Going Green in Washington, D.C.

The hubby and I are back from our long weekend in D.C., celebrating his 30th birthday!  I can’t believe we’re 30…we celebrated each other’s 16th birthdays together!

We had a great time, and even though we didn’t intend for our vacation to be a “green” vacation, we did our best to make good choices.

We flew on Southwest out of Albany and straight into BWI. While not very close to D.C., it was a great price, and we used public transportation to get into D.C.  The ride was really quick – about 50 minutes in the air.  If we had driven, it would have taken 6 and a half hours, if we had taken the train, closer to 9 or 10.  (Which is really ridiculous, when you think about it, because it’s a fairly straight shot).

So we debated which was our smallest carbon footprint, and decided, in order, train was the smallest footprint, followed by plane, followed by car.  Our flight was packed, and when you think about each of those people/families, taking a car 6.5 hours to D.C., the emissions are pretty tremendous.

We arrived in D.C., headed over to the Amtrak/M.A.R.C. station and took a train into Union Station, then the Metro to Dupont Circle, and checked in at our hotel, Hotel Palomar.  It was a pretty nice hotel, but I don’t know if we’d stay there again.  We were very pleased with its Eco-Pledge though. They print everything on recycled paper with soy-based inks, have recycle cans in each hotel room, and even participated in Earth Hour.

Earth Hour was Saturday night and I was really please to get notice, upon returning to our room, that they were participating.  From 8:30-9:30pm on March 28, 2009, the organizers of Earth Hour were trying to get 1 billion people to participate globally in turning off their lights.  While obviously we were in a hotel, and for liability purposes they couldn’t turn everything off, they dimmed all of their lights, asked their guests to keep their tvs and room lights off, and turned off all their exterior and non-essential lighting for the hour.  Very cool.

In front of the Capitol

The next day, K and I headed back to Union Station to start our trolley tour.  We spent the day seeing the sights with Old Town Trolley Tours, enjoying the conductor’s stories about different locales.  One of our favorite things about the tour was that the trolleys they use run totally on propane.  We saw the Capitol, Supreme Court, Library of Congress and spent the rest of the afternoon in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum before heading out to a delicious dinner at D.C. Coast.  We were trying to fit in as much seafood as we could while we were in the area!

Late Sunday morning, I headed over with my friend Toby to meet up with some friends for brunch at Firefly.  This place was fantastic!  Their menu is designed to utilize products from local farms and farmers.

A few of them:

With friends in front of Firefly

• endless summer harvest
• new morning farm
• baxters crabs
• prime seafood (wild alaskan fish)
• dolcezza gelateria
• pipe dreams dairy
• eco farm (greens & pottery)
• cowgirl creamery
• eberly organic chicken
• elysian fields lamb
• eco friendly foods (pastured pork)
• kreider dairy (BGH free milk)
• la pasta
• tuscarora organic growers coop
• northern neck farm

Toby and I split some challah french toast and a mushroom and cheese omelet.  Delish!

Dupont Circle Farmers Market

All too soon I returned to K, who was wandering through the Dupont Circle Farmer’s market.  The market was actually smaller than our Troy or even Schenectady farmer markets but they had a lot more things for sale – including seafood! Given where we live, we will likely never see seafood as we are nowhere near the ocean 🙂  It was pretty cool and K felt proud of himself in passing by 2 Starbucks while purchasing his coffee at the market.

We spent another day on the trolley tour, seeing the memorials, walking through the tidal basin and seeing the cherry blossoms in bloom!  The Cherry Blossom Festival actually started that day, and the weather got to 74F, beautifully sunny, and the trees and sky were just beautiful.  We debated going paddleboating, but totally forgot as we continued walking around.

Jefferson Memorial and the Tidal Basin

Finally, that evening, we ended up at Hank’s Oyster Bar.  We enjoyed ordered some oysters and clams on the half shell to start.  We started off with some Sting Ray oysters, local to the Chesapeake area, and they were mild-flavored and slightly salty.  Yum…then we went on to try some Top Neck clams. These are slightly bigger than the Little Neck clams we are used to and are also local, from the eastern shore of the Chesapeake bay.  All in all, absolutely delightful!

It was sad to come back from our little sojourn, but it was made slightly better by a voice mail left for us letting us know that we are getting a community garden plot starting next week!  I’ve already started researching heirloom varieties and hardiness zones and I can’t wait!

It’s been a busy week

And the following is just going to get worse!

