the right variety of pumpkin. Those big
This is what homesteading with children looks like. Fox, now a toddler, picked these precious San Marzano tomatoes, which he’s been doing periodically all summer. And, yes, it drives me I.N.S.A.N.E. But the alternative is to keep the kids out of the garden or, worse, stop gardening altogether out of frustration. And then everyone loses. Let me tell you why. Continuing to homestead on our
Can you believe we’ve been digging our roots into this homestead for five years already? I’m returning for intermittent blogging after taking a couple years off. And I wanted to let you all in the garden gate and show you how things have grown. Modern homesteads are about some degree of self-sufficiency, so our space has always been intended to offset our food supply. The
Here we are on the winter solstice, nearly three months after welcoming our sweet baby Fox. I hope you spend this darkest day of the year somewhere warm surrounded with love, with bright days ahead. Here’s the story of how we welcomed our biggest gift this year. This pregnancy was savored more than any other because I knew it was my last time on this
It turns out there was one more seat at our family table. We get to welcome a baby boy into the world in early October, just as summer is fading into fall. Although I am not blogging regularly anymore, the news just feels too big to not share. Life feels very full, but somehow I just knew we weren’t quite done with our family. Juniper
I was recently presented with a Community Service Award from the Oregon Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architecture (actually it was months ago, but better late than never!). This award puts me up in the company of leading regional landscape architects like Carol Mayer-Reed who have received the same Community Service Award in past years. It’s a real honor! ASLA is the professional organization
I spend a good chunk of the fall foraging for wild mushrooms, specifically chanterelles, around the forests of the Pacific Northwest. As I’ve gotten better, my harvests have gotten bigger and bigger – leaving me with the dilemma of how to process and preserve so many in a short period of time. After years of experimentation, I finally discovered the perfect preservation method: roasting, then freezing
