GuardNGuy.blogspot.com

  There are plenty of “back to the earth” bloggers out there who do amazing things with their gardens and livestock. As much as I admire them, at this point in my life I either don’t have the energy to do what they do, or I’d rather use that energy for other things. I suppose that if modern society as we know it collapsed, I’d be out there building a greenhouse out of milk jugs and Amazon boxes. That being said, there are a few things we’ve done that fall into the self-sufficiency basket. A few years ago, I started to tap our maple trees and made syrup. We don’t have the “right kind” of maple trees, but it still works, and the end product is really nice. This year I wanted to try making horseradish. We planted our horseradish oh, maybe 15 years ago. Up until last weekend we’d never done anything with it, but after watching a half-dozen YouTube videos it seemed like something easy enough to do. And, other than being a little time consuming, it wasn’t bad. We dug up some root...

(This was written about this time of year back in 2007.) I realized some time ago that my hobbies turn out to be nothing but different kinds of work.  In addition to my regular job, I enjoy teaching, free lance writing (such as this) and gardening.  Yes, gardening can be relaxing, but there is a lot of work to it, especially if you have a large garden. As with every other year, our garden looked great in May, very good in June, okay into July, but awful in August, and embarrassing by September.  Weeds are amazing, and it’s hard not to admire their determination to live long enough to reproduce.  Some anthropologists say at some level, that’s all any of us are really trying to do, but people can’t match weeds for their success. Last weekend was the beginning of the end of the gardening season.  It’s been longer than most this year, due to a temperate October.  It was nice to go out to the garden and pick some tomatoes or peppers in late October.  Bu...