Like most ferments, beet kvass is adaptable and has several “traditional” ways of being prepared.

That’s the beauty of ferments…

They remain open to both your interpretation and your creativity.

Beet kvass has deep roots in Eastern Europe and is particularly associated with Ukraine, Russia and other parts of the region.

Some say it’s a drink made from no more than beets, water and salt.

Some say it also contains sugar and rye bread.

No matter how you choose to prepare it, it offers a tangy, sour and deeply earthy flavour.

It’s a very simple lacto-fermented drink, and one that requires no starter when you’re working with fresh vegetables. The fermentation begins with the microorganisms naturally present on the vegetables.

There are two kinds of people when it comes to beets.

Those who love them…

And those who don’t.

If you don’t… you and I are the same kind of people.

Stay with me here.

Fall is the perfect time to make beet kvass. Fermentation transforms that earthy, almost dirty beet flavour into something completely different.

And beets alone aren’t enough for me.

I add one more thing.

Orange peel.

I wanted to create something warmer. Something that reminded me of what mulled apple cider on a fall day might taste like, but in a vegetable version.

The orange peel gives the kvass a brighter flavour. It feels a little more like the festivities of fall and leaves the finished kvass with a warmer, softer taste.

Sometimes I add half a cinnamon stick.

Sometimes I don’t.

That’s the beauty of ferments.

There’s room to play with your flavours.

How I Make Beet Kvass

It always begins with the freshest ingredients because your end result is determined before you even begin.

Fresh, firm beets. The variety doesn’t matter.

I don’t peel them.

Scrub them well and trim off the “tops and tails.”

Then cut them into chunks.

I find 1-litre jars to be the best size for this ferment.

Ensure your jars are clean and properly sterilized before you begin.

Place the chopped beets into your jars, filling them roughly three-quarters of the way.

Add your orange peel. Dried or fresh both work.

The Brine

You’ll notice, my ferments I always go back to a 2% ratio, there’s a reason for that.

It’s enough salt to create an environment where the lactic-acid fermentation get’s established, without making the finished ferment too salty or slowing the fermentation down more than we want.

Mix 20 g (about 1 tablespoon) of fine sea salt into 1 litre (4¼ cups) of filtered, non-chlorinated water.

For a smaller batch:

• 2 cups water: 10 g salt

• 1 cup water: 5 g salt

I prefer to weigh my salt rather than measuring it by volume because… you’d be surprised how different the weight of different salts can be.

Dissolve the salt into the water.

Pour the brine over the beets until they are completely covered.

Make sure to leave a little space at the top of your jar for expansion as the fermention happens.

I place a clean beet leaf over the top of the beets and then place a fermentation weight on top of that. It keeps everything submerged.

Do you need a leaf and a weight?

No.

But it sure looks pretty.

If you don’t have a fermentation weight, Grandma taught me to go find the perfect rock.

Wash it well and set it on top.

The important thing is that the beets stay beneath the brine.

Covering Your Jar

There are a few different options.

Place the jar lid on but don’t tighten it completely. This allows gases to escape.

Cover it with cheesecloth and secure it with a rubber band.

(My least favourite. The aroma of fermenting food in the kitchen isn’t something I enjoy)

Or, if you have them handy, use fermentation lids with an airlock.

Now tuck it away in a cool, dark place and let nature do what it does so magnificently.

How to Know It’s Ready

You’ll notice bubbles forming.

That’s when you know the kvass is brewing as it’s meant to.

The aroma will become sour and tangy.

The colour of the liquid will deepen into a beautiful purple-red.

And for the non-beet lovers, the flavour will have shifted from earthy and salty to bright and tangy.

I usually give it a taste on day four.

It gives me a point of reference.

I know then whether it’s going to need a few more days, or whether I need to keep a closer eye on it because it might just be perfect tomorrow.

Depending on the temperature of your home, it will take roughly 5–7 days.

Trust yourself.

You’ll know when the time is right.

Once it’s reached the depth of flavour I prefer, I strain off the liquid and keep it in the fridge.

The Fermented Beets

Please don’t toss them into the compost.

They are the perfect addition, chopped or grated, to salads, soups, Buddha bowls or alongside a meal.

You’ve already done the work of turning them into something entirely different.

Use them.

A Little Something for Fall

This is a really lovely fall beverage.

Enjoy it as it is, straight from the fridge, or add it to a little sparkling water.

We could spend a significant amount of time going over the health benefits of beets, fermentation and kvass.

But sometimes it’s really nice not to need to optimize everything in our minds.

Sometimes we can just enjoy the simplest things for what they are.

Beets.

Salt.

Time.

And the patience to let nature do the work.

-Angie

If you’re ready to go beyond this one recipe and learn the principles behind fermenting food and drinks at home, I’ve put everything I’ve learned into the Simple Fermentation Guide — including 9 recipes, methods, ratios and troubleshooting.

Explore the Simple Fermentation Guide

I write about building a slower, more self-reliant life… growing food, preserving what we grow, cooking outdoors, living closer to the land, and the deeper questions that come with choosing a different way to live.

Subscribe now

I can’t remember a time that I didn’t feel the pull to traditional ways.

Planting, growing, harvesting, preserving…. Yes

But it’s never stopped there.

Stretching and tanning hides from the neighbours sheep. Building structures with what we have on hand. Bushcraft. Foraging. Sewing. Knitting. ALL of it.

Not out of fear.

Out of need.

Out of a desire to be more connected.

Out of the fulfillment I feel at the end of a very long day’s work.

Out of a deep inner knowing that…

Many of these skills are lost.

Some would say forgotten.

And

I strongly feel we are absolutely going to need them in the not so distant future.

Perhaps we’ll need them because we’ve needed to reprioritize where our time, money and energy go.

Perhaps because of rising costs and affordability.

Perhaps there’ll be limited resources and materials available.

Perhaps it’s due to an unstable world which could lead us to needing to be much more self-reliant.

For me the solution to each of those things is to have the skills needed to carry us through such a time.

There’s a certain kind of pride that comes with earning the wisdom of what came before us.

It’s a wisdom that curates comfort.

Not certainty, but comfort.

We fell these cedar logs from our forest, and we did so in a way that ensured the next generation are coming up right behind these ones.

For us, this is relationship.

Making way, tending to, providing for.

We tend to the forest responsibly.

In return it provides for us.

81 lengths of log.

Approximately 52 trees.

Trees which were previously damaged in an ice storm.

Turned into what will provide for us for decades to come.

Something really interesting happened when we shared about this cold storage on Facebook.

The fear in people was palpable.

The arguing and assumptions began.

Their fear asked:

What if someone steals it?

What if it floods?

What if mice get in?

What if snakes move in?

Overall, the fear was about protecting the very food we tucked inside.

And I sat there reading it all thinking…

Fascinating, isn’t it?

Because what I was reading wasn’t people asking,

How did you solve those problems?

They were asking,

What could go wrong?

Fear drives us more than solution finding over and over again.

I understand these fears however… I don’t participate in them.

If I show you my food storage, it’s with the intention that it supports others in expanding their own and… you can be certain that I have the ability to take care of myself, my family and my resources!

If I am taking the time to design something to store my food, I am also taking the time to ensure that…. that food will be stored in a way that does not make it vulnerable to rodents or weather.

There are simple solutions in life.

They are all around us, just waiting to be implemented.

But we’ve become so accustomed to things needing to be complex, expensive and impressive that we’ve forgotten how to notice the smaller, more manageable and affordable solutions that are right in front of us.

This isn’t complicated and yet this is where we stored the food for 60 families, year round, for 10 years.

Depending on where they lived, every Wednesday or Friday we delivered a week’s worth of food to each family.

Storage crops were grown to put away for the long cold winters when fresh produce wasn’t available.

This is where that food waited for them.

When I talk about solutions… this is the kind of solution I am talking about.

It was built into the side of a hill.

The foods that can withstand the coldest temps are stored closest to the door.

The more sensitive ones are deeper inside.

It’s not complicated but it did take intention.

Cedar logs, insulation, airflow, water drainage… then buried back into the land.

It’s not perfect.

And some would say… it’s not pretty.

But it is incredibly effective. Isn’t that what we are after?

My design started out like this.

And then we built it out from there.

I’ve taken those very rough sketches and turned them into the actual design we built from, and I’ve shared it for paid subscribers.

You’ll find the materials, construction details, ventilation placement, crop storage information and the things we considered when building it, so you can understand not only what we did but why we did it… the way we did.

The complete underground food storage design is below.

Read more

There’s something I’ve become very attentive to over the years.

The seemingly odd abundance of certain crops, weeds, wild plants and even discarded resources.

The things that suddenly seem to be everywhere.

I don’t believe it’s by chance.

I don’t believe it’s coincidence.

And I don’t believe it’s simply a random cycle.

What I’ve experienced, over and over again, is that when I slow down enough to pay attention, what is abundant often has something to teach me about what’s coming next.

How often have you found yourself thinking:

Shucks. I wish I had preserved more tomatoes.

I wish I had dried more herbs.

I wish I had saved more seeds.

If you’re leaning into a more self-reliant life, I suspect these thoughts are familiar.

We’re always looking backward at what we wish we’d prepared.

But there’s another question we can consider:

What’s abundant right now that I may need later?

That question changes everything.

This is where I share the practical things I’m learning about growing, preserving, building, living more simply and paying closer attention to what life is already offering us.

Look at what keeps showing up

Motherwort has been growing everywhere around me lately.

And that’s unusual.

I don’t normally see this much of her.

Motherwort (Leonurus cardiaca) has a long history in herbalism as a plant associated with the heart, nervous system and the changing seasons of womanhood.

And knowing that makes her abundant presence feel like a little nudge from the landscape:

Pay attention. You may need me in the seasons ahead.

So I’m harvesting her.

Some will be dried for the apothecary.

Some will become tincture.

And then, once I start noticing one thing, I find myself noticing everything else.

The horseradish is another example.

Those bright green leaves are staying vibrant longer than usual, catching my attention before the familiar rusty patches begin to appear.

And I realize:

You haven’t even dug any of me up for winter yet.

Horseradish is one of those plants that feels aligned with the colder months. Hot, pungent and traditionally valued in herbal preparations for seasonal respiratory and sinus support. This root is nature’s “cold and sinus” prescription.

So I dig some roots.

Some will go into fire cider.

Some will be infused in apple cider vinegar.

Some will make their way into winter salad dressings.

And some will simply be grated alongside a meal.

The plant is already there.

The work is noticing it.

And often it has nothing to do with food

A few things from around the property. None of them bought.

Old four-wheeler tires become trailer tires.
Old cedar rails become raised garden beds.
A ruble rock wall becomes a heat sink to start rhubarb off earlier.

Recycled cardboard from the reuse store for garden paths.
My neighbour’s yard waste that becomes our compost.
The bags it came in become weed barrier.

Cedar logs the previous owner left in the bush…
never hauled out, never used…
now form the border of the raised garden.
Slowly, they're turning into soil.
And in the meantime, they hold moisture like a sponge.

