I enjoy a good brine. So for the holidays I got this beginners fermentation kit from Soligt Fermentation. I get incredible bread from Wholly Schmidt Sourdough so don't need to dip into those waters, but I tried my hand at pickled vegetables, sauerkraut, and hot sauce. It's easy, a fun way to get kids involved, and mostly involves doing nothing.

Most permaculture sector maps mark the pathways of natural elements like: wind gusts and flowing water, manmade products like noise or smoke or crime, destructive animals, insects or plants, underground networks of utilities (water, cable, electrical, etc.).

At the start of pool season, Jack got it in his head that we could heat up the water with some combination of pumps and tubing and buckets and fire. He gets a lot of these ideas—they keep him up at night—and sometimes he organically shifts to a new project or else I can redirect his energies, but this one stuck around for weeks. He kept presenting me with new hand-drawn schematics and eventually I had to admit, "I. DON'T. KNOW. HOW. TO. DO. ANY. OF. THAT." Nevertheless, he persisted.

Jack and I wanted to make something for Rose's 3rd birthday, and we settled on this DIY mud kitchen because the girl loves to cook. We used salvaged wood pallets, and a few other inexpensive materials, here’s a step-by-step.

Here’s our Spring, Summer and Fall plans. Feel free to use these plans but note that we are growing in Central Virginia, Zone 7A, so Google your growing zone as these plants may or may not work well in other regions.

On the last day I *went shopping* before quarantining in mid-March, my impulse buy was a bunch of lumber. I remember thinking it might be the last day I'd be allowed out of my house for a while. I called our local hardware store/lumber yard and asked if they were still open. “Today we are, but who knows if we will be tomorrow,” they said, which in hindsight was both true and an excellent piece of salesmanship.

We started this process about a year ago and we’re somewhere around Step 9 here, but this is a basic breakdown of the path we followed, with some links to outside resources as well as more in-depth content on this site. Here’s what we did…