I’m leaving in about 10 minutes for D.C. with the hubby!  It’s his birthday and he got to pick the location.  We went to Montreal for mine, so it was only fair 🙂 Yay cherry blossoms!

Next week I have a medical procedure to undergo, so I will be out of commission until next weekend 😦

We considered which would leave a smaller footprint, driving to D.C. or flying, as we live in Upstate New York…which do you think is smaller?  We may have picked the wrong one.

I picked up Made From Scratch at the library today! Can’t wait to read it next week.  The chapter titles make me giggle in amusement but I also think it’s pretty cool:

1. Chickens
2. Grow Your Own Meal
3. Beekeeping
4. The Country Kitchen
5. Old Stuff
6. DIY Wardrobe
7. Working House Dogs
8. Angora Rabbits: Portable Livestock
9. Homemade Mountain Music
10. Outside the Farm

Yea….this will be eye opening to say the least 🙂

I’m going to see how green you can be in D.C. to make a post out of it next week if possible.  Until then, see ya!

Maple Sugar Weekend

It’s the end of winter and the beginning of spring and what else is there to do in upstate NY and Vermont?  Maple sugaring of course!!  This weekend marked the start of a 2 weekend event called the 14th Annual Maple Weekend in NY.

I have always wanted to go maple sugaring, ever since I read about it in Little House in the Big Woods.  Laura Ingalls described the whole process, including maple syrup “snow cones” (they would pour syrup over snow and eat it) and the only candy she would get all year when she was very young was maple syrup candy (this was before they left Wisconsin to go out West).  This year I finally got my dates straight and hubby and I traveled to Berlin this afternoon to check out Kent’s Sugar House.

Kent's Sugar House

We headed up the mountain, and snow started to fall, perfect sugaring weather.  If it had been earlier in the year, we would have been worried about getting snowed in on the mountain, but given that it’s spring now, we felt ok driving in my dinky Honda Civic.  We actually passed one sugar house, then another – apparently people over here have their own little sugar houses in their back yards.  Very cool.  Finally, we saw a bunch of cars parked on the downside of the mountain, and a little red cabin with steam pouring from its roof.

Steam!

We walked into the cabin and were treated to a little tour about how the sugaring process works.

Inside the bustling sugar house

Sap from maple trees starts flowing just about the time when the temperatures get above freezing during the day (40 degrees F is perfect) and drops to below freezing (20 degrees F is ideal here) at night.  In order to keep a tree productive, you need older trees of at least 12 inches in girth, preferably 18 inches.  Taps are inserted 4-6 inches into the tree and a bucket hung below to collect the sap.

Two taps and buckets and on this maple tree.

Sap collecting in a bucket

The sap looks like water in the bucket, and sort of tastes like it too.  Shh…don’t tell anyone, but K and held out our fingers under the tap and let it drip onto us – it definitely doesn’t taste like maple syrup!

All of the sap is poured into a central collection point and then goes through this pipe into the sugar house.

Collection pipe into the sugar house.

Once in the sugar house, the sap is put into this machine-thingy, which I’m guessing is called the evaporator.

Sap in the evaporator

Below the evaporator, a furious fire stoked with hardwoods keeps the sap boiling for days.

Lots o' wood

Boiler below the evaporator

As it goes through the evaporator, it boils down further and further.

Almost syrup!

The steam in the sugar house was almost too much for my little camera, but hopefully you can see the little lanes the sap-to-syrup have to go through to the end.

Afterwards, the syrup is filtered with those little scooper things you see in the above pictures as well as put through cheesecloth.  Finally, it’s graded according color.

Grades of syrup

The grade of the syrup has nothing to do with the quality of the syrup, just the color.  The darker the color the lower the grade.  The color of the syrup has to do with the sap harvest that year.  We were told that this year was supposed to be the perfect maple sugar year – we had a long, hard winter – a normal winter for this area, unlike the last few years of relatively light winters, but now, at the end of the winter, it has been very very cold, and then all of a sudden very warm – into the 50s for the last week or so.  So they are disappointed.

They gave me and K a sample to drink….yummy, warm dark syrup.

K drank every last drop!

But hopefully we lifted their spirits a bit, by pretty much buying a ton of maple stuff from them.  Hey, we want to support our local farmers, and it’s not like we get to do this every day.  But I think we’re pretty much set until next season with maple stuff now 🙂

Our bounty from the sugar house

• 1 pint of Grade A Dark Amber maple syrup
• Pure maple sugar
• Jar of maple cream
• 2 teabags of maple tea

We also bought another tea bag and a pint of light amber syrup.  I think we’re good.

