Common Sense Home Good News Letter 4/8/23
“Spring unlocks the flowers to paint the laughing soil.” – Bishop Reginald Heber
Down the road from our home, the water flows along the roadside in a seasonal creek, bouncing and dancing over the jumbled stones. Even though we have two ponds on our land now, I still enjoy visiting that rushing water, which reminds of a similar roadside brook from my childhood.
We still have snow hidden in shady pockets here in northeast Wisconsin, but our ponds shed their coating of ice this week. The songbirds are singing their little hearts out, and the scent of the land has subtlety shifted from asleep to awake.
You can see in the Instagram video linked below that we have no shortage of mud right now, but this too will pass. It’s been rather tough tackling the pruning this year, as March saw the orchards buried in so much snow we couldn’t access the trees.
April entered with heavy snow, rain, and wind (not safe to be up on ladders). Next week the temperatures are supposed to jump from highs in the 30s and 40s to highs in the 70s. Duncan and I will be scrambling the next few days to finish pruning before the buds pop.
I’ve been thinking a lot this week about the different ways of eating that are currently popular on social media – carnivore diets, veganism, One Meal a Day, intermittent fasting, and no doubt dozens of others that I’m missing.
I can’t help but wonder if the biggest problem isn’t precisely what we eat and when, but that overall most of what passes for “food” is not nourishing us like it should. More than 2,500 chemical substances are intentionally added to foods to modify flavor, color, stability, texture, or cost.
There are tons of complicating factors – people are less active, there are more environmental toxins, and so on – but I’m old enough to remember when I could buy a piece of fruit at the grocery store and it wouldn’t be so hard that it would never ripen properly and get soft. I remember when even “junk food” had ingredient lists that were much shorter. Maybe we can balance the occasional treat with overall more nourishing foods and still come out okay?
Food for thought.
All our best to you and yours,
Laurie (and August IV, August V, and Duncan)
This week’s featured articles…
This old fashioned banana cake recipe is simple enough to make whenever you have extra ripe bananas, but you can also dress it up for company.
We have a new guest author at Common Sense Home! Please give a warm welcome to my friend, Dawn Ruben. Today Dawn shares her experience as the owner of Ruben’s Rabbits, putting together a list of what’s safe and what’s not safe for rabbits to eat. Get the list here.
I was talking to a friend and neighbor today and she asked me if I had all my seed ordering done. Technically, I should be done, but I was just thinking that maybe I should grab a couple more types of edible flower seeds for companion planting, so I can grab her budding herbalist daughter some calendula seeds, too. For those who are taking the plunge into gardening this year, this article is a good place to start.
Popular on Instagram this week: Duncan baking cake and the duck patrol enjoying the spring meltwater.