Preserve - Newest Issue of Taproot Magazine

If you have not yet found Taproot Magazine, it's time to check it out!  Focusing on gardening, farming, making, cooking, dreaming, with outstanding artwork, photography, essays and poetry, recipes & lots of DIY projects, this magazine has it all.

Each time a new issue arrives in our mailbox (yes, a real paper copy magazine to read with cup of tea in hand) my 8 year old daughter and I wrestle to see who gets to flip through it first.  She looks for the paper dolls, colouring pages, farm animal photography.  I admire the artwork, food photography, latest recipes and stories.  My husband admits he eventually makes his way through all the articles and stories too (even if it does give him pangs for a larger farm, some day).  But the magazine makes us feel connected to a larger community worldwide of those trying to live honest, simple, handmade, heart-filled lives.  We feel renewed in our efforts here on our little urban homestead to keep mending, baking, fermenting, unschooling, gardening, wild-harvesting, healing, and so forth - adding new insights and inspiration to what we already do in our day to day life.

In the current issue, check out our article - Homegrown Sprouts!  You'll learn how to grow sprouts at home, and get recipes for super sprout salad, and morning greens smoothie, plus learn a little more about how and why we love to sprout.

NEW! Plantain Soothing Salve

We have a new favourite salve that's ready in our Homestead Herbals online store.  The Plantain Soothig Salve.  This is made the usual way we make our salves - with a solar infusion of botanicals in pure olive oil (infused for 6 weeks), then beeswax and cocoa butter are added, and pure essential oils for healing properties and beautiful smell.  This salve is so special!  We are planning to give it to all family members for Christmas this year.  The reason we love plantain salve is that we've seen the amazing effects of it's healing abilities - plantain is renowned for soothing all manner of insect bites, bee and wasp stings, and mosquito bites.  We use the plantain leaf directly in summer months when we have it at hand, but there are times (like this past summer when we were at a family cottage where mosquitoes were driving everyone inside) where we can't find plantain growing nearby right when it's needed.  This salve does the trick!  We were handing this salve out as "testers" at our family cottage to anyone who had mosquito bites, everyone slathered it on their bites and in minutes the itching and redness was gone.  Our daughter too can attest to the healing ability of plantain for wasp bites - amazing results when it was rubbed on the welts, which again disappeared in short order.

So, it's not summer - yet.  But we are happy to have this salve ready with new labels and are sure to make customers happy when they experience the healing abilities of this wonderful salve.  And it might just make a unique gift for the outdoor-lover on your holiday list.

Healthful hops

The beautiful bountiful hops on our arbour is nearly ready for harvest.  Each year I harvest large baskets full, drying the hops flowers (called strobiles) and using them for herbal tea blends.  Hops is extremely easy to grow, and is a perennial herb that comes back strong year after year.  Hops has a wide range of benefits.  For example, offering sedative and relaxing properties so it is a nice addition to teas for insomnia, stress and anxiety.  Hops has been known to help women who are going through menopause, hops has been proven to reduce various kinds of cancer, and hops can also be used as a hair rinse to alleviate dry scalp.  Of course, hops is also a prime ingredient in making beer - on our bookshelf we have some wonderful books on making homemade beers including The Homebrewer's Garden, but have yet to make a batch using our own homegrown hops. Maybe during this autumn season...

Solstice garden!

Chilly day with brilliant sunlight reflecting off snow drifts, sliver of a moon in a crisp dark night sky...freshly chopped wood, baked apples stuffed with cranberries and almonds, a long leisurely winter walk through the woods, cozy dinner of local potato-leek soup with fresh sourdough bread and steamed kale uncovered in the garden, friends dropping by unannounced their arms filled with holiday treats, time to relax with other mama's sipping fantastic homemade eggnog as the children played...the solstice this year from start to finish was a glorious day, and now we look forward to longer days as we move into the new season ahead.

Some of our favourite garden catalogues just arrived in the mail (William Dam, Cottage Gardeners, Greta's Organic, West Coast Seeds...) and we anticipate spending many of our long winter nights infront of the fire, while paging through these seed lists and drawing up plans for next year's garden. Wishing everyone all the best for the solstice, holiday season, and new year ahead. Here are a few photos of our solstice garden and house. The crooked little white spruce will become our indoor festive tree this year, for only a few days as it needs to be put right back out into the cold to overwinter before it's planted in our yard next spring...

Around the Sound - celebrating local in Owen Sound

We took a short "holiday" this past weekend, to visit friends who we haven't seen enough of in the past months. They are living up in Owen Sound, about 3 hours north of here, and had recently purchased a home - this was a chance for a housewarming, to get a tour of the local town sites, time for them to connect with our new baby, and of course great conversations over equally great food.

Part of our tour included the local farmers market, featuring a good supply of local vendors with handmade goods as well as honey, maple syrup, eggs, baked goods, breads and even some end of winter organic produce. The second exciting stop was a newly opened local foods store - featuring all local items sourced largely from the Grey-Bruce County and a larger 100-mile radius. The store, aptly called "Around the Sound Local Foods Store" was well stocked with local meats (including the specialty smoked fish from nearby Georgian Bay), cheeses, produce, grains, handbaked breads, cakes, pickles and jams. It also featured some handmade crafts (knitted hats, soaps and candles), and a few books about eating locally. We duly dropped off a stack of the latest Edible Toronto Magazine (called Edible Toronto, but really featuring southern Ontario farmers and food stories), which Anne, the shop owner took happily to pass along to her customers. We were quite impressed with the shop, and couldn't leave without buying a few loaves of the wonderful wholesome bread (cranberry-sunflower, and multigrain sourdough, baked by the Rising Sun Bakery using local grains), and a jar of "fire kraut" (a unique and spicy sauerkraut made with chili peppers and spices)..mmmm

Next stop was a look at the huge open blue waters of the bay before heading home for lunch. Our friends are excellent cooks, also eating a mainly local diet which includes items from a winter share with their local CSA (community supported agriculture). Our breakfast that morning had already consisted of farm fresh eggs, with toast from Rising Sun Bakery, a fine homemade elderberry-wildgrape-rosehip-sumac jam made last fall. Now lunch was: roasted roots soup (cream of celeriac, parsnip and maple syrup) topped with savoury toasted tempeh bits, more bread from Rising Sun Bakery, and a raw salad of shredded beets, carrots, apples and celeriac from the CSA, plus toasted sunflower & pumpkin seeds, and homemade pickles, firekraut, and for dessert, last summer's homecanned peaches with a splash of amaretto.

Post-lunch we had time for a cozy cup of tea infront of the fire in the woodstove, and then a short hike up the nearby Bruce Trail on the rugged cedar-lined escarpment trails. We got home rested, well-fed, inspired, reconnected...