The Animals Blogs

Oh there’s no place like gnome!  Every year, for the family get-together, I make a little something for each place setting.  This year, we are getting gnomey.  The Gnome The gnome is a little mini mason jar, with handle, and the required gnome hat.
Cook a chicken; eat some; make bone broth; have leftovers; grind up the rest for chicken salad … for the win!! [Ground_chicken_leftovers.PNG] I absolutely love my new meat grinder attachment for my KitchenAid stand mixer.  Somewhere in my cupboards
Here we go again — high winds vs my hoophouses / greenhouses. Will the garden structures survive? [Hoophouses_and_high_winds.PNG] When I first set up my hoophouse, within a couple of days we had extremely high winds, which picked up the structure an
“How is my lettuce doing”, you ask? It has been amazing, watching the lettuce grow before our eyes.  One afternoon, we saw it jump within an hour. It is wild! I’m loving this experiment.  I’m still predicting that it will be two more weeks befor
Can you freeze-dry sourdough starter? Well, of course.  You can freezedry anything.  Whether it turns out okay is another story.  [Freezedried_sourdough_starter.PNG] The Experiment Rather than waste a batch of sourdough discard, I wondered what wou
Well, that didn’t go as expected!  Baking Day Today was designated as a baking day.  My goals were:  • To make something for the family meal tomorrow, for my granddaughter’s birthday  •  Bake some cookies for Christmas • Make some sourdough buns.  B
Living the dream can be uncomfortable; it can be down-right nasty at times! We all have those days when we feel like “throwing in the towel” and calling it quits, wondering why we are doing what we are doing.  How do we get through those tough ti
… after toting buckets of woodchips, I took some time to do some reflecting [Wisdom_from_woodchips.PNG] Life Shifts As we walk our path in life, we go through “shifts” and, as I call them, “life spirals”.  “We plan, we do, we learn, we plan again.”
Vertical gardening is my new favourite way to garden!  This year, I installed some trellises made with cattle panels and I loved them.  Vertical Gardening Benefits From my one-season experience with vertical gardening, I realized that this was the
We built a deck and we added chairs. But the high winds kept tossing the chairs around. So… we replaced the chairs with large logs! [Rustic_deck_seating.PNG] The Wood Do you remember the firewood that I said “yes” to, even though we don’t burn wood
Cooking like grandma means cooking from scratch [Cooking_from_scratch.PNG] My grandmother, the one that I knew, had a family of twelve to feed on a daily basis. And - she did it in the 1920’s and beyond. Just imagine that. Now, I don’t remember