Vintage Home and Farm

A good friend of ours, Nina Cesena, is a wellness coach, and she recently helped us plan an anti-inflammatory, low glycemic load diet that specifically targets our family's health needs and goals. Since then, I've been cooking from the recipe booklet she created. We're enjoying the new flavors and ingredient combinations she recommended so much that I wanted to share about her services here.  Before working with Nina, I had been repeatedly cooking the same basic recipes for a long time and was in desperate need of inspiration to help us stay on track with eating healthy. If I don't have ingredients ready and a plan for the week, it's exceptionally hard to stick to our health goals of eating home-cooked anti-inflammatory and low-glycemic meals. Nina was even able to offer options for each meal to account for my long list of food sensitivities. I especially enjoyed the salads, salad dressings, and soup recipes that Nina included in the booklet. We eat homemade soup re...

We recently attended a wild bird workshop that discussed creating and certifying a property such as our yard as a wildlife habitat through the National Wildlife Federation. The intention of the wildlife habitat certification program is to encourage people to make adjustments to their yards to benefit not only wild birds but also many other creatures, such as frogs, toads, bees, and butterflies. The program also results in increased species biodiversity and the support of native plants.  We've seen all kinds of wildlife on our property, but some are not visible during the full spring-to-fall growing season, and when they are present, they are not in great numbers. So, we're looking forward to adding a few elements to our property to attract and keep more wildlife around. I'm especially interested in how we can make our yard, fields, and garden more attractive to frogs, toads, and gardener snakes. As you may recall, we had a mama gardener snake and her babies hanging around o...

About a month ago, we were contacted by someone with PAIR (Pawsitive Animal Impact Rescue) about two kittens that needed fostering. We quickly said "YES!" and the kitties came to stay with us. Meet Crumble (the orange kitty) and Cookie (the black and white kitty). The kitties stayed in the Corral, a big TV/game room in our house with its name etched into the interior door window (the original owners did that back in the 1950s). The photo above is taken from outside the house, and as you can see, the kitties loved to sit in the Corral's big front windows. Crumble is a very lovable kitty who seeks affection, and so he was quickly ready to go on to a forever home. Even though we knew he'd find a great home, we were still sad to let go of him. Cookie, meanwhile, is timid. His ears go down if you go near him, and he runs away if you get too close or if he's startled. So, shy little Cookie is still with us. Meanwhile, we now have another kitty joining Cookie in the Corr...

After picking most of the apples from our heritage apple tree (I picked all the ones I could reach with our pole picker), I realized there were not as many as we originally thought. But we still had a good harvest! This was enough apples to put four little pies into the freezer for enjoying this fall and winter, and can 8 pint-sized jars of apple cider along with 12 half-pints of applesauce. The scraps went to the deer this year since we didn't eat the apple-cinnamon jelly and apple-pepper jelly I made in previous years well enough to bother with making jelly again.

What is with the gardener snakes this year? We've seen them all over our property; some are pretty large. There is a mama gardener snake living in our flowerbeds. We first spotted her in the early spring and were startled when we saw her then (and every time since), as she is at least 4 feet long. She is the largest gardener snake I've ever seen! She's pretty thick in girth as well. Maybe a dozen other smaller snakes (probably her babies) are hanging around, too. Well, the snakes are not just plentiful here on our property. We were walking this evening and encountered the strangest thing on the road. Just up ahead of us, we saw what looked like a snake slithering across the road, and its head appeared to be bouncing as it went! As we walked closer, we realized the strange sight was a toad trying to escape from a snake. The snake had ahold of the toad's back foot, biting down hard to hang onto it as it hopped along. I broke a long stem from a hedge and whacked at the sna...

This has been one of our most challenging years when it comes to caring for our ducks, bees, and the garden on our little farm. First, Barney, the beloved community barn cat, passed away, and since then, the critters he used to keep in check have taken over the garden and eaten everything in sight. Those critters are voles, a destructive rodent, and we have watched as they've eaten all of our corn and green bean plants before they even had a chance to bear fruit. They also knocked over multiple fava bean plants, snipped the pea plants at their base so the whole plant died, and ate the tops off the onions. I had no idea rodents ate onion greens, but they sure did! They ate the potato plants (the green part that appears above ground), so there I was a week ago, digging up the potatoes growing in the ground to see if any were left. It was hard to find them without a plant above ground to mark the way. Blessedly, we do have many nice potatoes to enjoy. Currently, they're wreaking h...