Given that we live in the area, we’re now hoping that our future homestead has at least a few maple trees that we’ll be able to collect sap from.  It takes 43 gallons of sap to make ONE gallon of syrup!  But the sugarers assured us you can easily make a half gallon or less instead of the hundreds of gallons they make in their operation every winter.  Mmm…I can see myself making maple syrup now…

I love this picture:

How to make 1 gallon of maple syrup

Here’s what the picture above reads:

This is what it takes to make one gallon of NY maple syrup:

1. It takes 4 maple trees, at least 40 years, growing in the mountain “sugarbush,” to yield enough sap in 6 weeks to produce 1 gallon of maple syrup.
2. It takes a “gathering crew” to climb the mountains daily during March and April to collect the dripping sap and haul it down to the “sugarhouse.”
3. It takes 40 gallons of sap, boiled down in the “evaporator,” to concentrate the sweet sap-water into one gallon of maple syrup.
4. It takes a 4 foot log, sawed, split, dried and burned in the raging fire in the “arch” under the evaporator for each gallon of syrup produced.
5. It takes the whole sugarmaker’s family to continually fire the arch, operate the evaporator and sterilize, filter, grade, and pack each gallon of syrup.

SO, if you had to climb the mountain, tap the trees, haul the sap, cut the wood, stoke the fires and pack the syrup to comply with the nation’s only strictly enforced maple law, how much would you ask for a gallon of Pure New York maple syrup?

It’s hard work.  But oh…drizzling that warm, amber liquid over some pancakes in the morning is SO worth it.

Book Review: Farewell, My Subaru

by Doug Fine, copyright 2008

I finished this quick read this morning and thought I should post some similarly quick thoughts on it. For starters, it wasn’t what I thought it was going to be.  I expected a story, but I thought it would have some more useful how-to’s and suggestions for things.  Instead it was basically a quick memoir of 2006-2007 for Doug Fine, of his experiment to try his hand a building a sustainable ranch in the desert of New Mexico.  It was cute, and it was very easy reading, but wasn’t as fascinating as I thought it would be.  Not sure why. I think the author and I just didn’t connect and so I really didn’t care as much when things went well or didn’t go well for him.  It may have been his writing style, I’m not sure.

The story follows Doug from his purchase of a New Mexico ranch of 41 acres in the middle of nowhere and apparently on a massive floodplain that gets promptly inundated only a few days or weeks after he moves there.  His intention is to eventually be completely self-sustaining but he goes about it pretty half-assed in the beginning.  Which is completely understandable, and made me appreciate the difficulties of trying to buy local AND organic.  There’s sort of a conundrum there…either I can buy organic food that is shipped 2100 miles to my local grocery store, OR I can buy something non-organic that was grown in my county…what do you do?  (For me, I tend to go local).

He buys a couple of goats that he promptly names Natalie and Melissa (um, after Natalie Merchant and Melissa Etheridge of course) with the intention of one day becoming the king of all goat milk ice cream makers.  He talks about ice cream.  A lot.  I think he really likes it.  But he never gets any ice cream in the book, save for one time his enviro-hippie-heroine-girlfriend-flavor of the month, that he makes sure to tell us he scored with, brings him some, along with live-saving goat medicine for Natalie.  Maybe he doesn’t get sex that often, but he really seemed to go out of his way to be all, “Yup, we did it!” in the story.  Hmm…more and more he rubs me the wrong way 🙂

The book goes through his adventures in converting his transportation to vegetable oil fuel, leaving the world behind him smelling like a fast food complex, and reminding me to never ever eat at Panda Express again in my life, no matter how much I like Chinese food.  Seriously, eww.  You’ll see if you read this.  Then it goes on to his near-death solar power experience in which I wonder where the hell he got $12,000 to purchase solar panels…but then I wonder why I am asking myself this as he obviously had enough money to buy a small ranch and live there for years without any paychecks coming in.  Clearly, I’m a cynic.  Or jealous.  We’ll see.

Finally, we are treated to lovely tales about the predator and prey cycles which I probably enjoyed most of all, especially the coyote he names Dick Cheney and the rooster he names Donald Trump.  Yes, Fine’s political views shine through a lot of this book, and sometimes are funny, and sometimes are even a little much for my non-conservative but not flaming liberal eyes.  Still, he makes me laugh out loud every few pages, so all in all, I can take it.  I appreciate his reverence for the “U.N. haters” as much as the alfalfa sprout lovers, after all.

