It seems I cannot get enough of books on farming/agriculture/food/etc. these days.

I've read quite a few in recent months and just finished another one last night.

I've so enjoyed these books I decided I'd make a reading list here to share them with you too.

It all started a year ago actually, when I happened upon a copy of The Dirty Life in an airport bookstore on my way back from Chicago, after a lovely weekend with Alicia and Eileen.

We'd been in our new house, with 26 acres, for about a year at that point and we had our baby chicks and I was just discovering all the things this land offered us.

The book drew me in and left me wanting to learn more. Even if you're not living on land with plans to raise sheep or chickens or start a farm, it's a great read: City girl meets hippie farmer, hilarity ensues.

After that, I dove into more books on the simple life and have been amassing my own small library on the topic.

So if you're looking for a book to settle down with at your favorite local coffee shop, I have some suggestions.

Here's a look at what I've read so far, and what's on tap.

1. Confessions of a Counterfeit Farm Girl by Susan McCorkindale. Have to admit this was not my favorite. It started out pretty entertaining, but after a few chapters, the funniness seemed forced and it just started to bug me a little. Still, I powered through and finished the book. I have some friends that loved it and I'm glad I read it, but it wasn't my favorite.

2. Mud Season by Ellen Stimson. I'm only about halfway through this one. Been working on it since October, but keep checking books out of the library and getting distracted. But honest truth, I love it so far. It's funny, witty and easy to read. Stimson really sets her scenes making me feel like I'm there with her and can relate to some of her comical moments while learning how to live the rural life.

3. Cooked by Michael Pollan. This one took me awhile to read, but I love it. This book has changed the way I think about a lot of things, and I'm grateful for that. I loved it so much I wrote an entire post about it.

4. The Feast Nearby by Robin Mather. This was a pretty quick read since Mather kept her chapters pretty short, organized by season, and then she filled a good chunk of the book with recipes. Mather starts off talking about her divorce and then she moves to a cabin in Michigan, where she lives on a small budget and makes the most of what's available to her, while also focusing on locally sourced foods. It made me think a lot more about supporting local farmers and producers and also concentrating on the foods I like most to more efficiently use the ingredients I have.

5. A Farm Dies Once a Year by Arlo Crawford. Crawford returns to his family farm for a summer and finds himself feeling out of place. But by the end of the summer, he's remembered some great things about farm life and some new skills. It's a fairly quick read and while it wasn't exactly what I expected, I enjoyed it.

6. The Wisdom of the Radish by Lynda Hopkins. I just finished this one, and returned it probably two weeks late to the library. Hopkins is serious in her efforts to farm and her passion for local farm systems, but also hilarious in describing some of those moments when she's thinking how the heck did I get here. There are curse words, but as someone who has spent hours digging post holes, getting attacked by roosters while trying to protect hens and finding rattlesnakes in my garage and mice in my kitchen and cars, I can relate.

7. Greenhorns edited by Bradbury, Fleming and Manalo. Okay, I've only read one essay in this collection of 50, but they were from Montana and it was a great read. The book includes a wide variety of young farmers from across the country and I love it so far.

There's a good chance I forgot one, but here's a look at my to-be-read list:

+ In Search of the Perfect Loaf by Samuel Fromartz
+ Made from Scratch by Jenna Woginrich 
+ Barnheart by Jenna Woginrich
+ Growing a Farmer by Kurt Timmermeister
+ Grow the Good Life by Michele Owens
+ Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
+ The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan and everything else he's ever written.
+ The Bucolic Plague by Josh Kilmer-Purcell 
+ Rurally Screwed by Jessie Knadler. I saw this book in a Bozeman bookshop a year ago and couldn't for the life of me remember the name of it. I was looking for it all year and in writing this post rediscovered it!


There's so many more I keep finding at the library and as I poke around Amazon, but I'll leave it there before this list stops feeling fun and starts to feel overwhelming.

Have you read any of these? What do you think of them? Any suggestions for my growing farm/food book collection?

Sometimes I think I'm going to lose it with all the tasks, projects, emails, calls, chores and to-do lists swirling in my head.

Oddly enough, the more I think about the things I need to get done, the less productive I become.

Last week, for example, I couldn't focus to save my life and made very little headway on a work project that I'm actually very excited about.

It's why I kept this photo and some video of the water on my phone. It's from Giant Springs State Park, here in Great Falls, and it's a spot my friend Sophia and I love to walk to.

Something about the sound of water, the wind in the trees and the peaceful stillness of the park is incredibly calming.

