Earth Sourced Food

Waking up to a drenching rain, knowing it'll pull out of here just past daybreak, allowing me to plant 100 more onion sets, makes me happy, happy, happy. Having ten teenagers head out this evening to The Mix for two days also greatly lessens my emotional load.

This retreat couldn't have come at a better time. Last weekend would've been disasterous, this weekend it's exactly what they need. Pastor Chris is who they need, this time will rejuvenate them all. Our high school guidance counselor is the man who'll be with my high school boys in the evenings, tell me that's not a stroke of brilliance in room assignments? He's very, very awesome, briefly seen in this episode of Made.

I, too, could use two nights of relative peacefulness, no teenage boys rough housing, it's hard for them to settle down each night thus usually keeping me up. Since Grandpa died, both JoJo and Allen have been dragging a futon to Martin, CW and Chuy's room, all five of them sleeping in the very large room each night with Amelia, their irrascible three footed terrier, right under my room.

JoJo's medications make him fall asleep first every night and Amelia inexplicably guards him warily. If anyone even looks at JoJo, much less punches his arm like Allen constantly does, Amelia bares her teeth, growls, snaps and attacks, which just spurs Allen on for about ten minutes every single cotton-picking night. So I have to listen to Amelia's histrionics on top of everything else. Indeed, I know she'll fret tonight without JoJo. She barks and runs around hunting his whereabouts constantly. Go figure.

This is JoJo and Allen's abandoned room where they just store their stuff. The only reason the newly installed hardwood floor is clean is because I did it. The room above is Jack and Nando's and they keep it right clean, much to my joy.

Ten less folks around, just to give me a 36 hour breather, is a heady taste of freedom and is just enough time for me. A sensee of what my life will be like in a couple of years, the last four children are pretty easy. Honestly, by Sunday at noon I'll be missing 'em.

It's simply a short breather for me, rejuvenation, time to allow me to get ten pounds of seed potatoes planted in the ground, this morning I'm gonna bake some potatoes I'd stored since last season, add garlic scapes that've greened up beautifully outside, plus FHPS - loving my 100 foot diet possibilities, extremely determined to make this my life's goal from here on out. Anais Dervaes explains it best here.

It's what I once had set out to do, light years ago, becoming derailed by the cantakerous demands of the 38 new, quite needy (and rightly so) children, alongside the one very reasonable one I already had birthed.

Sarah deeply shares my love of food production and has far surpassed me in her backstory information on food. Her cooking abilities passed me by many years ago, and left my raggedy butt sitting in the dust from which I farm.

I watch myself slowly and very happily returning to the self-sufficient one that my mama had originally raised up, just like her mama, Eloise, had done, just as my Granny Miller had raised up Eloise. That's as far back as I can remember, a buncha Southern women coaxing their food up outta the earth.

I've gotten her, Anais Dervaes, permission before to use her photos and some of the logos on my sidebar, giving her the credit, of course. It's all from her family's blog.