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…

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…

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…