Books to read and snow!

In the Kitchen

I am enjoying some much needed rest.  Yesterday morning, the first thing that Mark said was "pie".  So, naturally, I had to make a pie.  I made a cherry pie (I had made several quarts of cherry pie filling this past summer) and put a "crumb-like" topping on top...it was good!

Reading...

Now that things are slowing down, I have been doing a little bit of reading.  I don't really care for fiction books.  I read a lot more "how-to" kind of books.  

I happened to find this book called Locally Laid by Lucie B. Amundsen a few months ago.  Locally Laid is a humorous telling of this unlikely egg farm start up and through it, a painless lesson in America’s food system.  I really enjoyed this book so I started looking for other books that were about beginning farmers.  

Next, I read, Hit by a Farm by Catherine Friend. Catherine Friend was happy being an author and writing instructor. She always wore clean clothes. She never had anything disagreeable stuck to the bottom of her shoes. That all changed the day she agreed to help her partner Melissa fulfill Melissa’s lifelong ambition to farm in Minnesota. Catherine and Melissa embark on a rural odyssey filled with sheep, goats, chicken, llamas, and a host of other natural disasters. As it turns out, farming isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  I really enjoyed this one, lots of humor and real world advice about farming and balancing it all.

I found another book about chickens (they also have goats, alpacas, sheep and more) called Dirty Chick by Antonia Murphy.  The family in this book moved from California to New Zealand and started a farm.  They also have a child with a disability and I did not know that when I picked up this book but it added another dimension for me, personally, as I could totally relate to parts of the book when she is talking about school and other concerns.  An uproarious memoir chronicling the misadventures of a born-and-bred San Franciscan who leaves city life to become an artisanal farmer in New Zealand.

Lastly, I know that our local food Co-op has a book club but I have always been too busy to even look at the title of the book that is being read.  I noticed in my Facebook feed that the next book club book is 5 Acres and A Dream The Book by Leigh Tate.  This really caught my attention so I ordered it right away and I am just loving it and only have a couple of chapters left.  I am going to try and go to the book club discussion next month.

Snow!

We have gotten several inches of snow over the past week and more in on the way.  We had some leftover wood from last year and we have used it all up which is a little sad.  It is so nice to have a fire when it's cold and snowy.  I just could not justify spending a few hundred dollars for wood (when we might be moving soon...hopefully...).  

Coal in the driveway helping Henry shovel snow.

Beehive with snow!

Sunflower with snow hat.

I grew only one sunflower this past year to grow at our house.  This sunflower is for seeds.  Although I put all the sunflower flowers to bed, I never got around to harvesting my seed sunflower.  He seems to be holding up pretty well even with this big snow hat!