Be joyful though you have considered all the facts
(*) I totally stole that title from my friend and fellow chicken and beekeeper, Kath, who blogs at This One Good Life. She too had to do what I did today. Neither Hive 4 and Hive 5 , both installed on May 5, were doing well. In Hive 5, the split off Hive 3, I’m pretty …
Continue reading “The Queen is Dead, Long Live the Queen (*)”
In the afternoon I picked a huge salad for a party we’re going to this evening. All of this is from our garden: Lettuce, mache, minutina, sorrel, claytonia (with flowers), radicetta, kale, chard, lamb’s quarters Amie will eat only greens from our garden. Yesterday after school she got to go with my friend M and …
Continue reading “Eating from the Garden Again and the Little Activist”
A few weeks ago a very good friend and I were driving through town, delivering signs for an event. We were discussing vacation plans and I told her about a rule I’ve been tinkering with, that I would fly only to visit family, not  for recreation. She asked me why, which surprised me because she …
This Summer I’ll be growing food all over town. The black dots indicate where. The lower one is at the Ecological Food Garden at the popular Hannah Williams Playground, which we established last Summer. In the middle, the left dot is at my house, the one on the right is my daughter’s school’s garden, which …
Some time ago (April 16) we returned to the field of the Full Moon/Grief walk. Our group was smaller this time. We had timed our congregation to dusk, because that is when the male woodcock performs its sky dance for the benefit of the females of the species. Woodcocks are crepuscular, most active around dusk and …
Spring is supposed to be wet. Here in Wayland, Spring often means flooding in many basements and parts of town, sometimes even busy intersections and the public library. But until today it hadn’t rained for weeks. Drought is a relief from flooding and mud, true, but it brings fire hazard warnings, and having to  use …
The little chicks enjoyed yet another Summer Spring  day outside in their table chicken tractor. Amie was feeling better so I set up a teepee. She spent most of her time watching them and then hammering nails into a piece of wood. The chicks enjoy pecking at grass, chasing insects, and dust bathing. I shot …
My poor Amie. For months she and her orchestra colleagues worked on four pieces for her concert at Jordan Hall today. On Friday she had the sniffles, on Saturday she went rapidly downhill, and this morning it was obvious she couldn’t go. She spent the day in bed, reading, watching Youtube and napping. In the …
My day of rest after Earth Day Weekend involved gardening: watering, weeding, some sowing (calendula, chamomile), staking and training the sour cherry and continuing to lay the drip irrigation (hard on the hands, that). It was pretty warm, above 70F, so the fig trees came out, as well as the two chicks. I knew that …
What a rush. Wayland’s 2013 Earth Day Weekend, organized by Transition Wayland and the Wayland Green Team (both of which I am an active member), is over. It was a two-day community extravaganza of open houses all over town: people showing their retrofitted or super insulated houses, gardens, solar PV and Hot Water systems, heat …