This way of looking at what is trying to support our lives extends far beyond the garden.

That pile of dead, decaying wood you’ve been meaning to get rid of?

Maybe it becomes the base of the garden you’ve been planning to start next year.

That stack of cardboard boxes left over after moving your college student into their new space?

Maybe it becomes ground cover between your garden rows and helps suppress those pesky weeds in spring.

Those five-gallon pails that the local restaurant puts out on garbage day?

Maybe they become the containers you use to collect sap when you tap some maple trees next spring.

The things we’re tempted to look past are resources waiting to support our lives.

We just have to stop long enough to see them and recognize what they can offer.

This is the practice

At this time of year, I’m out gathering the wild foraged gifts that the landscape is offering.

Wild tart crab apples become a year’s worth of natural pectin for my canning.

Highbush Cranberries and Rosehips become the most potent vitamin c syrup one could ever indulge in.

Lemons preserved in salt become little bursts of citrus that can be tucked into hummus, stirred into dressings or added to a chicken as it roasts all winter long.

None of these things seem particularly significant… when we look at them individually.

A few crab apples.

A handful of berries.

A jar of lemons.

A patch of motherwort.

A horseradish root.

A pile of cardboard.

A stack of buckets.

But the accumulation of these small acts of noticing changes the depth of relationship we have with life.

Instead of constantly looking outside ourselves for what we need, we begin looking around us.

What is already here?

What is abundant?

What is being offered?

What could this become?

And perhaps most importantly:

How is the world around me trying to support my life?

That, to me, is one of the deepest forms of self-reliance!

Not simply knowing how to grow food or preserve it.

Not simply knowing how to make something instead of buying it.

But deepening the relationship we have to life itself.

Because the resources we need next are often already sitting in our garden.

Growing along the fence.

Hiding beneath the leaves.

Stacked beside the recycling bin.

Or sitting quietly in a forgotten corner of our own lives.

We just have to slow down long enough to notice.

Presence in our own lives may be one of the greatest forms of relationship we have.

So as you move through this season, I’d encourage you to pay attention to what seems unusually abundant.

Not just in your garden.

Everywhere.

Ask yourself:

What keeps showing up?

What am I being given more of than usual?

What might I need this winter?

What could this become?

You might be surprised by how often the answer is already right in front of you.

And if something here shifted the way you’re looking at your own life this week… consider passing this on.

Restack this article with a note about what keeps showing up for you.

Someone in your feed may be standing in there middle of their own abundance and not noticing it yet.

And if making the highbush cranberry syrup or turning wild crab apples into a year’s worth of pectin is something you’d like to look at a little closer, I’d love to share more about the process.

Just let me know in the below which one you’d like to see.

-Angie

I write about building a slower, more self-reliant life… growing food, preserving what we grow, cooking outdoors, living closer to the land, and the deeper questions that come with choosing a different way to live. New pieces arrive Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday.

Subscribe now

And if you’re looking for something specific, wander through

the full library of Guides and Resources.

I want to share the actual framework with you.

Not as a prescription, but as a starting point for you to make your own.

Because the version that works for you will need to be built around how you actually function… your rhythms, your resistances, the particular ways y…

Read more

December 31st, 2021 came and went.

We were in Mexico.

The house wasn’t sold. The debt wasn’t fully gone. By the strictest reading of what we’d written down two years earlier, we hadn’t achieved it.

And yet.

We had moved out of the house and rented it, which meant the mortgage was no longer ours to carry month to month. We were sitting in warm winter light somewhere unhurried and slow, in a country that had begun to feel less like a destination and more like a direction. Pascal had mornings that belonged to him. I was writing, cooking, learning the names of plants I’d never grown before.

We were living the feeling.

Not the letter of the goal.

The spirit of it.

I’ve thought about this often in the years since… about what it means to achieve something, and whether the clean version of success is always the most honest one.

The goal we wrote down in those early days was specific and time-bound and measurable, all the things a good goal is supposed to be.

And it served us exactly as it was meant to.

It gave us direction when we needed direction. It gave us a horizon to move toward when staying still had become its own kind of weight.

But life, as it turns out, has its own timing.

October 2022.

The house sold.

I remember the particular feeling of that day — not dramatic, not flooded with the emotion I might have expected after years of working toward it.

More like the feeling of setting something down that you’d been carrying for so long you’d forgotten it had weight.

Truly debt free.

Completely.

10 months later than the date we’d written on paper.

And yet arriving exactly when it was meant to.

By then we had already found the land in Mexico. Already begun learning what it meant to tend something, to build something, to stay somewhere long enough to understand its rhythms.

The house selling wasn’t the beginning of the life we’d imagined.

It was the quiet closing of a chapter that had already ended, the final release of something we’d already let go of in every way that mattered.

There’s something about the in-between.

The years between writing the goal and the house selling weren’t a waiting period.

They weren’t a delay or a detour or evidence that the process hadn’t worked.

They were the becoming.

Every decision made in alignment with those four words… disciplined, vibrant, healthy, energized.

Every morning practice.

Every drawer cleared.

Every meal cooked from scratch.

Every conversation with Pascal about what we actually wanted rather than what we’d simply gotten used to.

Every small action chosen… because it moved us toward the feeling rather than away from it.

That was the work.

And it was also the life.

This is what I couldn’t have understood when we first wrote the goal down, and what I now believe more fully than almost anything else:

The point was never only the destination. The point was who we were becoming on the way there.

The woman who taped four words to a refrigerator in a house she was preparing to leave… she needed the goal to be specific and time-bound and slightly terrifying.

She needed the structure of it.

The clarity of it.

The way it made everything simpler by giving her a direction to move in.

But what she was really doing, in all those quiet daily decisions, was practicing.

Rehearsing.

Becoming, in small and unhurried ways, the person who would one day stand on a piece of land in rural Mexico and feel — not arrival exactly, but recognition.

Oh.

This is what we were moving toward.

Soil to Sanctuary didn’t begin when we found the land.

It began in a living room, with two people and a piece of paper and a dream they’d been carrying long enough that it had started to feel like part of the furniture.

It began with a decision, quiet and undramatic, to stop waiting.

If you’ve been reading this series from the beginning, you know the steps we followed.

• The desire named.

• The goal written.

• The list made.

• The five actions chosen.

• The year mapped out one quarter at a time.

But what I hope you’re also taking away is something harder to put into a framework.

That the life you want isn’t only waiting at the end of the process.

It’s available in the middle of it too.

In the way you choose to spend a Tuesday.

In the four words you tape to your refrigerator.

In the small and honest decision to become, right now, today, the person you’re hoping to be.

That’s where it begins.

That’s where it always begins.

And now I’m curious about you.

After walking through this story with me, where are you in your own process?

Are you still trying to name what you want?

Do you know the life you want but haven’t yet found the path toward it?

Are you already moving, but need to get clearer about what deserves your energy?

Or have you arrived somewhere you once dreamed about and are discovering, as I have, that there is still a life to keep tending?

And perhaps the simplest question of all:

If you could write one thing on a piece of paper today that would change the direction of your life, what would it be?

You don’t have to know how to make it happen yet.

Just write it down.

I’d genuinely love to hear where you are.

The story ends here. The work doesn’t.

This concludes The Year We Stopped Waiting.

Thank you for reading it with me.

For six chapters, I’ve shared the actual process that took us from a vague longing for something different to a life we could finally recognize as our own.

Not because we followed the plan perfectly.

We didn’t.

Not because the goal happened exactly when we said it would.

It didn’t.

But because the process gave us somewhere to begin.

And perhaps that’s what a good plan is really for.

Not to predict the future.

To give you a place to put your intention.

If something in this series has stirred something in you… if you have a dream that has been waiting longer than it should, or a feeling that there is another way to live that you haven’t yet given yourself permission to name — you don’t need to have the whole path figured out.

You can begin with a piece of paper.

And if you’d like somewhere to take that first step, the Living Planner is the system I created to hold this process.

Your Living Planner

If this series has made you want to stop waiting and start putting your own life on paper, I made something for you.

The Living Planner is the actual planning system I created during the year we stopped waiting. It brings together everything we’ve walked through in this series… your desire, your goal, your four words, your five actions, your year, your months, and your days.

If you’re a paid subscriber, the complete printable version is already yours, it’s in your subscriber resources.

If you’re not subscribed, there are a few ways to bring it home:

The downloadable, printable version

Download - the Living Planner

Or subscribe, and the printable is included with your subscription

Subscribe now

Downloadable/Printable Version

If you’d prefer something physical… something you can write in, return to, and leave open on your kitchen table… the 288-page Living Planner is also available as a book on Amazon — just choose your country.

In Print - the Living Planner

You don’t need a planner to begin.
You need a piece of paper.
A willingness to be honest.
And the decision to stop waiting.

The planner simply gives that decision somewhere to live.

One last thing.

I began this series by telling you about a dream we hadn’t yet figured out how to say out loud.

Six chapters later, I think the most important part of the story isn’t that we eventually got to Mexico.

It’s that we stopped waiting for our lives to begin.

And I wonder what might begin in yours if you stopped waiting too.

If you could write one thing on a piece of paper today that would change the direction of your life…

what would it be?

You don’t have to know how to make it happen yet.

Just write it down.

—Angie

I write about building a slower, more self-reliant life… growing food, preserving what we grow, cooking outdoors, living closer to the land, and the deeper questions that come with choosing a different way to live. New pieces arrive Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday.

Subscribe now

The full series

• Part 1 Changing Your Life at Midlife: Where to Begin

• Part 2 From Dream to Life Goal

• Part 3 Finding Clarity, Creating a New Life

• Part 4 Five Actions Toward Your Dream Life

• Part 5 A Year on Paper: How We Mapped a Life

• Part 6 We Didn’t Hit the Goal Exactly. We Got Something Better.

Fall gardening is just around the corner.

And while we now grow in Mexico, where our challenges are the exact opposite with heat rather than cold, today I’m taking you back to Canada’s fall and winter gardening opportunities from our farm there.

Because this is the time of year when gardeners often start thinking about an ending.

The nights get colder.

The first frost appears in the forecast.

We start looking at the garden differently.

The tomatoes that seemed endless a few weeks ago are slowing down. The beans are producing less. The greens are suddenly looking much more valuable.

And eventually we start asking:

How much longer can I keep harvesting?

That question led us to one of the most useful ways we ever extended our growing season.

Not by heating the entire greenhouse.

By creating a greenhouse inside the greenhouse.

Don’t let the first frost decide when you’re finished

The first frost date is useful information.

But it doesn’t mean the garden is finished.

Different crops respond differently to cold. Some are damaged by the first frost. Some tolerate it easily. Some simply slow down. Others can remain alive and harvestable for quite a while if they’re protected from the extremes.

That means fall doesn’t have to be one dramatic transition from growing to finished.

There can be a long middle ground.

And that is where season extension becomes useful.

You don’t necessarily need to keep everything growing.

You need to protect the things that are still worth keeping.

A bed of greens.

