“Understanding the difference between healthy striving and perfectionism is critical to laying down the shield and picking up your life. Research shows that perfectionism hampers success. In fact, it's often the path to depression, anxiety, addiction, and life paralysis.”
― Brené Brown

During a Costco trip last month I did something that to me pre-kids was unimaginable: I picked up a case of pre-made little individual cups of guacamole. Between the waste of the single use plastic and the knowledge that homemade is 100x better, I confidently tossed it into my cart and continued on my way to the pre-cooked proteins section. There, I grabbed some chicken skewers and containers of diced chicken breast, both much higher unit price than my usual chicken breast or thighs. Then, I bought a big loaf of Costco sourdough bread! This feels embarrassing to write but I really had to grapple with both the cost and the environmental impact of the purchases, but I reached a breaking point over this summer with both kids home nearly all day every day: I no longer had the time, energy, or desire to do everything the from-scratch hard way all the time.

Also, my husband was about to head out for a weeklong trip to LA, so I would be holding down the fort solo – easy enough, because the kids have honestly been wonderful this summer, but that would still mean 14+ hour days with no break. Something had to give, and that, my friends, was my self-imposed ridiculous need to always do everything the hard way.

I’m not sure where that mentality all started, but I know being raised in a from-scratch household by an incredible home cook and baker (and home economics teacher) mom contributed to it, along with a healthy dose of ego building over the years. I used to hear friends and family rave to my mom about her cooking and baking, beg her for extras of her famous dinner rolls or homemade butter toffee at Christmas time, and relay tales of how she cooked a pig roast for 100 friends and made homemade whipped cream and angelfood cake for the strawberry shortcakes. Since passing away in 2011, she has taken on mythical qualities in my eyes, and my family members still fondly tell me of her elaborate Thanksgiving and Christmas feasts every year.

So naturally, I grew up wanting to emulate her. Also I watched and read nearly everything Martha Stewart did in the 1990s during my impressionable adolescent years. So I’ve always prided myself on doing things from scratch, both from a cost-savings angle and because I just know they taste better!

But as I approach my 40th birthday, I’ve been doing some soul-searching and wondering why, exactly, I feel the need to make my life harder than it needs to be. Especially with two young kids, lots of volunteering, trying to squeeze some recipe development and writing in, engaging in hobbies, having a semblance of a social life, exercising, taking care of a 100+ year old house, giant garden, 18 chickens, cats, and a dog.

I would never expect to harvest garden tomatoes in January, so why did I expect myself to run at full capacity through a summer with both kids home? Our capacity is seasonal and not a constant. Why did I keep expecting myself to be the exception to something I wax poetically about weekly?! Talk about a classic case of “rules for thee but not for me.”

So I’ve decided to embrace something that I’ve heard Ina Garten say countless times on Barefoot Contessa (my longtime comfort show): store-bought is fine. After spending my entire adult life post-college being the person who’d never take the shortcut while encouraging others to only take on what feels manageable to them, this is the first time I’m taking my own damn advice.

Now, if you’re coming to my house for a party, I’ll be making homemade guacamole because personally, I love to put my best foot forward and that’s how I enjoy hosting. But when I thought through the logistics of what it entails to make it homemade on a whim, say, when the craving strikes, that means I have to mentally calculate if we have avocados, if they’re ripe, and if I have limes, onions, and tomatoes.

Or, I can open the fridge, grab a tiny cup of Kirkland guacamole, open it up, use it on a breakfast wrap or with some chips and queso, then rinse it out and add the cup to my kids’ “making things bin” for arts and crafts use.

Maybe I’m paying more at the store and maybe I still feel a little guilty for the single-use plastic, but I’ll take that trade-off for lightening the mental load of motherhood and life right now.

Until next week,

Amy

The Revolution Will Be Planted With Wildflowers [New York Times]

The Watermelon Vs Climate Change [Offrange]

But first, coffee: The drink that energized the American Revolution [NPR]

Have We Forgotten How to Decorate Like Normal People? [The Harmonious Home Approach by ]

Why does everything feel like a scam? [Your Brain On Money by ]

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1. This might be a good thing to write about, and other people might agree —hit publish!

2. You can think about this, but don’t write it because it may come off as “pick me” and “not like the other girls”

Today, the former thought won out by a skosh. But just barely! I think what put me over the edge was sitting down to scroll Instagram on my computer to find my usual LOLs of the week, many of which I find during the week and save, but like to round it out with a few from the explore page. And personally, I like browsing on the computer instead of my phone, both so my aging eyes don’t have to strain at a small screen, and because you’re able to get a bird’s eye view of a lot of posts at once, especially when viewed at 50% zoom. Efficiency!

As usual, I was bombarded with 80% reels —can’t a girl find a photo meme easily anymore? Sheesh. But of the remaining ~20% static posts, nearly all of them were some variation of the “kinda chic” trend, Now, as a chronically online woman, I’ve of course seen the trend take off in recent weeks.

If you haven’t seen it, the gist of it is: a carousel of aesthetic photos with butter yellow font highlighting stuff that most people wouldn’t consider traditionally chic.

But unlike most trends which I think are kind of fun and entertaining, this one, to borrow Love Island UK parlance, gave me the immediate ick.

And I couldn’t quite put my finger on why, but I think I’ve narrowed it down: the trend is inherently one of the worst encapsulations of the naval gazing that we’ve all come to associate with social media. Now, I have always had qualms with my own social media usage, and have deleted it for months at a time because I get very existential with it, pondering why I want to post stuff? Who actually cares? Isn’t it narcissistic to post anything about my life?

Usually, I can reason myself out of a spiral with my mantra: WWMD (What Would Martha Do).

But you know what I think Martha would not do? The “kinda chic” trend. Even at her most boastful, for lack of a better word, she always comes across as simply stating that it’s how she does something, never directly attacking how someone else might do something. Does she think she’s better than other people? Undoubtedly —she didn’t get to where she is by having imposter syndrome!

But the “kinda chic” trend shines a light on what used to be at least partially camouflaged: a humblebrag.

And it’s the algorithm at work! If all you see are “kinda chic” slop carousels in butter yellow (the cool color to use now), then you’re inclined to post something like that because it’ll get views. But it kind of feels like an emperor has no clothes situation, because I’ve talked to multiple IRL friends who have seen the trend and expressed their distaste for it, yet it’s all I see on Instagram currently. If we all dislike it why is it everywhere? Are people pretending to hop on board because it’s just the trend du jour, but secretly think it’s dumb? WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

Of course, now my brain is worried that by not doing the kinda chic trend, and worse, writing about not doing it, am I contributing to the problem? Do I think I’m above a trend, and am I just naval gazing and overanalyzing? Probably, but also we are living through strange Internet times and I think it’s only natural to question why we do the things we do, especially at the behest of social media.

As always, it feels like we’re all little puppets and the social media companies are the ones pulling the strings, convinced that no actually, we’re the ones in control.

Until next week, overthinking random Internet trends while out on long mental health walks,

Amy

P.S.: I just noticed that Substack made a change and now free subscribers are able to comment on paywalled posts, which makes me so happy! You know it was a fraught decision to try this paid model (more on that decision here), and one of my main gripes was I missed the comment section discourse, as that change made it open to only paid subs on those paywalled posts. Let’s chat!!

Test Your Tomato I.Q. [New York Times] — A fun little tomato quiz from Margaret Roach — I got a 5/9, crap! I’m ashamed but had to be honest.

The Return of the Monarch [The Atlantic] — After many dismal years with decreasing populations, estimates have been increasing for the past two years. This seems to be connected to herculean efforts to save butterfly habitats in Canada, the US, and Mexico. Good news!

The spotted lanternfly is ravaging the eastern US. Pet dogs are coming to the rescue [BBC] — In another instance of “we don’t deserve dogs!!!”: a citizen science program is training pet dogs to find spotted lantern fly eggs before they hatch so they can be destroyed.

In These Orchards, Fruit Has All But Disappeared This Year [Civil Eats] Due to freak late frosts after fruit blossoms set, farmers across the country are faced with catastrophic losses, ranging from 70-100% across apples and various stone fruit depending on location.

Organic Farmers: Resilient in the Face of War [Offrange] — The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is still affecting US farmers, with 70% of them saying they’re unable to afford all the fertilizer they need for their farms. Meanwhile, organic farmers, which make up 1% of US farms, remain relatively unscathed. Perhaps now is a good time to reevaluate our dependence on fossil fuel-derived synthetic fertilizers?

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“Do not keep anything in your home that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”
— William Morris

Before moving to this house in 2020, the longest we had lived anywhere before moving was 4 years — both in Brooklyn, and then in Santa Monica. Prior to those spots, I had shorter stints in Boston, San Francisco, and Jersey City. What this semi-regular moving afforded me was the regular opportunity to clean house, declutter, and get rid of items that no longer served me, items that were broken, clothing that didn’t fit or wasn’t my style anymore. But hitting the 6 year mark here soon has made it apparent that it’s high time for a full-house declutter in preparation for a town-wide yard sale that occurs every September!

However, I like to joke that both my husband and I have fallen prey to an unfortunate minimalism phase, one in which we got rid of many, many items that we still regret to this day. We lived in a microscopic apartment in Brooklyn and had to ruthlessly edit our belongings, since we didn’t want to bother with a storage unit. Then, we moved across the country to California and left even more items behind in a pretty bangin’ stoop sale. I’m still mourning my collection of colorful PYREX nesting bowls that I got for $30 at Brooklyn Flea. What was I thinking?! That same collection usually goes for $200+ on Etsy or at antique stores. UGH.

I know oftentimes you hear from minimalists or decluttering experts that, “You never miss what you get rid of!” I’m here to say that sometimes, there’s such a thing as too much decluttering, but I, for one, have flown too close to the sun and still have the burns from it.

