A dog’s aging process happens gradually, but it may become apparent suddenly, as he’s no longer able to jump onto the couch or navigate the home as easily as he used to. In my own home, I’ve been making changes for my dog Leo who just celebrated his 14th birthday. I wish I’d made some…
Author: krissyhix
My 30 Plant Foods a Week – And Why I Eat Them
Eating 30 plant foods a week has a healing effect on health, and is even important for those with food sensitivities. Diversity on the plate leads to diversity in the gut. This simple strategy makes a huge difference to your microbiome, gut health, and immune system.
3 Easy Non-Toxic Living Changes to Adopt Today
Has something happened to you that makes the world seem full of toxic traps that might cause cancer? Are you overwhelmed and don’t know where to start? I’m here to make it easier for you. First I’m going to tell you my background and explain why I think you should take my advice anyway, and…
Soaking Rice for Improved Digestion and Nutrition
Dealing with SIBO and food chemical sensitivities, my diet has needed to change frequently over the past few years, but one part of my food prep routine has remained the same – I always soak rice before cooking it. In this blog post I’ll show you how I prepare brown rice prior to cooking, but…
We Grew it From Seed – Friulana Rugosa
Last year in the garden, a new variety climbed up to take the gold medal place for summer squash in my heart: ‘Friulana Rugosa.’ This summer squash is an Italian heirloom – the fruits are yellow or light green, long, and bumpy. Ok, actually they’re warty. And I’d forgive you for thinking it’s just another…
In Praise of Bolted Carrots
There’s nothing delightful about carrot roots that have bolted. Yet, I’m here to sing their praises. Carrots are biennials, and are supposed to wait until year two to produce flowers. When they bolt in year one, instead of sending their energy into root production, that energy gets moved into reproduction, aka flowering, leaving the root…
We Grew it From Seed – Will Rogers Zinnias
One of the delights of my gardening life is trying new seed varieties – a pleasure that my husband Chad and I share. Lately though, I’ve been dealing with gut dysbiosis related food chemical intolerance, so choosing seed varieties of tomatoes or winter squash is no longer the easy breezy, fun process it used to…
Introducing Little Pirate, Our Babydoll Sheep
After our Mama Sheep, Izzy, passed away recently, we were left with just one sheep, Buttercup. As herd animals, sheep feel stressed out living alone, and while other types of animals can make decent companions for a lone sheep, another sheep (or more) is the best type of buddy. On her first night alone in…
A Dying Sheep – Saying Goodbye to Izzy
We keep sheep for their wool and for manure for our garden – and because we love animals. This week we had to say goodbye to our sheep Isadora (also known as Izzy or Mama Sheep), who was about 14 or 15, pretty old for a ewe. As she grew elderly, I looked for resources…
Cosmos Flowers in the Garden
It’s summer, and summer is a good time for a break, a good time to send post cards. Here’s my summer garden post card to you. While the “official” purpose of our garden is to grow food that we can eat, my not so hidden agenda is growing flowers. Yes, they help attract pollinators which…
How I Remove Wasps from Our Farm Home
On our farmstead we have a pro-wildlife stance, and that includes smaller types of wildlife too. We don’t kill bugs outdoors without good reason, and we have the same philosophy for bugs that end up inside our home. If we find a bug in the wrong place (according to us), we try to investigate to…
The Cayenne Pepper Salicylate Experiment – Can a Plant Save Me?
I love plants – growing them, learning about them, seeing them in their natural habitats. I also love learning how humans and plants have interacted across time, with humans finding species for food and medicine, and in exchange, helping to spread these species far and wide. Plants were the original medicines, and for the…
My Experience with Gut Dysbiosis
The wind lifts and drops the branches of the box elders outside our kitchen window in front of a dark sky. Rain showers pelt down, and then disappear. The sun appears, seeming to banish the clouds, then rain returns, and the sky darkens again. The patterns of this moody weather are much like the ups…
A Summer Solstice Tradition
One of the ways we assert ourselves as creatures of the natural world is to celebrate equinoxes and solstices. As part of these seasonal celebrations, a few years ago Chad and I started a tradition of hiking to the same spot in the desert on these occasions. We nicknamed our spot, “Solstice Point.” Every solstice…
An Experience with Histamine Intolerance
As I went through our garden and orchard this morning, watering our annuals and fruit trees, I marveled at how much better I felt today than yesterday. It was a reminder that sometimes the signs my body is sending me require a little deeper digging. A few days ago our Russian olive trees started blooming….
