Thank you for being here, faithful friends and followers! I’m so grateful to have the opportunity week after week to share my favorite things with all of you. But today isn’t about my favorite things, it’s about YOURS! Yep, it’s that time of year again. I’ve tallied the likes and put together a list of the favorite-four posts from our fourth year together!
Taking notice of which posts have received the most attention helps me home in on what our readership (you!) values most. And each year the results have both surprised and inspired me!
FASCINATING FOLLOWER FACTS revealed by this year’s likes:
1.) Y’all are PRODUCTIVE PEOPLE! Posts focusing on gettin’ er done topped the list this year, especially regarding the homestead!
2.) You want to GROW! I love that our followers are a group focused on growing both as people and when it comes to your food!
3.) You like to frequent FOUR SEASONS! Two of the top posts this year are seasonal celebrations, telling me that my dear followers are seasoned readers! You love the anticipation of the new, and you marvel as nature shifts her colors.
Your Four Favorite Posts from Our 4th Year!
*these results are according to likes only
#4: 🛒CHECKING OUT🚜 First 14 Grocery Items We’ve Cut from Our List!
“Another one bites the dust!” has been the anthem of our homestead this past year and a half. We broke ground up here in mountainous Montana with a clear goal in mind: to break up with the grocery store one item at a time until we are feeding ourselves homegrown and foraged food . . . ideally for free.
Yes, it is slow going, but actually not as slow as we expected! It’s been a joy watching our garden expand as that cart trims down with each growing season. And even though we aren’t really saving much yet as everything will be balancing out those start-up costs for some time, sourcing our own food has already been far more rewarding than we’d imagined. Savings are grand, but the food itself is proving to be the real showstopper. It looks better, it smells better, it tastes better, and we feel better for having eaten it. Fresh-from-the-garden meals just make you close your eyes and say, “oh mercy.”
Food is impossibly delicious when you grow it, raise it, hunt it, and forage it yourself.
Read on to find out what we’ve trimmed from our grocery list after just two growing seasons!
#3: 🧄Everything We Did Our SECOND FALL on the Homestead🐓
Our fall was a whopping 53 days long! Summer, we declared officially over the last day of August on our mountain homestead. We prepared for an early winter, but October was generous, supplying a tasting menu of all four seasons, including a wacky springlike week where everything turned green again, new plants springing up after the return of the rain, fooling the birds, the bees, and the humans.
The past few days we’ve spent putting the garden to bed for the 2023 growing season, and what a season it has been! As I stood at the garden gate looking back at the newly-stripped fleet of raised beds, a collection of rescue-potted herbs and calendula at my feet, a stirring of emotion flurried up in me like a foreshadowing of the snow today would bring. By virtue of my absurd side, the lyrics to “Goodbye Old Girl” from Damn Yankees drifted over the bare beds and I found myself singing a love song to the garden.
#2: 🍄March of the mushROOM🍄
Upon entering the “hungry gap,” our family has been positively feasting on mushrooms this past month. No, not foraged ones, for our landscape is still whitewashed in melting snow, but rather cultivated fungi from a tent in our basement! It’s been a wild experience, from seeing them “flush,” to gobbling gourmet, to dreaming at night in strains reminiscent of Lewis Carroll.
Come with me and you’ll be in a world of pure humidification.
Step into our MushROOM.
In truth, the whole process and effect of growing culinary mushrooms has been Willy Wonka like, watching fungal “fruit” pour out of plastic bags like a baking soda volcano and then transforming into a magical woodland scene under a florescent purple glow. The spectacle is so bewitching, eating them is really just a fringe benefit.
#1: 🐞Everything We Did Our SECOND SPRING on the Homestead🐓
It feels a little odd writing a spring wrap-up post when we’ve already slurped up a month and a half of summer weather up here in our little clearing in the big woods. We’ve been enjoying a veritable festival of shorts and t-shirts, iced tea and fresh-picked salads, a barrage of birds and bees and cigarette trees (made ‘ya look), and even a smattering of early herbs, greens, and strawberries. This spring has been the opposites-attract best friend of last year; a bold and audacious life-of-the-party with her shy, mild-mannered wall flower companion scrunching behind, the latter all too content to be outshined and forgotten by all.
In other words, our garden is a full month ahead of last “spring.” And yet, in feigned fidelity to the solstice and rote constancy to my calendar, I have diligently recorded everything we’ve accomplished (or attempted) on this our mountain homestead since March 21st. That particular date I find to be a hilarious paradox for us Great Northerners; one continually sticking its tongue out at us from inside the same little black box locked into the third grid of the year and wearing the absurd name tag, “first day of spring.” We look up from our cheeky, photo-paper calendars, bursting with glossy images of poppies and Swallowtails, to find snow falling steadily outside our window. We slap our calendar shut on that smug little label and begrudgingly stoke our fires . . . again.
But this year, the paradox and pouting were both short-lived.
Miss April smothered the snowdrifts in sunshine and Madame May barely bathed in the effects before pulling the plug mid-bloom on spring. All we could do was laugh and chase after her with our butterfly nets.
So, here it is, our wrap-up post for our “second spring” which masqueraded as a premature second summer . . . a “spummer,” I suppose. In full Montana irony, however, after weeks of 70’s and 80’s on the mercury and mind-blowing plant explosion in fuchsia and electric green, today I’m typing this up for you all beside my crackling fireplace (I kid not), nursing hot tea from under my hoodie and unabashedly shutting out the coldest day we’ve seen in two months. The hummingbirds are hiding out and so are the kids and I (following nature, you know), hailing back to our hibernation months and giggling at our self-indulgence. This convinces me of two things. One, Montana is truly a four-season state but, “like a box of chocolates,” you never know which of the four you’re gonna get day to day. And two, these California roots die hard.
THANK YOU!!!
for reading . . .
for following . . .
for liking and commenting . . .
for reaching out . . .
for sharing . . .
and most of all . . .
for caring to grow!
If I may ask a little favor of you lovely friends: If you enjoy this blog and consider it to be a positive part of your life, please spread the word! Share your favorite posts on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, or share in an email with friends and family! It would mean the world to us to share our family’s love for ~Holistic Homeschooling and Homesteading~ with more and more families around the world each year! 💗
May our lovely little holistic hub continue to thrive and grow!
Love, Candace Arden