Late peas.

Cold-tolerant vegetables.

A crop that was planted a little later than planned.

Something that is still producing and simply needs more time.

The question becomes less about how do I keep the whole garden protected?

And more about:

What can I protect?

The greenhouse is only the first layer

Years ago, we had a hoop house.

It already gave us protection from the wind, frost and cold temperatures outside.

At two different times, we tried using wood heat inside it.

It worked.

But it was exhausting.

Someone had to feed the fire through the night, and it began to feel like an enormous amount of effort and resources to heat all that air.

Then I started thinking about where the plants actually were.

Close to the ground.

And heat rises.

So instead of asking how we could heat the entire hoop house, I started asking:

What if we created a smaller protected space around the plants?

That was when we began putting low tunnels and cold frames inside the hoop house.

And suddenly we had something very different.

A greenhouse inside a greenhouse.

The hoop house became our first layer of protection.

The low tunnel became the second.

And if we needed it, we could add another layer over the plants themselves.

We weren’t making winter warmer.

We were making the space immediately around the plants more protected.

You don’t have to protect everything

This is one of the biggest advantages of thinking this way.

A greenhouse doesn’t have to be one uniform environment.

And your garden certainly doesn’t.

As fall moves in, some plants can remain completely exposed.

Others might need a little protection.

Some need considerably more.

So instead of trying to maintain the same temperature everywhere, we created small microclimates within the larger protected space.

A cold frame over one crop.

A low tunnel over another.

Row cover directly over the plants inside the low tunnel.

And on a particularly cold night, even an old bed quilt over the top of the low tunnel.

It sounds ridiculously simple.

That’s why it worked so well.

We weren’t trying to engineer a perfect climate.

We were simply giving the plants the amount of protection they needed.

And the soil is storing warmth for you

The other piece that made this system work was underneath our feet.

The soil.

We used black bio film, a biodegradable mulch film, both early and late in the season.

In spring, it helped warm the soil.

In fall, that same principle worked in our favour in reverse.

The sun would warm the greenhouse during the day.

The film absorbed that energy and helped warm the soil.

Then, as the air temperature dropped at night, the soil slowly released some of that stored warmth.

Put a low tunnel over that warm soil and you’ve created another protected pocket.

This is why I don’t think of season extension as one particular tool.

It’s a system.

The greenhouse gives you one advantage.

The low tunnel gives you another.

The soil gives you another.

A layer of row cover gives you another.

And none of them has to do all the work.

The best season-extension tools may already be sitting around

Our favourite cold frames weren’t purchased as cold frames.

They were two old casement windows.

We found them secondhand. I don’t remember whether it was Facebook Marketplace or Kijiji. I only remember that they cost us nothing.

They already had a six-inch frame built onto them.

We could simply place them over plants and create another protected growing space.

And because they weren’t permanently attached to anything, they could move.

When we didn’t need them inside the greenhouse, we used them in the garden to pre-warm the soil before early spring planting.

The low tunnels worked the same way.

Inside the greenhouse in fall.

Outside in the garden when they were needed there.

Then somewhere else.

They were temporary architecture.

They didn’t need to be beautiful.

They didn’t need to be expensive.

They just needed to solve the problem in front of us.

And that became one of the principles I carried into all of our gardening:

Don’t ask what something was made for. Ask what else it can do.

Give the garden more time, not necessarily more heat

I wish more people understood this part about fall gardening.

A season extension doesn’t necessarily mean making plants grow through winter.

Sometimes it means keeping them alive and harvestable.

A cold-hardy green might continue growing slowly.

Another crop might stop growing altogether but remain perfectly good to harvest.

A tender crop might give you another week or two simply because you’ve protected it from an early frost.

That is still a season extension.

And when you’re growing a meaningful portion of your own food, another week of harvesting matters.

Another month… matters enormously.

You don’t need every plant to produce more.

You simply need to lose less of what is already there.

Now look at your greenhouse differently

If you have a greenhouse or hoop house going into fall, I would encourage you to walk inside it and look at it differently.

Before your first frost, look for:

• One crop you’d like to keep harvesting longer.

• One warm spot inside your greenhouse or garden.

• One layer of protection you already own.

• One additional layer you could add if temperatures drop.

• One portable structure you could move as the season changes.

Consider how many microclimates you can create.

Where is the warmest soil?

Where does the afternoon sun linger?

Which crops are already happy with the temperatures inside?

Which ones need another layer?

Could you put a low tunnel over one bed?

Could row cover go underneath it?

Could an old window become a cold frame?

Could you use thermal mass or dark mulch to help hold daytime warmth?

And perhaps most importantly...

Do you really need to protect everything?

Probably not.

Protect what is worth protecting.

Let the hardier crops experience the season.

Give the vulnerable ones another layer.

Move your portable protection as the garden changes.

That is how we made a greenhouse work harder without making it bigger.

And then, when spring comes...

This is the part that makes the whole idea even more useful.

The exact same system works in reverse.

The greenhouse becomes your first layer of protection again.

The low tunnel creates another.

The cold frame creates another.

The soil warms under the sun.

And suddenly you’re not waiting for the calendar to give you permission to begin.

You’re watching the conditions and deciding what they will allow.

That’s how we used the same simple structures at both ends of the year.

In fall, they helped us hold onto the garden.

In spring, they helped us get into it earlier.

But if I’m honest, it’s the fall application that changed the way I looked at the garden.

I stopped seeing the first frost as a finish line.

It became a signal.

Some things were finished.

Some things needed protection.

Some things could stay exactly where they were.

And some things had more time than I thought.

That’s what I would encourage you to look for as you head into fall.

Not a way to defeat winter.

Not another expensive structure.

Just the places where you can create a little more shelter around the food you already have growing.

Because sometimes extending the season doesn’t mean growing more.

It simply means giving what you’ve already grown more time to feed you.

And that, to me, is a much more interesting way to garden.

What are you doing this fall to keep your garden producing a little longer… and is there something you've tried that surprised you with how well it worked?

-Angie

I made you a one-page version of that pre-frost checklist — walk your greenhouse with it.

Fall Season Extension Check

26.1KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Over the years, we’ve built our own planning systems around many of these same questions — how much to grow, what stores well, what actually feeds a household, and how to make better use of limited space and short growing seasons.

If your goal is food security, the first step isn’t necessarily spending more money — it’s knowing what food you actually want to grow and how much of it you need. That’s exactly why I created the Garden Planning System: to help us plan planting dates, expected harvests, seed viability, and the amount of food we’re actually growing.

It includes interactive garden planning sheets, yield calculators, planting schedules, and seed viability references.

Garden Planning System

And if you've been thinking about adding a hoop house to your garden, I've already shared how we built ours, from the design through to the materials. You can explore that build here and then start thinking about what you could create inside it.

I write about building a slower, more self-reliant life… growing food, preserving what we grow, cooking outdoors, living closer to the land, and the deeper questions that come with choosing a different way to live. New pieces arrive Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday.

Subscribe now

We are on the land now.

The goal has been lived, in the way that real life fulfills the things we imagine. The debt is gone. The winters are here, slow and warm and full of growing things. The life we wrote on paper has become the life we actually live.

And I still ask myself these questions.

Not because I’m working toward another goal, though there is always something being built, something being tended. But because I’ve learned that the practice doesn’t end when the destination is reached. It simply takes a different form.

These are the questions I return to when I feel like I’ve lost the thread — when the days start to feel reactive rather than intentional, when I notice I’m drifting from the things that make me feel most like myself.

I’m sharing them with you not as a framework but as companions.

Read more

I am, by nature, someone who resists being pinned down.

Give me too rigid a structure and something in me quietly begins to push against it. Schedule every hour and I’ll find myself staring out the window during the ones I was supposed to be productive. Make the plan too fixed and I’ll unconsciously find reasons to abandon it — not out of laziness, but out of a deep need for the kind of breathing room that makes sustained effort feel possible rather than punishing.

I knew this about myself. It shaped everything about how we approached the year ahead.

We started with the largest view first.

The whole year, laid out in quarters. Four broad chapters, each one containing the major milestones that needed to happen in sequence for the goal to be real by December 31st.

We worked backwards.

The final quarter held the goal itself — debt free, winters elsewhere, the life we’d written down. Then we asked what needed to be true for that to be possible. What had to happen in the quarter before it. And the quarter before that.

It sounds almost too simple. But there’s something clarifying about seeing a year as four distinct seasons of effort rather than one long, undifferentiated stretch of time. It made the whole thing feel less like an act of faith and more like a sequence. One thing, then the next thing, then the thing after that.

Our first quarter had two tasks.

Begin the severance process for our property. And contact our mortgage company to understand what paying it off early would actually require.

Not dramatic. Not sweeping. Just the next right thing, broken into its actual component parts — measuring the land, creating the required sketch, contacting the township office, requesting the fee schedule, submitting the formal application.

Each step small enough to do. All of them together, enough to move us forward.

From the quarterly view we moved to the year at a glance — a simple calendar, the kind you can hold in one page, with only the fixed dates that mattered. Not aspirational dates. Real ones. The things that didn’t change year to year, the anchors that everything else would need to arrange itself around.

And then the month. More detailed now, each quarterly task broken into its individual actions and placed where they actually needed to happen.

This is where most planning stops.

It’s also where most plans quietly fall apart.

Because a monthly calendar tells you what needs to happen. It doesn’t tell you how to actually live the days that get you there.

What I built for myself… and what became, over that year, something I returned to every single morning… was something more personal than a planner.

What began as a system I created for myself eventually became the Living Planner.

I made it physical because I wanted something I could actually live with… something that could sit open beside me each morning rather than disappear into a digital file.

It grew into a 288-page planner built around the same structure that carried us through that year.

Each day had three parts.

The first was the one thing. The single task that would move us most meaningfully forward, already scheduled, already known. I didn’t have to decide it in the morning. It was simply there, waiting.

The second was three smaller actions chosen not for their productivity but for the way they would make me feel. Actions aligned with my four words. Things that would leave me more disciplined, more vibrant, more healthy, more energized than I’d been when I woke up.

The third was the small, almost invisible things. The decluttered drawer. The glass of water before coffee. The walk in the late afternoon when the light was going gold. The things that don’t appear on any goal-setting framework but that quietly determine whether a life feels livable or just functional.

I also kept space for gratitude… not as a ritual to perform but as a genuine practice of noticing. Three things, written simply, without ceremony. After years of studying what actually sustains people through change, I kept returning to this: it is very hard to feel depleted and grateful at the same time. The gratitude wasn’t naive. It was practical.

And connection… real connection, not the scrolling approximation of it. Each day, some intentional reaching toward people I actually loved. One of my deepest values has always been true relationship, and I knew that if I let the busyness of transformation crowd it out, I would lose something essential to why I wanted the life I was building in the first place.

I’ll be completely honest.

I didn’t follow this perfectly. There were weeks that went sideways. Months where the plan on paper looked little like how the days actually unfolded. Times when I came back to my morning pages and found, looking at what I’d tracked, that I hadn’t been doing what I knew made me feel the way I wanted to feel.

