We like ‘cracker day’ around here – Josh baking all the different flavors of crackers – Duende and I stealing them as we pass through. It’s always food food food around here – ha! And that’s the running conversation – food as health and medicine, food as politics, food sovereignty, local food, food as a family, preserving food – right now we are simultaneously having a conversation about how amazing the body is to break down the energy stored in your food to use (but only if you chew it and are able to process it – enzymes! prebiotics! probiotics! ooooh, metabolic processes…and versus a 10 yr old who thinks she can just chuck tiny cheese cubes into her mouth and swallow, like cheese vitamins, she used to do it with frozen peas when she was 3 – she decided she needed one a day, every day).
We are getting the fledgling chicks out in a daily playpen right now, too – they are loving it – they love to find a bug and then relay fight for it, they get so excited and animated. Hilarious! The tiny meatbirds are still too little, still cute and fluffy yellow, snuggled up together in the corner of the brooder. Meanwhile the chicken coop is coming along for the former and chicken tractor plans being made for the latter.
The garden is looking pretty nice, I still keep finding seedlings to throw in but the bulk of the planting is done for now. I may consider succession planting the green beans or replacing the peas with haricot vert in the near future (I’ve given up on brassicas/cruciferous – the cabbage moth/caterpillars and aphids really get to me, and my beets failed – or rather, I failed to keep them properly weeded and therefore competition-free) – though I have too many eggplant/gold – green – and cocktail tomato/lemon cucumber/celery/melons/orange bell peppers and still huge amazing summer and winter squashes that are no longer seedlings but full-on fruiting plants and still some companion plants – borage/marigold/johnny jump ups/basil…
Let’s keep crossing our fingers that the oven works another week – please feel free to share our soon to be desperate need and community building projekt for the Rock Bottom Homestead Hearth.
Rock Bottom Homestead 