I was flipping through an old issue of Time the other day, in an effort to clear clutter, I read all my back issues that I'm behind on so I could toss them, and read another article about how time in nature is really good for us.

This particular article talked about the reduction of stress and anxiety and the improved ability of your brain to function.

Seems simple right? Spend more time outside, improve your life? Right, except all those emails, tasks, chores and to-do lists.

A co-worker/friend invited us to kayak the Missouri River from Carters Ferry back to Fort Benton on Sunday and at one point I worried about spending an entire day away from those lengthy to-do lists.

Guys, it was the best day.

And so relaxing that I didn't look at social media or email that night or even much the next day, since I was off work.

I often feel tied to my inbox and guilty for all the emails I never get to. But, the less I looked at my inbox the last few days, sure enough, the better I felt. And, I had more time to cross off things on my to-do list. Like read a fascinating book related to that work project I'm so excited about. And clean out my closet and finally fill up that ThredUp bag that's been sitting on the counter for ages. And mail birthday and anniversary cards to family. Bake, make dinner, run, play with the dogs and watch an episode of Turn with M.

It's not the new year and not a resolution, but my goal for even September is to spend less time worried about my inbox and more time outside soaking in all the gloriousness around me in nature. Plus, the sheep need water.

How do you reduce stress and stop worrying about your inbox, to-do lists?

I may have used this image before, but figured it was appropriate for the post in which I announce that I'm getting sheep.

SHEEP!

I don't really have the slightest idea what I'm doing, but we've made it this far with chickens and things just sort of came together on the sheep.

We have 26 acres and while some of it is unsuitable for crops and it's unlikely we'll ever do more than small scale vegetable farming since we're on a plain, on a hill, with no real trees or structures around to break the sometimes 50+ miles an hour winds that whip across our property.

But that land should be put to good use in my opinion, even if I don't have the slightest idea what I'm doing. One grandfather lived on a farm and the other worked in agriculture, so maybe somewhere deep down, it's in my bones.

So here's how the sheep thing went down.

We were out eating Mexican food one night a few weeks ago and I was going on about having a field of corn and a berry patch and apple trees and on and on and on about growing lots of produce.

M, ever the realist, reminded me about the less than ideal environmental conditions for that kind of agriculture.

Well, alright then, maybe I should just get sheep and make my own yarn and open my own yarn shop, was my retort. 

That's probably the most doable of your ideas, M said.

Challenge accepted.

I spent the rest of the weekend researching sheep -- who knew there were more than 200 breeds of sheep in the U.S.? Not me, that's who.

By Sunday night, I had found a breed that I decided I wanted and found the one and only woman in Montana who bred them.

By Monday morning, she told me she was willing to sell three to me and by the end of the week, I had mailed my deposit check.

Gotta love a man who lets you run wild with your crazy ideas that involve live animals. 

When I picked my breed, Leicester Longwool, I didn't realize that it was a rare American heritage breed that is still raised in Colonial Williamsburg -- one of my favorite places on Earth not far from my hometown. 


Of course I would pick a sheep breed with Virginia ties. OF COURSE! They'll go well with our Buckeye chickens, a rare heritage breed that a Ohio woman created. Our minifarm will pay homage to our home states.

The sheep won't be ready for pickup until the fall, so that gives us time to get the fence ready, build a sheep shelter and prep the pasture.

The woman I'm getting my sheep from recommended, wisely, that I start with nonbreeding animals to figure out what I'm doing and if I'm actually cut out for it before I get in too deep. So I'm getting two ewes and a wether, a castrated male.

The weather has been warmer too, so things are about to get crazy around here and I, for one, am excited.

So now I just have to learn to sheer sheep, or I suppose pay someone to do that, then spin and dye my own yarn.

My new dream, and 5-year-plan, is to open my own yarn shop. And in my mind, this yarn shop will have a wine and coffee bar plus books. 

I told my mom about my yarn shop plans and she said "that's all of your favorite things in one place."

It's going to be long days of hard work getting ready for the sheep, finishing the chicken coop/barn and moving our started seeds to the ground and protecting from deer and rabbits, but there's something incredibly satisfying about doing all these things ourselves.

So, I might have no idea what I'm getting into, but I'll learn and just maybe, in the next few years, I'll be opening what, to me, will be the happiest place in the world.

Have you ever had a crazy dream and been really excited about the prospect of making it reality? Tell me about it!

This week, I cancelled my Birchbox subscription.

It's not because it wasn't fun to get a box of random girly goodies once a month. But that joy only lasted a few minutes and I ended up with a massive pile of the boxes, mostly untouched, and a drawer full of random beauty products I wasn't using. 