But that’s precisely why I kept coming back to it.

Not to perform consistency. But to stay honest with myself about where the energy was actually going. To notice the patterns. To make small adjustments without drama or self-criticism.

The system wasn’t a cage. It was a compass… something to orient us when the path got unclear, something to return to when I’d wandered, something that kept pointing, quietly and without judgment, toward the life we were trying to build.

One day, one quarter, one year at a time.

Next : We didn’t hit the goal exactly. We got something better.

-Angie

The Living Planner is the system behind this whole series — the one we built the year we stopped waiting and started building the life we’d been dreaming of. If these pieces are giving you the thinking, the planner is where it becomes a practice you can actually keep.

Paid subscribers… The downloadable, printable version is yours, it's in your subscriber resources.

Downloadable/Printable Version

Download - the Living Planner

Prefer a print copy, or want to read reviews first? It’s also on Amazon.

In Print - the Living Planner

I write about building a slower, more self-reliant life… growing food, preserving what we grow, cooking outdoors, living closer to the land, and the deeper questions that come with choosing a different way to live. New pieces arrive Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday.

Subscribe now

If you have happened upon part 5 and haven’t come across parts 1 - 4 here’s the full series

• Part 1Changing Your Life at Midlife: Where to Begin

• Part 2From Dream to Life Goal

• Part 3Finding Clarity, Creating a New Life

• Part 4Five Actions Toward Your Dream Life

• Part 5A Year on Paper: How We Mapped a Life

• Part 6We Didn’t Hit the Goal Exactly. We Got Something Better.

There’s a passion within me for plants that, to some people… makes no sense.

I’ve been known to refer to a plant as she, and there are people who wonder why.

Why do you call a plant “she”?
It’s just a plant.

Those words have always felt strange to me.

Because when you’ve spent enough time with plants, you begin to understand that they’re so much more than something growing in the ground.

They’re living examples of adaptability.

Of resilience.

Of possibility.

They’ve been here long before us, and they’ll remain long after us. They’ve survived droughts, floods, fire, grazing, neglect and seasons we thought might destroy them.

And somehow, they continue to grow.

There’s something humbling about that.

And something we’ve forgotten.

We’ve become so accustomed to looking at the plants around us as scenery, weeds, landscaping, food or crops… that we’ve forgotten the very relationship that humans have carried for thousands of years.

Plants as medicine.

Not medicine in opposition to everything modern. Not medicine as something that requires us to reject what we’ve learned through the years.

But medicine as another expression of our relationship with the natural world.

Long before laboratories, pharmacies and bottles with printed labels, people were paying attention to the plants growing around them.

They watched.

They experimented.

They remembered.

They passed knowledge from one generation to another.

Many of the compounds we now use in modern medicine originated with the plants.

That doesn’t make one better than the other.

It simply reminds me that there’s an extraordinary intelligence in the natural world that deserves our attention.

I’d like to invite you into a corner of my world, into something that I’ve never shared here before.

I’ve been walking this path with plants for a very long time.

Since 2001, I’ve been studying herbal medicine.

I’ve spent years learning about plants, making tinctures, infused oils, medicinal teas, oxymels, salves, balms and elixirs. I’ve learned through books and teachers, through workshops and countless hours of observation, but also through the very hands-on process of making medicine myself.

In 2018, what had previously been part of Heritage Harvest Farm became its own expression of something I’d been living for years...

Living Wyld.

Living Wyld was never “a brand”.

It was our way of life.

It was about learning to live closer to the land. Growing and wildcrafting what we could. Making what we needed with our own hands. Understanding the plants around us and learning how to work with them rather than simply seeing them as something growing in the background.

The products became one expression of that way of life.

I formulated every one of them.

I grew some of the plants.

I wildcrafted others.

I made the medicines.

And I taught others how to make them.

Living Wyld grew into an extensive herbal apothecary... tinctures, oxymels, elixirs, balms, salves, medicinal teas and nervine sprays.

It grew into an entire line of natural personal care products... deodorants, hair washes, hairsprays, hair oils, face serums, toners, body oils, magnesium sprays and perfumes.

It grew into herbal home cleaning products.

It became a much bigger part of my life than I ever expected.

And it still is.

I still make these things today.

In fact, one of my visions for the mountain we’re creating our sanctuary on is to grow as much of what we need as possible.

Not simply so that I can make medicine for myself.

But so that one day, people who come to stay with us can walk into the garden, harvest a plant with their own hands, sit beside me at the work table and learn how to turn that plant into something they can take home and use.

That feels like the kind of knowledge worth passing on.

This coming weekend, I’ll be teaching another herbal workshop. It’s focused on crafting herbal teas, learning the properties of individual flowers and how they can support wellbeing through flower essences, and making herbal vinegars from wild-foraged flavours.

After all these years, I still find myself completely fascinated by the plants.

Because the more I learn… the more I realize how much there is still to learn.

The plants already growing around us

I’ll be sharing some of my knowledge here.

Not because I want to convince you that every plant is a miracle.

And certainly not because I think you should take my word for the safety or effectiveness of any herb.

Quite the opposite.

I want to encourage you to become curious.

To learn the plants around you.

To understand their traditional uses, their constituents, their preparations and their cautions.

To learn which ones are appropriate for you... and which ones aren’t.

And perhaps most importantly… to begin seeing them differently.

Because some of the plants we spend our lives trying to remove from our gardens are very interesting allies.

Goldenrod is one of them.

Goldenrod... nature’s medicine growing in plain sight

Every year, as summer begins to turn toward fall, goldenrod appears in a blaze of yellow.

I harvest it each year when we return home to Canada.

Every time I see it, I wonder how many people walk past this plant without ever knowing what’s growing beside them.

There’s something about the timing of goldenrod that I find particularly beautiful.

The seasons have a way of offering us what we need… when we need it.

And late summer and early fall bring us this bright, warming, aromatic plant just as we begin moving toward a cooler, wetter season.

Even its Latin name gives us a clue.

Solidago comes from the Latin solida, meaning whole or solid, and ago, meaning to make.

To make whole.

Whether or not we give too much weight to the symbolism of a botanical name, I’ve always loved this one.

You’ll appreciate why it’s been given such a powerful name after learning some of it’s properties.

Traditionally, the aerial parts of goldenrod have been used both internally and externally, particularly for their warming, drying and astringent qualities.

Goldenrod has a long history of use in herbal preparations, particularly for supporting the respiratory, and urinary systems. Its warming, drying and astringent qualities make it especially interesting when there’s excess moisture or congestion in the body.

It’s also an aromatic carminative, traditionally used to settle the digestive system and relieve gas and that feeling of digestion that seems to have become... stuck.

There’s so much more to this yellow beauty than most of us realize.

And then there’s the way I use it seasonally.

I love combining goldenrod with other plants and ingredients that complement its traditional properties to support seasonal allergies.

One of my favourite simple preparations is a goldenrod infused honey.

The video below is making that honey for the winter months from a few years back.

This is the part of herbal medicine I want to share with you.

Not just a list of herbs and what they’re “good for.”

But the relationship.

The noticing.

The harvesting.

The making.

The understanding of what grows around us and why our ancestors paid such close attention to it.

Because when you begin to learn the plants, something changes.

The landscape becomes different.

The yellow flowers dancing in the fields are no longer simply yellow flowers.

The plant growing that you once thought of as a weed becomes a plant you see as medicine.

You begin noticing when she appears.

Where she grows.

What grows beside her.

When she flowers.

When she disappears.

And slowly, almost without realizing it, you begin to feel that you belong to the landscape in a different way.

That’s what I hope to share here.

Not a replacement for medical care.

Not a promise that plants can fix everything.

And never a suggestion that you should use an herb simply because someone on the internet told you it was beneficial.

Plants are powerful.

That’s precisely why we need to know them well.

We need to understand proper identification, preparation, dosage, interactions and contraindications. We need to know when a plant is appropriate and when it isn’t.

And we need to remain humble.

Because the deeper I go into herbal medicine, the more respect I have for what I don’t know.

There are thousands of years of relationship between humans and plants behind us.

I’ve only been walking this particular path for twenty-five of them.

And I’m still learning.

Still harvesting.

Still making.

Still sitting at the table with plants in my hands and amazed at the fact that this knowledge has been here all along.

Maybe that’s what I want most for you.

Not to become an herbalist.

Not even necessarily to make your own medicine.

But simply to look at them a little differently the next time you walk past.

Because medicine may not always arrive in a bottle.

Sometimes...

it’s growing quietly beside you.

I’d love to know...

What would you like to learn about herbal medicine?

Would you like to learn more about individual plants and what they have to offer, how to make your own herbal preparations, or how to begin recognizing and using the plants growing around you?

Please let me know in the comments. I’ll be listening... and it will help me decide where we go next.

-Angie

I write about building a slower, more self-reliant life… growing food, preserving what we grow, cooking outdoors, living closer to the land, and the deeper questions that come with choosing a different way to live. New pieces arrive Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday.

Subscribe now

And if you’re looking for something specific, wander through

the full library of Guides and Resources.

A note about herbal medicine

The information I share about plants comes from years of study, traditional herbal knowledge and my own experience making and using herbal preparations. It’s intended for education and to encourage further learning, not to diagnose, treat or prevent disease.

Plants can have powerful effects and can interact with medications or be inappropriate for certain people, ages, pregnancies, allergies and medical conditions.

Please research each plant carefully and speak with an appropriately qualified healthcare professional when necessary before using herbal preparations.

It Was Never Really About Building the Villa

A few years ago, we left our old life behind and came to the mountains of Oaxaca with a fairly simple idea.

We wanted to live differently.

More slowly. More intentionally. More closely connected to the land beneath our feet.

When we arrived, there wasn’t much here to suggest the life we imagined.

There was raw land, steep slopes, dry soil, trees and brush, and a whole lot to figure out.

Over the years, we’ve cleared areas for fire safety, worked to slow soil erosion, planted trees and gardens, learned how to work with this particular piece of land and built… often with our own hands, the things we needed along the way.

Little by little, the landscape began to change and soften.

And so did we.

Somewhere in all that work, the idea of a sanctuary began to take shape.

At first, I think we imagined it mostly as something we were creating for ourselves. It was a feeling vs a vision we were after. A place to live, to work, to grow food, to gather, and eventually to share with others.

But there was another hope underneath it all.

We wanted our children to have a place here too.

A home away from home.

A place they could return to again and again… even though this was not the place where they grew up.

For years, that was just an idea.

This week, it became real.

There’s always a moment when building becomes living

The villa isn’t finished.

Not even close, actually.

There are still things we want to change and things we haven’t gotten around to doing. The bathroom isn’t complete. Eventually, we’ll extend the palm roof over the front so there is more protection from the heavy rains. There are details to finish, decisions still to make, and plenty of work waiting for us.

But somewhere along the way, I realized that “finished” wasn’t actually the point.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the years feeling like we were working toward something.

Toward the next stage.

