On our way home from this past weekend's camping trip (more about soon) we stopped to see our friends Jeff and Taryn on their Siuslaw River homestead and meet all their baby goats. Let me tell you, those were some cute kids all around, and it was hard to resist taking some home with us. We all fell in love with the runt. There's something about tiny little goats that just pulls on your ...
Life
One Proud Mama Chicken
Our little Silkie Bantam hen, aptly named Silkie, has wanted to be a mama for a while now. Over the past year, she went broody about four times, and never at a really good time of year for chicks. We kept taking her eggs because we needed them to eat, but that didn't stop her a bit. She just sat right down on the other hens eggs with ruffled feathers and surly pecks at any hands that came near to ...
April Showers
April showers are not just the stuff of old sayings this year, and I have been working away on the garden in stolen moments between downpours, and trying not to get too impatient for the field to dry out. I've never checked the weather report so often in my life. I even made it a tab on my browser. We did manage to work one section on two dry days last week, and I started getting those potato ...
Ode to the Skunk Cabbage
"Methinks the first obvious evidence of spring is the pushing out of the swamp willow catkins…then the pushing up of the skunk-cabbage spathes…" ~Henry David Thoreau (Journal; March 10, 1853) If you can get past associating its pungent odor with an unpleasant smelling critter, our Western Skunk Cabbage, Lysichiton americanus, is quite the striking beauty in the springtime ...
Custard Pie
Spring brings so many wonderful things, but few can rival the egg. With modern marvels like lights on timers, we can enjoy farm fresh eggs all year, but the Spring is when we look forward to an egg-stravaganza! This is when all those egg recipes come out, and egg salad sandwiches make their way into lunch baskets. As egg production really picks up, we can look forward to selling them and ...
Wildwood Flower
Here are a few of the Spring beauties I've spied out in the forest lately... Pacific Trillium(Trillium ovatum) Red-flowering Currant(Ribes sanguineum) Round-leaf Violet(Viola orbiculata ) Indian Plum (Oemleria cerasiformis) Snow Queen(Synthyris reniformis) Salmonberry(Rubus spectabilis) Pacific Trillium, petals faded pink with age. ...
Back in the Tent Again
After many weekends of having our plans thwarted by the weather, we finally made it out for our first tent camping trip of the season. Our yurt camping trips in the winter months are a lot of fun, and get us out to the woods and beaches year-round, but there's something about off-pavement camping that feeds the soul in a greater way. No campgrounds, no neighbors, no cars driving by, just a ...
Chicken Crossing
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Goin’ to the Hootenanny
Sometimes we all just need to kick up our heels and dance, and that is exactly what we did this last Thursday and Friday. Deadwood Revival, a four-piece, progressive old-time jamgrass ensemble from my hometown came travelling through last week, playing one night at a local watering hole and one night at the civic center in a nearby town. Since moving out into the country, evening cultural ...
Braving Alaska: Food for Adventuresome Thought
I will start of by saying that I've had Alaska on the brain for a very long time. Often I wonder what it is about this far-flung state to the north that captures my imagination so. In my mind, it stands as the last frontier; a rugged, sparsely populated, beautiful and harsh wilderness. I can't help being fascinated by such a place, and I couldn't tell you how many times my husband ...