Food and Farm

At the beginning of each month I hang a blank calendar page that I fill in with what we're cooking for supper. When I started this practice I would only fill in the week or two. I did this for two reasons - so I would know what items I needed on hand when I went grocery shopping every two weeks (we got paid every two weeks); and so when dinnertime rolled around I wouldn't be wondering what to make. Before this it seemed like we had the same three or four meals all the time and the minions began to gather a rebellion. 

I've been doing this for 12 years now. And those once-blank, now-filled-in monthly calendars have been stuck into a binder. I pulled out that binder today and made a list of the meals we have eaten this past year. I came up with 57 meals! 

So if I can pull this off, we can go nearly two months without repeating a meal! Of course, there will be some family members that don't like what might be served, but this isn't a restaurant and they'll get to eat what's on the table that night. 

The nursery in the snow last week

Down on the farm these days... we've finished suckering the trees. Suckering is when we take pruners and clip the suckers at the base of the tree so that they grow up and take away from what the parent tree needs to grow. We* also bought a harvester and a sweeper. I am looking forward to learning how to use these machines! We've done some work in the nursery with the baby trees, getting ready to plant the next fields this coming winter.

*By "we", I almost always mean the Mr.