The next garden.

The next building.

The next improvement.

The next thing that would make the land feel a little more settled and the life we imagined a little more complete.

And there is a strange trap that exists within that.

When you’re always working toward the finished thing, you often miss the moment when the thing you’ve been building is already enough to experience.

We’ve been learning that slowly here.

This life isn’t about reaching a finish line.

It’s about becoming devoted to the process.

The villa reminded me of that once again.

Even something as ordinary as choosing windows became part of the conversation we keep having with this place.

Here, windows and doors aren’t something you simply pick up off a shelf. They’re made to order, and traditionally they’re made without screens.

That works beautifully for a certain way of building, but it wasn’t quite right for us.

I wanted the villa to feel open.

I wanted the air to move through it.

I wanted to see the trees and the mountains and feel connected to what was happening outside, without constantly fighting the insects that come with living in a tropical landscape.

So we found our own way of doing it.

Simple screened windows.

Nothing elaborate.

Just enough to allow the building to breathe while still making it comfortable to live in.

And the more I thought about the villa, the more I kept coming back to the same two words.

Open and Spacious. Two words that are as much a feeling as they are an aesthetic.

Open air.

Open views.

Open energy.

I didn’t want to fill it with things simply because there was space to fill.

I wanted the landscape to be part of our home.

The trees.

The light.

The sounds.

The breeze.

The changing colours of the mountains.

The view when you wake up in the morning.

Sometimes building a home is as much about what you leave out as what you put in it.

Then she arrived

For so long, we imagined what it would feel like to have our children here.

Not just visiting us.

Not staying for an afternoon.

Actually being here.

Waking up here.

Having coffee with us in the morning.

Going to the beach.

Eating something we had grown.

Sitting around together at the end of the day.

And when our daughter finally arrived, something shifted for me.

The villa stopped being a building we were working on.

It became a home.

Not because we had finished it.

Because someone we love was living in it.

That distinction has stayed with me.

We didn’t suddenly have everything we had imagined.

The villa wasn’t complete.

The landscaping wasn’t complete.

There were still things on our list.

But none of that seemed particularly important when we were sitting together drinking coffee in the morning.

Or harvesting mangoes and limes.

Or heading to the ocean.

Or watching her surf.

Or sitting together as the sun disappeared at the end of the day.

Those were the moments.

Not the finished walls.

Not the windows.

Not the roof.

Not the list of things still waiting to be done.

The moments.

Maybe that’s what all this building has really been for

There have been days here when the work has felt enormous.

Days when the land seemed to push back.

Days when something we had carefully built needed to be rebuilt.

Days when progress was so slow that it was hard to see whether we were actually getting anywhere at all.

When you’re in the middle of it, it’s easy to measure progress by what you can point to.

Another wall.

Another garden bed.

Another tree planted.

Another building standing.

Another thing checked off the list.

But I think I’m beginning to understand that the most meaningful progress isn’t always visible.

Sometimes it’s a morning coffee with your daughter.

Sometimes it’s watching someone you love wake up in a place that exists because of years of work you once wondered whether you had the energy to keep doing.

Sometimes it’s sitting together at the ocean and realizing that the life you once imagined in the abstract is happening around you.

Not perfectly.

Not completely.

But here.

I think we sometimes imagine that the reward for building a slower life will be reaching a point where everything is finally finished and we can relax.

I’m not sure that’s how it works.

There’ll always be another garden to plant.

Another wall to repair.

Another season to prepare for.

Another idea that seems worth bringing to life.

The work doesn’t disappear.

What changes is our relationship to it.

We stop seeing the work as something standing between us and the life we want.

The work becomes part of the life.

And maybe that’s what we’ve been learning all along.

We didn’t come here to build a perfect home.

We came here to build a life that felt like ours.

A life with dirt under our fingernails and mangoes ripening in the trees.

A life where the seasons dictate our rhythm.

A life where we make things instead of always buying them.

A life where the land isn’t simply the backdrop to our home, but part of the home itself.

And now, slowly, it’s becoming a place our children can be part of too.

That feels bigger to me than finishing a villa ever could.

Because one day, long after we have forgotten which windows were installed first or which walls took the longest to build, I hope what remains are the memories.

Coffee in the morning.

Salt on our skin after the ocean.

Laughter around the table.

Mangoes picked from the tree.

A daughter surfing while we watched from the shore.

The sun going down over a place that, years ago, was nothing more than raw land.

Maybe this is what we were building toward all along.

Not a finished home.

A place where life could happen.

Maybe this is what we were building toward all along.

Not a finished home.

A place where life could happen.

What are you slowly building in your own life that you're not quite ready to call “finished”?

-Angie

I write about building a slower, more self-reliant life… growing food, preserving what we grow, cooking outdoors, living closer to the land, and the deeper questions that come with choosing a different way to live. New pieces arrive Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday.

Subscribe now

And if you’re looking for something specific, wander through

the full library of Guides and Resources.

August is a funny month in the garden.

There is still so much growing that it can be easy to think we’re simply carrying on with summer.

But if you pay attention, you can feel the shift.

The onion tops start falling over. The potato leaves begin to yellow. The mornings feel a little different. Some plants are still giving generously, while others have quie…

Read more

August is the month the garden starts handing everything back.

The beds are heavy now. Onion tops are folding over. Potato leaves begin yellowing, and somewhere in the freshness of an early morning, there’s a hint that the season is beginning to turn the corner.

The tasks change just as the season does.

Less coaxing things to grow.

This is the month the phrase backyard grocery store stops being an idea and becomes something you can see… jars filling, onions hanging to cure, and a cool corner slowly becoming this winter’s pantry.

August is less about growing more, and more about keeping what you’ve grown.

If you only do a few things consistently this month… harvest and cure your storage crops, plant what will carry you into winter, and clear out what’s finished… you will be doing enough.

This is part of a year-long series following the rhythms of the garden through all twelve months.

Each month, I share what is happening in the garden, what to plant, what to harvest, what to preserve, and the small lessons the season teaches along the way.

If you’d like these monthly garden notes, seasonal checklists, and printable garden guides delivered quietly to your inbox, you can subscribe below.

Subscribe now

What’s August Really About?

August is the hinge of the season… abundance at its peak, and the first step toward storage and fall.

The garden is still producing heavily, but the work is beginning to shift. Now it’s about curing onions, garlic, and potatoes so they’ll last through winter, planting crops that will carry you into fall, and clearing spent plants before they become a home for pests and disease.

Much of what fills your pantry through winter is decided quietly in August. Not by growing more, but by storing well what the season has already given.

Garlic is always the first crop to disappear into our underground storage. It rests there quietly until the onions, beets, rutabaga, cabbage, squash, and potatoes slowly join it over the weeks ahead.

August Garden Checklist

If You Only Do One Thing This Month

Cure and store your keeping crops.

Onions, garlic, and potatoes are the backbone of a winter pantry, but only if they’re cured properly first.

Harvest onions and garlic as the tops dry and fall over. Cut onion tops back to about an inch, allow the cut tops to dry thoroughly, and cure them out of the sun in a cool, dry place for two to three weeks before storing.

Lift potatoes once their leaves have died back. Gently brush away loose soil and cure them before storing over winter. Don’t wash them. Moisture dramatically shortens their storage life.

Then keep all three in a cool, dry place (32-40°F / 0-4°C), always away from apples, which release ethylene gas and dramatically shorten their storage life.

This is the quiet difference between a harvest you eat in August and one that feeds you in February.

Watering + Soil Care

• Continue checking containers, hanging baskets, and raised beds every day during hot weather.

• Water deeply and evenly through the last of the summer heat.

• Hoe weeds while they’re still tiny. A few minutes now saves hours of pulling next year once they’ve gone to seed.

• Consider sowing cover crops in empty beds if you aren’t succession planting. They’ll feed the soil while protecting it through the coming seasons.

Pest + Disease Awareness

Keep monitoring for disease and insects of all kinds…the pressure doesn’t ease until the weather turns.

Clear out any plants that have finished producing so they don’t become a home for next years challenges. Healthy spent plants can go in the compost. Anything showing signs of disease is best removed from the garden and burned rather than added to the compost.

Late Summer Crop Care

Summer Squash

• To extend the crop, harvest daily.

• Remove dead or diseased leaves to improve airflow and keep plants producing. Don’t be shy with your pruning!

Plant Now for Fall + Winter

August often feels like harvest season, but it’s also one of the most important planting months of the year.

• Succession sow peas until late August for a fall crop.

• Plant leaf lettuce, mustard greens, Swiss chard, and spinach for fall harvests or overwintering.

• Salad turnips, peas, and other quick-maturing crops do well now.

• Sow cover crops anywhere the garden has empty areas that you dont intend to replant.

Harvest + Preservation

August is the fullest month of the storage year.

• Cure onions, garlic, and potatoes for long keeping.

• Store them cool and dry, away from apples.

• Dry or freeze herbs in small batches.

• Begin preserving tomatoes, beans, cucumbers, and berries while harvests are at their peak.

• If you’d like to save seed, now is the time to begin marking the plants you’ll save from.

What Not To Do In August

• Don’t prune fruit trees now. It encourages tender new growth that won’t harden off before frost.

• Don’t store potatoes, garlic, or onions near apples.

• Don’t leave finished or diseased plants sitting in the beds.

• Don’t let summer squash go unpicked. Daily harvest keeps it producing.

And, as always… don’t measure your garden against someone else’s online. A garden that feeds you does not need to look perfect.

Common Mistakes This Time Of Year

Storing crops before they’re cured
Uncured onions, garlic, and potatoes are far more likely to rot instead of keeping.

Waiting too long to plant fall crops
The vegetables that feed you through fall and into early spring often begin their journey now.

Leaving spent plants in the beds
Finished plants invite the pests and disease you’ve worked all season to avoid.

Pruning fruit trees too early
Tender new growth won’t survive the first frost.

Adjusting This Checklist For Your Growing Zone

This checklist is written around a Zone 5 garden. Adjust the timing based on your own last frost date and seasonal rhythm.

If your climate is colder than Zone 5
Shift this checklist 2–6 weeks later.

If your climate is similar to Zone 5
Follow this checklist closely.

If your climate is warmer than Zone 5
Shift this checklist 2–8 weeks earlier.

If you live in a mild winter climate
Focus less on frost dates and more on heat, rainfall, and seasonal growing patterns.

August is where the garden teaches you to keep.

Not just to grow… but to gather, cure, and preserve what the season has given.

The real harvest isn't what comes out of the ground. It's the quiet confidence of knowing your shelves will stay full long after the garden has gone to sleep.

And somewhere in the drying onions and the filling jars, a backyard quietly finishes becoming a grocery store.

For those who want a little more structure…

Over the years, I realized the hardest part of growing food wasn’t always the gardening itself.

It was remembering what to plant, when to plant it, how much to grow, and how to make sure the garden actually supported the kitchen.

So I created the Garden System — a collection of simple planning tools designed to help you grow with more clarity instead of guesswork.

