Welcome to our blog!
We live in a small urban homestead in a property that is 5100sqft in total. We have tried to use as much of our space as possible and within this blog you will find a wide array of topics covered from gardening to baking and how we utilize our space to live the life we want.
We hope that you enjoy our posts and join us on our adventure!
Want an easy way to find what interests you? Look here. Click in one of the categories or search.
How to Plant, Grow, & Cook Artichokes: A Complete Guide
This is everything that you need to know about growing, harvesting, and preparing artichokes to eat. I’m going to walk you through all the basics so it takes the mystery out of this unique and perennial vegetable.
How to Dry Farm: Growing Tomatoes without Water
What is dry farming and can you grow food crops without any water? Yes, you can grow food without water through a process called dry farming. Simply put dry farming is a method of growing crops without additional irrigation. This is best done in areas that are water stressed and have no to minimal rainfall over the summer months. The end result will produce intensely flavored and sweet crops!
Fermented Jalapeño Pickles
I never grew up eating spicy food but I absolutely love it! This is the much tastier and better version of the jalapeños often found on nachos. But honestly I eat these with pretty much everything sometimes. Fermenting dials down the heat of the peppers so if you don’t like them raw maybe give this a try.
Not Another Sourdough
So here's a secret: not everything needs to be a sourdough. So what to do when sourdough baking just doesn’t quite fit into your life, but you still want to bake some tasty artisan bread? You use yeast of course!
Indulgent Triple Chocolate Cookies
I wanted something that would just feel indulgent to eat, like a good holiday truffle. To my surprise the first batch turned out almost perfect! After a couple of additional tweaks and test batches, I decided these were just too good not to share.
Creating a Park Strip Pollinator Garden
What to do when you have a large garden space but it happens to be between the road and the sidewalk?
I’ll admit that at first I had no idea what to do with the space either. It’s 5 feet wide by 68 feet long and all I could think was that I wanted it to be low maintenance. Well that changed quickly when we cut our lilac bushes to expand the backyard. Without the lilacs, where would all the bees go? So low maintenance quickly became high maintenance, but it’s so worth it.
Flowers and gophers
Oh gophers, you troublesome and fearless creatures. While they are extremely persistent, they can be managed. I will share with you some things that I learned and a solution that has been the best gopher repelling method that I have ever used, which is completely safe for you, the environment, and the gophers.
Designing A Perfect Garden
Landscaping has challenged me tremendously. In my quest to figure out what to do for our space I read several books on landscaping (standard, edible, and permaculture), read dozens of internet articles, and searched high and low for inspiration online…And every time I came across that I would turn my head to the side like a confused puppy. My theme is to grow food and have a space for pollinators and my color palette is whatever color I like.
Heritage Oatmeal chocolate chip Cookies
I love the flavor combination of oatmeal and chocolate; anything with those ingredients is just automatically homey and comforting to me. I wanted to create a cookie that really showed off those flavors, but still was healthy enough that I didn’t have to feel guilty about grabbing one for breakfast.
Heritage Multigrain Bread
I think that normal sandwich loaves get kind of a bad rap. Everyone thinks of great bread as being lofty sourdough boules and crusty baguettes, but I'll bet the average person goes through a lot more sliced sandwich bread than anything labeled 'artisan'. And isn't that kind of a shame?
Floral Bath Salts
I have always loved bath salts. When I was a teenager I used to buy loads of it to try even though most of the time they weren’t particularly good and I didn’t really know how to properly use them.
A Connection to the Past
The more bread I bake, the more I fall in love with the ancient and heritage grains. Now, there is nothing wrong with simply grabbing a bag of run-of-the-mill bread flour - that was certainly how I made my first loaves - but I’ve always been a bit too curious for my own good.
Birth Day!
Our son is two years old today! Watching him grow has been such a joy and it’s been wonderful to see him discover things that interest him. This day also has me thinking a lot about my journey into motherhood.