116 Ways to Connect with Nature
I believe that connecting to nature can bring joy, satisfaction, and meaning to one’s life – because it has done so for me. My husband, Chad, who is a certified wildman, provided some suggestions of his own and I added them to this list as well. So here you go, over one hundred ideas for…
My Experience with Food Chemical Intolerance Symptoms
I wrote recently about some of the accomplishments I’m proud of from the last decade. Here’s one I’m less thrilled with: I have become an expert of sorts on food chemical intolerances, having developed four of them. A food chemical intolerance is different than a plain old food intolerance. With food chemical intolerance, rather than…
How SIBO Has Changed Me
Almost a year and a half after my SIBO diagnosis, I realize that dealing with this gut ailment has changed me in many ways. Some of theses changes are ones I’m happy to embrace, others are ones I’m hoping are temporary. Here’s a few ways that Small Intestine Bacteria Overgrowth has changed me: No More…
A Look Back at the Last Decade – From Paris to Utah
I missed an important anniversary last year – 2021 marked the ten year anniversary of my leaving Paris, France for a return to life in the US. Essentially, I transitioned from being a “city mouse” to my current situation, “country mouse.” As you might imagine, my 14 years in Paris were very, very different from…
How to Pot a Chayote Seed
Chayotes, also known as “chokos” or “mirlitons,” are used in Latin American cuisine, but not so much in standard American fare. Unless of course, you develop salicylate sensitivities like I have, and then you end up with this cucurbit as one of your staple foodstuffs! With a quickly dwindling menu, mirlitons have been a godsend…
How to Get the Seed Out of a Chayote for Propagation
I’m growing chayotes in my garden for the first time this year after developing salicylate sensitivity and I’ve found that there’s just not a lot of guidance out there on growing this crop in the home garden. Call them what you want, chayote, choko, or mirliton, so far some of the tips I have read…
How I Use a Food Journal for Gut Health
The last few years of my life have been very centered around my gut health and food sensitivities – and I would have been truly lost in this process without keeping a food journal. I’m going to tell you what I include in my food journal and tell you the specific ways it has helped…
My Experience with GABA as a Sleep Aid
Me and my sleep have been through some rough times in the past few years. My troubled sleep has ranged in severity, from months of insomnia so bad that I would go for days without sleeping at all – to waking after just three or four hours and being unable to fall back asleep. For…
How I Discovered My Salicylate Sensitivity
It was summer and the wildfire smoke was at it again. I was feeling miserable, trying to hide indoors with air purifiers on full blast, and meanwhile I was having new food related symptoms. Confusing Symptoms I had already adopted a low histamine diet, reduced my oxalate intake, and was also avoiding FODMAPs for SIBO….