And in my effort to simplify my living space, and my life (though if I'm being honest, that's not going very well), I decided it was time to end the madness. 

I went through the samples again and pulled things like small tubes of moisturizer with sunscreen, other sunscreens, hand lotions, lip gloss, chapstick, a small mascara and the like and put them in a small makeup bag that had been sitting in a drawer for years. 

That bag got tossed into my purse and it's actually been handy to have the mascara when I forgot to put some on for work last week, the lip gloss when my chapstick ran out and the sunscreen since I've been outside more, on the go.

This was my strategy to start using up the stuff I had accumulated and actually had use for. 

There's also currently a row of face cleansers, scrubs and exfoliators in the shower so I remember to use them up. And a few small lotion bottles on the counter so I remember to use them when I get out of the shower in the morning.  There's a small bottle of moisturizer on my bedstand now too, so I use that up at night.

If you come to my house in the next year, you'll probably get a box of random beauty products that I think you might like as a welcome gift, or find a jar of the stuff in the bathroom in case you forgot something.

Here's the thing, I am not a beauty product kind of person. I hardly wear any makeup, ever, and have a pretty simple routine.

My morning routine looks like this: 

Shampoo (usually only every other day): Organix, whichever variety I have on hand, I've been rotating through them.
Conditioner (only if I'm blowdrying): Organix
Face cleanser: Never A Dull Moment from Origins
Face polisher: Never A Dull Moment from Origins
Moisturizer: Lately, it's been one from a Birchbox, otherwise, it's usually VitaZing from Origins, or one of the other many, many pots of lotion I've also acquired from Origins.
Mascara: I don't have much preference on this, but I've been using some from Ulta for the last year or two and just stocked up on more.

That's it. 

Seriously. 

All the beauty magazines, commercials, ads and society somehow get me thinking I need or want to use more products for a more polished look every day, and so I've end up with all these things I don't need. We also live on a septic system, so we have to be careful about what we put down our drains and there are certain chemicals that we absolutely can't put down the drain without risk of destroying the septic system that works pretty well.

For some girls, there's enjoyment in all of that, but for me, it's just not there. I do, however, have a current obsession with Essie nail polish. My nails have always been short and I struggle to keep them growing, so the polish is a trick to keep me from messing with them.

I'd been thinking about canceling Birchbox for months but kept putting it off for fear of missing out on something that I might get in my box and enjoy, and mostly, just procrastination. But the more I looked at how much I hadn't used in the three years of boxes and how I'd spent $10/month on those unused things and how much I worry about costs associated with house renovations and startup farming, the less sense it made for me to keep paying for something that carried little value for me.

So much of life is out of my control and lately I've been feeling like too much of the world's weight is on my shoulders, so I finally took action on a small thing that actually made me feel like several less things were weighing on me, and that's worth more than the $10/month I now have to put toward the sheep I'm getting this fall, or new skates, or a house project. All things that will give me a joy and satisfaction that will last much longer than what Birchbox could ever give me.

What about you? Do you get enjoyment from beauty products or actually know what you're doing with them? Or end up with a pile of unused tubes and bottles because you keep reverting to a simple routine like me?

I'm sharing a little bit of work this week, because it's near and dear to my heart. 

April is Month of the Military Child, and as a military kid, I wrote a column for the paper to help promote the forum I'm moderating next week on what it's like to grow up in the military.

My dad was a career Air Force officer and my mom was an Air Force nurse for a few years. That's me and my dad in the photo, probably in Michigan. That's where I was born, but we left when I was two and I've sadly never been back.

I swore that I'd have nothing to do with the military when I grew up, but here I am, living with a guy who spent 10 years as an Air Force officer and my entire professional career has involved writing about the military or working for museums or non-profits directly related to the military. It's amazing how much you pick up about military life as a kid that you realize that most other people have no exposure to such things.

There's a lot you learn and a lot that's great about being a military kid. You learn to adapt quickly, make friends everywhere you go, experiences many different cultures and see the county, sometimes the world. But, you also have no real hometown and you feel a little like an outside pretty much everywhere you, even when you find a place to settle down.

That said, I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Here's my column, which was printed in the Great Falls Tribune on Friday (feel free to click the link since our jobs practically depend on it these days, but you can read it all below too):

Growing up in an Air Force family, I hated the military.

I hated moving all the time. I hated my dad being gone a lot. I hated that the Air Force had more control over my life than I did.

Life was basically lived in letters.

While Dad was a WSO on a B-52, we PCS’d, lived in TLFs, dad went TDY and we shopped at the BX.

