has it been this long?
i've been caught up in a whirlwind of new work, old werk, and REALLY OLD work and have hardly had time to tie my shoes, let alone write posts worth a damn on this blog. so you'll all have to pardon my neglect of the last several weeks while i thank you for stopping by to leave a encouraging comment or two

fall foliage weekend
all week long it's been the northeast kingdom's fall foliage festival. it's a really wonderful week-long celebration of some of the things that make vermont such a unique and wonderful place in the world. in addition to just being outdoors during peak foliage season and witnessing the beauty of mountainsides tinged with red

sixty pounds of squash
part of the beautiful squash harvest from our garden this year. it's all sitting in the dining room, curing in a warm place, soon to be moved for short term storage to a cool bedroom upstairs...but mostly i need to peel, cook, mash and freeze a lot of it.we roasted a couple of them last night with some

the wake-up
i don't think i've ever had a september quite like this one. while the fantasy of having a food-producing garden is a wonderful one indeed, the reality is that if you're really going to have a food source in it, there is a lot of work to be done. never having grown anything in an amount resembling a "crop" until this year, i

big changes
it seems as suddenly as autumn arrived that it also brought with it some rather sweeping changes in the way of livelihood. i've been on the fence about the soapmaking for some time now, and since it's not so easy to sell it these days and i'm terrible at sales and marketing (believing, in my shyness, that a truly good produc