Perhaps the reason folks are slow to post is that we are too busy mucking out the byres & tending our various gardens & menageries?

It's the end of May and weather has been so cold and wet that we can't even get the garden planted yet. Our house has wood heat and we can't get it warm enough inside to start seedlings... and being homesteaders, we live too close to subsistance to buy any fancy extras like those seedling-tray heater mats they sell in the yuppie garden catalogs.

We have forty acres... no mule. We've been trying to save money to buy Scottish Highland cattle for three years, but my car accident wiped out the cow fund. We tried to buy piglets from another farmer, but it was the sow's first litter and she rolled over & squashed 'em all. Our next attempt? Guinea Fowl-- we're on the wait list for the big order that's coming in soon at the local feed store. We'll see...

On the bright side, we scavenged enough lumber to build a henhouse this last weekend... and they say it might get up to 65 degrees (farenheit)tomorrow, on the first of June, after two weeks of grey skies and temps in the 40s & 50s.

I love the work of homesteading in spite of the way it breaks my heart-- and my back-- over and over again. I love being able to choose from 14 kinds of heirloom tomatoes in September, be able to walk our woods in May to find trilliums (trillia?) and jack-in-the-pulpits growing boldly and peacefully in ground that will never be disturbed. I love seeing a flock of forty wild turkeys stroll, dignified, across the fields, even though I know they're planning to devour the newly-planted cover crop. Mostly I love living in the hope that, somehow, we'll hold this place together, feed ourselves, build a better house someday, and not hurt anyone else or the earth too terribly in the process.

(Of course, if I could figure out a way to get paid for all the folk/cultural work I do, maybe we could afford animals and a better house and all sorts of lovely homesteader gadgets... oooh, time to go write another grant application, methinks!)

Blessings to all who tend their homes in good stead...

   --Cuilionn (in a falling-down house on a dirt road, somewhere in Maine, USA)