When Thanksgiving is as warm, sunny and in every way gorgeous as this one was, it’s easy to get into the spirit of gratefulness. This year I was especially thankful that we had another balmy 10 hours to get more winterizing done in the gardens and paddocks, and I was also thankful that while Shannon and the boys were outside doing that, I was inside making dinner out of my fabulous new cookbook, “The Joy of Cooking.” continued »
Fall, as harvest season, is in many ways a time for goodbyes. We say goodbye to the lovely rows of crops in the field and goodbye to a number of the animals we’ve been raising for food. Oftentimes, the harvest is bittersweet, as we relinquish the lives and the companionship we share with our livestock, trading roles of nourisher and nourished. Tomorrow our turkeys will leave the farm. But we can’t honestly say we’re sad to see them go. continued »
Just about four years ago now we picked up our family and moved from a crowded two-flat in Chicago to this big place in the country. The first thing our pre-teen girls wanted to do when we got here was find a puppy. We got the puppy before we even moved, actually, at the Bargain Nook thrift store in Darlington on a weekend trip to clean up the new house. But that’s another story. The second thing they wanted was a horse, of course. continued »
What have we been up to here at Circle M? Well, September and October flew by in a rush of harvest tasks and celebrations. In our extended rural neighborhood, farms throw parties for hope in spring and gratefulness in fall. These open house festivals are lovely quotation marks on either side of “The Growing Season” and we threw our own this fall as well as attended those of friends. Many of you joined us here around the fires, both inside and out, and we very much enjoyed the shared meals, music and merriment of craft and conversation that closed out our garden year. We hope you’ll come back again in spring when the whole circle starts again. In the meantime, we’ve shifted gears as the outdoor work of sowing and tending is supplanted by indoor tasks of woolcraft and bookkeeping. continued »
