Welcome to the Walden Effect! We do most of our blogging at www.waldeneffect.org. Mother Earth News offered us the opportunity to share our cheerful self-sufficiency here, and we’re thrilled to be reaching a larger audience.
Here in southwest Virginia, we’ve had a mild–but very wet–winter, so we’re already dreaming of spring. We’re getting our perennials weeded, fertilized, mulched, and pruned, and will soon be planting our first lettuce bed of the year. Meanwhile, we’re still eating fresh greens from the garden nearly every day thanks to our quick hoops, and are also enjoying homegrown carrots, potatoes, sweet potatoes, butternut squash, and garlic stored in our fridge and on our kitchen shelves, plus lots of frozen produce.
This is going to be an exciting spring since we’re ordering pathogen-resistant bees to try out in a top bar hive and will be going into our third year of raising broilers–starting from scratch using eggs from our own hens. We ate our first entirely homegrown mushrooms this month and look forward to making more oyster mushroom spawn on cardboard for no-cost gourmet dinners.
This is Anna typing today, but my husband Mark will be sharing most of our adventures with you while I finish up my book (due out in fall of this year.) I hope these rundowns of our weekly experiments will tempt you to delve deeper into into our primary blog, where we’ve already shared several years’ worth of successes (and failures.) Thanks for coming along for the ride!
