Come the Revolution

An Ethical Engagement

In that I might explain our long absence from this blog, I would like to say that farming is a full time job and a half, even for apprentices with short hours. We also made the decision to make a mad dash to the altar (or river, through a ...

Schools Out For Summer

To let us concentrate on gardening/farming, we're going to take a summer vacation. Somewhat like the kind you have as a student, except this one involves more work. In a few months we will return, we hope with awesome farmer tans (I will try and convince Amanda to share them with ...

Rutland market: Where’s the asparagus?

The weather was perfect yesterday morning, and I knew this really cute guy would be selling leafy greens and flowers at the Rutland farmers' market, so I decided to head downtown and check it out. I was impressed with the sheer number of vendors -- people were selling everything from jewelery ...

7 Perfect Survival Foods

This list from LiveScience was published last fall -- it documents the 7 best foods to have on a deserted island. If you could only eat seven different foods for the rest of your life, you might want a meat-lovers pizza with three kinds of cheese, but it turns out ...

Dollars and Sense: Prioritizing the food budget

As crunchy, frugal, eco-conscious types, Cian and I ask a lot of our food budget. Although modest, it has to supply us with a good variety of nutritious food while supporting local, sustainable agriculture. If we wanted to, we could easily spend hundreds of dollars a month buying organic ...

Free Education

I'm about up to my ears in educational debt. The current statistic (or at least the last one I've heard) is that the average newly-graduated bachelor of the arts or sciences has racked up $20'000 in debt. I'll put it lightly and say I'm above average in this regard. With ...

He says… Larding the Lean Earth

A few months back I read an amazing book. It's called Larding the Lean Earth by Steven Stoll. The reading is relatively dense, but it's filled with history and an expert analysis of the conversations of the earlier half of the 19th Century with regard to improving soils through on-farm ...

Not much money, oh but honey…

...Ain't we got fun? I am in debt. Quite a bit of it, actually. Cian has debt, too. And we're not alone: Generation Debt author Anya Kamenetz wrote in 2007 that two thirds of undergrads have an average of $19,300 in educational debt, and undergrads in their final year carry an ...

Just a spoonful of… corn syrup?

This isn't pretty, but it's true: When I read that researchers found traces of mercury in nine samples of corn syrup, I laughed. Of course they did. Of course! It figures that one of the worst products ever to hit American diets and agriculture would also contain a potent neurotoxin. Alanis ...

Frugality and Holiday Spending

Over the past couple of weeks, there have been some changes in the revolutionary household. My second job, the one that allows me to sock away a little bit per week, dissolved. In the process of tightening our belts a little and the consumer version of Christmas breathing heavily down ...