Peripatetic philomaths…focusing on what's really important, eating ethically and cleanly, fermenting, foraging/wildcrafting, practicing herbalism, and being responsible stewards of our land. Sharing our photos, musings, and learnings. Still seeking our tribe.
Let the good times roll! ⛈️ Sometimes, when you try to outmaneuver Mother Nature, you get smacked down. That’s what happened when we tried to get the morning chores done before a thunderstorm rolled in.
Continue reading “Around The Farm: Caught In A Storm (Or “A Free Shower”)”
It’s been raining. A lot. Though it’s stopped for now, it’s left behind sloppy, slippery mud. Everywhere. And that clay mud gets on everything, bogging down the wheels of the cart I use to convey feed to the animals, clogging up the tread of my boots…imagine walking in that same mud with now-treadless boots – good times.
Continue reading “Haiku: Maddening Mire”
As I walked through the pasture today, something caught my eye – a miniscule turtle! It was in a fairly open area, but well-camouflaged.
Continue reading “Haiku: One Step At A Time”
Through the vicissitudes of life, when uncertainty and turmoil further erode the fragile veneer of civilization, the trees stand watch. They were here before us and will be here after us. Despite our (humans’) attempts to destroy them – cutting, burning, poisoning – they persist. I celebrate them, bathing in their resilience and quiet energy, and I’m thankful that there are still trees to be enjoyed.
Now may be an opportune moment to spend some time with a gentle arboreal giant…may you find peace in these trying times.
A storm blew through last night, and it left fallen branches and leaves in its wake. When I was refreshing the pigs’ water (the “pond” above is their water bowl), I was struck by the image created by the multicolored leaves that had been swept into the water: it so clearly was, to me, a harbinger of Autumn.
Sometimes stitches just don’t want to cooperate. Yes, I know I may be anthropomorphizing, but this particular one – Trinity – keeps making an extra stitch appear. From where??
Having to buy eggs has served as a harsh reminder of why we got chickens in the first place. And buying pastured eggs from the store just felt wrong. We miss our own flock’s eggs, so it’s time to begin again. Call it v2.0.
I continue to practice knitting on needles and find it very enjoyable. Especially exciting is a section in one of my books that provides directions for making different stitches – there are more than just garter and stockinette stitches! In learning new stitches, though, I encountered one that tested my patience.
Every year, we find volunteer sunflowers growing somewhere on our property. The cause is easy to identify: the black oil sunflower seeds (BOSS) that we feed to the poultry and waterfowl get scattered around – sometimes even by wild birds – and those plucky seeds germinate. Seemingly in the blink of an eye, a radiant sunflower appears. And what’s cheerier than a sunflower?
When the volunteer grows late in the season, though, its chances for its seeds to reach maturity become slim. One late summer sunflower, with multiple funky little heads, did manage to produce seeds.
A second one that grew just weeks behind the first (above) succumbed to a killing frost. I found it frozen one morning when the temperatures had plunged overnight. I wish that one had made it to the finish line, too…but know it didn’t worry about the future – it just lived and grew, each day.
In Spring, I’ll plant some low-maintenance, smile-inducing sunflowers intentionally…but I bet a few volunteers will still pop up, too!
My knitting journey began a few months ago with a desire to make some knitted hats. I made a number of hats and a scarf on round looms of different sizes and was pleased with them, especially the hats. But I really wanted to learn to knit with needles, too, so my learning journey began this week.
Continue reading “Knit This: Learning To Knit (With Needles)”