Adventures of an urban homesteader growing greens, preserving the harvest and tending a backyard barnyard
I enjoyed my first foray into the world of mushroom hunting recently. Mushroom hunting has been on my “to-do” list for a few years now, but I can never afford the fancy, all weekend workshops that happen around the NW. Some day I will take those great classes, but for now I’m riding on the coattails of a few good friends. My friend Colin has
My chickens have never been great jumpers, probably because they are fairly lazy and spoiled. My neighbor’s chickens, however, are expert jumpers. It’s not uncommon for them to hop the fence into our yard to hang out, but lately they have started hopping their back fence into the nearby alleyway. Tragedy struck last week when one of my neighbor’s beautiful Black Sexlinks hopped the fence
My cupboards are generally stocked with homemade, canned marinara sauce. It makes my life sooooo much easier on busy nights to pop open a jar, throw it in with some pasta and call it dinner. The marinara sauce I make is also great on pizzas, which we have about once a week. It takes time and love, but pays off big time come winter. The
The first frost of the season waits for no one! I can’t use grad school as an excuse to delay the coming cold season, so I’ve been spending some early mornings and late evenings in the kitchen processing tomatoes. When I don’t have time to make a big batch of sauce, I am canning them simply on their own. Canned tomatoes in their own sauce
Fall is the season of preserving and it’s high time I start sharing what’s been simmering in my canning pot. We can’t seem to have enough jars of applesauce in our cupboard, so I’ve been cooking up batches for the past couple weeks. It’s a great snack, breakfast, and dinner side dish. Applesauce is also fairly simple and easy to can. You can use almost
My birthday falls at a great time – just as summer closes and autumn unfolds. As each year passes, I find myself celebrating simplicity and this year was no exception. I didn’t want to coordinate a big outing. I didn’t want to be around big groups of people. Instead, I wanted peace and calm. The morning began with pastries from a local bakery and a
After our blissful stay in Maine, we drove down the coast to relax in Cape Cod for the last half of our vacation back east. It’s a part of the country we have heard great things about, but never had the opportunity to visit before. Our timing was impeccable – after Labor Day when the tourism drops off, but early enough that the weather is
I just returned from a blissful week in New England where I attended one of the sweetest weddings ever. We flew from one Portland (Oregon) to another Portland (Maine) and somehow the world did not spontaneously combust. Our friends getting married, Dan and Emily, gave us a great reason to visit this part of the country. Portland, Maine, can be summed up in one word:
I have a huge project on the horizon that I have been carefully working on all summer. It explains a few odd things, like why the season has flown by for me and why I can easily eat a pint of cherry tomatoes several times a day. I’m growing a baby! This may or may not be a surprise, depending on how much you read
I am happy to report that the plum wine has been coming along very well. This is my first foray into wine-making and it is thus far proving to be pretty straight-forward. The plum wine fermented for a week in a primary container and was recently racked into the secondary. The primary container was a sterilized plastic bucket with a tight-fitting lid. I needed to
