Homestead Voices

A few months ago, while I was squeezing a cheesecloth filled with pulped nuts to make almond milk, I realized that I had yet to milk a cow. It took the gush of almond juice between my fingers for me to realize that this was the closest to…
Read more...

First aid kits are a must on any farm or homestead. Just be sure to check the expiration dates of any and all contents, lest they be expired or, worse yet, rendered to dust.|Photo by Julia Bayly There’s an inescapable reality when you…
Read more...

There's an area in my house where everyone congregates. And that's become the heart of our home. What's yours? Photo by Sarah Walker Caron When we moved into our cozy 1887 farmhouse duplex, I bought three black stools for our kitchen…
Read more...

For my generation, staying in touch is mostly digital: sending DMs to college buddies on Instagram, lurking on high school classmates’ Facebook profiles or receiving the occasional email from that friend in the Peace Corps…
Read more...

Ask any four or five people to define “farming” and you will, in all likelihood, get four or five different answers. Farming is one of those things that while people know it when they see it or smell it, they have a hard time putting it…
Read more...

Congratulations are in order, readers. This week, I celebrated my one year anniversary at Hello Homestead and the Bangor Daily News. It may seem like small potatoes, but it’s a big deal for me -- I haven’t lived anywhere for a full year…
Read more...

Rusty Metal Farm's Miss Kitty Carlisle and Chiclet tag along on a woodland hike. | Photo by Julia Bayly Thanks to Instagram and a really great outdoors feature written by my colleague Aislinn Sarnaki about people who hike with their…
Read more...

A few weeks ago, I declared my second planting of shell peas a failure. And true to form, Mother Nature wasted no time in letting me know how wrong I was. Not a day after publishing the column, I went to my garden to find flowers all…
Read more...

When I lived in the Bay Area, I would take the train to San Francisco every Friday for a long walk along the harbor. Sometimes, I would walk past the piers to Boudin Bakery to buy a loaf of their famous sourdough bread. The secret to their…
Read more...

Chickens of all shapes, sizes and colors congregate happily on Rusty Metal Farm. | Photo by Julia Bayly I admit it, when I first decided to raise egg-laying chickens on Rusty Metal Farm, I honestly thought they were good for one thing…
Read more...

We’ve reached that time in the season — the point where we bid goodnight to our garden beds and reflect on the season past. We make mental notes not to repeat the mistakes we made this year. And we begrudgingly pull those plants we…
Read more...

I see art in everything. I have a blue enamelware spoon hanging on the wall of my kitchen. A cleaned jar of salsa with a flame-licked label (spoiler alert: it was hot) sits proudly on display in my living room. When I moved to New England,…
Read more...