So I have started to err on the side of holding onto things, especially once we moved out of ~750 sq ft rentals into a home quite literally 10x as large when you factor in the living space, detached garage, and basement. It’s become too easy to say, “Oh let’s just hang on to XYZ, we will use it someday!”

Except that mentality compounded over the years, plus two children and their various clothing and toys and books has led to us having, in technical terms, a whole lot of crap shoved in the attic.

Now, speaking of attic, we are also having some work done up there this month, and for said work we need to have the entire attic cleared out (along with all humans and animals, which is a whole other matter entirely). It’s all rather organized, but there is quite frankly a lot of stuff that we don’t need, use, or want. I’ve been diligently letting friends rifle through bins of old kids’ clothes to take what they want for their own kids, but I’ve been holding onto everything just in case. Just in case what!? I know for certain that we are done having children, after hemming and hawing for a while about a third kid. However, I know in my heart of hearts that I simply cannot fathom another pregnancy, another two years of breastfeeding, and starting over entirely.

So I’m finally ready to part with all of the baby stuff! But it’s still very sad and bittersweet. Of course, I’ll hold onto certain sentimental items, and a handful of awesome vintage dresses I’ve picked up over the years — in case our kids ever decide to have kids when they are all grown up.

Another factor that makes the whole affair trickier is that we live in an old 1890s house, with closets that are true to the time period in which the house was built. You know, back when the average adult had around ~40 items of clothing total! As I quickly approach my 40th birthday, I’m doing some soul searching and trying to determine what I really love to wear, like the items that I feel good in, can wear in multiple ways, and in colors that I think look good on me. As much as I love a kitshy, ironic sweatshirt and t-shirt, I’ve come to the sad realization that I just don’t reach for them as much because I’m not wearing them to school pickup, meetings, or in my day to day life.

So from now until September I’ll be sorting through every item of clothing I own, setting aside lots for the yard sale, and giving my languishing Poshmark account a refresh! Eventually. Once the kids are back in school and I have a wee bit of free time.

Until next week, decluttering like my sanity depends on it,

Amy

Medium Scare: As temperatures rise, the threat of a tick-borne meat allergy grows. [Distillations Magazine] On Martha’s Vineyard, the incidence of Lyme disease on the island is 11 times the statewide rate in Massachusetts, but the meteoric rise in lone star ticks has led to an increase in alpha-gal syndrome aka the meat allergy we’ve been hearing about.

Shameless plug for my tick article:

What if We Pesticide-Proofed the Bees? [Offrange] — New promising research is working on engineering bees that aren’t as susceptible to chemical harms, but bee biologist Sam Droege deftly argues that, “The idea is novel and clever, but it’s a solution to an already corrupt biosphere. It’s not a way out of the modern problems of agriculture, pesticides, and pollinators.”

What the Cyclospora Outbreak Says About the Food Safety System [Civil Eats] — This administration has taken an axe to the surveillance, state and federal staff, and communications that all work hand-in-hand to deal with food-borne illness outbreaks.

An Artist Uses Plants as Her Muse [New York Times] A lovely piece on Wendy Hollander, a botanical illustrator of 26 years, and how she takes notice of the patterns to distinguish members of one family from another.

HOAs are often barriers to sustainable landscaping and solar energy – here’s how they could be bridges instead [The Conversation] — Millions of Americans live under the thumbs of HOAs that often throw up barriers to sustainability. As the climate continues to change, will they continue reinforcing yesterday’s aesthetic norms at an environmental cost or become partners in creating more sustainable futures?

Red Rising by Pierce Brown — I needed a change of pace after months of living in the most epic fantasy series I’ve ever read, and this is just the palate cleanser! Bonus points that it’s not a 1,300 page book that I struggle to hold upright as I’m reading in bed at night, leading to me dropping it on my face when I doze off.

What’s in season mid-July in the Northeast:

Tomatoes, sweet corn, blueberries, peaches, plums, nectarines, blackberries, raspberries, melons, cucumbers, zucchini and summer squash, green beans, peppers, eggplant, tomatillos, okra, fresh shell beans, garlic, onions, leeks, beets, carrots, Swiss chard, kale, collard greens, cabbage, fennel, celery, scallions, chives, fresh herbs, purslane, lamb's quarters, mushrooms, new potatoes, and early apples.

How to use your goodies:

1. Garlic & Herb Tomatoes — A simple, unfussy classic from .

2. Yellow Squash Bread — A twist on zucchini bread, and one of the recipes that folks have loved on my blog!

3. Creamed Leeks — I am growing leeks for the first time this year and this is my reminder to harvest them soon! That is, if I can find them in my weedy mess of a garden.

4. Chez Panisse’s Blueberry Cobbler — Every time I make a recipe and love it, I’ve taken to printing it out and sticking it in my recipes binder. This one made the cut!

5. Cucumber Crunch Salad With Tofu —My package of tofu in the fridge with a best by date of next week has a date with this recipe.

Guys, I have a confession to make: I deeply neglected my garden for almost the entirety of July, and now the weeds are so bad that I am embarrassed to even share any pictures. It’s quite literally a jungle! And I started beating myself up in my head for letting things get so bad while out there one day recently picking tomatoes and kale, only to discover a hummingbird flitting about the preponderance of Jewelweed (Impatiens capensis). It turns out that hummingbirds are the most efficient pollinators of jewelweed, and scientists believe that jewelweed flowers have evolved their design and high sugar content to attract hummingbirds.

So if you feel guilty for “weeds” just tell everyone that you’re supporting pollinators!

Other goings-on:

• We’ve had quite a few close hawk calls with the chickens recently, but the roosters are doing a good job of protecting everyone. Unfortunately, the previous beta rooster (Charlie) has assumed the alpha role (previously Frank) and is a total jerk, so I think his days are numbered.

• Lots of goldfinches around, and they seem to favor the cutleaf coneflowers (Rudbeckia laciniata). I leave these flowers all fall and winter, only cleaning them up finally during my May spring cleanup. Birds peck at the seeds all winter long!

• We found a cutie little spring peeper on the side of the pool this week, and I think it was the first time I’ve ever seen one up close! I performed a kickboard rescue and relocated it to the woods, not because I’m scared to touch them but because I had sunscreen on my hands from applying it to the kids and their skin is permeable and incredibly sensitive to oils and chemicals that might be on human skin. Also did you know that all toads are frogs but not all frogs are toads?

• Ladder app for workouts. Despite a previous career in fitness and lifting regularly since high school (minus 4 years in college during which I gained the freshman FIFTY lol), I sometimes still struggle with programming and motivation and keeping track of workouts. I’m also picky about what programs I do, because I like progressive overload, not too many newfangled exercises, and it can’t take longer than an hour. I was half-assing workouts recently and had a lightbulb moment in which I was like, “You don’t always need to do things yourself/the hardest way/the cheapeast way” and I got to searching my favorite place for exercise info: Reddit! Specifically r/xxfitness (since it’s women only). Lots of folks were raving about Ladder, so I did a free week trial and was SO IMPRESSED. I signed up for a year (I think it was $187) and it’s made getting my strength training in enjoyable, seamless, and an actual joy because I don’t have to think about anything. Here’s my code for a free 7 day guest pass!

• Sodium percarbonate. I was influenced to give this a go by one of my favorites ever: Nancy Birthwhistle! She refers to it as a “green bleach” and since I’m not a chemist, I don’t dare get into the nitty gritty of how it works but all I know is I’ve been using it on everything. I soaked our trash and recycling bins with hot water and a sprinkle of this and all the gunk and grime lifted right off, I use it while washing all of our reusable tea towels and kitchen rags, cleaning toilets, cleaning bathroom grout, and so much more. I got a 10lb bin of it!

• Trader Joe’s Skinceuticals Vitamin C dupe. At $9.99 compared to the jawdropping $185 for the same size bottle of Skinceuticals, this is a no brainer for me to try. One of my skincare obsessed best friends convinced me to buy the $$$ one a few years ago and while it lasted close to a year, I physically could not spend that again, so I’ve been going without, despite knowing that Vitamin C serum is one of those “actually proven to be good for you not just some woo-woo crap.” As soon as I learned about the TJ’s version I scooped it up and TBH I can’t tell a difference because to me, the Skinceuticals one smelled like boiled hot dogs which is how this one smells, too! More deets here.

“It’s important for me to have hope because that’s my job as a parent, to have hope, for my kids, that we’re not going to leave them in a world that’s in shambles, that’s a chaotic place, that’s a dangerous place.” —James Cameron

Recently, I saw a TikTok proclaiming that “doomerism is a weak man’s game and a coward’s way out” and I smashed the repost button within the first 5 seconds of watching — I’ll embed it here and hopefully you can watch because I know a lot of people still don’t have TikTok!

@julesandthevibeI BELIEVE IN HOPE!!!!!!! #julesandthevibe #politics #political #hopecore

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She sums up so much of what I’ve been feeling lately, and by lately I mean ever since ~2020 or whenever the algorithms changed to show only the most polarizing content imaginable to keep our eyeballs glued to the screen. And I am probably guilty of this as well, as I know in the past (and depending on my mood/mental health/state of the world/where I am in my menstrual cycle) that I have erred on the side of doomer-lite. Heck I was certain I never wanted to have children for many years due to my doomer outlook on the state of the planet!

But truly in my heart of hearts my personal ethos is more in line with Samwise Gamgee:

Honestly, if I weren’t hopeful about the future I wouldn’t be writing this newsletter. While my audience may be small in the grand scheme of things, I know that small can be mighty. And I am also a firm believer in the ripple effect — who knows what can light a spark?

Climate doomerism is, in a nutshell, the belief that taking action to reduce the climate crisis is pointless because we are past the point of no return. And before I risk sounding like a Pollyanna, rest assured that I know things are not spectacular right now! Fires, intense heat waves, and unprecedented storms will continue to worsen so long as we fail to sequester our carbon and reduce our dependency on fossil fuels.

