Five Things Friday: where I assemble assorted favorites, oddities, announcements, discoveries, random thoughts, life tidbits and whatever else wasn’t quite long enough for a real post. This week: year round gardening, my favorite essential oil, nerdy books and garden clean-up.
Do One Little Thing This Week
The name of the game right now is finalizing your garden plan for 2018. One of the things that can be especially tricky is figuring out when to plant what crops so that you can maximize your harvest.
If that’s something you’re still working on figuring out, check out How To Make Succession Planting and Year-Round Gardening Really Work, a comprehensive look at how I plan in terms of “crop windows” in order to get the most from my garden, all year round.
Item I’m Loving This Week
DoTERRA On Guard Essential Oil – I like essential oils, but I’m not one of those bloggers who wants to tell you about how they will change your life and, like, cure alopecia or something. And I certainly want nothing to do in the periodic catfights that crop up over essential oil brands.
So from the perspective of someone who has no particular loyalty or attachment to any essential oil, the doTERRA On Guard blend is the best smelling thing in the entire world. It’s ridiculously expensive, but it took me nearly a year to use up my first bottle with basically daily use, so I just sprung for a second bottle. I put a couple drops in the diffuser (this is the one I use) and my whole bedroom just feels warm and cozy.
What I’m Reading
Continuing with the “what’s on my bedside table theme,” for Christmas my husband gave me the Neal Stephenson novel Cryptonomicon. I love almost everything Stephenson writes, and The Baroque Cycle on audio read by the incomparable Simon Prebble (I’d listen to Prebble read the Yellow Pages) remains the best – and also the longest – historical fiction experience of my life.
So what a treat it was to pick up Cryptonomicon and realize not only is it in the same literary universe as The Baroque Cycle, but it shares a similar intricate, time-hopping, plotline-weaving style in a slightly more accessible length (it’s still over 900 pages long).
Full of mystery, tech, cryptology, security, and danger, this is something like Bitcoin meets Nazis. While in some ways Cryptonomicon is more relevant than ever, the only drawback I’ve encountered is that the future has somewhat caught up to Stephensons 1999 imaginings, so some of the tech feels a touch dated.
Here’s the full list of what I’m reading this year.
In The Garden This Week
Rain, rain and more rain. That dry spell was too good to last, I suppose. In between downpours, a few garden scenes caught my eye. Clockwise from upper left: The color on this self-seeded Golden Chard is incredible – the cold seems to make color more vibrant; the pile of trimmings from winter pruning; new tender growth on over-wintered Red Russian Kale will make a nice addition to meals.
Quote I’m Pondering
“Experience is what you got when you didn’t get what you wanted.”
— Howard Marks
Ahh, Erica. I don’t have much time these days to read blogs, but every time I come back to yours it makes me so happy.
We got 13″ of snow in NC this week and I stayed home from work yesterday. I found myself slipping into the patterns of the life that I yearn for– baking bread, stock simmering on the stove…mapping out my garden plan for spring and your wonderful book in my lap as I actually took some time to read while our little girl was napping in between snow excursions.
This is Andrea from your “homesteading with children” post from back in 2015. Thought I’d leave a little update here for you, since your blog post meant so much to me when I was pregnant and is currently printed up and tucked into our baby book.
Our little girl, Willow, was born in March. My water broke while I was planting peas in the garden. I think after her birth my husband and I were plunged into some sort of desperate claiming of the life we intended to live when we decided to get pregnant. Every week my husband came home with more plants to plant. When she was a few months old we got our first piglets. We have persevered in our efforts to in whatever small way we can claim our independence and quality of life. We’ve managed to keep a decent sized garden every year, although food preservation has been less than ideal.
We are both self employed and work away from home. We staggered our schedule so we didn’t have to pay for childcare. We are fortunate to be able to do that, but the result is that we don’t have any time home together as a family.
We’re falling into these conversations this year about the logistics of one of us being at home full time. Neither of us make enough income individually at this time for it to make sense, but when you start looking at the cost of working and how much more you could produce and save if one of us was home it almost seems possible. We don’t have a lot of the payments other people do- we don’t have car payments, television, Netflix and all of that stuff but we’re just not there. It’s kind of a mind fuck really. When your heart yearns for something so simple and foundational but you have to participate in a system that is so complex and removed from your core values, all while the budget gets tighter and tighter.
But, we’re getting there. Doing little bits at a time when and where we can. I know one day I’ll be home full time, putting my time, sweat and intellect into something that actually matters and feels important to me. In the meantime, we take the moments when we can.
I love that every time I happen to check into your blog it is always relevant to me. I was just thinking that succession planting is my biggest weakness in the garden. I’ve got to map out a plan and actually stick with it this year…because cilantro all summer long is critical to my happiness. And OnGuard- I agree, it is amazing stuff and lasts for ages even though it is one of my most used oils. It smells like warm, spicy, wintertime holiday happiness and has helped us avoid all kinds of nasties. Love that stuff!
Ok, long comment. Just wanted to check in and say thanks again. I am grateful for you and your little corner of the internet!
He should scratch all the right itches but I have yet to get into a Neal Stephenson book.
If Cthulhu meets computers meets Nazis in space appeals to you, you might like the Laundry Files series by Charles Stoss, and they’re all shorter books around 300 pages.
I just re-listened to Reamde! One of my favorites. Sometimes you just need a nerdy adventure story set in the PNW.
Just wanted to thank you for linking to your succession gardening post! I’ve been thinking I’d love to plant garlic, but never thought I had the space. Turns out I have 3 tomato slots just waiting for garlic. Brilliant! I’ll definitely add more spinach under the dying beans and squash. I succeeded in getting a few spinach plants up last fall, but it was a pretty weak showing, and I’d waited till the lettuce was done. Smarter to put them under the nitrogen-fixing beans, for sure.