There were lots of recipes and fun facts sprinkled throughout the books and I really really need to try a few.  For instance, this one:

Thai Peanut Chard Stir-fry

• 4 garlic cloves, minced
• handful of shiitake mushrooms
• 1 leek
• 1/4 cup pine nuts (what…peanuts you say?)
• 3 TBSP olive oil
• 8 rainbow chard leaves
• 1/4 cup snow pea pods
• 1/4 cup carrots, sliced
• 2 TBSP tamari (must find out what this is, but presuming a spice)
• 1 TSP Thai red curry paste
• 1 TBSP peanut butter

Over medium-high heate, sauté garlic, ‘shrooms, leek, and pine nuts in olive oil until garlic begins to crisp.  (mmm…crispy garlic)

Add chard, pea pods and carrots.  Top with tamari and red curry paste.  Sauté, stirring periodically, untill veggies are blazing hot but still firm.  Remove from heat.

Stir in peanut butter.  Squeeze lime over finished stir-fry.  Garnish with parsley.

Oh yum.

(For more on Doug Fine and his book, check out www.dougfine.com.)

The ride along Clinton’s Ditch

You know, it’s really a shame we don’t own any land and our jobs are a pretty long commute from where we live, because every day I like it more and more.  On Sunday, after my trip to the library and after K put together his bike, we strapped on our bike rack, loaded the bikes, and headed to the canal.

Ready to go!

We live near the Erie Canal, also known as Clinton’s Ditch, after Governor Dewitt Clinton who championed it.

The Erie Canal is a man-made waterway New York state that runs about 365 miles from Albany on the Hudson River to Buffalo at Lake Erie, completing a navigable water route from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes. First proposed in 1808, it was under construction from 1817 to 1825.

…

The problem was that the land rises about 600 feet (180 m) from the Hudson to Lake Erie. Locks at the time could handle up to 12 feet (3.7 m), so at least 50 locks would be required along the 360 miles (580 km) canal. Such a canal would cost a fortune even today; in 1800 the expense was barely imaginable. President Jefferson called it “a little short of madness” and rejected it. Nevertheless [it] managed to interest New York governor DeWitt Clinton. There was much opposition, and the project was scorned as “Clinton’s Folly,” or “Clinton’s Ditch.” But in 1817, Clinton got the legislature to appropriate $7,000,000 for construction.

Thank you Wikipedia.

In reality, we could probably bike to the canal from our home, but K doesn’t have a helmet yet, and the road there is pretty busy, so in the interest of safety we decided to drive to the trail.  In the future though, we’re definitely going to bike all the way into the city.

We headed along the canal towards the Stockade district, along a very busy state route. There were lots of bikers out today, it was really nice outside!

Biking along Rt. 5

We finally got off the busy highway and headed into the Stockade District.  The Stockade is a historical district that was a very early Dutch settlement (think 1630s early!) to protect the inhabitants from the Iroquois Indians.  The first stockade was burned and about half the inhabitants massacred by the French and Northern Indians in 1690.  It has over 100 landmarked homes.

The first landmarked building we passed was the Robert Sanders House.  I can’t figure out who he was after Googling, but the Sanders family was a big name in the area (as judged by the Glen Sanders mansion, but that was owned by a John Sanders).

Robert Sanders House (dated 1750)

As you may be able to see from the historical marker, this house was visited by George Washington and later became the Schenectady Female Academy.  I had a double take when researching this because in all the pictures I found of it on the Web, it’s a brilliant white, but I guess it has been repainted red since the doorway is the same.

Then we came across the beautiful First Reformed Church, whose congregation dates back to 1680.  However, the first building was destroyed in the 1690 Stockade massacre.

First Reformed Church

Over one of the doors to the church, called the Bride’s Door, is this inscription:

"His banner over me was Love"

We continued on past some gorgeous historical houses:

Quintessential Dutch home dated 1742.

Lovely gingerbread trim

And continued biking out of the Stockade district to the old industrial area nearby.

Going under the railroad trestle

Old industrial warehouse

K and I have often driven past this abandoned building, dreaming of turning it into a year-round market a lá Marche Atwater in Montreal.

Interesting architecture

This one looks closer to the actual Atwater building 🙂

On the way back to the car, we noticed the ice breakup on the canal this year.  Although the river is now free-flowing, huge blocks of ice have been deposited on the banks of the canal all the way up to the bike path.

