Jan's autobiographical blurb.
Jan's site recommendation of the moment - Edible Garden Design. I love my niece, Leslie, and this is her awesome business. Check it out!
7/9/08 Cool night, fresh mead, sushi, beet salad from the garden, miso soup, homemade spiced icecream with ginger orange sauce, shooting stars, frogs, friends back home from a long trip, 5 goats (2 mammas, 3 babies!) here day after tomorrow, new little earthen barn, straw, hay, herbs,sunflowers, mint, and the baby chicks are growing up!
5/18/08 It's getting hot. Broody hen sitting on 10 eggs - babies in 10 more days if all goes well. Definitely a jump in the pond day. Full moon tomorrow?
5/11/08 Waxing moon, transplanting tomatoes, peppers, flood irrigating greens, frogs, ladybugs, beez, heat, breeze. Music last night - harmonies, concertina. I've alphabetized my song collection!
5/1/08 potatoes, beets, ladybugs, carrots in the lower garden. We're prepping the beds for planting summer vegetables in mid May - tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, herbs, corn, squash, melons, beans...
4/21/08 Watching the cat leap in and out of the window. Now she's on the roof and looking very satisfied. Now she's disappeared...all very catlike.
4/20/08 Sunday - Sleepy day. Reading and sleeping and reading, My Stroke of Insight - Jill Bolte Taylor (downloaded it from Lulu.com) and Gaviotas, A Village to Reinvent the World, by Alan Weisman. Soil Science Simplified is also in the lineup.
4/7/08 Living at Quail Springs and working on designing and putting in a new garden with acequias (running water filled ditches) for the irrigation system. Pictures from the ridge coming soon. Two redtail hawks this morning, 5 hives of bees now, wildflowers, fruit trees budding.
12-29-07 Happy Winter Time! I'm surrounded by boxes and the packing thang is going on. Holy moley.
8-6-07 Chicken coop is beautiful! Couple more days of mixing mud and we're ready to put on the roof and paint a big chicken head on the lay box.
8-1-07 Rosemary, marjoram, chocolate mint, spearmint, parsely.
7-14-07 Red-throated hummingbird just came through my door.
7-12-07 Plum jam! Pressure canned plums! Beets, carrots, broccoli, squash, tomatoes from Lloyd's garden.
6-23-07 I bought a bale of straw for the cob chicken coop.
First spinning lesson. Made fat yarn with grey sheep's wool on the spinning wheel. Then spun angora! A few moments with the sense of spinning. Also tried the drop spindle.
6-22-07 Solstice weekend. Dan's Taco Palapa Fiesta at Sands Beach (Isla Vista). Edwin's birthday party with mask-making on display at the house (I'm hoping). The sun is shining, Breakfast gardening! Basil, peppers, lettuce, carrots, buckwheat for a cover.
5-22-07 Long day. Spoke to some sweet people today, snuggled with a lab puppy - fat and soft.
5-18-07 Almost 1am. Planting pumpkins and squash later today, beans, clary sage and angelica...more cilantro. Seeding beets! Practicing, writing. Packing for travelling to Quail Springs for the weekend to visit with my sweetheart and find out how the first week of the permaculture course went. Bringing 10 gallons of goat's milk, goat cheese, another bee box, tangle foot, a stand, fertilizer, perlite, worm castings, fig trees, concertina and guitar, walking shoes, sleeping bag, sun hat.
5-17.5-07 Check out my favorite media of the moment. This is my former husband, Joel Arant, and Lucky, the amazing singing dog (I picked her up on highway 1 in Brighton, Iowa when she was just a wee thing) singing together.
5-17-07 Friends over tonight for dinner. Snow Peas with basil, bean stew with cilantro, sourdough bread, goat cheese, artichokes, olives, flatbreads, chocolate ice cream. Mulberries and fava beans for breakfast, pineapple-coconut juice, goat cheese for lunch, goat's milk coffee ice cream, jasmine green tea.