So, last week the content was a little sparse here on NW Edible. That’s because I got in a collision last Monday morning while driving the kids to the bus stop. Everyone is safe, no major injuries were sustained, the car is in the shop with substantial boo-boos, and we are all moving back towards…
Family
Lunch In A Jar: How Mason Jars Can Make Your Brown Bagging Easier
Do you run short on reusable, environmentally-friendly containers when you are packing lunches? In the, “this may be too obvious to be a blog post but may also change your lunch hour for the better” category, I’d like to talk about using your stash of mason jars for things other than canning (or margaritas). Like brown…
Where The Men Aren't
Maybe you have websites like these your blog-reader. They are filled with instagram-tinted family photos and helpful recipes and they have cute tag-lines that always include the phrase: “journey to self-sufficiency.” These blogs focus on what one family is doing to become more healthy, self-reliant or economically and environmentally responsible. Sometimes the focus is on…
Mother’s Day: A Radical Act of Defiance
Secretly, creeping through the brain and heart and blood of every mama there is a deep, dark fear that we are Not Mom Enough. We snap at our kids, or grab the sharpie out of their little hand a bit too roughly before they can decorate another piece of furniture, or are the last to…
Notes From A Synthetic Environment
For the past five days I’ve been living in an unreal, unearthly limbo. I’m at a professional conference, in a 34 story hotel, in Chicago. I could easily have no idea what time it is. I certainly have no idea what the weather is like. My menus over the past few days read something like this:…
Side-Dressing: A Feeding Strategy For Plants and Kids
For a year-and-a-half I felt terrible guilt that I was ignoring my daughter. Reasonable observers would assure me that I was not neglecting her, but in my heart I knew that the attention lavished on her had diminished markedly since the birth of our son. You see, our daughter was a home-schooled only-child for six-and-a-half years. She got…
An 18 Month Old's Ode To Broccoli
On Things That Make You Feel Big Broccoli, my broccoli: Nothing brings me more joy I love you more than all my toys. With you I can pretend to be A big ol’ giant, eating trees. On Showing Your True Feelings Broccoli, my broccoli: When I know I get to eat you – and what…
Burning Polly Pocket: My Clutter-Clearing Fantasy
I can tell it’s officially spring because yesterday I was hit with an overwhelming urge to take everything in my house, pile it in the driveway and burn it. In my pyromaniacal fantasy I haul room-fulls of stuff out into the street and pile it up until all my precious individual things have blurred into an undifferentiated mountain…
The 5 Best Vegetables To Grow With Kids
I wrote the article below for the website of a local magazine called ParentMap about a month ago. It’s all aglow with the joys and benefits of gardening with kids, and these are many. But I gotta tell you, this past weekend I turned around to see my son standing in the raised bed I’d just been…
Escaping The Cult of Busy
Note to Self: Life on Garden Time does not mean Life on Frantic Time. “Oh, I’ve just been so busy.” “With all the kid’s activities, I’ve just been so busy!” “With the new job, I’ve just been so busy!” “I don’t know what it is, it’s just crazy busy right now.” “Wow, I wish I…
Refactoring In The Garden
2011 was The Year of Additions. We added to our garden: new perennial bed, new mini-orchard, new chickens, two new coops for aforementioned chickens, and a couple new raised beds. We added this blog, and with it a sizable commitment and a wonderful community of like-minded folks. And late in 2010 of course, we had added this…
Build A Lower Waste Lunch
A friend asked for some tips on packing lower-plastic and lower-waste lunches for her school-age son. This rather surprised me, since this particular friend is genuine cloth-diapering, Keystone XL Pipeline-protesting, etsy-craft-selling kind of girl. And in fact, when further questioned, it turned out my friend was already packing a pretty green lunch, but was looking…