Ice chunks near the overlook

Huge ice chunks

Ice on and next to the trail

Compare these pics with what the river looked like only 6 days ago:

Ice break on the canal March 9, 2009

The above photo is from a local blog:  http://giacalonephotos.wordpress.com/2009/03/09/ice-jams-at-riverside-park/.  I did not take it.

But look how far the ice has come in just 6 days.  Spring is almost here and I can’t wait to plant!

Edumacation

Ahh, I love Sundays when there’s not much else to do, the sun is shining and Spring is trying its darndest to break out of its Winter hibernation.  This past Sunday, hubby and I went food shopping quickly (this involves 3 stores, oy) and then decided to take a bike ride by the canal later on.  That, however, will be a different post 🙂  K got a bike from his parents for Christmas so we’ve been looking to bike together later this year.  But while he put the bike together in the driveway, I took myself to the library to check out some books for the next month.

I think in the future we’ll be able to bike to the library (and the farmer’s market) together, but I was unsure if I could make it by the close, so I drove instead.  I did look for a bike rack at the library though and didn’t see one.  K thinks it may be on the other side, but who knows?  We have tons of bike paths around here, and not nearly as many racks.

Flagship library

I’m not sure when it was built, but it sure looks like a bunch of 1970s-ish concrete.  Not the most beautiful thing by far, but it’s pretty large and holds many book, including one that is out right now but I’ve called dibs on next 🙂

Alright, in reality, it’s the only book that came up when I looked up “urban homesteading” on the library catalog.  But it looks pretty interesting, even if it’s stuff I’ve read about before.

I also took out a bunch of other books that looked pretty interesting.

From left to right:

• The Complete Photo Guide to Sewing
  My MIL gave me an old Kenmore sewing machine in perfect condition that was sitting in her attic for years sometime before Christmas.  It belonged to K’s aunt who passed away from breast cancer 2002 😦  I’ve been meaning to get into sewing for quite a long time, I’ve been cross-stitching for years, and it was a great gift.  However, I still don’t know how to use it.  I meant to sign up for a Joann’s basic sewing machine class but have been too busy thus far.  Hopefully, this will be a lot of help!
• Cleaning Plain & Simple by Donna Smallin
  I’m always looking for new green cleaning tips. I’m not actually sure how much green cleaning is in here but I saw lots of mentions of vinegar and hydrogen peroxide, so it looked good enough to bring home.
• Farewell My Subaru by Doug Fine
  I’ve been meaning to pick this book up for awhile as it’s on a lot of locavorism book lists.  It’s about a guy who moves to New Mexico to live without fossil fuel for a year.  It’s about the contradictions and challenges of going green when you’ve never really tried it before.  It sounds hilarious!
• The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
  My mom actually had this book the last time I visited my parents, and since I can’t be without a book for more than 2 hours (it’s a compulsion, really) I picked it up and started reading it. I only got to p. 88 before I left, so I’ve been meaning to get it and finish it because it really was fascinating.  So far, it seems to be about an Indian (as in Calcutta, India) in the 60s/70s who are trying to fit in America without losing their Indian heritage.  From the back of the book, it looks like it’s more about their son, but I haven’t gotten that far yet.  Very good so far.
• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
  My friends still can’t believe I haven’t read this book yet.  It’s at the TOP of locavorism book lists and I’ve been meaning to get to it for well over a year.  But I’ve been trying to finish several other books before I got to this one.  For those who don’t know, this is about a family who decided to live on local food for one year, food that was either grown by themselves or raised within 100 miles of where they lived.

And that’s my library sojourn for the day! They’re due back April 13th, so I’ll have to get to reading.

Farmers Market – Winter

Schenectady greenmarket sign

On any given Sunday, between 10am-2pm, hubby and I can usually be found in one place, an independent coffee shop/theater alley.  Drinking fair trade coffee?  Lining up to see the latest show?  Hardly.  While we both love the arts and our caffeine, we’re there for something else – our local farmer’s market.

Since November, we’ve been thrilled to say we actually can go to one in our own town.  Well, apparently they have one every Thursday by City Hall between 11am and 1pm, but some of us actually do work and are unable to get there during those hours.  I’m not sure how great it is anyway.  But for the last few years, K and I had been making a weekly drive of about 30 minutes every SATURDAY to a pretty fantastic farmer’s market one county away.  It was kind of tiresome, and sometimes we thought about the impact of our cars on our environment in our attempt to buy local foods, feeling a bit hypocritical.