That’s weapons systems officer, permanent change of station, temporary lodging facility, temporary duty assignment and base exchange.

But as an adult looking back, I’m grateful for that childhood.

Dad didn’t make us use hospital corners on our beds or require that we call him sir, but everyone else was “sir” and “ma’am.”

He did occasionally feed us MREs, or Meals Ready to Eat, when Mom worked late as an Air Force nurse.

I refused to speak to my parents for two weeks during one military move and I may have thrown a tantrum when Dad missed a ballet recital, but I wouldn’t trade those years for anything.

Life as a military kid isn’t easy.

I grew up during relative peace. We didn’t have the threat of dozens of deployments at the time. I have a deep respect for today’s military kids. They carry a heavy load, mostly before they’re old enough to drive.

Tough as those years can be, growing up military makes teaches invaluable life lessons.

You learn that there is a world far beyond your hometown, in part because you don’t have a hometown.

We moved to five different states by the time I was 14. As much as I hated it, I had more pen pals across the country that I actually knew than any of my classmates.

In those moves, from Michigan to Texas, to South Dakota, to Las Vegas and eventually Virginia, I was usually the new kid who talked funny with my acquired accents who said soda instead of pop. But in all those moves, I saw most of the country. We always made a trip out of a cross country move, stopping in national parks, historic landmarks and experiencing local culture.

I say I’m from Virginia, mostly because that’s where we lived the longest.

All that moving makes you really great at making friends. You have no choice. When you move every other year, it’s up to you to make friends and you have to find your place in schools where kids have known each other their whole lives.

It makes you an excellent packer and by the time you graduate college, moving to a state where you don’t know a soul, by yourself, for a new job, seems like a piece of cake. I’ve done it a few times now and left the country solo without breaking a sweat.

You learn rank structures, acronyms and you can read military time. You learn discipline, time management and that you’re going to have to carry your own weight.

Life as a military kid is hard, but years later, most of us wouldn’t trade it. I know I wouldn’t.


Where you a military kid? What did you learn from your experience?

It's been quiet on the blog lately. 

There's been a lot going on and I've spent more time with my nose in a book or my hands filled with yarn and knitting needles. 

And honest truth, I've been thinking about a lot of things lately and never quite reached that point when I could distill those thoughts into anything resembling a coherent blog post. 

But, while I've been away, some good things have been happening.

A few weeks ago, okay a month or so, I wrote about the book Cooked. 

In that post I made some vows. I'm quite happy to report that so far, I've kept most of them and am continuing to work on them. 

In the last month, I've cooked more, even if many times it was the same recipes I've fallen back on for at least five years. Can't go wrong with old favorites. 

But, I've also experimented with crock pot recipes and made a few that I haven't made in awhile. M has been cooking too so we're doing pretty great on that front. 

A few weeks ago, I baked muffins and bread. People, I MADE BREAD.

And both were very good. A coworker said it was the best muffin he'd ever had and while the bread was super dense, it was delicious. And beautiful.

Who knew I'd get so much personal satisfaction from baking.

The recipes weren't especially difficult, just a bit time consuming, but if I can do it, anyone can do it! (I'll post the recipes in a separate post later this week so you can try it too!)

For the muffins, I used 100 percent whole wheat flour. I'd made cookies earlier when I tested the whole wheat flour as half the amount required. I stuck with all purpose flour for the other half. 

Bread required bread flour, so my range of ingredients has been expanding slowly and I love it.

It's a funny thing. I could buy a loaf of bread at the grocery store for a few dollars, but there's something about slicing bread I made myself. The recipe also made such a dense, hearty loaf, that I feel less like I'm eating cabs and more like I'm eating something wholesome and satisfying.

We're getting started on our vegetables for the season too. M started seeds for tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, beans, broccoli and more over the weekend. I also went a little crazy and decided we should try watermelon and cantaloupe too. 

There's still an awful lot I don't know about farming, agriculture or baking or food in general, but I have to admit, I'm excited about learning. 

My reading list on farm/agriculture/food books is coming soon as well since I've been cranking though some of those and have a massive pile I need to get too.

Oh, and a sneak peek at what's coming in my life soon. I've decided that I want to have sheep and spin my own yarn. Yeah, that's right. I'm going all in at this minifarm thing.

More on that coming soon. Here's to hoping the slightly warmer weather helps me stay motivated and better able to put my all over the place thoughts into mildly coherent blog posts. 

Happy April everyone! And hopefully it's spring where you are! It snowed in Montana today and more is on the way.