Brunette Writes Podcast

Let me tell you a weird story about our cat. We had some problems with water seeping through our basement walls. When this happens, the water is muddy. Even if you clean it up, it leaves a very fine silt behind. One place that ended up having a pretty thick layer was behind the furnace. It was out of the way and hard to get to, so it just sort of built up. We fixed our gutters and created a water garden in the backyard. Our roof runoff fills some drums, and then when they overflow, it runs out to the water garden, as does a French drain to draw water away from the basement. After we did that, we haven’t had as many problems with water in the basement. But that silt just set back there getting dryer and dryer. One day I realized I had not needed to clean the cat’s litter box in a while. He seemed OK. He wasn’t lethargic. I thought, “Maybe that silly cat is pooping somewhere other than in his litter.” I looked and looked and looked and finally found a nice pile of poop behind the furnace in that lovely, soft silt. Well, I guess you can’t really blame the cat. The silt is as soft as down, and the furnace makes that spot nice and warm. But still, I had to clean up the cat poop and then clean up the silt. The cat went back to his litter box, and all was well.

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As of today, all five chicks are still alive.

So, yeah, we haven’t garnered any losses yet, and the chicks look… healthy. Happy, even. They run around playing games with the “treats” I give them, with beet peels and red pepper bits standing out as apparent favorites.

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My father is a very handy man. He’s the type of guy who sees a brick patio and thinks, “I could do that.” And then he figures out how to do it. And then actually does it. And it looks awesome. As his son, it is both heartening to see what can be done and discouraging when you see how often your attempts at doing something awesome falls short. But as my grandfather used to say, “It’s good enuf fer who it’s fer.” It took me years to translate that from his Oklahoma twang to my more prosaic American standard into, “It is good enough for whom it is for.” I always liked Grandpa’s attitude towards life.

I first heard about making homemade toothpaste back in high school, from a science teacher named John McCullough. “Commercial toothpaste is a scam,” he declared, and then he broke down the science behind why you could get at least the same or maybe even better results if you simply took hydrogen peroxide and baking soda, mixed them together into a paste, and used that to brush your teeth instead. He assigned this little craft experiment to all of us enrolled in his freshman Introduction to Physical Science class, as homework.

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I’m so full of enthusiasm for these two beautiful herbs that I hardly know how to start talking about them. They tick just about every box on the list! What are they? 

American mountain mint, or Pycnanthemum pilosum (above left)

Anise hyssop, or Agastache foeniculum (above right)

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We’ve latched onto the idea of “permaculture,” drawn to the movement’s emphasis on independence through a garden stocked with human-use plants. So rather than only enjoying the sight and smell of the spring season’s plethora of petals, we challenge ourselves to make use of them as well. 

There’s a new trend on TikTok. Mercy. I wrote that sentence, and I realized that is the modern equivalent of “Scientists recently…”. It’s that sentence that you know is going to end badly. Or as someone put it to me once, “If you only watch the first act of the movie, the new scientific discovery works out just fine!”

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After an overall mild but strangely prolonged winter, we’re finally looking spring squarely in the buds. And that means it’s time to put the past three months of dreaming and planning into action.

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It’s fitting that I first learned about the subject of this season’s giveaway through another… giveaway. That one was over at Permies.com, an online permaculture community where I spend a fair amount of time researching, reading, and contributing. I did not win that giveaway, but Kate Downham’s book A Year in an Off-Grid Kitchen: Homestead Kitchen Skills and Real Food Recipes for Resilient Health caught my attention enough to warrant immediate purchase. I’ve been her fan ever since. Affiliate link for the book: https://amzn.to/3XZxrEu

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