Inside you’ll find interactive planting calendars, yield calculators, seed viability tracking, and the planning tools we use to help turn a garden into a reliable source of food.

It’s not about creating the perfect garden.

It’s simply a way to understand your season, make thoughtful decisions, and slowly build your own backyard grocery store.

I made you a one-page version of the August checklist — walk your garden with it.

August In The Garden Checklist

30.9KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

And if you want to take this seasonal planning one step further, I’ve created the Garden Planning System — the tools we use to track planting dates, expected harvests, seed viability, and what we’re growing throughout the season.

Garden Planning System

For paid subscribers, I’ve also created the August extended garden planner — weekly rhythm pages, a harvest tracker, seasonal priorities, and space for the observations that turn into intuition over time.

Think of it less as a workbook and more as a quiet companion for the season ahead — a place to track harvests, make notes, notice patterns, and stay connected to the slower rhythms of growing food at home.

Inside you’ll find weekly garden rhythm pages, harvest trackers, seasonal priorities, preservation notes, and space to build your own record of the season as it unfolds.

I write about building a slower, more self-reliant life… growing food, preserving what we grow, cooking outdoors, living closer to the land, and the deeper questions that come with choosing a different way to live. New pieces arrive Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday.

Subscribe now

There was a time when every dairy product our family of six consumed came from our backyard.

Solena was the most precious addition to our farm. Not because she provided milk, but because every morning at 7:30 she would remind me that farming was never just about what the land produced.

Those big brown eyes didn’t just look at you. They connected with you in a way that left my husband joking, “You talk to that cow more than you talk to me.”

She was the heart of the farm in so many ways.

Solena was a heritage breed known as a Dexter, which is a true dual-purpose breed providing both incredible milk and quality meat. There are two main lines within Dexters—one bred more toward milking and one bred more toward meat production. Understanding their genetics, their throwback traits, and choosing what characteristics you wanted to breed for became something I grew deeply passionate about.

It’s all of those moving pieces that taught me just how precious milk truly is.

While it has been years since our sweet girl went on to teach another family the art of milking, my passion for home dairying has never wavered.

• Milk.

• Cream.

• Butter.

• Buttermilk.

• Clabber.

• Yogurt.

• Cream cheese.

• Cottage cheese.

• Ricotta.

• Feta.

• Mozzarella.

• Farmers cheese.

• Cheddar.

• Parmesan.

• Triple cream blue cheese.

• Camembert.

And of course, ice cream.

If it came from dairy, you would find me deep into learning how it was made.

Home dairying is where art and science meet.

Today I want to share one of the simplest ways to begin exploring home dairying: an acid-set cottage cheese. It requires no special equipment, no cultures, and no rennet. Just good milk, an acid, heat, and a little patience.

Homemade Cottage Cheese (Acid Set)

Ingredients

• 2 litres milk

• ¼ cup fresh lemon juice

• 1/2 teaspoon salt to start

Optional:

• 2–4 tablespoons cream for a richer, creamier cottage cheese

A few things to note before you begin

My preference is always full-fat milk.

You can absolutely use 2% milk, but the difference is… it will produce a softer curd than whole milk.

If using homogenized milk, the curds will also be smaller and more delicate than what you would get from non-homogenized milk.

To avoid confusion, when I say homogenized milk, I am not referring to “homo milk,” which is simply a reference to the fat content. Homogenized means the milk has been mechanically processed so the cream does not separate and rise to the top.

Ultra-high-temperature (UHT) treated milk will not work well for cheesemaking because the high heat treatment changes the proteins in the milk.

Whenever possible, I prefer cream-top milk for cheesemaking. With cream-top milk, the fat globules remain intact, and many cheesemakers find this creates a richer mouthfeel and a more traditional texture. Homogenization changes the structure of those fat globules, which influences how the curd forms and behaves during the cheesemaking process.

Fat content matters. A lot!

The higher the fat content, the richer your final product will be. Your curds will set firmer, and the finished cheese will have a superior texture compared to what you can achieve with lower-fat milk.

Method

Heat 2 litres of milk slowly to 85°C (185°F), stirring regularly to prevent sticking.

Do not let the milk boil.

Keeping it around 85°C helps create softer, more tender curds.

Remove the milk from the heat and allow it to cool for about 5 minutes.

Slowly add ¼ cup (60 mL) of fresh lemon juice while stirring gently.

Gently is key.

Once the lemon juice is added, avoid vigorous stirring. Too much agitation can break the curds into tiny pieces.

Stop stirring and allow the milk to sit undisturbed for 10–15 minutes.

Check if your whey has separated.

If the whey is clear yellow-green, you are ready to drain.

If the whey is still cloudy and white, add another tablespoon of lemon juice, stir once gently, and wait another 5–10 minutes. Repeat if needed.

Once the whey has separated, drain the curds through cheesecloth.

For a moist cottage cheese, drain for 15–20 minutes. For a firmer cheese, allow it to drain longer.

Once drained:

• Mix in 1/2 teaspoon of salt.

• For a creamy cottage cheese texture, stir in 2–4 tablespoons of cream.

And there you have it.

A simple, fresh cottage cheese made from milk you chose yourself.

The Lesson Home Dairying Taught Me

Home dairying is humbling.

More often than not, it puts you in your place if you aren’t fully present during the process. That is the science part of it.

• Time matters.

• Temperature matters.

• The smallest details matter.

And while most mistakes can still become something delicious, it can be incredibly disappointing when the result is not what you were hoping for.

More than once, I have turned 8 litres of barely set yogurt into a drinkable version because the texture was not what I had envisioned.

I have dreamed of pulling apart a homemade pizza topped with perfectly melted mozzarella, only to end up with a slice of cheese that refused to melt because I had lost too much fat during the stretching process.

That is part of learning.

You will find dozens of ways to do almost anything these days, and often many of them work—to varying degrees.

This recipe is a simple acid-based cottage cheese that allows anyone to begin exploring the world of home dairying.

But if you truly want to master cottage cheese, and you want something with the curds and texture similar to what you find at the grocery store, that’s a different process entirely.

It requires different ingredients, different techniques, and honestly, it is where the real art of cheesemaking begins.

If that is something you would like to explore, let me know in the comments. I would be happy to share that process next.

-Angie

Some mornings begin with a plan.

This one did.

We were going to head into town early and order the wood for the next stage of the villa.

That was the plan anyway.

I walked past the fruit trees with my coffee and immediately knew we weren’t going anywhere.

I’d noticed them the day before.

And the day before that.

I was hoping they could wait just one more day.

They couldn’t…

Our dry season has reached that point where watering by hand once a day simply isn’t enough. The trees were asking for more.

So before the heat arrived...

we pulled the drip irrigation supplies out of the shed.

They had been sitting there for weeks.

Not because they weren’t important.

Because something else always seemed a little more urgent.

As I pulled them out I smiled because… that has become our life.

Every evening we make a plan for tomorrow.

And by tomorrow morning...

the land usually has a different idea.

Maybe that’s what intentional living has become for us.

Not sticking to a schedule.

Simply paying attention.

In this weeks video diary we tend to what became urgent and then began building a living system that will feed us for years.

Building the things nobody will ever see

After the irrigation was finished, we finally headed into town to order the wood.

Around here that doesn’t necessarily mean the wood arrives today.

Or tomorrow…

Sometimes it does.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

We’ve stopped asking exactly when because life moves differently here.

A pace that frustrated us when we first arrived has slowly become something we’re learning to appreciate.

The work is honest.

People stop to talk.

Nobody seems to be in quite as much of a hurry.

So while we waited...

we started building something nobody will ever see.

The soil.

Healthy living soil isn’t something we can buy here.

It has to be created.

Layer by layer.

Season by season.

Using whatever the land is already offering us.

Every pile eventually becomes useful

As we filled the beds, I realized each material we are using had been sitting somewhere on the property waiting for its turn.

The old palm ends that became our roof months ago.

Corn husks we’d saved.

Dry leaves gathered from the mountain.

Old wood.

Coconut shells.

Finished compost.

Even the native soil that most people here would probably never think twice about.

Every pile we’d been stepping around for months suddenly became exactly what we needed.

Nothing is wasted here.

One thing we were careful about was soaking everything before it went into the beds.

Dry materials can steal moisture while they begin breaking down, so we wanted to give them a head start.

Green materials were a little different.

We talked about it while we were filling the beds.

If green material dries out here instead of decomposing...

it simply becomes another carbon source.

Not bad.

Just not what we’re trying to create.

We’re learning as we go.

Trying things.

Changing things.

Paying attention.

I honestly don’t know exactly what these beds will look like after one rainy season.

Right now they’re filled with hope as much as they are compost.

Native soil...

old palms...

leaves...

corn husks...

finished compost...

We’ll look back in a year and see what all of this became.

The timing belonged to the mountain

One of my favourite moments this week wasn’t something we planned.

We had almost finished filling the bed when one of the banana trees fell over.

We’d been talking all morning about how nice it would be if we had a banana trunk to add as green material.

I remember saying, “Maybe we’ll wait and fill the next bed.”

A few hours later...

the mountain answered for us.

It still amazes me how often that happens here.

Not because I think nature is performing miracles for us.

But because the more closely we pay attention...

the more often we notice how everything has its season.

The bananas were ready.

The tree had finished its work.

And now it had another purpose.

Letting life begin

Before covering the beds, I made the mixture that will surround the outside edge.

Crushed biochar.

Corn cobs.

Gravel.

The biochar had already been soaking for days in homemade liquid fertilizer so it could become alive before it ever went into the garden.

That little detail mattered to me.

We’re not just filling raised beds.

We’re trying to build an ecosystem.

After everything was in place, we covered the beds with mulch, tucked plastic over the top to hold in the warmth and moisture, and soaked the whole thing with more homemade fertilizer.

Then...

we walked away.

Nothing to plant.

Nothing to harvest.

Just time.

Sometimes doing nothing is part of the work too.

What a beautiful life

Late that afternoon, the wood finally arrived.

The men climbed out of the truck, looked at the woven palm panels on the villa and immediately started trying to explain that we’d built the wall all wrong.

Those are sleeping mats.

Not walls.

At least that’s what we understood through our very broken Spanish.

We laughed.

Pointed.

Used far more hand gestures than actual words.

Eventually they realized this wasn’t the finished wall.

It was an interior divider.

The real walls would come later.

Everyone laughed again.

Before they left, they stood looking out over the ocean.

For almost twenty minutes no one said very much.

Then one of them turned to the other and quietly said...

“What a beautiful life.”

I’ve thought about those words a lot since.

Because that’s what we’re trying to build here.

Not just a villa.

Not just a garden.

A life.

A slower one.

One where the plans change.

The land has a voice.

And we’re learning, little by little...

to listen.

Have you ever had a moment where life changed your plans... and looking back, you realized it was exactly what needed to happen?

-Angie

I write about building a slower, more self-reliant life… growing food, preserving what we grow, cooking outdoors, living closer to the land, and the deeper questions that come with choosing a different way to live. New pieces arrive Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday.