My Experience with Visbiome and SIBO
I was diagnosed with SIBO in late 2020, but believe I’ve been living with this condition for at least a decade and a half. Over the past year I’ve done everything I can to learn about the condition. I’ve also used antimicrobials, adopted a restrictive diet, kept a food journal, tried dynamic neural retraining, and…
Comforting Pear Muffin Recipe (Gluten Free, Low Oxalate, Low Salicylate)
When the days get cooler I find myself craving foods that have warming flavors, such as cinnamon and ginger. Unfortunately, because of several food chemical intolerances, I have to follow a restrictive diet and all the warming spices are off the menu for me. Pears, however, are packed with flavor, especially when baked, and offer…
Chayotes and Contemplating the Nature of the Self
I could say the past year has been an interesting one for me on an existential level, if I were to put things in a positive light. I keep having major life changes that seem to tell me, “Oh, you think that’s part of your personality, do you? Well what if we take it away?…
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 flying overhead in summer. But in other ways it can be a harsh environment, especially in winter when the temperatures plummet to sub-zero levels. To…
Death and Life – A Walk in the Desert
Who needs candy and costumes? We celebrated Halloween with a hike in the desert where we found signs of life and death to help us contemplate the holiday. Since we’ve been enjoying a mild, exceptionally wet, and colorful fall on our farm, we found that conditions in one of our favorite desert hiking spots were…
Welcoming Barney – Transitioning a Feral Cat into Our Home
For a while it was a running joke between Chad and I that we didn’t need any other cats – but, we didn’t have an orange one yet, so maybe if one showed up…? Last spring, shortly after we moved our formerly feral feline, Owlfie indoors, a new cat did show up on our farm….
Bonus Round – The Fall Garden
In early October we brought in what we thought would be our last harvest before wintery weather put an end to our summer garden. Now, a day away from November 1st, after several rainstorms and a few weeks of mild days, there are some unexpected surprises in the garden. We don’t usually get to grow…
Are Plants Trying to Kill Us? A Look at Oxalates
It can be easy to forget that a plant has a point of view. We tend to not see them doing much, so we think that they aren’t very much like us. We are constantly busy – moving, and making noise. Plants on the other hand, just sit there. At least, it can seem so…
Showy Milkweed – Weed or Wildflower?
When it comes to differentiating between a weed and a wildflower, the answer lies in one’s perspective. Many farmers find that milkweed gets in the way. I wouldn’t exactly say that my husband and I qualify as farmers. Though we do live on a small farm and keep farm animals, we earn our living from…
We Grew It From Seed – Costata Romanesco Zucchini
In addition to ‘Cube of Butter,’ another of our favorite zucchini varieties in the Hearthwilde garden is this Italian heirloom, ‘Costata Romanesca.’ What initially appealed to me about this summer squash, after its long history, was its ridges. Texture is a big thing for me, just as important as how things look. The ridges on…
Celebrating the Autumn Equinox
Being nature lovers, we like to celebrate the equinoxes and solstices, those special moments in the year that mark the rotation of the earth around the sun. At each of these occasions, we take a hike out to a particular point in the desert to watch the sun set, a place we call “Solstice Point.”…
Winter Squash and Pumpkin Varieties – 2021
This year, 2021, we grew at least 11 different cultivars of winter squash and pumpkins. ( I say “at least” because we can’t peg an ID on some of them.) While our 2020 winter squash haul gave us some behemoths, this year all of our winter squash and pumpkins were medium sized or smaller. But…
Fall Color on the Farm
As much as I love gardening during summer, the transition into autumn makes me want to give a big sigh of relief. Along with the cooler weather, some glimpses of fall color seem to bring a promise of rest and rejuvenation to come. And while flowers may not be what you think of when I…
100 Years of Love – A Tribute to My Grandfather, Crawford E. Hicks
Today my dear grandfather left his mortal form and passed on. Since I’m unable to grieve with my family in person, I’m sharing this here to celebrate his life and proclaim my good fortune in having such a pillar as a family member. When I celebrated his 100th birthday earlier this year, I acknowledged how…
Watching Our Pollinator Neighbors
Once the days are warm and the flowers in bloom, one of my greatest and most simple pleasures is watching insects – and our garden affords many opportunities to do just that. Actually, harvesting food from our garden makes me quite happy, but honestly, not as happy as watching these little “neighbors” of ours buzzing…
We Grew It From Seed – Plains Coreopsis
Coreopsis is a plant I’ve been fond of back since my high school days when I had an afternoon job working at a family owned garden center. There’s something reassuring and cheery about this plant’s bright, bobbing flowers. So when I noticed some seeds for plains coreopsis (Coreopsis tinctoria), a native of the Great Plains,…
