Yesterday was Steve’s day off. For some, a day off means leisure time, but around here it means playing catch-up! Steve and the boys harvested the potatoes and rototilled the soil. We’re hoping to have some success with a winter garden–we will be using hoop houses to extend the growing season in three of our boxes, and will be planting cabbage, carrots, spinach, and garlic (although the garlic is a fall bulb that won’t be ready until next year). While…
Steve and I read a lot of blogs and belong to quite a few online groups and forums related to homesteading. Interestingly, only a few of them mention foraging. I don’t know why more people don’t take advantage of foraging. Maybe it makes people think of spending hours in the woods, searching out roots and odd greens, or invokes images those guys on Survivor eating bugs and half rotten fruit? In reality, it just means picking food from an uncultivated…
This year’s garden has been pretty sorry. It’s our first year with a garden, and as we’ve mentioned, the rain gave us quite the set back. Almost nothing of what we planned made it into the ground, and what did go in was, well, just off a bit. The broccoli turned out kind of ok. We got a couple of little broccoli florets (seriously, they can’t even be described as heads) that were tasty, but that’s about all we can…
A few months ago, I’d planned on banana bread for breakfast. I had mixed it up the evening before, and since I didn’t have time to bake it that night I planned to put it in the oven in the morning. And then I overslept. At 7:30, with three boys yelling about grumbling tummies, I added some extra milk to the batter, and Banana Bread Pancakes were born! They’re now one of our favorites, although I don’t make them nearly…
We’d planned on schooling through the summer. Well, that hasn’t gone quite according to plan! In truth, we have certainly done school this summer, but we just as certainly haven’t done as much as I’d wanted. Part of the reason is that we’ve been re-evaluating our homeschooling philosophy a bit. I even went through a brief phase where I had considered just sending them to school. (This may or may not have been during a fit of self indulgent tears…