A natural living site where you'll learn about organic gardening, foraging, home medicine and more.
It’s the time of year when fresh produce from the garden is starting to come in. We don’t have ripe tomatoes yet, but I’ve been able to harvest some hot peppers. One thing I surely love is hot pepper sauce to use in the middle of winter. It’s a great reminder of summer.Continue Reading
One of my favorite summer meals is barbecue. Barbecue chicken, barbecue ribs, pulled pork with BBQ sauce. You name it. The rhubarb in my organic garden is producing abundantly, and I’ve been making all things rhubarb, including rhubarb sauce sweetened with maple syrup. And that gave me the idea to try and create some homemade rhubarb BBQ sauce.Continue Reading
When it comes to winter and foraging, pine comes calling. Just the scent alone can bring me to a place of calm, and cooking with it adds a heavenly aroma to my kitchen. Especially when I’m cooking oven roasted potatoes on a bed of pine needles. Continue Reading
I don’t think there’s a cookie I love more than a crispy, old-fashioned butter cookie. This amazing recipe from the new book, Sweet Maple by Michelle Visser, takes the goodness of butter cookies one step further with the addition of maple syrup. Old-Fashioned Maple Syrup Cookies are simply wonderful! Continue Reading
Making mead, or honey wine, is an ancient form of brewing using the simplest of ingredients. It’s a perfect place for beginners to start on their home brewing journey. Even this blueberry mead recipe is simple enough for a beginner who is somewhat familiar with the art of fermentation.Continue Reading
Because there are so many elderberries to be found in the area where my husband works, he is the elderberry forager in the family. He’ll stop on the way home and harvest, and then after dinner, he and I will sit on the back porch as the sun sets, listening to tunes and removing berries from the stems. It’s a late August date every year. And the next day I set about dehydrating the elderberries for elderberry syrup, or I make low sugar elderberry jelly.Continue Reading