cultivating a sustainable life
The wood stove is finally in! It was a lot more work than we anticipated, though we shouldn’t really be surprised by that anymore.The biggest part of the installation was removing a row of bricks from the surround so it would fit inside our existing …
We had a nice, relatively quiet weekend (our weekend is Sunday/Monday), puttering and getting a few things done around the house. I pruned the fruit trees that needed pruning (we put in one each of apple, apricot, pear, cherry, peach, plum and fig trees last …
I finally sat down and sorted my seeds out today, deciding what I need to order more of, what I’m going to sacrifice to free up some space in the garden, and what kinds of new things I’d like to try this year. I’ve been …
I’m a real creature of habit. Once I find something that I like, it takes a lot to get me to try something new (why risk being disappointed?). My absolute favorite local vegetarian restaurant (perhaps even my favorite Vancouver restaurant, period) is the Naam. It’s …
Sharon from over at Casaubon’s Book has written a great article about the importance of farmers and locally produced food. Here’s an excerpt: Wendell Berry points out that what we’ve done to our rural communities over the last 100 years is a form of colonialism. …
Since our dryer quit a few weeks ago, we’ve been getting along just fine without it, though my darling husband would never willingly admit that. He just shook his head at the sight of the laundry hanging out in the snow when he came home …
If you’ve been reading for awhile, you’ll know that we’ve been looking for a set of used kitchen cabinets to use in our kitchen renovation for quite some time. Twice we thought we’d found some, but both times they ended up being sold to someone …
We got blasted by another wicked windstorm today, the fourteenth so far this winter (previously, we might have seen two during a normal winter). The kids and the dog had a ball running around in the wind, but the poor birds were battered. We drove …
I’m really excited about a new show that’s premiering on CBC tonight called Little Mosque on the Prairie. It’s written by Zarqa Nawaz, a Muslim woman who was raised in Toronto and moved to Saskatchewan (one of Canada’s three prairie provinces) 10 years ago. The …
