The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Bite-size segments

temp Wheelbarrow full of weedsEvery month, I make a list of the farm projects that really must get done that month.  And at the end of the month, I shake my head in digust and move half a dozen tasks onto next month's list.

But not this March!  For the first time ever in our three and a half years on the farm, we actually finished everything on the month's list...with two days to spare!  In large part, I suspect this unexpected success came about because Mark insisted on buying a truckload of mulch, saving me days worth of work raking leaves out of the woods.  But I like to imagine that we're actually starting to get the farm under control and broken down into bite-size segments.

Of course, weeding didn't even make it onto the March list.  Guess what I'll be doing all of April?  I got a head start on Monday, with sodden soil making it easy to rip out chickweed, deadnettles, bittercress, and dandelions that had sprung up in gaps in the strawberry beds' mulch.  Three wheelbarrow loads of succulent greenery plopped into our four year old Golden Comets' tractor, their prize for laying one egg per bird per day for the last few days despite their age.

Want to create your own schedule and spend time on what's really important?  Read our ebook about funding our journey back to the land.



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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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Don't think of chickweed and dandelions as weeds but as your first salad crop of the season. I eat chickweed in salads and green smoothies and dandelions depend on what stage how they are eaten.
Comment by Lisa Tue Mar 30 14:43:27 2010
I was wondering if chickweed was edible. The chickens love it so much that you'd think it might be! Good to hear it is!
Comment by anna Tue Mar 30 16:32:23 2010





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