By American standards Amanda and I don’t normally generate much garbage. Amanda is fanatic about her recycling, and we buy less packaged goods than most folks, so a typical week’s garbage is a small bag or two. Now all of that is changing.

We were planning to extend wood flooring into the tiny bathroom of our tiny apartment, even though Amanda and I were both a little apprehensive about having all the water from the bathroom on wood floors. The call from our friend Scott Ruppert changed that.

Amanda and I are still recovering on Monday morning, but our marathon painting work in the pole barn is more or less complete.

We still get funny looks when people learn we will have no range in our apartment in the pole barn. How can that be? How will we survive? Actually, neither of us is worried, and I’m downright excited.

Amanda and I live in central Alabama, and all our children live 2,000 miles away in California. So most of what we do on the farm has to happen without them. All three of them are interested in their weird parents’ adventures in agriculture, however, so when they came to […]

It doesn’t take a genius to see that, with energy increasingly more expensive and harder to find, we can’t keep pulling around two and half tons of steel to propel one man or woman to the store and back. Whether we like it or not, whether we are prepared or […]

There are many times each week when I am glad Amanda chose to marry me. Saturday was another, because she made me rest.

We have been watching our little stand of corn each week, hoping to see signs of tassels forming at the tops of the plants. We spotted them this week, and they announce that our corn plants have entered a new phase of their lives.

Experienced gardeners will laugh at my ignorance, but I’ve never seen a squash grow. Now that I have, I realize squash must be related to kudzu. You check progress and then, while you look away, it grows another inch.

As you probably know by now, we’re moving from a 2300 sq. ft. house in Vestavia Hills to a 600 sq. ft. apartment in the pole barn at Longleaf Breeze. That’s the scariest way to say it. Now let’s flesh it out and make it less intimidating.