When we had to move two kids into a tiny shared room, four years apart in age, I was worried it wouldn’t work. But with a loft bed and a reading nook, it is working well for us.
How to Make a Worm Bin
Projects seem to get prioritized around here based on necessity–probably the same for most of you. We have a long list of projects we want to do in our new house, and making a worm bin was not originally close to the top of the list. However, we ran into a problem with the compost…..mainly…
A Day in Life of a Working Mom
Yesterday, for International Women’s Day, this is what I did to celebrate: The day started when my son woke up with Pink Eye. His eyes goobered shut, and highly contagious. In that moment of looking at his pathetic little sick angel face, I was simultaneously cognizant of and weighed down by two things: 1. Nursing…
Part II: What it takes to downsize
Deciding to actually buy a very small house for our family of four was the first half of the marathon….actually downsizing and relocating was the second half. In my last post I described the long process of deciding what kind of home purchase best supported our goals and values as a family, and than deciding…
Moving to a Tiny Home
Yup, that Pinterest board we all have turned into real life for us. We just purchased our first home; it’s 684 sf. And we have two children. I think that everyone I have told this to has raised their eyebrows a bit, looked confused, and asked an awkward question about how we like it or…
Homebrew Hard Cider
So…I started writing this post in November. Taking advantage of the snowy Portland weather to finish it up…. (I sit drinking my first glass of hard cider that I brewed myself while eating Roasted Gorgonzola crackers from Trader Joe’s….it’s the right thing to be doing). This fall I slid into a cider obsession. It all…
Some Good Ideas and Some Things You Should Avoid at All Costs: Lessons from My Summer Garden
This blog post might be more aptly named “Everything-I-took-photos-of-since-May-but-never-blogged-about-because-the-summer-was-too-crazy-and-I-wanted-to-look-at-the-sky-rather-than-a-computer-screen”. So here we are. End of August. Rain outside for the first time in months. Oak leaves all over the lawn. And I am coming to terms with the summer ending. I am pulling things out of my summer garden and getting fall/winter crops going (a…
How to Make More Chickens the Old Fashioned Way: With Chickens.
I always have had a strong fascination with seeds and eggs. These beautiful inanimate objects that create new life. When I was a kid, I loved to climb the apple trees at my Oma’s house and look in the Robin nests. All those beautiful, small, perfect orbs that little baby Robins would come out of. …
Old World Easter Eggs
This is the way Oma taught me to make Easter eggs. They are made using vegetables found in your refrigerator and garden weeds. No chemicals. And so simple that my nearly two year old helped me with these. There is less than a week left until Easter. I thought I’d pass this along just in…
How to Get Free Seeds
Have you started planting yet? This was my seed table about two weeks ago. The seeds have been popping up throughout this week. I don’t have artificial light heat in my greenhouse, so seeds are a little slower to come up. But my theory is natural selection: I am saving my own seeds, so am…
Meeting my Meat: Reflections on Our First Rooster Butchering
If you eat meat, hopefully you are aware that it is not created in a factory and it does not originate in Styrofoam packages. It was once a living, breathing, animated life walking this earth. So if you are willing to eat it, you must be OK with its life ending for that purpose. But…
Growing Food Year Round For Free and Without Watering: Reclaimed Windows and Some Rotten Wood
Today it smelled like spring outside here in Oregon. And when I went into my little greenhouse, I saw that my experiment was working, and I had hope for this year’s crops. Last summer some neighbors were replacing all of their windows, and gave us the old ones for making a greenhouse. Neither my husband…
For Real Urban Farming 