FROM SCRATCH CLUB

I love to garden. Maybe you do too. I love to do lots and lots of things. So many things, in fact, that I am too busy to allocate as much time to my garden as I would like. If only I had an extra 2 hours a day… that would make things so much [...]

    O wind, where have you been, That you blow so sweet? Among the violets Which blossom at your feet – Christina (Georgina) Rossetti This Spring, I discovered that many of the “weeds” that grow in my yard are edible! This is exciting if, like me, you enjoy foraging for food and, come springtime, are [...]

Making vegetable stock is so easy, yet I’m guessing that not all of you have homemade stock on hand. By the time I remember to make some stock, I only have half an onion or a single celery stalk to work with and something about buying a whole basket of fresh veggies just to boil [...]

My last post about syruping included a few photos of the cinder block fireplace we built in 2011 for boiling down the sap that we collect from maple trees in our neighborhood.  When we built our current fireplace a week later, I took more extensive photos.  We changed our fireplace a little this year; we [...]

Editor’s Note: Its that time of year again- Maple Sap running! You can do it- go outside & tap your neighborhood maple trees (with permission from your neighbors of course!) Dianna is back with another (helpful) installment in her How To Maple Syrup Series. If you weren’t with us last year this time, Dianna cranked [...]

Editor’s Note: Our last installment of “new to us” posts from the personal blogs of FSC Contributors is a lovely piece from Jillian. She writes an extremely reflective blog about family life on Everyday Life for Four Seasons. This post was originally published on January 16, 2010. On a related note, if anyone is moving [...]

Editor’s Introductory Note: To give us another week to get back “into the swing of things”, I decided to have a very special week of posts lined up in advance. I asked all six contributors with a personal blog (Christine, Jillian, Erika, Deanna, Liz & Becky) to republish an “oldie but a goodie” post here on [...]

Its pretty simple: I love baking bread and I love eating bread. I bring bread to almost every food swap and am always experimenting with a new kind. Lately, I have been making so much bread, English muffins, biscuits, etc, that I have not purchased any bread products from the grocery store in quite some [...]

Recently I made two types of body scrubs for FSC’s Saratoga Food Swap*. If you want to save money by cutting out luxury items without losing the luxury, this is an easy and cheap way to pamper yourself. Spend a tiny bit extra for some fab packaging and you have yourself a really delightful, super [...]

There is really nothing like the smell of freshly roasted coffee. Unless of course you were like me when I was introduced to coffee roasting, seven and a half months pregnant. It was Christmas of 2004, I was in my third trimester of pregnancy, and my mother decided that for my dad’s Christmas gift that [...]

So in the first two parts of this DIY series, I’ve shared some of the how-to and what not to do’s of keeping backyard chickens. You may be wondering, though, why bother with backyard hens? Or maybe, like the folks at All Over Albany, you’re thinking that backyard chickens seem like a lot of work. To [...]

I’ve pretty much wrapped up harvesting crops on Silly Goose Farm. Apples are done, tomatoes are done, and all that’s left to put-up is a couple of cabbages, a few rows of rainbow carrots, and a whole bunch of pears. The pear trees on our farm are over 100 years old and positively drip with fruit. [...]

October is one of the busiest months for me. Well, make that August, September and October. Harvest time in the Northeast starts in August and doesn’t end until past Halloween (I won’t even begin to really harvest my pears until November!). Usually this means just cutting down and picking the wonderful veggies and apples and putting [...]

Our old farm has a fun history. From the reseach I’ve been conducting on the property, here’s what I’ve found: The original farm was started by the Gaige family pre-Revolutionary War (the Gaige family can be traced to our area since the 1730s). The house across the street was built in the early 1800s by [...]

Not long ago, I began a little series on keeping a flock of chickens in your backyard. You can read the first installment here. This week I introduce to you: THE COOP I began dreaming about my chicken coop back in 2005. I was living in New Canaan, CT and working in Tarrytown, NY. One day [...]