We Grew It From Seed – California Poppies
While we still grow some exotic garden flowers in our polyculture garden, such as cosmos and zinnias, this year I decided to add more native annuals to the mix. One of the native wildflowers I planted was California poppies. Our sunken garden rows are on a slight slope, so when I planted the seeds, they…
The Totally Unexpected Way I Reduced My Inflammation: A Low Oxalate Diet
A year ago today, my body was so inflamed, it seemed like everything hurt: my back and my joints in particular. I felt like my body was attacking itself and wondered if I had developed an autoimmune disease, which is why I tried the AIP diet. (AIP was not what I needed, it turns out.)…
We Grew It from Seed – Lauren’s Grape Poppy
I’m not sure why, exactly, but I decided to grow several different types of poppies from seed this year. Lauren’s Grape poppy was one of my favorite varieties. With deep purple flowers, this poppy variety was pleasing to the eye – but also to our local pollinators, affording me many pleasurable moments snapping up photos…
A Natural Way to Remove Skunk Smell from Dogs – Apple Cider Vinegar
Living in a rural area means we have lots of wildlife visitors. Loads of friendly pollinators visit our garden, deer come to browse at the apples that fall from our apple trees, and skunks make themselves at home here too. For the most part the skunks tend to stay out of our fenced in back…
Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees
Have you ever hugged a tree? And have you wondered if it might be aware of you hugging it? If you are the type of person who might entertainment such a question, I have a book recommendation for you: Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees. After hearing an interview with Wohlleben, I hurried to…
Gut Health and SIBO – How I Finally Got Diagnosed
I’ve struggled with gut issues for over a decade and a half. With hindsight, I believe that I may have had SIBO (Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth) this entire time without realizing it. I’m going to describe the history of my gut issues and the testing process in case this helps you finally get a diagnosis…
A Low Oxalate Garden
Since I began gardening seriously in 2013, I have always been focused on expansion. How can I grow the most diversity of foods? How can I incorporate perennials, fruit trees, shrubs, and unusual edibles into my landscape? It seemed silly to me that there were so many edible plants out there that were being overlooked…
A Natural Remedy for Ringworm – Coconut Oil
One day I noticed our cat Louie licking his belly. This didn’t seem to be a typical grooming session, he had been licking the same spot for far too long. So I approached him and parted the fur where he’d been licking. There was a bare spot on his belly where there was no fur,…
A Truly Green Bed – What to Look for in a Natural, Organic Mattress
I used to wake up drenched in sweat every night. If you’ve ever slept on a bed that had one of those vinyl-plastic-hospitalish peepee pads on them, you know just how horrible they are… I was looking for a mattress and bed that would have a positive impact on our health and would not have a negative impact on the environment.
Peeling the Onion – My Journey Towards Better Health
Have you ever stumbled across one of those blogs, one that has plenty of content and then stops pretty suddenly? This always makes me wonder what’s going on, what has happened in the writer’s life to stop them from writing. Well, it’s been about four months since my last post, and I’m going to tell…
Histamine Intolerance – The Weird Food Intolerance You’ve Probably Never Heard Of
If someone had told me three months ago that the weird constellation of symptoms I was experiencing was all connected and that to reign in my symptoms I would need to avoid eating leftovers, all fermented foods, and things like olives and pickles, I probably would have looked at that person and said, “Is this…
An End to Painful Periods
After years of thinking I’d be suffering from painful periods until menopause delivered me from my monthly cycle, I have found an unexpected release from my monthly pain. If you also suffer from painful periods, read on, this might hold the answer for you too. Ten Years of Suffering About ten years ago I was…
My Experience with Three Elimination Diets for Gut Health and Lowering Inflammation
Over the past year I’ve tried three different diets to help with my gastrointestinal issues and inflammation: the Low FODMAP diet, the Autoimmune Protocol (AIP) diet, and the Low Histamine diet. I kept a food journal while I did this to record my reactions and try to pinpoint which foods seemed to be causing me…
2020 Winter Squash Harvest
What do you call a big veggie with attitude? Sassquash. Now that I’ve gotten that terrible joke out of my system, it’s time to share some gardening news. As a welcome balance to a very difficult year, part of our 2020 garden was exceptionally productive. This included our winter squash plantings. Winter squash is an…
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. It doesn’t take long though for us to remember why it is we spend time and effort planning, seeding, tending, watering, and harvesting our much-loved…
