Claim Your Power to Support Small-Scale, Bio-Regional Seed Growers
Are your garden seeds grown in a small-scale farm with regenerative practices or in a massive monoculture? Are your garden seeds grown locally to your bio-region or far, far away in another time zone, even another continent? Supporting small-scale and local seed is important for the health of our gardens, our environment, our local economies…
Seed Saving: My Top 5 Insights
As a gardener saving seeds is a favorite seasonal ritual—Saving seeds helps me deepen my connection with plants, the garden and myself. Saving seeds is one of the most important, meaningful and special human practices. Saving seeds naturally helps me learn to produce more and consume less, which in turn helps me heal my relationship…
What is Homestead Culture?
Home: The dwelling, place, village or region where one lives.Stead: Standing firm in a place.Culture: To tend, care or cultivate land or crops. Homestead Culture means to tend to gardens in the place where we live while thinking multi-generationally. We are literally putting down long term roots and co-creating with the natural world around our…
Growing Corn Nourishes My Heart
I have practiced growing flint, flour and dent corn for 6 seasons now. After harvest the corn is brought inside and hung up, laid on screens or carefully placed in boxes to dry and cure. From winter through summer I look forward to finding time to cook a batch of cornbread or corn pancakes using…
How Our Hearts Fell Into Working with Seeds
Its fall season and our family has been collecting seeds this season for several months now. We have worked with seeds for enough seasons now that it has become easy and natural to fall into the rhythmic nature of seed harvesting. When we were just getting started homesteading, Ann and I spent some dreamy time…
The Gifts of the Mountain
It so happens that here in southern Oregon, the wild elderberries ripen near the fall equinox and it has been an impromptu ritual that we go to the mountains every fall to collect this delicious medicine. It’s common among homesteaders to find ourselves so rooted in our land that we seldom make a trip elsewhere.…
Deeply Nourished From Afar
Our family just returned from a beautiful homestead wedding. For several days leading up to the wedding we camped on a rural property a long day’s drive from our home. Our good friends chose to get hitched on the land where they currently homestead. I am feeling especially grateful for the people that came to…
Homestead for Deep Connection, to Thrive
Homesteaders of the 1800’s largely chose to homestead as a means to survive. They claimed a privilege to have access to land to make a living. Not a living wage, but to live from the land by growing and raising their own food, building their own homes, making their own clothes, crafting their own tools.…
Is Living in the Country Lonely?
“It’s so lonely here,” my mom and some friends have told me when they visited us at our homestead. This comment has always struck me with a comical irony. Of course, I totally understand what they mean. The me in 2009 would definitely agree. Back then, I loved going hiking and occasionally apple picking (for…
How to Make Your Own Miso (It’s Easier Than You Think)
If you love probiotic, nutrient-rich, and flavorful food, then homemade miso would be a great addition to your homestead pantry! Miso is a very versatile seasoning for a variety of dishes. You can use miso like boullion in soups or like soysauce for dips and dressings or as a marinade for any meat. The flavor…
Herbal Pesto (and Pistou) Recipe
Our family loves eating herbal pestos. Several years ago we branched out from basil and started making pesto with new herbs. That exploration has opened up a lot of fun and new ways to cook the various herbs that grow abundantly in our garden. Opening up pesto to other herbs has also allowed us to…
Delectable Dandelion Hamburger Recipe
I am often trying new ways to cook with weeds so that our family’s bodies can benefit from their abundant nutrition while leaving our tongues and bellies craving more. Dandelion is one of our favorite weeds because she is free, self sowing, abundant, easy to harvest and beautiful! Nutritionally, her leaves and roots are packed…