How I Dress For Cold Weather: An Ode to Wool
Life on the homestead in NE Utah is thrilling in many ways – gorgeous sunsets, seedlings emerging dramatically from the soil in spring, or the surprising call of sandhill cranes…
Why We Grow Our Own Food
Sometimes in the middle of summer when it seems like all our spare time goes to the garden, both Chad and I can start to question our commitment to gardening.…
How to Be Less Reliant on Heating and AC
As I write this it is the middle of summer, and like many of the recent summers past we’ve experienced hotter than normal temperatures. And yet, in our household we…
Gardening: How to Grow a Survival Garden for Beginners
Growing your own food must be sounding pretty good right about now, eh? And you’re not alone, based on the current run on seeds. The seed companies can’t keep up…
Living With Less
Howdy friends, Lately I’ve been trying to recenter the framework for this blog. One of the things that keeps coming up is that life here on the homestead is so…
Wildlife: Painted Lady Butterflies
Last summer we had some borage come up as volunteers in our garden. Did I say “some”? I meant thousands of plants. We didn’t have borage plants, we had borage…
Why I Embraced Vegetarianism – And Why I Gave It Up
One evening as a young teen I was babysitting for some family friends. The baby was safe and sound in bed and all I had to do was eat my…
Climate: The High Desert
We live in the high desert in Northeast Utah, where the winters are long and cold and the summers are short and hot. It’s a continental climate. I first learned…
North, South, East, or West: Determine Your Direction at Home
I did not grow up thinking about the cardinal directions. Although I was a Brownie (translation, “pre-Girl Scout”) for about one season as a child, all I remember from that…
Foraging – Why Eat Wild Food?
Getting to Know Plants My first gardening experience came when I was a teenager. Back then “gardening” for me was an after school job at a small, family-owned garden center,…
Gardening – Composting in the Desert
Anyone who gardens or simply cooks a lot of vegetables quickly finds out – you must have a compost pile! Vegetable waste translates into useful fertilizer and soil very quickly…