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Personally, given the wildfires blanketing Canada and the Northeastern United States in smoke the past week, I’ve gone on an unfollowing spree on social media of accounts that are all doom and gloom. I can pick up a paper and read about what’s happening around the world, but I cannot give my eyeballs and attention to content creators riding the wave of climate doomerism to increase views, engagement, and followers. It’s not productive! It’s simply a cheap n’ shitty form of dopamine for our brain, and unless something productive happens after viewing said content, it’s an utter waste.

I don’t fault the creators putting this sort of stuff out there, as we’re little more than rats conditioned to press buttons to get rewards. The negative doomer content works because it activates a deep part of our brain hardwired for survival that llights up like a fireworks display on the 4th of July when presented with flashy short-form videos about the demise of the planet. A University at Buffalo study found “a correlation between greater social media use and climate anxiety. This includes climate distress, which is general concern and anxiety about climate change; and climate doom, which is the belief that climate change will lead to the breakdown of social, political and economic systems.”

While researching today’s newsletter, I stumbled upon climate scientist ’s Substack, Talking Climate, and more specifically this piece:

Talking Climate

Are we really doomed?

These days, I’m often accused of being a “hopium peddler” – someone who promotes overly optimistic, even delusional solutions to the climate crisis, offering false comfort like some kind of emotional drug that helps us avoid facing hard truths…

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a year ago · 171 likes · 55 comments · Katharine Hayhoe

I found myself nodding along to every part of Hayhoe’s post, but especially this portion:

The doomerism I’m talking about is the absolute conviction that there’s nothing left that we can do, paired with the desire to spread this message like an Old Testament prophet. And when climate scientists like me insist that there is something we can do, this threatens the comfortable feeling provided by giving up, which in turn can make doomers turn hostile. I received my first attack of this nature over three years ago, and they’ve only increased as alarming headlines pile up.

It’s absolutely true that we can no longer avoid all the impacts already unfolding. It’s also true that, although climate action is happening, it’s not at the scale needed to avoid dangerous impacts. And it’s true the challenges before us are serious: but they are not beyond our ability to solve.

Hayhoe also argues that there’s no difference between climate doomers and those who believe climate change is a hoax because the end result of their messages is the same —nothing is done.

Frankly, I find myself a little bummed that I’ve had to unfollow some folks that historically I’ve enjoyed! But in the interest of protecting the squishy little sponge inside my skull that's prone to getting riled up by hyperbolic climate alarmism, I’ve had to clean house a bit. Also spending less time on social media in general! And while I will sometimes share memes about current climate and global horrors, it’s merely a Milennial coping mechanism —if we can’t laugh, we’ll cry. Gallows humor has always been my preferred method of dealing with complex emotional issues, which is probably not healthy but that’s a discussion for my therapist someday.

This piece from Reslience.org titled “How to talk about climate change and the problem with doomerism” did a fantastic study in which they tested 11 common messages meant to boost climate change beliefs, policy support, and concrete action. Their findings? Color me unsurprised!

Our findings revealed that doom and gloom messaging was highly effective for stimulating climate change information sharing, like posting on the internet or social media, where negativity reigns. As you can see in our figure below, doomerism (ie negative emotions) was the single most effective strategy for increasing social media sharing.

However, doom and gloom messaging was the absolute worst for motivating action and among the worst for changing climate change beliefs or support for climate change policies. In fact, negative emotions backfired on effortful behavior—making people significantly less likely to take action for the environment compared to a neutral control condition (shown as the dotted line on the figure below).

Doom and gloom messaging was highly effective for stimulating climate change information sharing, like posting on the Internet or social media, where negativity reigns! This kind of messaging not only induces helplessness and discourages individual-level action; but it also motivate people to spread the word —leading more people to do even less. Bad news bears!

I’m still trying to navigate the waters of communicating about gardening, nature, food systems, globalization, environmental issues, ecosystems, food sovereignty and more in ways that feel hopeful without glossing over the very real issues associated with all of these issues. It’s a tough needle to thread, but one thing’s for sure and two things for certain: I’m going to continue heavily curating my feed moving forward and doing my darndest to police my own thoughts and posts lest they reek of climate doomerism.

Until next week, cleansing my feed and touching grass,

Amy

P.S.: Please share any of your favorite accounts who you believe are educating without fear-mongering! I’ll do a roundup soon of my own personal favorites and include some of yours as well.

Our Plastic-Surgery Nightmare [The New Yorker] — I always love a Jia Tolentino piece, and this is no exception. Tolentino argues that Instagram-driven beauty standards, increasingly invasive "undetectable" surgery, and the toxic looksmaxxing movement (I learned about Clavicular against my will) are turning faces into commodities optimized for algorithms rather than markers of human identity.

All the Cool Kids are Birding [The Atlantic] — Young people are reviving a hobby typically reserved for older bird nerds, driven by pandemic-era craving for low-screen outdoor activity, and by apps like Merlin that use Shazam-style sound ID to make bird identification accessible without old-guard gatekeeping. My husband and I always say birding is like Pokemon but for real life!

How Ina Garten, Everyone’s Favorite TV Chef, Learned to Trust Her Appetite [CULTURED] — A fun profile on everyone’s favorite queen of conviviality, the Barefoot Contessa herself. She’s a cross-generational icon with a preternatural ability to inspire everyone to “suck the marrow out of life.”

Delicious, Yes, But Golden Mushrooms Threaten Ecosystems [Civil Eats] Golden oyster mushrooms have been cultivated for culinary purposes for 20+ years, but have escaped into the wild across 25+ US states. This could reduce a forest’s biodiversity, affecting not only other fungi but also species that rely on native mushrooms and the rotting logs they colonize.

The Lab Rat of Fruits [Offrange] — Turns out, scientists are as obsessed with tomatoes as home gardeners are! The combination of a small genome, fast life cycle, natural mutations, and ease of crossbreeding makes them an ideal model species for studying fruit ripening, nutrition, and plant biology broadly.

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“It is simply amazing how quickly attitudes improve when people finally understand bats as they really are—sophisticated, beautiful, even cute, quite aside from their crucial roles as primary predators of insects, pollinators of flowers, and dispersers of seeds.”
-Merlin Tuttle

First, a mea culpa! We were thrust back into the stone ages last weekend when we lost Internet for 3+ days due to a major storm in NY/NJ that…evidently affected the Internet in a small town in Central MA. I’m no technical whiz but that seems like a not ideal situation! So as a make good, I wanted to offer this issue (the second of the month, technically) as free to all and then resume the regular cadence of publishing. Thanks!

Last night while walking our son upstairs to bed — far too late, as summer bedtimes have become — I saw a bat whiz by my head and into our daughter’s room. Now, I love bats and think they’re adorable and have spent far too much time watching baby bats get swaddled and fed bananas, but one in the house is too close for comfort. So naturally I shrieked for my husband, grabbed my son, ran him back downstairs, and stuck both kids in the bathroom and closed the door.

Ever the calm, cool, and collected one (I have hardly any of those bones in my own body, unfortunately), Kristian grabbed a container and ventured into our daughter’s room to try to remove the bat. He was able to do so with ease, and we all got to take a close look at our nocturnal intruder before he set it outside on a branch which allowed it to crawl out and fly off. What an unexpectedly dramatic bedtime for everyone!

However, my mom brain started to immediately run through everything I know about bats and bat encounters and that dreaded word — rabies. I wasn’t sure how long it had been in the house, or if it had been around while we were sleeping the previous night. I remembered one of our cats had been meowing very peculiarly all afternoon on Thursday, but I attributed it to her simply getting old and senile. Perhaps it had come down the chimney that day?

After some cursory Google searching, I started to spiral and decided to call poison control for more guidance. They then gave me the number of the state epidemiologist’s office, and the on-call epidemiologist gave me a call back shortly thereafter. I explained the situation, that I wasn’t sure how long the bat had been in the house, and that I was worried about possible rabies exposure. She was wonderful in talking me off a ledge (we’re ok!) and also educated me a bit on bats — things that even as someone who is pretty down with nature-y things I was unaware of. And naturally I got to researching a bit more on my own so I thought I’d pass some bat info around, given how crucial they are in our ecosystems but also how they can be a bit misunderstood and can wrack our nerves when we find them in unexpected places — like hanging on a wall tapestry in your kid’s room!

Fun Facts About Bats:

• Bats are mammals that belong to the order Chiroptera (from the Greek cheir – “hand” and pteron - “wing”).

• There are 1,500+ species of bats worldwide, with 40 species in the United States alone!

• Bats make up one-fifth of all mammalian species worldwide and are found on every continent except Antarctica, contributing to ecosystem health by suppressing pest insects, pollinating plants, and spreading seeds.

• Scientists estimate that insect-eating bats may save U.S. agriculture billions of dollars annually in pest control — making them among the most economically valuable wildlife on earth.

• A single little brown bat can eat thousands of mosquitoes and other insects in a single night.

• While bats locate insects via echolocation, some have excellent eyesight as well, contrary to popular belief.

• Bats can live more than 30 years and can fly at speeds of 60 miles per hour (or more!)

• Most bats only have one pup at a time and bat mothers can find their babies among thousands or millions of other bats by their unique voices and scents.

• Over 300 species of fruit depend on bats for pollination. Bats help spread seeds for nuts, figs and cacao — the main ingredient in chocolate. Without bats, we also wouldn’t have plants like agave or the saguaro cactus.

• Bat droppings, called guano, are one of the richest fertilizers, and guano used to be Texas’s largest mineral export before oil.

• About 80 medicines come from plants that rely on bats for their survival.

Some Not-So-Fun Facts About Bats:

• Some of North America’s once most abundant bats have lost more than 90% of their populations.

• More than half of the bat species in the United States are in severe decline or listed as endangered.

• Bats have few natural predators — disease is one of the biggest threats. White-nose syndrome (WNS) is a fungal disease killing hibernating bats in North America.