First Steps to Reducing EMFs
I’m going to give you a primer on the first steps you can take at home to reduce your exposure to EMFs – no meter required! First, though, I thought it might be useful to review why anybody would want to do such a thing in the first place. A Low-EMF Environment is What Nature…
Celebrating a New Season – Autumn Rituals
As I sat outside this morning throwing the ball for Leo, I looked at the ground and noticed that the first leaves had begun to fall. The air was crisp, and I could feel that, a few days after the autumn equinox, the fall season was truly here. Chad and I like to acknowledge the…
We Grew it from Seed – Cube of Butter Yellow Zucchini
Chad and I usually prefer open-pollinated varieties as opposed to hybrids, so that we have the option of saving seeds if we want to. However, early this year when we were choosing our seeds, I was tempted by ‘Cube of Butter,’ a yellow zucchini hybrid that promised to be very productive, have a great texture,…
Gluten Free Sourdough Starter from Chick Pea Flour
After a few years of loyalty to my trusty brown rice sourdough starter, I tried experimenting with switching out the brown rice for chick pea flour earlier this year. To be honest, this creation wasn’t some brilliantly hatched culinary dream brought to light. I was simply trying to use up an excess of garbanzo bean…
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 are surviving without any air conditioning, our roof has not exploded, and so far, no one in our household has passed out from heat stroke….
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 experience is singing Kumbaya during a camping trip, and the mime that once came to entertain our troop. I didn’t use a map to get…
How to Forage and Cook Lambsquarters
Do you grow spinach in your garden? If so, or even if you are just a spinach fan, you might want to consider branching out to this other, less well-known member of the goosefoot family – lambsquarters. This is young lambsquarters nestled in among my lettuce: There is also a stray cilantro plant in there…
Alternate Ways to Use Sourdough Starter
Most people make sourdough starter with the intention of making bread. That was my intention as well, when I first started cultivating a starter. As it turns out, I use my sourdough nearly every day – and rarely for making bread. However, if you’re main purpose is bread making, you may still be interested in…
Edible Weeds: Blue Mustard, Arugula’s Wild Cousin
I have been craving sauteed greens lately – and as our stocks of frozen spinach have started to disappear, I’ve been thinking about what’s in the garden. Not the plants we are growing, however, but the weeds coming up between our rows. We ate lots of wild lettuce last year, so I went out to…
Edible Weeds: Dandelion
The first seeds in our spring garden are just barely starting to come up, and with less frequent access to the supermarket, I’ve been missing fresh greens. I was thrilled when I noticed the answer to my craving on my way to the garden – dandelion! There are a few patches of it growing around…
Garden News: Spring 2020
Howdy friends! It’s time to show off what Chad and I have been up to recently. It’s so nice to have energy to work on these projects instead of moping around sick inside the house. Starting warm season seeds I have added a new item to my daily routine: daily care for the warm season…
Prompts: Finding Perspective
Welcome back to your weekly lockdown prompt! If you didn’t see my answer to last week’s question, it’s right here. As previously mentioned, since many people are confined to their homes at this time, I thought I would offer some prompts for those who find themselves with a bit of extra time on their hands…
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 with the demand and are having to close for days at a time just to catch up on backed up orders. I have received emails…
Prompts: Your Desert Island Foods
Being home with a somewhat limited food supply has me thinking about food a lot. I’m not exactly stuck on a desert island, yet, the situation makes me wonder what I’d do if I was. Lockdown Prompt #2 Desert Island Foods Name 3 unprocessed foods that you would be happy to eat for the rest…
Prompts: Know Your Neighbors
Hi there! I hope everyone reading this is staying healthy, or recovering. I was sick for a month myself and am just regaining my normal rhythm, routine, and (mostly) energy. This is not a good time to be sick, my friends! Take your vitamins, get some exercise, turn the news off, and do what you…
Garden News: Overwintered Carrots
This week, Chad and I received a gift from ourselves from the past – almost 20 lbs of carrots! We had a large carrot crop last summer and decided to keep many of them in the ground for winter – a way to take advantage of the outdoors as an additional source of refrigeration. I…
Homekeeping: How to Get By Without Toilet Paper
I thought I would try to cover a few subjects of current interest to myself, and perhaps you, during this global health crisis we’re living through. Don’t moments like this put things into perspective? I mean, I’m talking about priorities! Priorities like… Toilet paper. Yep, you’re not the only one, here on the healthy, happy,…
Food Issues: No Clue about Paleo? Here’s the Answer.
