Well a few months back I mentioned my homemade laundry detergent and bragged about what a great job it did getting our clothes clean. There was only one problem: it was lumpy. This must be because I used half a bar of Fels Naphtha soap ( which I completely forgot to use this time). I …

Actually I can’t make weeks at home, so I can’t truthfully advertise homemade weeks. If I could, I would have made about a thousand of them already and quit my job. In the absence of that, however, I’ll document all the homemamde stuff I made this weekend. I’ll also try to document how those homemade …

As I write this I’m eating homemade butter on homemade wheat & buckwheat bread. (What is buckwheat? If you can tell me without Googling it or looking in Wikipedia, you win! I have no idea what buckwheat is. Jessica ground some to put in muffins the other day and there was still some buckwheat flour …

My gallery in Calistoga, California (Stix and Stones Gallery, wish they had a website) called some time ago with an announcement that they were running low on original artwork by me, and that they would like some more, please. This is a good thing. So I have created four new originals which I will be …

I hate to keep braying about this, but I don’t hate it so much that I won’t keep doing it. This is (Ta-daaa!) our first all-homemade meal. At least that I can recall. Milk: neighbor’s cow. (I won’t be getting a milk cow anytime soon.) Waffles: homemade from wheat we ground, oats from our storage, …

Homemade butter Friends of ours are now up to four cows and milk hasn’t been selling well for them lately, so their milk is piling up. They’ve agreed to sell it to us for $2.50 a gallon, about what you’d pay at the store. But this is Jersey cow milk, so there’s a lot of …

Warning: this is a messy procedure. Learn from my woes and surround your interior chimney with an old sheet before proceeding. Well, since we never actually had winter around here I’ll detail this procedure and post the pictures from when I cleaned the chimbley around Christmas time. The principles are still relevant and I’ll do …

To Absalom’s legs, that is. The ones with the spurs on them. Absalom met his Maker on Saturday morning. Here’s the fixin’s for rooster soup, just before Jessica bagged them to put in the freezer: It was not a pleasant end. I’m really sorry, Absalom, but I didn’t know what I was doing. By the …

I had to get on the roof. When I get sick to my stomach I get really sick. Violently sick. It’s icky. And the timing was rather poor for the violently-icky illness I had over the holiday, because our chimbley was clogged* and I had to get on the roof to fix it. Until I …

I estimate January 15 to be halfway through the burning season, which ends, by exactly the same precise calculation, on May 1. Here’s our winter heat supply as of the first week of the new year. I’ve used up just over two rows of the seven rows in the wood sheds. Here you see the …