And then it happened.  Driving down one of the most busy streets in our county, we saw a banner overhead heralding the beginning of a new farmers market nearby.  And strangely enough, it was beginning in November.

Patrons on the lower level of the greenmarket

Now, November is not the most ideal time to start a farmers market. All of the summer markets in the area (the three county-wide area to be exact) have shut down by then.  But root veggies and cold crops like broccoli and cauliflower are still hanging around, and there’s a few other things that can be purchased.

Obviously, in the days of yore, wintertime was the time when much of the farm work came to an end for some months, and everyone lived off the bounty of the harvest hopefully, or starved if they didn’t.  Whatever could be preserved was tucked away to be eaten during this time, whether it was dried or smoked, salted, or canned.  Trying to eat locally becomes a bit more difficult than at a summer farmers market.

Which is why I was so surprised to see that one was getting started at that point in the year.  And the story of it founding made it even more unique.  Apparently, our farmers market was started by the customers, people like you and me who were also tired of driving a distance each week and went in search of farmers who would be willing to come to us to sell.

So they spent this summer driving down dirt roads in search of the sorts of farmers who never come to the average city-dweller’s mind. Forget rows of corn and climbing beans — that won’t sustain a market when the snow starts to fall.

Grass-fed beef, pastured pork and chicken

City residents sought out butchers, bakers, dairy farmers and beekeepers. They looked for maple sugarers, wine-makers and apple growers.

Organic bread from one of the three local bakers

By the time vegetable farmers began their last harvests of the season, this grass-roots committee had found and persuaded nearly a dozen winter farmers to drive to Schenectady, come snow or ice, and sell their goods. Not all are selling raw foods — there will also be stews and soups, soaps and lotions, pottery and wool. –(From the article – Farmers market to be open year-round in Schenectady, Schenectady Daily Gazette, Sunday, October 12, 2008)

Apples and cider

We’ve loved having a farmer’s market so close to us.  Weekly, we enjoy buying bread, eggs, meat, veggies (all root veggies at this time of year, obviously) and honey.  We also look forward to buying our weekly quart of apple cider and will be sad when the apple harvest has been consumed.

But in only a few short months, the abundance of the land will be upon us again and we can’t wait for the sun to be beating upon our shoulders as we bike to the open-air summer market!

For now, though, we’ll just enjoy being nice and warm through the winter.

Local farms that we go to pictured above:

• Coopers Ark Farm
  Eggs, poultry, ducks, emu
  www.coopersarkfarm.com
• Migliorelli Farm
  Vegetables, fruit, cider, donuts
  www.migliorelli.com/our_farm.html
• Our Daily Bread
  Artisanal breads, scones, granola, biscotti, bagels, danishes, pastries
  http://www.insiderpages.com/b/15238675909
• Sweet Tree Farm
  Grass-fed beef, pastured pork and chicken
  www.sweettreefarmny.com

Modern Homesteading

The other day, hubby and I were at Barnes and Noble, looking for a travel guide to D.C, when my eyes fell on a table of books. Now, if you’ve ever been to a Barnes and Noble, it’s likely you’ve seen a similar setup – a table with lots of books lined up all over it and a sign that says “Classics” or “Black History Month” or whatever subject the books are all aligned with. But the sign on this table was one I’ve never seen before. It said…

Modern Homesteading

No joke, my jaw fell open. I’ve never seen in print this thing that I’m into – but Modern Homesteading is it! Of course, I just about fell over myself opening every single book on canning, raising chickens, planning vegetable gardens, etc.

Ok, so right now I can’t raise my own chicks. Even though there’s lots of advice on how to urban homestead, and even though I don’t exactly live in a city, I am not extreme enough at this moment in time to go and try to raise my own meat or get my own eggs. BUT, it is something that hubby and I have talked about in the past and when we finally end up on our lovely old farmhouse with lots o’ land (*cough cough*, one day 🙂 it is exactly the type of thing we would love to do. Along with a goat. (Whatever, I’m dreaming, mmmkay?) I’ve already got the fruit canning down, and have to get a pressure canner so we can start canning meats and veggies).

In the meantime, it has given me lots of inspiration for what we would like to start aiming for.

Here are some cool and wacky blogs/websites that one could use for inspiration:

• http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2006/09/17/an-introduction-to-homesteading/
• http://www.realitysandwich.com/node/443
• http://a-homesteading-neophyte.blogspot.com/search/label/Urban%20Homesteading
• http://www.lifeunplugged.net/