Stick season is upon us. I step outside to do an evening check of animals and a cold wind whips dried leaves around my ankles, making me wish I had grabbed a coat off the hook before leaving the house. We spend part of Sunday winterizing bee hives. We kneel on the grass in our…
Category: Outdoors
November
I always think of October as rounding the corner. We begin the month with the foliage party: everything ablaze. We wear T-shirts to walk the dogs and still feel the warmth of the slanted autumn sunlight until late afternoon. The sheep mill around the pasture nibbling and enjoying afternoon naps at the edge of our…
Walking Into The Past
It has been one of those weeks; every line on every day in the calendar book full. This weekend the weather was sunny and dry and we decided to skip digging potatoes and hike heading to one of our favorite fall foliage areas in the Champlain Valley. Leaf litter crunches as a light breeze pulls…
Preparing
I close the gate to the pasture after letting the sheep in and push hard on the metal gate to the garden. Long tendrils curl away from the pumpkins, small yellow bulbs swell but don’t really resemble a Jack O’lantern yet. Kale plants, eternally hardy, faithfully push new leaves out for me to harvest. The…
Cidre
The leaves are beginning to drop. Some color is showing itself on the mountainside[s] but the majority of maple leaves are rusty, without their normal brilliance. Because we are Vermonters, we have to explain everything in terms of weather; this year, the lack of brilliance thus far is being put down to the unprecedented height…
Circle Of Fire
The red cider press is bolted to the deck and ready to go. Leaves spin down, our road already covered. Our apple trees are loaded with hanging fruit which are also beginning to drop. It is cider season. Tomorrow we will spend the morning of the holiday as we do most years, at the Labor…
Making Change
As we enter the Dog days we are spending a lot of time harvesting. I find that when I am kneeling at the earth’s alter, my hands busy pulling carrots that will be sauteed in a cast iron skillet until they release sweetness from under their charred exteriors, my brain has time to free-wheel. I…
Summer’s Not Over Yet
When I am looking out the window in early January, and the snowplow has just gone by creating a white wall at the end of our driveway making it impassible without a snowblower and some shoveling, and the only way to get water to livestock is in metal buckets filled in our bathtub, winter wins…
The Art Of Taking and Giving
This morning I pulled a large steel bowl from under the counter and headed down to our “mobile” garden. Living in the woods means that our main vegetable garden is done with sun by mid afternoon. This works for most of our growing but not for tomatoes or basil so we repurposed one of our…
The Price
As I walk the dogs, the sunlight cuts across in front of me and I can see dandelion seeds lift and gently blow into the trees: it is magical, like hundreds of miniature hot air balloons rising into the sky. I pause to watch them while Sam sloshes around in the stream. Outside our kitchen…
Toward The Less Comfortable
I can hear my breath as I attempt to pull the hood over my head. I close the front of my bee-keeper’s suit, zipping a painful amount of hair into the teeth. Anxious to be suited up, I yank my hair out and swear. I look over at Paul who has the older suit, to…