• Bat disease hysteria has endangered bats, and given them a bad rap!

• Thousands of bats are killed by wind turbines every year.

If you happen to have bats nesting in your attic or barn and it’s problematic, there are companies who specialize in removal and making it so bats can exit but not return. However, these actions should be undertaken only during May and from mid-August to mid-October. This timeframe can differ depending on where in the country you live, but in between those periods young bats could be blocked inside, and without access to food, would be left for dead. In fact, it’s illegal in many locales to remove bats during the maternity season, so make sure to do your due diligence before blocking entrances up!

What can you do to help bats?

• Put up a bat house — research has shown that bat houses providing warm roost microclimates can dramatically reduce energy costs for bats recovering from white-nose syndrome, improving survival and reproduction. Bat Conservation International has free plans and placement guides at batcon.org.

• Skip the pesticides — Many bats eat insects, and some pollinate plants, so limiting these chemicals gives bats healthy foods to eat.

• Bat-proof thoughtfully and at the right time — Bats can fit through openings as small as 1/2” , and you can bat-proof your home using caulk, chimney caps, and draft guards. But! This should only be done outside of maternity season (generally May through August) when pups may be present and unable to fly out.

• Plant native plants. Native plants attract native insects that provide food for bats. Specifically, they love to eat moths so finding moth host plants will be especially beneficial to them.

• Turn off lights at night — Bats rely on darkness to survive and light pollution can disrupt their natural behaviors. Just like birds! And many insects!

• Leave deads trees AKA snags if you’re able to — Bats can roost in dead trees, so if a dead tree does not pose a safety concern, consider leaving it as a potential bat roost.

Until next week, ordering a bat house and putting it up ASAP,

Amy

I Wanted an Ecologically Responsible Garden. It Was Harder Than I Thought. [New York Times] — A beautifully written piece highlighting how quickly native plants can make a meaningful contribution to the local ecosystem. The author visits the home of Doug Tallamy, a professor of entomology and a leading expert advocating for gardening with native plants, and learns that through his own native gardening has attracted 1,370 moth species and 62 species of breeding birds on his land. Incredible!

Floral Arraignment: Plant evidence can be a powerful crime-solving tool. So why is it used so rarely? [Distillations Magazine] — Pollen and plant fragments have cracked murder cases, kidnappings, and other unsolvable crimes for a century thanks to forensic ecology and environmental archaeologists.

He’s Big, Loud and Unruly. Meet Neil, Australia’s Celebrity Seal [New York Times] — I love Neil so much it hurts. Neil is a2,204-pound southern elephant seal who is making his twice-a-year pilgrimage to Tasmania’s southeast coast, his birthplace, and wreaking havoc in an adorable fashion everywhere he goes. However, the public is warned to love him from a distance to keep him and everyone safe.

What to Know About the Diarrhea Outbreak Tied to Fresh Produce [TIME] Wow, I really hoped I would never have to write the word “diarrhea” in this newsletter, but alas I’ve written it twice now! And since it’s all over the news, with the unfortunate adjective of “explosive” often being tied to it, I figured it was important enough to address here. There’s nothing conclusive yet, but from what I’ve read it sounds like cooking kills the parasite, and to avoid bagged lettuce, along with a list of other foods that have been associated with past outbreaks.

EPA’s Pesticide Approvals Prompt Fears of PFAS Contamination on Farms [Civil Eats] — Nathan Donley, Center for Biological Diversity, referred to this as, “the single biggest mass approval of pesticides I’ve ever seen.” Coincidental timing, given that the Supreme Court granted immunity to pesticide companies! MAHA, right guys?!

Wind and Truth (Book 5 of The Stormlight Archive) by Brandon Sanderson —I will finish this book if it’s the last thing I do! It’s spectacular, but as the last book in the series where each book is 1,200 pages, I’m ready for a new world. Next up will be either Red Rising or Dungeon Crawler Carl, I think!

What to Eat Now: The Indispensable Guide to Good Food, How to Find It, and Why It Matters by Marion Nestle —This book is downright fantastic but be warned that it is LONG. I’m listening to the audiobook on walks/runs/doing chores and it’s ~25 hours long but I keep jotting down notes as it’s incredibly thought provoking and infuriating in equal measure.

Two absolutely spectacular playlists that I’ve been enjoying this summer: one, aptly named because every song I’ve been able to sing nearly all the words to despite not hearing for 20+ years and the other just a hysterical and oddly descriptive name loaded with bops galore!

What’s in season mid-July in the Northeast:

Blueberries (peak!), blackberries, raspberries, first tomatoes, sweet corn (just arriving), cucumbers, zucchini and summer squash (abundant — brace yourself), green beans, peppers, eggplant, fresh garlic, beets, Swiss chard, kale, collard greens, cabbage, cauliflower, scallions/green onions, chives, kohlrabi, new potatoes, purslane, lamb's quarters, fresh herbs (basil especially — peak!), mushrooms, watercress, and the first melons if you're lucky.

How to use your goodies:

1. Sally’s Blueberry Pie. To avoid the parasite, of course! That’s going to be my justification for baking all sorts of fruit pies and tarts this summer, TBH.

2. Fresh Tomato, Basil and Prosciutto Pasta. I’m a sucker for a simple pasta dish featuring fresh produce in the summer. No oven needed.

3. Creamy Corn Pasta. If ever I’m able to save some ears of corn from my kids who gobble up corn on the cob any chance they get, it’s immediately going into this pasta.

4. Blueberry Cake. I’ve made this one before and it was a hit, and endlessly riff-able as she provides loads of other fruit swaps.

5. Angel Hair Pasta. There’s something about angel hair pasta and summer because I swear I never eat it at any other time of the year?

I'm writing from zone 6a in Central Massachusetts, so if you're in a warmer zone you're probably a few weeks ahead of me, and if you're further north you might be a few weeks behind. Adjust accordingly!

• Keep watering consistently, but you can ease up slightly. Keep an eye on moisture levels —we got 2.5” of rain in one day last week so the soil was saturated for days following that.

• Harvest, harvest, harvest. We’ve gotta be out checking daily (I need to take my own advice here!). A zucchini that’s perfect on Monday is a baseball bat by Wednesday in this heat. Green beans, cucumbers, and the first tomatoes all want to be picked regularly to keep the plants producing. Leaving overripe produce on the vine signals the plant to stop putting energy into new fruit so pick, pick, pick!

• Tomato check-in. If you’re seeing the first blush of color on your tomatoes, resist the urge to pick them too early. Let them ripen on the vine as long as possible — flavor develops in those final days. Which is why grocery store tomatoes taste like sadness and despair, because they’re picked when they’re not ripe yet. If you’re worried about critters getting them first, picking at first blush and ripening on the counter is fine, but avoid picking while they’re hard and green.

• Cucumber and squash patrol continues. Early morning checks are your friend as they’re moving slowly in my experience. You’ll catch more cucumber beetles, squash bugs, and vine borers in the cooler morning hours. Check the base of squash stems for frass (sawdust-like material) which signals a borer is already inside. Also if you see squash bug eggs on the leaves, smoosh them or drop them into soapy water.

• Garlic harvest time. I think this will be my week to harvest garlic —a good rule of thumb is to harvest when roughly half the leaves have browned. Don’t wait too long or the wrappers start to deteriorate (been there!). Once pulled, cure in a shaded, warm, well-ventilated spot for three to four weeks before storage. Do not wash them — just brush off loose dirt and let them be.

• Succession sow beans this weekend. Water them in well and keep newly sown seeds consistently moist until germination, which in this heat that means checking daily.

• Weed while the weeding is good. Every weed we pull now is one less weed to be a problem when it goes to seed!

• Pinch your basil constantly. Pinch flower buds off ruthlessly and harvest big handfuls weekly as we want the plant to keep producing foliage and not seeds. It’s pesto time, baby!

• Plant fall crops this month. Mid-July is the time to start thinking about what goes in for fall — broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, and Brussels sprouts all want to be started from seed now (or transplanted in early August) for a fall harvest. Count back from your first frost date (mid-October for zone 6a, I use October 17th) and work backward from the days-to-maturity on your seed packet. Truthfully, I’m not sure if I’ll get a fall planting in the ground but who knows!

Black raspberries are starting to fade and blueberries are getting picked by the handful, much to our children’s delight. I’ve barely had any! Kale, Swiss chard, and lettuce are still producing beautifully, as are the collard greens and cabbages. Lots of lettuce has bolted, but enough has been hanging in there despite the heat that we’re enjoying weekly salads. There are a couple of volunteer sunflowers that are well over 10’ tall, while the ones that I planted and painstakingly protected from chipmunks are inching into 5’ territory. We’ve started plucking some early cherry tomatoes off the vine, and I’m working to stay on top of tying them to the wooden stakes for support as they grow furiously in the summer heat. I think my squash are already a lost cause, and potentially my pumpkins, due to squash vine borer damage. Ugh!

Other goings-on:

• Our two roosters have been sparring more than normal, which I’m watching closely and may have to rehome one of them if it continues to be a problem — it can stress the hens out, and I worry about one of the roosters getting injured! They’re both docile and sweet with humans though, so I am hoping they sort things out.

• Baby bunnies have been coming and going from the garden but seem to not be inflicting much damage. They’ll be too big to fit through the fence openings soon so I’m inclined to let it ride.

• One of the chickens caught a toad recently and was triumphantly parading it around the yard until Kristian heroically rescued and relocated it. The toad, not the hen!

• We’ve been seeing loads of monarch butterflies laying eggs all over the milkweed that has self-seeded prodigiously all over the property. Including smack dab in the middle of the driveway through a tiny crack.

This section periodically comes and goes, because sometimes our meals are so boring and uninspired that I think, “what’s the point in even sharing this!?” But then I think that sharing actual meals as a mom of young kids, trying to be mindful of the grocery bill, cut down on food waste, cook at home a lot, and add some variety while keeping it fairly simple might be helpful. Or IDK maybe I am overthinking the whole thing, but here we go!

