No worries! ✌🏼
This ain’t me, friend.
Honestly, even people w/ lucrative full-time jobs are doing this now. It’s annoying. Stop encroaching on farmers restaurant accounts, putting up farm stands, undercutting at the market bc you don’t need the money. You want an ego stroke? Help a small farm break into a bigger market by funding them.
I don’t think there is anything worse than rich people deciding to start “farming” while there are people who have dedicated their whole lives to the work, with limited resources, struggling to take their businesses to the next level. Rich ppl: invest in existing farms and just keep a garden.
It’s also a fast growing lower BTU firewood. Great for starting your woodstove and for mild spring and fall days where you don’t need your stove to be putting off 400+ degrees. Excellent when combined with black locust (fast growing, higher BTU) for coppicing firewood.
Why should you grow willow? It’s easy, all you do is stick a cutting 2/3 into the ground in early spring and keep it mulched and watered.
It’s a great weaving material, great for hedging, wonderful songbird habitat and a good early source of pollen for bees.
I have a bunch of basketry willow cuttings available and will ship within the US. DM me and I’ll send you the order spreadsheet. Ask any questions below.
Is it just me or is the social fabric just getting more and more unraveled? I acknowledge it could be me but I’ve never felt more isolated than I do right now. I see people talking about community all the time and I just have no effing idea what they are talking about. Fake it til you make it?
Hey homesteaders: post yr pantries! Extra points if you don’t have a monetized social media account about your pantry.
Polish donut (pączki) recipe testing: Round 1. Fried in pasture raised lard and filled with homemade black currant jam. The dough wasn’t quite right with the batch, but still delicious. Back to the drawing board!
So excited to have an indoor space to host visitors that isn’t my personal living space. New wood stove installed in our summer kitchen. Will be teaching classes and hosting our weaving circle here.
Get that light closer! They look a little leggy. I’d have the light about an inch or two away from the tippy top of the seedlings. They won’t stretch as much to get to the light.
I also rarely if ever edit my posts before posting, so just prepare yourself for that because I won’t apologize for it. :)
I’ll mostly be posting on that. I mostly shoot from the hip on social so a lot of what I share will not be planned or coordinated like someone pursuing professions content creator status. I’m allergic to that sort of thing so I’m mostly here to connect in earnest and have interesting conversations.
We mostly operate from a “subsistence first” model, where we seek to meet our dietary and energy needs first, selling excess second to that. A choice we came to after doing the market farmer hustle + burning out. We have some interest in approachable, affordable methods of disaster preparedness.
I guess an intro is in order: I’m Meg. I’ve been farming full time for 15 years in NJ and now NY. I grow veg, herbs, cut flowers and raise chickens for eggs. Formerly raised goats for dairy but enjoying a ruminant-free period for now. We run a farm stand and sell to restaurants…
They probably had a conversation about how efficient this is.
Just mailed off this basket that I made for my friend’s wedding gift. It cost $168 to ship. I’m not a natural at weaving and I’ve been trying really hard to get reasonably good at it. If the post office damages it I’m going to beat some ass, I think.
When I realized that I could make my own tortillas, even as a person who sucks at baking bread, so many possibilities emerged. Entire cultures have flourished while consuming breads that never saw the inside of an oven. I feel free!
Welp, yet another social app. How long until I start ignoring this one?
Any advice on approach with this one? Left Twitter a year ago, Threads is filled with engagement bait. Where can I find other grumpy back-to-the-land types on here that aren’t trads? No content creators, just good convos.
