Driving home from our whirlwind visit to my father in South Carolina, we seemed to be travelling back in time.  The tree leaves shrank back into their buds until they were a mere haze and black locust flowers gave way to redbuds.  As we crossed the border of our home county, we passed a large strawberry field coated with row cover fabric --- a good reminder to check the weather and notice a frost warning in effect.  I followed the strawberry farmer's lead and covered as many of my strawberry and broccoli beds as I could, even though the light frost didn't seem to harm the plants left unprotected.

Lucy had broken into one of the chicken tractors while we were gone, not to eat the chickens but to eat their scraps.  So I chased down three hens as they happily scratched through my garlic's mulch (then chased them down again half an hour later when I realized where the hole in their cage was.)  Across the yard, the chicks seem to have eaten the majority of the grass clippings I gave them, along with a gallon of feed, and were begging for more.  We were only gone for 36 hours!  Could everything really have grown so much in a day and a half?

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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