Monday: Pesto pasta + broiled shrimp

Tuesday: Baked salmon + cornbread (Reese’s request)

Wednesday: Chicken caesar salads (Zach’s request)

Thursday: Lots of frozen goodies from H-Mart, like potstickers and steamed pork buns

Friday: veggie pizza with bell peppers, onions, and Swiss chard

Saturday: kale chicken caesar salad

Sunday: dinner on the road, will be driving home from a beach day trip

Goodies made this week:

• bagels

• sandwich bread

• Caesar dressing

• Ranch dressing for dipping veggies

• My new favorite TikTok comfort creator who also now has a Substack, ! Every time one of Kacy’s posts pops up in my feed it’s like a calming breath of fresh air. I was so glad to read her intro Substack post and learn more about the woman behind the account. I know lots of folks aren’t on TikTok but good news, she also has an Instagram account! Go follow for feel-good vibes and good food and drink content.

• Chef Moe on TikTok. A chef of 20+ years, he is using his expertise about the art and science of cooking to help his viewers cook good meals, on a budget, with his specialty being $5 or $10 meals. He’s positive, encouraging, and empowering, and I love seeing someone put so much good out into the world and using their platform to help others. He has 2M followers on TikTok but somehow only 17K on Instagram, so spread the good word!

• These sewing patterns for cute bags! has these patterns available currently and they’re too cute I can’t even handle them. Sewing is a burgeoning hobby of mine, and I’m currently in the “too many saved ideas, not enough things actually made” phase of the hobby, and mentally I have convinced myself I can only sew in the winter since it’s an indoor hobby. Which makes no sense, I know! But I am absolutely dying over these bags and want to make one for my daughter, who is a budding ornithologist and birdwatching enthusiast.

“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret to getting started is breaking your overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.”
—Mark Twain

This is the first summer with both kids fully nap-free, and I greatly underestimated what that would do to my garden time. For years, naptime was my sacred window — an hour or two of guaranteed quiet where I could actually get things done outside. That window is long gone now, and it’s taken me most of June to admit that the garden I built during the napping years doesn’t fit the life I’m living anymore.

Three years ago, in 2023, I expanded the garden 3x. At the time I had two kids who both still napped, seemingly endless hours, and big dreams. It was glorious, but it was also, in hindsight, a garden built for a version of my life that was always going to be temporary.

In so many ways this feels like my best gardening year ever — I nailed seed starting, hardening off, planting, timing, composting, amending the soil. But every time I go outside for 30 minutes, I start panicking about how much there is to do, and my brain decides that if I can’t get it all perfectly weeded and composted right this second, there’s no point trying at all. That’s crazy talk, I know. So today I turned to my husband and asked for help — because lately the garden has tipped from happy place to something that falls on the back burner and gets neglected at the expense of everything else.

I’ve written before about good enough gardening and my gardening prioritization system for triaging tasks. Both were about changing how I work within the garden. What I’ve had to finally come to terms with this year is that the garden itself is the problem, like the actual size. Bigger isn’t always better! It clicked into place recently while volunteering with the Master Gardeners: a garden my size typically has a rotating crew of 5-6 people. No wonder I’ve been burnt out trying to run it solo.

So here’s what I’m changing for next year — written down mostly so Future Amy has no excuse to forget:

1. Perennials around the inside perimeter, mulched and left alone.
Rhubarb, chives, asparagus, comfrey — the same fruit tree guild logic I already use elsewhere, just extended to the fence line. My keyhole beds make that area annoying to weed, it’s too big to fully plant every year, and bare soil in a huge bed is a weed invitation with a bow on it. Perennials solve this once and then mostly take care of themselves.

2. The right side becomes the sprawl zone.
Pumpkins and squash get their own dedicated real estate instead of me tucking them in around everything else like a vegetable game of Tetris. I already preach “if it fits, it sits” companion planting — turns out sprawling vines don’t really fit anywhere except their own territory.

3. Fewer beds, more sitting space.
This one is counterintuitive, because I have always operated under the principle of, “If some garden is good, more is better!” The garden is tucked behind the garage, so if life is busy I can go days without setting foot back there. A place to actually sit might mean I spend more low-pressure time out there simply existing in the space, not just working it. Sometimes the fix for “I don’t have time to garden” isn’t more efficient gardening. It’s making the garden a place you want to be even when you’re not accomplishing anything.

I love this hobby, and most days it’s still pure calm. But lately it’s been tipping toward stress more often than not, and I don’t think that’s a me problem so much as a “this garden has outgrown what one person with two small kids can reasonably maintain” problem. Good enough gardening was never just about lowering my standards for individual tasks, and this year it also means lowering my standards for how much garden I need in the first place.

So this season I’ll be making extensive notes on exactly what’s working, what mistakes I have to avoid like the plague next year, and chipping away at the weeds while trying to not get overwhelmed. It’s just a silly garden!

Until next weekend, cutting it short so I can go for a swim,

Amy

An Outsize Affection for the Biggest of Leaves [New York Times] — Margaret Roach (one of my favorites!) walks through favorites like the umbrella plant, ostrich ferns, native pokeweed, and a big-leaf magnolia.

War‑induced fertilizer shortage may be reducing US soil and water pollution [The Conversation] — Decades of farmers over-applying nitrogen and phosphorus have built up large legacy nutrient reserves in soil (especially in the Midwest and livestock-heavy regions), meaning many farms can cut fertilizer use substantially with little yield loss — while also reducing runoff that drives algae blooms and dead zones.

North Carolina Wants You to Stop Saying “Sweet Potato” [Offrange] — Explores how this tiny town became the center of America's sweetpotato industry (North Carolina grows nearly two-thirds of the US supply), and the local campaign to spell it "sweetpotato" as one word since it's botanically unrelated to a potato.

If I Had to Learn How to Cook Again, I’d Start Here [Hot Dish With Sohla by ] Sohla breaks down the cooking skills she'd build first if starting from scratch, framed around the idea that real cooking confidence is "earned intuition" built from understanding why techniques work, not from collecting recipes. I have and love her cookbook Start Here!

Five hosting habits I nicked from my friends [Convivial by ] — Next houseguest we have I’ll offer a bath to in our oversized clawfoot tub!

That’s it for free subscribers this week! Spilling the beans below on a secret project we’ve been working on at the house since last fall —and some big landscaping decisions that I’ll be making moving forward.

Read more

“It is possible to make people content with their servitude, you can provide them with bread and circuses, and you can provide them with endless amounts of distraction and propaganda” - Aldous Huxley

…but what happens when the bread and circuses become too expensive? We won’t get into the World Cup ticket prices, concert price gouging, or other exploitative pricing today but we will be discussing groceries.

You may notice some changes in the order of things this week! I’m playing around with the format —kind of like the feminine urge to redecorate random rooms in your home and move furniture around at inopportune times. Is it necessary? No, but it sure is fun! Also I’ve always tried to send this newsletter on Fridays, but with the kids home all day every day this summer, my writing hours are currently relegated to the margins of the day and evenings. Thanks for bearing with me! :)

Earlier this year, I boldly exclaimed that I was going to get a handle on our grocery spending this year —to read that full piece (as I won’t rehash the whole thing) if you missed it, or are a new subscriber (welcome!) you can see it here:

For reference, here are the 2025 numbers that gave me pause, and prompted this whole experiment in the first place.

2025 Grocery Spending, Month by Month

January 2025 — $2,155.45
February 2025 — $849.46
March 2025 — $1,078.61
April 2025 — $908.19
May 2025 — $1,296.20
June 2025 — $1,219.76
July 2025 — $858.02
August 2025 — $1,416.59
September 2025 — $1,078.71
October 2025 — $1,225.49
November 2025 — $771.28
December 2025 — $607.52

Total for the year: $13,465.28
Average per month: $1,122.11

Thus far this year, I’ve been dutifully meal planning (ugh), reducing food waste, cooking at home (well, I’ve always done this so it’s nothing new), buying mostly store brand whenever possible, and avoiding expensive grocery stores. I’ve been much more mindful than I usually am, and though we did have some extra food expenses the past couple months (we’ve been having some work done at the house and I like to put snacks and drinks out for the crew when they’re here), I feel fairly confident that I’ve reduced our average monthly groceries from 2025. However, to keep myself honest and write this part out honestly and from the heart, I haven’t pulled the exact numbers yet, but will do so right this instant.

2026 Grocery Spending, Month by Month

January 2026 — $794.82
February 2026 — $1,058.30
March 2026 — $578.68
April 2026 — $992.73
May 2026 — $1,047.14
June 2026 — $642.23

Total so far (Jan–Jun): $5,113.90
Average per month: $852.32

Meaning that in terms of my lofty 2026 goal was to cut our 2025 average in half, from $1,100 to $550 —and while I’m not there yet, if we go January - June from both years:

• 2025 (Jan–Jun) average: $1,251.28/month

• 2026 (Jan–Jun) average: $852.32/month

31.9% reduction, I’ll take that!

So not nearly as dramatic as I was expecting, and I know the Costco purchased snacks/drinks for workers play into it, but also that’s what a grocery budget is sometimes. Like if you’re having relatives for a visit, or hosting a lot of seasonal entertaining at your home. It is what it is!

And like I always say with everything from budgets to workouts to habits, what gets measured gets managed. I would always rather have the numbers, even if they’re not pretty, than be flying blind or sticking my head in the sand like an ostrich. When you know better, you can do better.

While researching today’s newsletter, I wanted to check the internet’s pulse on how we’re all feeling about the cost of groceries. A collective vibe check, if you will. I took to Threads (while lamenting the days of searching Twitter before it was taken over and made completely unusable IMHO!), with the search term being simply “groceries” and here is but a small smattering of posts that just about sum things up.