Fellow food-intolerant friends, As mentioned here recently, I have spent some weeks (months?) of frustration on the food intolerance front, despite some fairly valiant efforts to avoid suspect items. During this period I started feeling like my food-gut issues were a puzzle, and that there were too many missing pieces for me to (ever) have…
Homesteading: Creating and Keeping Routines
When we’re on the road, Chad and I like to listen to Great Courses CDs, and one of them we listened to recently was on decision making. Chad wasn’t excited about it when I first told him the title, but he gave it a chance and we both quickly became enthralled listening to it. One…
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 patches. This was our first year with a borage explosion, so we thought we’d let some of it live, not realizing just how hardy it…
Food Issues: A Quest for a Healthy Diet
I thought I had my healthy diet all figured out. Vegetarianism was my eating style of choice. For me, this choice lasted for twenty five years. After a long struggle with debilitating IBS, I discovered that I had a sensitivity to corn, and was gluten intolerant. And then my body let me know that my…
Yoga: My Home Practice
I live in a very rural location with no access to regular yoga classes. But yoga is one of my great joys in life, so I’ve had to figure out how to keep my yoga practice up, despite my location. When I lived in Charlotte, with access to several yoga studios, my teachers regularly reminded…
On Aging and Growing Older
Over the past several years I have noticed something about growing older: I feel the same as I did when I was a little girl. I assume I am not the only one who feels this way – and I think this is one of the biggest misconceptions young people have about their future, adult…
Garden to Campsite
Last year we went on a short road trip to Montana. We made sure to take some of our garden produce with us to use as we stopped over at campsites on our trip. Taking the Garden Camping Chad had thinned our carrot beds so we had a harvest of lots of small, adorable little…
Garden News – Summer’s Harvests – 2019
Winter seems like a good time to look back at the past year’s summer bounty and see what did well for us out here in the high desert. Here are some of the highlights: ‘Lemon Boy’ tomatoes. I’m trying to keep my acidic food intake low and these tomatoes are great. They are low acid…
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 about continental climates when I was a student in Finland for a semester. In one of my classes I learned that there are places in…
Garden News – Winter Seed Catalogs and Garden Planning
My spirits tend to get low during the winter – the post-holiday blues, gloomy weather, and reduced outdoors time always get to me. Winter here in NE Utah is long, but I have something to cheer me up and carry me through: seed catalogs and garden planning. By mid-January, there’s a stack of seed catalogs…
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 often about making do and accepting a humble lifestyle. A long period of underemployment has recently broken (yippee!), but during those months, watching our savings…
Homekeeping: How to Buy Organic Gluten Free in Bulk
If like me, you’re trying to make a simple living by being largely self-sufficient, finances are probably one of your constant concerns. But along with pinching pennies, I also have high standards and I bet you do, too. Everyday I’m trying to find the best ways to save money while still eating high quality, organic,…
Garden News: The Apricopocalypse
My Two Weeks (Or So) Of Non-Stop Apricots One of the nice things about living on an old homestead is that usually some person, decades ago, was smart enough to plant some fruit trees. Thanks to such past individuals we have an apple tree, crabapples, and a big, mature, apricot tree. The apricot tree has…
Growing Heirloom Snap Beans
This spring as I planned our garden, I wanted to make sure we planned heavy on produce that would get us through the winter – including lots of winter squash and dry beans. After Chad and I reviewed my plan, we realized that it was VERY bean heavy,
Garden News – Harvesting Apricots – 2019
Harvesting Apricots in July in Utah We have one mature apricot tree on our property. Mostly every year it blooms a bit early, then a frost comes along and kills all the blossoms off, knocking them to the ground, meaning that there will be no apricots for us. When we noticed the tree covered in…
Recipes – How to Make Fermented Sauerkraut
Make Your Own Homemade Sauerkraut Making homemade fermented sauerkraut used to scare me. Along with the fear of botulism, I was also confused and unsure how to proceed. I really wanted to try to make this delicious, pro-biotic-rich condiment, but was utterly lacking in confidence.
