I can't believe that so much time has passed since I last posted. Life just got away from me.
I went to vist my grandmother for a week somewhere along the line. She's 96 and still living in the house she's lived in for at least 70 years. She puts in a kitchen garden every year, and grows enough potatoes and carrots that she is still eating them in February. In talking to her about my plan to try and grow my own food, I asked her when she plants her seeds (she lives in a different zone than I do) and her response was "when the soil is ready". I asked her how she knows when it's ready (hoping for some kind of useful clue that would help me understand my soil) and she looked at me like I was a bit slow and said that she just knew. And I realized that she has spent her whole life depending on that garden and the food she grew there. She fed her children with what she and my grandfather cultivated out behind their house. They hadn't had a lot of money, but even more than that, she was a farmer's daughter - it was the way you ran a household. Raising fruits and vegetables, canning and freezing, putting by for the winter is just what has always been done.
Which of course made me think about what our relationship with food is nowadays. How most people don't know what a freshly-grown tomato tastes like, much less how to go about growing one. How did we get so far away from nourishing ourselves?
So of course lately things keep coming back to how excited I am about trying to turn our little homestead into a lush, thriving personal supermarket.
In the meantime, the snow is melting (and so the basement is flooding...), I planted some red pepper, onions and leeks (and I gave in and bought a heating mat because I'm afraid the house is too cold for the seeds to germinate) and it is definitely the mud season. Once again I appreciate our sump pumps.
Spring is definitely on the horizon.