I remember being broke-as-a-joke after graduating from college in 2009, and spending roughly $40 a week on groceries at Trader Joe’s while living in Boston, and shortly thereafter in San Francisco. I was eating like a queen! I even had room in the budget for good ol’ 2 buck Chuck (IYKYK). In fact, I did some digital forensics just now and was able to unearth my old spreadsheet that I used for budgeting from 2012-2015, before my husband and I switched to joint finances after getting married in 2014. Then, we began using YNAB (You Need a Budget) and have never looked back!

Now, I manually tracked all of my expenses when I used the spreadsheet tracker, and I was incredibly diligent about that because I wasn’t making much money and was living in Brooklyn during that time period. I also lived with my husband, but the way we sorted our finances then was I covered groceries, we split the rent, and he handled all of our other expenses (phone, internet, utilities, dates, etc) and it typically all came out in the wash or he would spend more because he made more than I did.

So here’s what two adults actually spent on groceries each month, pulled directly from real receipts (from NYC stores such as Key Food, Trader Joe’s, Pathmark, Park Slope Food Co-Op, and general grocery line items):

• 2012: We spent $127/month.

• 2013: $266/month

• 2014: $230/month

• 2015: $459/month

It was such a long time ago that I can’t recall what caused the 2014 to 2015 jump, but I want to say we started predominantly shopping at our local bougie food co-op, and were buying more specialty items, and became a bit less budget conscious.

What I can tell you, because I went down a whole rabbit hole instead of catching up with Love Island like I should be doing (hehe), is how those numbers actually stack up against the real, official cost-of-groceries data for those exact same years. I found the USDA’s archived “Cost of Food” reports — these come out monthly, going back decades, and they publish an exact figure for what two adults (ages 19–50) “should” be spending on a moderate, not-trying-particularly-hard budget. So I pulled the June figure for each year we have data for, to match against our June-to-June spreadsheet.

I wanted to know why grocery bills have gotten so brutal more recently, beyond the vague gesture at “inflation” we’re all doing at the self-checkout while quietly wondering if we should consider going vegan again (just me?), reevaluating our life choices (why didn’t I go to law school or start a tech company and sell it!!), and wondering if it actually is cheaper to cook at home anymore (host a BBQ in this economy)? Turns out there are three distinct things happening, and they get blamed interchangeably even though they’re not the same thing:

1. Plain old inflation. Food-at-home prices rose 31% between January 2020 and February 2026 alone. And groceries specifically have outpaced general inflation — one analysis found grocery prices rose 23.5% from late 2019 to early 2024, compared to an 18% increase for everything else. Your grocery bill is rising faster than your gas bill, your rent, your everything-else bill.

Some of the other charts in this Wolfstreet article had me like:

• Chicken: boneless chicken breast averaged $4.14 per pound, up 35% from January 2020

• Eggs: Grade A large eggs soared 368% from $1.33/dozen in mid-2020 to a peak of $6.23 in March 2025, then plunged 60% from that peak to $2.50/dozen in February 2026 — but still 71% higher than mid-2020.

• Dairy: the dairy CPI is 21% higher than January 2020.

• Coffee: ground roast coffee averaged $9.46/pound, up 30.5% year-over-year and 127% since January 2020.

• Beef: Ground beef averaged $6.74 per pound, up nearly 20% from a year earlier and 73% from January 2020. Uncooked steak spiked 3.6% in February alone, to $12.74 per pound — up 17% year-over-year and 66% since January 2020.

If any of those items are in your weekly grocery cart, you’re no stranger to the “holy shit, this is HOW MUCH NOW?!” It’s not your imagination, and you’re not crazy!

Climate change shoulders a lot of the blame here, alongside geopolitical conflicts and ongoing supply chain disruptions. Fruits and vegetables are especially vulnerable to drought, since they depend so heavily on irrigation and steady weather, while beef prices reflect drought's slower-moving, longer-term toll on cattle herds.

The USDA forecasts fresh vegetable prices to rise 7.8 percent in 2026, while fresh fruit prices are also expected to climb.

2. Shrinkflation. About a third of common grocery items have shrunk in size since the pandemic while charging you the same price, banking on the fact that nobody’s out here weighing their cereal box. Except me! Because I’m a crazy lady with a chip on her shoulder about Big Corporations Trying To Pull One Over On The Little Guy (I’m workshopping here ok!). Some real albeit random examples:

• Family-size Wheat Thins: 16 oz → 14 oz (28 fewer crackers per box)

• Cottonelle Mega Rolls: 340 sheets → 312 sheets

• Gatorade bottles: 32 oz → 28 oz

• Chobani Flips: 5.3 oz → 4.5 oz (this one I especially noticed because I worked at Chobani when the team developed Chobani Flips and I used to crush those things —when I’ve purchased them, I just knew they were smaller!)

Some more photo examples can be found in this Buzzfeed article —wow what a throwback to the early 2010s —and in this piece from BusinessInsider.

THIS SHOULD PISS YOU OFF! All caps because it pisses ME off!

3. “Greedflation.” Economists are not in agreement on this, but that’s good because I am in agreement on this, and I’m not a professional economist so I don’t feel the need to judiciously hedge my bets here. Corporate profits have been argued to have driven over half of inflation in some recent quarters, and grocery chains specifically have kept a slightly bigger cut of every sale than they used to, even as manufacturer profit margins mostly settled back down post-pandemic. However, other economists who looked at markup data across thousands of companies found basically no correlation between which industries raised prices fastest and which grew their margins the most — meaning the increases line up more with “costs went up for everyone” than “this particular company got greedier.”

According to this piece from Northeastern’s College of Social Sciences and Humanities:

There’s a concept in economics called “customer markets.” It holds that firms don’t like to raise prices because consumers get mad, and so if they’re in a situation where they feel they can raise prices, they’ll take advantage of it if they’ve had increases that have accumulated over a long time and their profit margins have been eroded. Then they’ll use the excuse to make up for past cost increases and also sometimes for expected future cost increases as well.

So the customer markets phenomena can lead to even bigger increases in prices than you might expect.

Except replace “orc mischief” with “greedflation!”

It’s not just in your head. “Groceries feel more expensive” and “groceries are objectively more expensive” are both true at the same time. When your staple grocery items are rising at objectively insane rates, it becomes yet another item added to the mental load. If grocery shopping used to be a mindless activity for you, and something you found truly enjoyable, it now is likely fraught with stress. It is for me, and I am fortunate enough to not have to truly worry about the cost of groceries. I don’t like to overspend because I’m frugal, but that’s different from being unable to spend. And food insecurity is a real and scary problem for many in this country right now.

In response to the truly appalling grocery price increases the past few years, a new report finds that instead of merely switched to lower cost brands, consumers are trading down on retailers themselves and seeking out lower-priced stores. The report also notes that, “Consumers aren’t just spending less — they’re spending more deliberately. Value-seeking behavior spans all income levels and demographics.”

So the next time you’re standing in the cereal aisle wondering if you’re taking crazy pills, because a box that used to last the week now disappears by Thursday, you’re not imagining it. The box got smaller but the damn price never does.

Until next week, brushing up on Depression era meals (obsessed with this YouTube account Depression Cooking, may she rest in peace) because the news has me kind of freaked out over food prices in the near future,

Amy

P.S.: Get a free month of YNAB here! I’ve put quite a few friends onto this and they’ve all said that it has transformed their relationship with money. As a former broke-bitch who had to track every single penny and used to overdraw her bank account fresh out of college, I will budget until the day I die honestly lol

It’s Time to Worry About Ticks in the City [New York Times] — Turns out that we've gotten so good at building green spaces in cities, and that's invited the wildlife (deer, mice, birds) that bring ticks right along with them. We're hitting peak nymph season right now too, which is the part that should actually worry you, since nymphs are tiny, easy to miss, and the ones most likely to cause Lyme disease. Tuck your pants into your socks, even on a "quick walk to the park" — yes, even in the city. Also I’ve got a whole nerdy newsletter on ticks!

Why Pollinators Belong at the Center of Biodiversity Policy [Earth.org] —This piece makes the argument that pollinators aren't a cute side issue, they're load-bearing infrastructure for food security, biodiversity, and sustainable development. We hear a lot about pollinators regarding food production, as ~ 3/4 of the world’s leading food crops depend on animal pollination, but pollinators also can sustain the hedgerows, wildflower borders, wetlands and riparian vegetation that stabilize soils and reduce contaminated runoff.

Do You Know Where the Compost Goes? [Offrange] — Here’s a great albeit slightly deflating read on municipal composting! The gist is that a lot of curbside "compost" in places like NYC is actually getting turned into bio-gas and burned for energy rather than becoming soil. Bummer! Although more people than ever are composting, all of that waste isn’t necessarily reaching farmers, and ultimately, we need to make sure we reduce food waste overall.

We’re quietly teaching our kids that everything is more important than them [ on Substack] — This essay about parents (all of us, let's be honest!) scrolling while our kids talk to us absolutely wrecked me. Also applies to family members, friends, grandparents, everyone who interacts with children.

Pamela Anderson, Martha Stewart, and Ron Finley on What They Wear to Garden [ on Substack] —Such a fun piece, and I found a lot of new folks to follow from this! Glad they didn’t ask me, as I’m usually in various states of garden gremlin attire and nothing nearly so chic as some people on here.

That’s it for free subscribers this week! Paid subscribers get the rest: what’s in season now and what to make, this week’s harvest highlights, Master Gardener notes, and everything else. Once a month, I unlock the whole thing for everyone, but if you don’t want to wait, you know what to do!

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potter about/around:

"To spend time in a pleasant, relaxed way, often doing small jobs in your house."
— Cambridge Learner's Dictionary

Paid subscribers, it’s time for the June Garden Tasks PDF! Grab it at the link further down the newsletter to download. Lots to do all around, but also lots of wonderful goodies coming out of the garden right now. Enjoy!

