Turkey Terror
I’m freaking. My hubby brought home the turkey last night….the beautiful, 20 pound, local, free-range turkey. This is my first time being intimidated by a dead bird. Usually, I get a 39 cents a pound frozen bird from the grocery store. In recent years I’ve even splurged for the 89 cents a pound fresh bird.
Tips for pre-holiday cleaning
T minus 4 days until our first time hosting Thanksgiving. The bird is ordered, the sides are planned-ish, and tomorrow’s weather forecast is supplying me with the perfect day to get this place clean. In case you are also hunkering down to the same project tomorrow, I thought it might be a good time to
Top 10 tips for enjoying -or at least surviving-winter.
I’m pressing pause on the sustainability posts for just a second. Winter seems to have settled into our little corner of the world, and it’s not even Thanksgiving yet. In the last week, I’ve had a lot of conversations punctuated with complaints about the weather. So here’s my confession: I Love winter. A lot. Yes,
Let it snow! A little sustainable holiday help.
The unthinkable has happened. I missed the weather window and did not get my garlic in the ground in time. Seriously, a week ago we were still in the 60s and I was worried it might be too warm, and now there’s an inch plus of snow and ice on my garlic plot. I’m devastated
Sustainable Shampoo
If you’re just here for the recipe, here you go, as promised. Basic Sustainable Shampoo recipe: ½ cup Bronner’s ½ cup water 1-2 t of baking soda (optional: 10-20 drops essential oils or 1t coconut oil) So what’s the problem with store-bought shampoo? Well, a lot of it is full of junk that is pretty
A Halloween Treat
It’s a rainy and blustery Halloween in our part of the world. This means our Halloween plans have been put on hold and I may actually get another post up this evening while my husband and son watch Coco and gorge themselves on candy. In the meantime, however, I wanted to share this with you
The sustainability project…finally
Well, this post is more than a bit overdue, but I have had a good time playing around with sustainability over the last couple of months. The phrasing may sound a little irreverent, but it’s important to remember that sustainability is defined as “the ability to be maintained at a certain rate or level.” The
Letting go of summer
For a last day of summer, this is one for the record books in term of perfection. There’s a gorgeous warm breeze populated by dragonflies, thistledown, and the spicy smell of aster. The bees are ecstatically hitting all the late summer blooms and the chickens are enjoying a lazy dust bath and leaving their summer
Lost and found at 40
The garlic is in, the tomatoes are starting to ripen, and the herbs are threatening to flower if I don’t hurry up and do a second harvest. It must be August. In Maine, the beginning of August generally means that the older maples start sending up warning flags that fall is approaching more quickly than
Which should you get, chickens or ducks?
So I have been mentioning for a while that I intend to do an actual homesteading post and it seems rather overdue. The question I want to address is one that I see on a lot of different homesteading blogs and I really wanted to put my two cents in. Which kind of bird