Subscribe now

Over the years, we’ve built our own planning systems around many of these same questions — how much to grow, what stores well, what actually feeds a household, and how to make better use of limited space and short growing seasons.

If your goal is food security, the first step isn’t necessarily spending more money — it’s knowing what food you actually want to grow and how much of it you need. That’s exactly why I created the Garden Planning System: to help us plan planting dates, expected harvests, seed viability, and the amount of food we’re actually growing.

It includes interactive garden planning sheets, yield calculators, planting schedules, and seed viability references.

Climates With Frost/Winter

Tropical/Sub-Tropical Growing

Having twenty-five possibilities in front of us was exciting and… overwhelming.

Because the truth is, most of us don’t struggle with knowing what we could do.

We struggle with knowing what to give our attention to.

When we looked over our list, we didn’t ask:

“What is the biggest thing here?”

Or:

“What would create the fastest transformation?”

Instead, we plac…

Read more

There’s a story we often tell ourselves about change.

That it happens after.

After we achieve the thing.
After the circumstances shift.
After life rearranges itself into something that finally gives us permission to show up differently.

We wait to feel disciplined until we have a reason to be disciplined.
We wait to feel energized until something comes along that energizes us.
We wait to feel free until freedom is something we’ve earned or arrived at or been granted.

I spent a long time living inside that story without realizing I was living inside it at all.

Last week, I shared how we created our list of twenty-five possibilities — every action we could imagine taking that might move us closer to the life we wanted.

We wrote without filtering.

Without judging whether something was realistic or practical enough.

We simply created space to see what was possible.

Alongside that list, we identified our four words.

The feelings we wanted to embody.

The qualities we wanted to move through our days with.

1. Disciplined.

2. Vibrant.

3. Healthy.

4. Energized.

But a list of twenty-five possibilities, even an honest one, is not a plan.

Eventually, you have to decide where your energy goes.

So we asked ourselves a very practical question:

Which five actions would move us toward our goal the fastest?

Not the most impressive five.
Not the five that sounded the biggest.
The five that would create the most movement from where we were toward where we wanted to be.

Because if everything is important, nothing is.

We needed to focus.

We looked back at our list and started narrowing.

Would this actually move us closer?
Would this create momentum?
Would this make the path ahead clearer?

And then we held each action against our four words.

Would this support me in feeling disciplined?
Would this move me toward feeling vibrant, healthy, energized?

If yes — it stayed.
If not — it waited.

What surprised me was how much easier the doing became once the decisions had already been made.

There was no longer the constant question of:

“Is this what we should be focusing on?”

We knew.

The path was clear.

And this is where something shifted.

Because choosing those five actions was not just about productivity.

It was about learning to stop waiting for the future version of ourselves to arrive before we started acting like the person already living that life. The one where we have achieved the “goal”.

We began making decisions from the person we were becoming.

Eating differently wasn’t just about saving money, though it did that too.

It was about feeling healthy and vibrant in our bodies now.

In this ordinary Tuesday.

In this life that had not changed on paper yet, but was quietly changing through every small decision.

Moving our bodies.

Reducing what we consumed.

Clearing out the excess that had accumulated over fourteen years of staying in one place.

These weren’t sacrifices we were making in exchange for a future reward.

They were the beginning of actually living the way we wanted to live.

There’s something almost paradoxical about this, and I’ve thought about it many times since.

The goal — becoming debt free, wintering in Mexico, creating a life with space and land and slowness — was not the thing we were truly after.

Not at its deepest level.

What we were really after was the feeling we believed that life would give us.

And when we understood that, something loosened.

Because the feeling was available now.

Not fully.
Not perfectly.
Not in the exact form it would eventually take when we were standing on Mexican soil, watching the sun set over land we had created a life around.

But present.

In smaller, quieter ways.

In the choices we were already making.

Discipline didn’t require the debt to be gone.
Vibrancy didn’t require the passport stamp.
Health didn’t require a different address.

We just had to start.

I think about this often now, living the life that was once only written on paper.

The version of me who taped four words to a refrigerator in a house we were preparing to leave — she was already becoming this.

Not because the circumstances had changed yet.

Because she decided to stop waiting for them to.

That decision, quiet and undramatic as it was, is the one I would go back and make again first.

How has this been for you? Have you been considering what it is you might like to move towards? I’ve been creating something to help you continue sitting with these questions.

Not a planner designed to fill your days with more things to do.

Something quieter.

A place to slow down, listen inward, and begin building a life that feels intentional from the inside out.

A place to gather the ideas, dreams, habits, and small steps that often get lost in the noise of everyday life.

I’ll share more soon — how it came to be, why I created it, and how I’ve been using it as we continue building this life we once only wrote down on paper.

Because sometimes the life we’re looking for doesn’t begin with a massive change.

Sometimes it begins with giving ourselves the space to notice what has been quietly asking for our attention all along.

Next week: The year on paper. How we mapped a life we hadn’t yet lived.

If you are walking through this process alongside me as a paid subscriber, the next section which has just been sent to you is where we move from possibility into action.

I’ve shared the five actions we chose, why these became the foundation for everything that followed and the questions we used to decide what truly deserved our energy.

Not the biggest actions.

Not the most impressive ones.

The ones that created the most movement toward the life we were building.

-Angie

The Living Planner is the system behind this whole series — the one we built the year we stopped waiting and started building the life we’d been dreaming of. If these pieces are giving you the thinking, the planner is where it becomes a practice you can actually keep.

Paid subscribers… The downloadable, printable version is yours, it’s in your subscriber resources.

Downloadable/Printable Version

Download - the Living Planner

Prefer a print copy, or want to read reviews first? It’s also on Amazon.

In Print - the Living Planner

I write about building a slower, more self-reliant life… growing food, preserving what we grow, cooking outdoors, living closer to the land, and the deeper questions that come with choosing a different way to live. New pieces arrive Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday.

Subscribe now

If you’ve just happened upon this series, I invite you to begin at the beginning.

This story didn’t start with moving to Mexico, building a sanctuary, or creating a different way of life.

It started much earlier — with a quiet knowing that something needed to change, and the courage to begin asking different questions.

The full series

• Part 1 Changing Your Life at Midlife: Where to Begin

• Part 2 From Dream to Life Goal

• Part 3 Finding Clarity, Creating a New Life

• Part 4 Five Actions Toward Your Dream Life

• Part 5 A Year on Paper: How We Mapped a Life

• Part 6 We Didn’t Hit the Goal Exactly. We Got Something Better.

When we finished filling our ferrocement raised beds, we knew something important:

The work of building soil wasn’t finished.

It had only changed.

The first stage was creating a foundation.

Layers of coconut shells, corn cobs, compost, leaves, and materials gathered from around us gave these beds structure.

They created space for water to be held.

Space for roots to move.

Space for life to return.

But living soil cannot simply be built once.

It has to be nurtured.

And that meant asking a deeper question:

How do we create a garden that becomes more fertile every year instead of slowly becoming depleted?

If you’re drawn to rebuilding a deeper relationship with the land… learning the slower skills of growing food, building soil, and creating a more self-reliant life — You’re in the right place

The Difference Between Growing Food And Growing Soil

Most gardens are designed around extraction.

We plant.

We feed.

We harvest.

And each time we remove the crop, we remove the nutrients held inside that plant.

This is not wrong. Harvesting food is the purpose of a garden.

But if we only remove and rarely return, eventually the soil begins to ask for what we have taken away.

Nature has always shown us another way.

In a forest, fertility comes from cycles.

Leaves fall.

Plants die back.

Roots release their stored energy.

Life returns to the ground that created it.

Nothing is wasted.

Everything has another purpose.

The Peanut Lesson

One of the ways we are beginning to build this cycle into our raised beds is through peanuts.

The peanuts are not only a crop for us.

They are a crop for the soil.

This distinction changes everything.

We allow them to grow until they begin to flower.

Then, before they move fully into seed production, we cut them back at the base and return the plants directly to the beds.

The goal is not to maximize the peanut harvest.

The goal is to maximize the fertility cycle.

These are the moments we love documenting most — the practical details, the lessons learned, and the deeper principles behind creating a life that works with nature instead of against it.

Why Return The Plant Instead Of Harvesting It?

A plant is not only the food it produces.

It is also the fertility it gathers while growing.

Peanuts, like other legumes, have the ability to form a relationship with specialized bacteria that live in nodules along their roots. These bacteria take nitrogen from the atmosphere and transform it into a form the plant can use.

The plant then uses that nitrogen to build itself:

Its leaves.

Its stems.

Its roots.

Its entire living structure.

This is where many gardens miss an important part of the cycle.

When we harvest the peanuts and remove the plant from the garden, we also remove much of the fertility that plant spent the season collecting.

But when we chop and drop the plant back into the soil, we return that captured fertility to the system.

The plant becomes food for the soil organisms.

The soil organisms make those nutrients available again.

And the next crop benefits from what the previous crop built.

This is the difference between simply growing a harvest and building a living garden.

Why Timing Matters

There is a reason we cut the peanuts back as they begin to flower.

Plants have different priorities at different stages of their life.

Before flowering, much of the plant’s energy is invested in creating vegetative growth — building leaves, stems, roots, and the relationships below ground that support them.

Once flowering and seed production begin, the plant begins shifting more of its energy toward reproduction.

By cutting the plants back before that transition is complete, we are capturing the greatest amount of living biomass and returning those nutrients to the soil at a time when the plant has accumulated significant fertility, but before much of that energy has moved into seed production.

This is not about interrupting the natural process.

It is about participating in it.

Understanding the moment when the plant has given the most, and returning that gift back to the system.

The Work No One Sees

This is the part of gardening that happens quietly.

There is no harvest basket.

No photograph of abundance.

No obvious reward.

Just a layer of green material slowly disappearing into the soil.

But beneath the surface, the real work begins.

Microorganisms begin breaking down the plant matter.

Fungi weave through the organic material.

Nutrients are released slowly.

The soil food web becomes more complex.

The bed becomes less like a place where plants are grown…

and more like a living system that grows itself.

Building Fertility Instead Of Buying It

After decades of working with gardens, one of the greatest lessons I have learned is this:

Healthy gardens are not created by constantly adding more.

They are created by understanding cycles.

By noticing what the land is already trying to do.

By recognizing that every plant has more than one purpose.

A peanut plant can feed us.

It can protect the soil.

It can build fertility.

It can prepare the way for the next crop.

The question is not only:

“What can this plant give us?”

The deeper question is:

“How can we return what this plant has given?”

The Garden Feeds Us, And We Feed The Garden

This is the relationship we are building inside these ferrocement beds.

Not a garden that depends on constant inputs from outside.

Not a garden that becomes less fertile with every harvest.

A garden that becomes richer because we participate in the cycle.

The food we grow here is not the end of the story.

It is one moment in a much larger conversation.

The garden feeds us.

And we feed the garden.

This article is part of the larger story of building our garden system from the ground up.

Before the beds could hold soil, we had to understand the structure that would support them. And before we could grow food, we had to learn how to build living soil from what the land provided.