It all started with the simple act of sitting outside to have a cup of coffee right here:

This patio off our dining room door is a lovely, secluded spot flanked by a couple humongous rhododendrons. Some plants that, since we moved in 2020, have remained untouched and slowly encroached roughly two feet into this sitting area. So since they had finished blooming, I consulted this piece from the American Rhododendron Society about methods/timing for pruning just to double check, and started methodically cutting away some of the offending branches to open the area back up. Typically I like to let our rhodies simply do their thing, but unfortunately these needed some snipping.

I wish I took a before and after, but alas I had my phone still plugged in upstairs (as part of my near constant efforts to reclaim my dang brain). But I put all the clippings on top of a rather large tarp to bring to the compost pile and it was a sizable mound of plant material. Now, I feel it important to clarify here that I didn’t actually bring them to the compost despite my good intentions, and my loving husband did that task for me the following day. The area feels so much better and open, and I even moved the chairs around a bit since the area above gets drenched from lack of gutters on that part of the house.

Then, buffered by some early success, I realized the chickens needed some water and food, so I set off on my merry way to do that. Except while out there, I noticed that one of the chicken waterers was still broken, despite my earlier attempts to fix it. So I lugged it over to the hose by the garage, disassembled it, cleaned every single piece, and put it back together again. Ugh, still broken! I threw up a quick Instagram story asking folks to weigh in on their chicken waterer solutions, and ended up getting some fabulous responses. But while out by the garage, I figured I would start on one of my action items from our weekly family meeting — clean out the garage.

An hour later, I had a pile of junk to bring to the recycling center, had unearthed a giant rainbow umbrella that I thought was broken, found our bluetooth speaker that we’ve been looking for for months, and brought all of my wooden tomato stakes out from storage.

“Well, I’ve got the tomato stakes, might as well quickly pop out and do that before we head out of town for a few days!”

Meanwhile, I had yet to have a single sip of coffee and it was currently languishing untouched by the sitting area next to the newly-pruned rhododendrons.

Oh, well! I could microwave it when I was finished with my tasks. So I set off to stake the tomatoes (nearly done, mental note to purchase some more because I’m 10 short) when what did I discover? A bunny has somehow either taken up residence or found a weakness in the garden fence. Another mental note: patch up the likely entrance.

While faffing about the garden checking on my plants, I noticed a male oriole chittering away, I think in his attempt to alert me, jelly lady, that I needed to hop to it and fill it back up. And alas, the oriole feeder was devoid of jelly —so I hustled back inside to grab some jelly and fill it up. I couldn’t possibly risk disappointing our resident flock of orioles and irreparably damaging my street cred with the local birds. What if they never come back!? My heart couldn’t handle that kind of guilt.

What had I been doing? Oh yeah, the garden, but that could wait. More pressing was cleaning the garage, because the only thing I love more than a checklist is the dopamine hit of being able to check items off a checklist.

So I moved some items up to the second floor, rearranged some other items, listed some more on Facebook Marketplace (the bane of my existence), ShopVac’d the entire garage, and started researching DIY plans for shelving to better organize the space.

Now, let the record show that while I have never been diagnosed with ADHD, I’ve had countless people in my life tell me that they know for certain I have it, including my husband. Because this video below is basically how every moment of every day feels for me, but I can’t tell if it’s actually ADHD or just general scatterbrained mental load from motherhood. Jury is still out!

When I finally came back inside —all of this happened in the margins of the morning when my husband was hanging with our kids before he had to hop online for work —I reheated my coffee, and brought 4 other mugs that I found scattered around the yard, garden, car, and garage. They’d been missing for a while, and I used my old “I put them somewhere for safekeeping” line which both my husband I know to mean “I left them somewhere while I got distracted doing something and they’ll eventually make their way back inside.” Because they always do!

Until next week, writing to-do lists in various notebooks, pieces of paper, and phone apps in a desperate attempt to get a handle on things,

Amy

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“The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.” – Charles Darwin

As someone who considers themselves to be borderline chronically online (but working on it), I feel as though I was relatively offline this week —only to be smacked in the face with news upon sitting down at my computer and scrolling my feeds today. A resurgence of screwworm? Hunter Biden doing some grade A shitposting? 450,000 Americans have been affected by the tick-borne disease alpha-gal?

At least once a day I fantasize about a return to early 2000s technology. Like, remember the ability to log off? Or put up an away message? I would give anything to hear the sweet, sweet sound of the AOL log-in tone, and to feel the bliss of a brain unencumbered with the 24/7 horrors of the world. As someone born in 1986, I have distinct memories of Before Internet Times and, dear reader, they were good. Much like the lyrics “don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you got' ‘til it’s gone.”

But whenever I think or write about this line of thinking, I fear coming off like I’m whining about everything-was-better-back-in-the-good-old-days — and that’s not exactly what I think, but in some ways it is! Last week, we talked about wanting a 90s summer, but more than merely a summer, I want that year round. And it may be a privileged take, but I miss not knowing everything that’s going on in every corner of the world, but at the same time feel as though if I don’t keep tabs on The News, then I’ll get canceled for not being informed.

However, what good is chronically being informed if we never channel our frustration and rage into action? We’ve all (myself included) gotten too complacent with shouting (typing) our disbelief/anger/takes into the ether of the Internet, all the while forgetting that if we’re not a part of the solution, then we’re a part of the problem.

And while I don’t have all the answers, nor would I ever pretend to, I know that doing small, local actions helps me feel better about my place in the world. I took a volunteer position on my town’s Agricultural Commission, to meet more like-minded members in the community, and to be involved in a minor way in small-town politics that directly affects my day-to-day-life. Right now, we’re working with the Board of Health to develop animal keeping regulations in our town, and it feels good to speak up, have a say in the matter, and put forth suggestions that are being incorporated into the final document.

For instance, the BOH floated the idea of an outright ban on roosters, to which I countered with the issue of food security and local food systems —plenty of folks keep roosters and raise their own meat birds, and at a time when grocery prices are through the roof, I felt it wrong to prohibit people (on appropriate sized lots, of course) from doing so.

Additionally embarking on the year-long Master Gardener certification has also scratched the itch of making a small difference and getting involved at a community level. My favorite sites to volunteer at so far have been farms that grow food for local food pantries, and teaching gardens at local schools. It’s a way to share my skills and knowledge with a broader audience, instead of merely posting memes and short-form videos that are at the mercy of billionaires’ algorithms. These days, posting on social media feels pointless —no one sees anything unless you post something as rage bait. And energetically, I hate doing that! It feels icky! But that’s why you see so much rage-inducing content these days, because it’s truly one of the only things that “does numbers.”

Also helping out in my kids’ schools feels incredibly gratifying, and something I’m so happy to be able to do. They’ll probably reach an age where it’s embarrassing to see their mom in school, but for now I relish the opportunity to get to know their teachers, classmates, and school administrators.

So when things feel uncertain, scary (meteor exploding in Massachusetts and shaking our house!?), or downright maddening, I try to bring my attention back to things in my circle of control (rather than my circle of concern):

Everything we worry about lives in one of three circles. The outermost is our Circle of Concern, or things that affect us but that we have zero control over. This includes such things as weather, the economy, traffic, wars, natural disasters, and the overall news.

Then the middle ring is our Circle of Influence, or things we can’t control directly but can affect through our actions. Our relationships, our reputation, our home environment, and the like.

And at the center is our Circle of Control, or the only things we can actually, truly control. What we say, our behaviors and actions, our decisions, how we spend our money, our attitude, what we eat. Although don’t get me started on hyper-palatable ultra-processed food highjacking our brain’s pleasure centers, and agricultural subsidies given to the food industry to economically incentivize the production of said food! That’s a topic best left for a future newsletter.

But what we eat is something I think (and write) about a lot. Growing your own food, eating locally, cooking from scratch, and preserving the harvest might all seem insignificant given what we’re up against, but they all feel to me like acts of control in a world that feels like it’s spiraling out of control daily.

So on days when the news feels like it’s all too much to bear, like this god-forsaken screw worm nightmare, I check myself and ask which circle is this in? Most of the time, the honest answer is that it’s in my circle of concern but not my circle of control, much to my chagrin. So I try to redirect that energy toward something tangible and within my circle of control, which these days is the garden, parenting our kids, my attitude, the books I read, what I write, town meetings, my volunteer hours, the chickens, and the birds at the feeders.

Until next week, tending my silly little garden to avoid falling into a pit of existential despair,

Amy

Things are moving and grooving out in the garden finally! My tomato plants need staking, and I’ve been harvesting lettuce multiple times a week to encourage it to keep producing. I’m curious to see how the various heat-tolerant/bolt-resistant varieties I planted this year fare in our New England summers —though June has started off pleasantly mild so far. Mid-80s, albeit with less rain that I would like for this time of year. We’re in a month-long mandatory outdoor watering ban in my town currently, and though our yard’s irrigation system is from our well, not town water, I have resisted turning it on yet for fear of ~*the optics*~. So instead I’ve been surreptitiously hand-watering early in the morning.

Last week I got all of my beans, corn, squash, and cucumbers sown, and I’m eagerly waiting on them all to emerge. Peas are flowering, radishes are popping out of the garden daily, and I randomly found an entire area of self-seeded bok choy in a pathway. Not wanting the plants’ energy to have been spent in vain, I dug them all up and tucked them around the garden so they didn’t get trampled on.

Other goings-on:

• We had an indigo bunting at our bird feeder, and I squealed with delight. Now if only we could entice a Scarlett tanager to visit…

• The peonies are blooming and I cannot get enough of them. Also our tea roses are blooming and the scent is downright heavenly.

• Oodles of praying mantis babies are patrolling the veggie garden.

• We have fruit on most of our fruit trees, which is very exciting!

• I keep spotting a Northern Flicker hanging around the garden and yard, so hopefully it’s eating loads of grubs.

• We discovered a caterpillar munching on some native violets, and discovered that it is going to turn into a fritillary butterfly! I had no idea they were host plants, but I let them grow wherever they pop up.

