Looking at the world from my small rural acres in the Blue Ridge.
It’s the time of year that we who are garden starved pour over the mail order seed catalogs and yearn to get our hands into the dirt. No matter that it’s cold and icy and wet and stormy and the soil would hate being disturbed!…
As I write this it’s a new season here at our smallholding. When I report back in the fall I’m sure there will be wonderful and delicious things to tell. In the mean time, it’s Mother’s Day morning, I’m off to take my cup of…
To top off settling in a new place shortly after I got here I decided to go to college for an endless number of years sometimes living far from home to do the history thing I have been doing as a scholar for almost three…
For many years while my husband and I were farming in South Dakota the buzz word in the counter culture back-to-the-land press was self-sufficiency and many a ‘back to the lander” busted their butts trying to raise it all themselves, and even worse to presume…
Today rather than judge ourselves by some illusory benchmark of historical rural American self ‘sufficiency’ we might do better for each of us to make the effort to be more self-reliant. By self-reliant I mean making the goal to do as much as possible for…