Tuesday, January 8, 2008

A Name for Folks Like Us

When you see two horses, two goats, two opossums and two hawks on your way home during a torrential downpour, you can't help but wonder if they're on their way to the ark. But the freaky, warm weather came in handy during dinner when I burned the snot out of the garlic bread, set the smoke alarm off and needed to open the windows to air the place out. Which leads me to my New Years resolution. I've decided I'm going to learn how to cook.

Oh sure, some of you have stomached things I've made and survived. I've managed to squeak by all these years. What I'm talking about is REALLY cooking. You know, something that doesn't have instructions on the side of the box. Something to excite my newly rediscovered taste buds. Something *cough, hack, sputter* healthy. Tonight it was green eggs and ham. My customers weren't nearly as amused by it as I was. They caught on that the green was in fact spinach in disguise.

Speaking of spinach, that's my other resolution. This year we're going to plant our garden. Last year was all about regaining control of the landscape and chasing my cherry tomato plant in a pot all over the yard. This year I'm gonna plant that sucker in the ground. We'll just see if it blows away then! I'm hoping for an herb garden along with a veggie garden. Oh and maybe some strawberries. I want other berries too, but I'd better start off small.

We'll need some fertilizer. Which brings me to the chickens, chickens poop. A lot. Good thing if your a gardener, not so good if you're, well, pretty much anybody else. So in theory, the chickens will feed the garden, the garden will feed us, the leftovers will feed the chickens, the chickens will feed us and so on and so forth. In theory.

It had been a while since I'd raised chickens or grown any spinach, so I did the obvious. I looked it up on the internet. While browsing www.backyardchickens.com and a few others, I realized that there's apparently a HUGE market out there of self help books for city slickers wanting to get away from it all and become "Homesteaders". People who would willingly leave their lattes behind in an effort to get back to nature. People who will commute to the country, find a quiet spot and build themselves a little house on the prairie. Complete with chickens and a garden.

We've been so busy doing our thing, we didn't even realize we WERE a thing. Come to find out, we're homesteaders.

2 comments:

Jen said...

Wow, who knew!!!! That's it, you need to start a quilt camp so we can all come and live like pioneers for a week!!

Anonymous said...

We've got about 5,500 people on our forum at www.BackYardChickens.com that feel the exact same way.

Come by and say hello!