Native Plants – Elkweed
On a recent hike I was excited to discover a plant I was unfamiliar with. For those of you who grew up in the Western US, you probably are familiar with this meadow-dwelling plant. I had never seen it until recently and spent quite a lot of time getting some close up looks of its…
Food: Cauliflower and Mushroom Sauté
Last night as dinner time approached, I looked in the fridge. Nothing to eat, or so it seemed. I looked in the cupboard. I considered cooking a box of (gluten free) pasta and tossing in some vegetables. But pasta, when it’s a fallback and not an excitement, is never a good thing. For me, eating…
Tips – How to Keep Track of Your Polyculture Garden Plantings
A few years ago I excitedly planted several varieties of snap beans and dry beans in the same section of the garden. At the time of planting, I marked the different varieties with wooden markers, so I didn’t think I’d have any problem knowing which was which later. By the end of the summer, however,…
A Natural Resolution
In her book the Nature Fix, author Florence Williams says that the Finnish recommend being in nature for 5 hours a month to reap health benefits. That seems like a pretty good thing to add to a New Year’s Resolution list – just an hour and fifteen minutes a week spending time outdoors in a…
Gluten Free and Organic Bread Options
We, the gluten intolerant and celiac-afflicted really miss the taste and texture of wheat bread. Yes, there are substitutes, but once you make your way around the gluten-free bread section of the grocery store you will notice a few things:
Recipe – Gluten Free Sourdough Starter
Most of us have probably heard that fermented foods are healthy for us, increasing the biodiversity in our microbiomes. Fermentation is also an exciting way to see nature at work – seeing an inert mixture develop bubbles and start to smell heavenly is a fun science lesson and provides a tasty cooking ingredient.
Nature – Love is a Two Way Street
Author, Professor, Botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Robin Wall Kimmerer asked her students this question one day: You love nature but do you think that nature loves you back? Her students, all very respectful of the earth, had never thought about it that way. I bet most of us haven’t either!
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, lugging around a heavy, interminable garden hose to water, section by section, the herbs, the perennials, the shrubs, and the flats of annuals. Out alone…
Garden News – Polyculture Garden in Late Summer
On this last day of August the days are still hot and I find myself longing for fall. The garden is producing beautifully, and everything seems as if it will keep on going this way forever. But I try to remember not to take things for granted – the last warm days, the bounty of…
Foraging and Cooking Wild Asparagus
Asparagus grows wild and abundant around here in the springtime, but we only have a few small patches growing near our driveway. We harvested a few stalks one morning for brunch, and it made a delicious side dish with our omelettes. But my sweetie had been telling me he could take me to a place where…
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 if you compost, so it is a huge waste NOT to create some composting system – not to mention the cost of buying bags of…
Homesteading – Sheepy Poos
When my husband introduced me to his two icelandic sheep, I asked what their names were. He looked slightly embarrassed and told me he hadn’t named them. Strangely, two names instantly came to me, and I asked if I could use them. He kindly acquiesced. So let me introduce you to two of the biggest contributors to…
Hearthwilde 