This is the work we are continuing to share here — the experiments, the lessons, the failures, and the small discoveries that come from rebuilding a relationship with the land.

If this way of living speaks to something you’ve been longing for, you’re welcome to walk alongside us.

Each week, we share the real process of growing food, preserving what we harvest, building with our own hands, and creating a simpler life rooted in place.

-Angie

I write about building a slower, more self-reliant life… growing food, preserving what we grow, cooking outdoors, living closer to the land, and the deeper questions that come with choosing a different way to live. New pieces arrive Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday.

Subscribe now

Over the years, we’ve built our own planning systems around many of these same questions — how much to grow, what stores well, what actually feeds a household, and how to make better use of limited space and short growing seasons.

If your goal is food security, the first step isn’t necessarily spending more money — it’s knowing what food you actually want to grow and how much of it you need. That’s exactly why I created the Garden Planning System: to help us plan planting dates, expected harvests, seed viability, and the amount of food we’re actually growing.

It includes interactive garden planning sheets, yield calculators, planting schedules, and seed viability references.

Climates With Frost/Winter

Tropical/Sub-Tropical Growing

If you want to understand how we arrived here, these are the layers that came before:

The more I think about it, the more I think we may be asking the wrong question!

The question has been:

“How should we handle AI?”

But I believe the real question is:

“What are we actually trying to protect?”

If the answer is authenticity, trust, and giving creators credit for their work… then we need to examine something much deeper.

If AI detectors cannot reliably distinguish between human writing and AI-assisted writing, should they be used to influence a reader’s trust?

I feel that’s the question that matters.

Because these tools aren’t simply identifying AI-generated content.

They’re beginning to influence how readers perceive the person behind the words.

And that’s something that carries a much deeper responsibility.

Substack wrote:

“Norms around AI use and its disclosure are unsettled. But we have made the assessment that while the use of AI isn’t necessarily a problem, a lack of transparency around it definitely is. Our aim is to help writers get credit for the work that’s theirs and help their audiences make more informed choices about what they spend their time on.”

I actually agree with the sentiment of this.

Creators should certainly receive credit for their work.

Readers certainly deserve honesty.

There’s a conversation worth having around people using AI to fabricate experiences, expertise, research, or stories that are not their own.

That being said… I believe we need to be very careful about the tools we use to determine authenticity.

Because a tool designed to protect trust must actually worthy of our trust.

Several of my own articles have been identified as 100% AI-generated.

The irony?

They weren’t generated by AI.

One was a written version of a video I created and publicly shared five years ago.

Another came from teaching material I created for my online academy hosted on Teachable. Also five years ago!

I can document the origin of my work.

The videos exist.
The lessons exist.
The timeline exists.

Exhibit A: The original work created over 5 years ago. (Jan 6, 2021)

Exhibit B: The article adapted from that work.

Assessment: 100% AI-generated.

This is where the conversation becomes bigger than me.

Because while I can document my authorship.

Many writers cannot!

I want to be clear here.

I’m not making the argument that AI was never involved.

It was.

I use AI and I will continue to unapologetically.

I use it for editing, grammar, structure, organization, designing graphics, and creating a better experience for the reader.

I believe those are legitimate uses of a tool.

But AI did not create the ideas.

Did not build the garden.

Did not film the video five years ago.

Did not teach the course.

Did not live the experiences that shaped the work.

Those belong to me.

And that distinction is what matters.

Because authorship is not simply the act of arranging words on a page.

Authorship is the ownership of ideas, lived experience, and responsibility for what is published.

This is where I believe we need to stop arguing about AI itself and start questioning whether AI detection tools are actually fit for the purpose they are being given.

AI detectors do not determine authorship.

They identify patterns.

Those patterns may resemble AI-generated writing, but they can also come from:

• a person who’s spent years developing a consistent voice,

• a teacher who’s refined their explanations,

• a writer who uses a familiar framework,

• someone using tools to improve accessibility,

• someone whose communication style has become clear and structured over time.

A person’s own voice can become the evidence used against them.

That should concern all of us.

And my example above was not an isolated example.

Is the question we want the answer to actually:

“Was AI involved?”

The questions that truly matter are:

Who created the ideas?

Who lived the experience?

Who is responsible for the message?

Who stands behind what has been shared?

Those are questions no detector can answer.

They require human judgment.

They require context.

They require discernment.

This is also where we need to consider what transparency means.

Transparency about process can be valuable.

But transparency should not become a requirement for personal disclosure.

People use tools for many different reasons.

Some because they have dyslexia.

Some because they live with a brain injury.

Some because they communicate more effectively with assistance.

Some because they write in a second language.

Those reasons are personal.

Should someone have to explain their personal circumstances in order to justify using a tool that helps them communicate?

I don’t believe authenticity should require vulnerability that has nothing to do with the truthfulness of the work itself.

If… the goal is honestly to help writers get credit for what is theirs, then it is our responsibility to ensure that the systems we build don’t actually take that credit away.

Because false positives do not just misidentify content.

They create doubt.

They ask authentic creators to prove they are authentic.

Isn’t the most important question this:

If AI detection cannot reliably distinguish between human writing and AI-assisted writing, why are we allowing it to become a measure of trust?

Maybe the conversation isn’t:

“How do we make writers prove they didn’t use AI?”

Maybe the conversation should be:

“How do we create systems that recognize the difference between assistance and authorship?”

Because those are not the same thing.

AI is a tool.

Tools have always helped humans communicate.

The question has never been whether people use tools.

The question is whether the work remains theirs.

Is a photograph edited on a computer any less the work of the photographer?

Is a memoir professionally edited any less the story of the person who lived it?

Is a manuscript refined by an editor any less the work of the author?

Authenticity has never been something a machine could certify.

It’s something a creator builds through years of work, lived experience, accountability, and the willingness to stand behind every word they share.

That is what we should be protecting.

Perhaps the question isn’t whether a machine can recognize human work.

Perhaps the question is whether we have become so eager for certainty that we are willing to overlook the very humanity we claim we are trying to protect.

What are we willing to sacrifice in the pursuit of proving what was already human?

-Angie

Read more

I want to tell you about a particular kind of resistance.

It’s not loud. It doesn’t announce itself. It lives in the moment just before you write something down — the moment where your mind quietly suggests that perhaps this idea is too small to be worth including, or too large to be taken seriously, or too revealing to say out loud even to yourself.

That resistance, I’ve learned, is almost always pointing at something worth writing down anyway.

We had a goal now. A real one, with a date and a shape and enough specificity to be slightly terrifying. What we needed next was to understand how we might actually get there.

So we made a list.

Not a to-do list, exactly. More like an excavation. Every possible action either of us could imagine taking that might move us from where we were toward where we wanted to be. No filtering. No judgment about whether something was realistic or practical or sufficiently ambitious. Just — everything.

We pushed ourselves to twenty-five.

The first few came easily. The obvious things, the ones that had been sitting on the surface of our thinking for years. Sell the house. Reduce expenses. Pay down debt.

The middle ones required a little more reaching. Things we hadn’t quite let ourselves consider before. Rent the house instead of selling it. Look more seriously at what winters elsewhere might actually cost. Stop spending money on things that were filling space rather than filling us.

And then, somewhere around twenty, something shifted.

The last few items on that list felt different. They came from a quieter, less defended place. They were the things we knew — had perhaps always known — would actually work. But they required saying out loud that we were serious. That we weren’t just dreaming in a comfortable, noncommittal way, but actually intending to do this.

There’s a particular vulnerability in that.

When you write something down with real intention, you become accountable to it. And accountability, even self-directed accountability, requires a kind of courage that’s easy to underestimate.

What I remember most about making that list isn’t the items on it. It’s the feeling of having finally laid everything out in front of us. Of being able to see, all at once, the full landscape of what was possible. Of recognizing that we weren’t as stuck as we’d felt. That there were more paths than we’d been allowing ourselves to see.

We weren’t committing to all twenty-five. We were simply refusing to pretend they didn’t exist.

Alongside the list, we did something else.

We asked ourselves how we imagined we would feel once we’d actually arrived. Not what we would have or where we would be — but who we would be. How we would move through our days. What quality of aliveness we’d be living with.

Four words came.

Disciplined. Vibrant. Healthy. Energized.

I wrote them down and taped them to the refrigerator. Small notes about them went up around the house. Not as reminders of somewhere we were trying to get to, but as questions we started asking in the present tense.

Is this decision supporting me in feeling vibrant?

Does this choice align with the person I’m becoming?

It sounds simple. It is simple. And it turned out to be one of the most quietly powerful things we did that entire year.

Because what we were really doing was learning to stop waiting to become the person who lived that life — and starting to be her now, in the small daily decisions that most of us make without thinking.

A question I hope you’ll feel into:

What are the words that describe the person you are becoming — and what would it look like to begin living them today, before everything around you has changed?

The list told us what was possible.

The four words told us who we were choosing to become.

Together, they gave us something we hadn’t had before — not just a destination, but a way of moving toward it that felt true.

For paid subscribers: the questions I use to build my own list of 25, and the practice I still return to when I need to find clarity about what to do next.

Next week: We didn’t wait to become who we needed to be. We just started being her.

If this exercise stirred something in you, I’ve created a quiet companion to go alongside this post.

Not a worksheet to complete or a checklist to finish — but a space to sit with the questions, write without editing yourself, and begin uncovering what you may already know but haven’t yet given yourself permission to say out loud.

Inside, you’ll find guided prompts for exploring what you truly desire, space to build your own list of twenty-five possibilities, and the four-word practice we used to begin becoming the people we wanted to be.

My hope is that it gives you the same thing this process gave us:

A little more clarity.
A little more courage.
And a clearer sense of the next step waiting in front of you.

-Angie

The Living Planner is the system behind this whole series — the one we built the year we stopped waiting and started building the life we’d been dreaming of. If these pieces are giving you the thinking, the planner is where it becomes a practice you can actually keep.

Paid subscribers… The downloadable, printable version is yours, it’s in your subscriber resources.

Downloadable/Printable Version

Download - the Living Planner

Prefer a print copy, or want to read reviews first? It’s also on Amazon.

In Print - the Living Planner

I write about building a slower, more self-reliant life… growing food, preserving what we grow, cooking outdoors, living closer to the land, and the deeper questions that come with choosing a different way to live. New pieces arrive Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday.

Subscribe now

If you’ve just happened upon this series, I invite you to begin at the beginning.

This story didn’t start with moving to Mexico, building a sanctuary, or creating a different way of life.

It started much earlier — with a quiet knowing that something needed to change, and the courage to begin asking different questions.

The full series

• Part 1 Changing Your Life at Midlife: Where to Begin

• Part 2 From Dream to Life Goal

• Part 3 Finding Clarity, Creating a New Life

• Part 4 Five Actions Toward Your Dream Life

• Part 5 A Year on Paper: How We Mapped a Life

• Part 6 We Didn’t Hit the Goal Exactly. We Got Something Better.