Busy Hands Homestead

All of my nap time creations are finished and will be available for sale this Sunday at the MADE fair.   See images of a few finished pieces here . Now to make dinner.  Label and price EVERYTHING!  Clean the house and pack 4 carry on bags. We are leaving Missoula and heading to Great Falls immediately after MADE fair, and flying to Oklahoma early the next morning. Where to start. Breathe. Lets go.

This fantastically awesome photograph of me was taken by Sylvan on the very tip top of  Waterworks Hill.  It is the hill I can see out of our east windows.  The three of us have never made it to the top for the following reasons:  1.  We walk to the trail head.  Even though the trail head is just at the edge of our neighborhood it adds just enough distance to the trek that we have to turn back way before the top. 2.  I let Sylvan walk.  He is slow. So slow.  It took us three hours once to walk from the car (lesson learned from reason 1) to just past this little draw and back to the car...  I could point the very spot out to you from my yard.  It was at once a far distance for Sylvan to walk and so, so very far away from the peak.  3. We leave our house to close to lunch time and we go home to eat.  So today we: 1. drove to the trailhead 2. Sylvan walked the way DOWN. 3. were on the slopes by 10:00 ...

After heating up the oven to 450 degrees it was too hot to eat in the house.  We took our plates and moved outside to the picnic table and ate our slices of pizza in the cool shade our maple tree. I made my favorite pizza: roasted beet, feta, caramelized onion and walnuts. I made a second pizza: feta, pizza cheese, beet greens and morels. Between the two pizzas I used a beet and all the beet greens off of the bunch I bought from the farmer's market Saturday morning.  Reluctantly, I let Adam pack the remaining slices for his work day lunch.  I know that I will be making pasta with radish green pesto for the kids and I...  but that pizza was so, so good. I always enjoy pizza night. I like to think that it involves washing less dishes...  probably not true...  after making the dough, caramelizing onions and mixing up the sauces the dishes pile up just the same.  But it feels different. I like sliding the pizza onto the baking stone in the oven. I ...

Ivory opened the door and beamed at me: "It is a beautiful day!" And it was.  After a wonderful Father's Day breakfast at the Riverside Cafe the remainder of our day was filled with: Random little chores around the yard.  Commencing the construction of a custom coffee table.  A few random chores around the clay studio.   A beautiful day indeed!

Three plant starts are now nestled in dirt, packed in burlap bags, lined up on top of our chicken coop.   Sixteen five gallon buckets in, I started feeling crazy. Lugging the sixteenth bucket up the ladder I start worrying that I will not finish before the kids wake up from their naps and that this whole idea is more trouble than it is worth.  A total of twenty two buckets later, Ivory is up, Sylvan is still sleeping and three green, I-should-have-planted-them-last-week starts are sunk into the dirt.  I hope this works.  I visualize the plants growing, cascading down the walls of the coop, keeping the interior of the coop cool while growing big fat heavy fruits....  but this isn't a story of making the most of the space on a city lot, or about one of the many uses of burlap bags, but about the seeds I hope will flourish in this space.  Years ago - pre-children, pre-marriage and even pre-engagement - Adam, my future in-laws and I atte...

The kids and I walked through our garden this morning an snipped flowers for our first summer bouquet:  some roses, a sprig of lemon balm, parsley blossoms, bolting radishes and flowers off of what I am fairly certain are pretty, but invasive, weeds.   It sits in front of me as I trail shapes onto the cups that I threw during yesterday's nap time.  While the children sleep an apple tree moves through the seasons; carrots, beets and cabbages grow  in rows; and hens peck at scratch. Today's nap time creations. 

I bend down, look into the fridge. I close it and step out the back door. I scan the garden beds - back to the fridge. It is June and I am in love with this time of the year. The meal planning gets looser...  instead of having solid shopping lists and a specific plans for each and every item purchased, I step into the garden and ask: "What are we having for dinner?" The truth is, that even though it is June, there are not many things to harvest. There are radishes (and their greens. delicious!), spinach, sprigs of dill, almost ripe strawberries and a mounding rhubarb plant.  All other plants are still tiny - promising more later in the summer. I snip Spinach leaves. They mound up in my basket. I snip a few sprigs of dill. We are having Pacific Rockfish for dinner and these garden additions will be perfect. I look down at my pan and realize that this is the first of  this year's dinners that has a substantial garden contribution.  Sure, I have been usi...

The days are sunny and long. There is no time sit down or sleep. There are morels to pick. So many morels to pick that we actually let our kiddos go over to a friends house for an entire day while we scrambled across the steep slope of the burned forest floor.  Our first day together with out children...  in - oh - 5 years or so.   There are summer birthdays to celebrate. There are amazing thrift store scores to discover.   Yes these are my new, super sexy footed pajamas. As I am climbing into bed. Adam: Are you glowing? I look down.  Me:  Yes. I. Am.  All the pterodactyls glow in the dark.   HOT.  right? There are bread baking skills to practice and share. There are more cups to etch.  There are back yard summer nights and bright summer mornings to enjoy with friends.  Somewhere in the doing and going and fun there is time to sleep and maybe the occasional moment to post ...