• The wisteria covering our deck’s pergola is blooming, and I’m trying to figure out if it’s the native variety of the invasive one. If anyone can tell for certain, please let me know?! Though it pretty much sticks to this area so I’m not too concerned about it spreading…and I just love it so much.

I'm writing from zone 6a in Central Massachusetts, so if you're in a warmer zone you're probably a few weeks ahead of me, and if you're further north you might be a few weeks behind. Adjust accordingly!

• Water, water, water. Newly transplanted tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, cucumbers, and squash all need consistent moisture to establish, and on hot days things can dry out very quickly. Water deeply in the morning so plants have moisture reserves going into the heat of the day. Wilting by midday is normal and doesn't always mean they need more water. From NC Cooperative Extension: Wilting occurs when a plant’s cells lose turgor pressure—that internal water pressure that keeps stems and leaves firm. As temperatures rise, plants lose water through their leaves faster than they can absorb it from the soil. The result? Drooping leaves and stems.

• Cucumbers, melons, and squash…final call to get them in. If they’re not in the ground yet, this weekend is your last comfortable window before the heat really sets in. I picked up a backup tray of cucumbers just in case my seeds don’t come up, as a summer without cucumbers is too sad to imagine! Both direct sow and transplant work fine at this point. Warm soil is ideal for these crops, and they’ll germinate and establish quickly in this weather.

• Game over for cool-season crops. With temps pushing into the mid-80s this week, any remaining spinach, arugula, and non-heat-tolerant lettuce is bolting or about to bolt whether you like it or not. My mizuna patch is bolting daily, and the chickens are enjoying loads of leafy green treats. Harvest everything that’s left right now, or take your chances and leave some of them and see how they fare. I love to use super gallon sized bags to store harvested greens —just pick and store without washing, and they can keep for ~2 weeks in the fridge.

• Succession sow beans. Bush beans and pole beans absolutely love this weather, so if you got your first round in a few weeks ago, sow another round now for a continuous harvest through summer. In fact, right after I hit send on this, I’m marching out to the garden to do just this very thing!

• Thin your carrots. If yours are up and looking feathery, this is the week to get in there and thin to 2-3 inches apart. This is one of those incredibly tedious tasks that kind of sucks to do in the moment, but is worth it when you’re harvesting big ol’ proper carrots instead of the little donkers I sometimes grow when I don’t heed my own advice.

• Direct sow flowers. Keep ‘em coming! I keep tossing down sunflowers, zinnias, cosmos, and nasturtiums to ensure I have loads of my favorites in the garden. Also because I’m at war with the chipmunks and so far, they’re winning the sunflower battle but I hope to outlast them with my tenacity.

• Mulch, mulch, baby! A 2-3 inch layer of mulch around your plants is the difference between watering once a day and watering twice. It keeps soil moisture in, soil temperature regulated, and weeds suppressed. If you have wood chips, compost, or straw, get to mulching. This year, I finally picked up a leaf mulcher to use in the garden, so I’ll be putting that to use. I used to use the mulched clippings from our lawn mower that my husband would drop in a corner of the yard, but this year we’ve been mowing and dropping clippings in place to try to keep the lawn a little healthier. So far, so good!

• Watch for pests starting to emerge. Aphids, squash bugs, and cucumber beetles are all getting active now. I like to get out first thing in the morning when the cucumber beetles are still slow and sleepy and knock them into a cup of water, then bring the haul over to the chickens for snackies.

What’s in season early June in the Northeast: Strawberries, blueberries, snap peas, snow peas, shell peas, pea shoots, garlic scapes, green onions, chives, arugula, lettuce, spinach, kale, collard greens, mustard greens, Swiss chard, beets, radishes, kohlrabi, bok choy, cabbage, rhubarb, sorrel, purslane, lamb’s quarters, fava beans, fresh herbs (mint, parsley, cilantro, oregano, tarragon, thyme, rosemary, sage), mushrooms, sprouts, watercress, currants. PHEW! It’s a produce bonanza.

How to use your goodies:

1. Fresh blueberry muffins. If you see early local blueberries at your market this week, buy them immediately and make Smitten Kitchen's blueberry muffins! The difference between a muffin made with local peak-season blueberries and one made with those giant watery supermarket ones is like night and day. Speaking of, I need to throw some bird netting over ours because otherwise they’ll devour them before we get any.

2. Stir-fried bok choy. My friend texted me that she had a surplus of bok choy from her CSA box and was wondering what to do with it. The options are numerous, but this Easy Stir-Fried Bok Choy Recipe from The Forked Spoon is a simply and unfussy classic that lets the vegetable shine!

3. Cacio e Pepe with Peas and Favas. As a self-proclaimed bean queen, I have to admit that I have never grown fava beans despite loving them very much! Next time I spot them at the farmers market I know what I’m making though.

4. Grilled Garlic Scapes. And easy-yet-impressive side dish to toss on the grill when you’re cooking. I love growing hardneck garlic because it’s a one plant, two harvests kinda deal. Cha-ching!

5. Watermelon mojitos. Queen Ina recommends this for a batch cocktail, so if you’re in the mood to imbibe and find yourself flush with mint in the garden, throw a little party and wow them with your homegrown garnish.

• Love Island + my walking pad = match made in heaven. Listen, last summer I swore I wouldn’t watch Love Island USA again, but I’m a big dirty hypocrite and started watching this season. But on one condition: I can only watch while on my walking pad! That way, even if the show goes south and I start hate watching it, at least I’m getting my steps in. It’s also nice because with the kids home for the summer, I have been missing my daily walks, and I haven’t found a way to squeeze them in yet. I go to the gym before they wake up in the morning, but a little leisurely walk for some head-clearing has been missing! Now, instead of clearing my head I get to fill it with reality TV garbage!

• Summer kick-off amusement park visit. Oh my gosh, what a freaking blast! The last time I was at an amusement park was when I went to Disneyland with a boyfriend in college who I discovered non-ironically wore a fannypack. I had to actively deconstruct my crush/feelings that entire day, because College Amy simply couldn’t handle the 2006 social suicide that I would be committing if I continued to date him. Needless to say, a visit to Canobie Lake Park with my adorable children and loving husband was a huge success! Except for Zach was mildly traumatized by our ride on the log flume, which I mistakenly thought was much milder than it actually was. But now he can engage in the time-honored tradition of developing a sense of humor born of childhood traumatic experiences!

Dopamine Kids: A Science-Based Plan to Rewire Your Child’s Brain and Take Back Your Family in the Age of Screens and Ultraprocessed Foods by Michaeleen Doucleff

Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans by Michaeleen Doucleff

What to Eat Now: The Indispensable Guide to Good Food, How to Find It, and Why It Matters by Marion Nestle

Pigeons navigate using magnetic sensors in their livers, say researchers [phys.org]

The USDA’s Local Food Program Transformed Regional Food Systems. Now It’s Gone. [Civil Eats]

The Secret to the Best Pie Dough Isn’t an Ingredient. It’s You. [NYT]

Mangrove forests are healing after decades of human destruction [BBC]

Soil Restoration Is the Fastest Way to Cool the Planet [Earth.org]

“No stories were viral. No celebrity was trending. The world was still big. The country was still vast. You could just be a little person, with your own little life and your own little thoughts. You didn’t have to have an opinion, and nobody cared if you did or did not. You could be alone on purpose, even in a crowd.” - Chuck Klosterman, "The Nineties"

Next week, my daughter finishes up school for the year and my son will be finished the following week. So I’m staring down the barrel of a full summer at home with two young kids, no childcare (SAHM life, which I truly love and am grateful for the time), and minimal camp. They’ll each do two weeks of half-day nature camp which they adore, and I’m going to try my best to make the most of those hours but I know I’ll blink and they’ll be back home.

I started getting a little emotional last week while trying to fall asleep one night, thanks to an ill-advised 5pm at-home latte. Reese turned 6 recently, and it’s true what they say about the days are long, but the years are short. She has 12 more summers under our roof, and I want to make them as magical for her (and Zach, who will be 4 in August) as I possibly can. So naturally, I’ve been thinking a lot of my own childhood summers and how much I truly loved them. However, I can’t tell if it’s one of those cases of romanticizing the past and looking at things through rose-colored glasses, or if life today for kids and grown-ups alike is so incredibly fraught that I’m yearning for the simplicity of my childhood.

I’m also reading two separate parenting books right now from the same author (see reading section below!), which has caused this all to feel very top of mind lately. Last summer, I started things off with a 30 day screentime detox for the kids which I thought was going to be horrible, but ended up being just what we all needed to reset our brains, emotions, and expectations of what summer would entail. We’re in a better place this year so I don’t think I’ll need to be quite so draconian, but they know I mean business now.

Nor do I want to overly schedule our days, trying to entertain them during every waking moment, and ensuring that every day is filled with novelty. Rather, I think boredom is good for kids and leads to boundless creativity. And experts agree! The Child Mind Institute piece titled “The Benefits of Boredom” explains:

Helping your children view boredom as an opportunity to do something will benefit both of you. They’ll try new activities, develop better frustration tolerance, learn how to take initiative and entertain themselves, acquire planning strategies and problem-solving skills, build perseverance, increase confidence and get to know themselves better. Plus, you’ll hear fewer complaints and have more time to yourself. The next time your child says, “I’m bored,” respond with, “That’s great! I can’t wait to see what you’ll do!”

In fact, I made this “boredom buster” PDF to print out for Reese over the winter — sometimes it helps them to see options. Including it here and you can upload and make it your own using Canva:

Boredom Buster Worksheet

5.63MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

But I know that it can be uncomfortable to parent like this in the age of social media where, if you follow any parenting or motherhood accounts, it seems as if everyone else is doing things better than you are. Activity kits, various arts and crafts stations, daily stimulating outings, endless educational opportunities…it feels like if you’re not doing the most then your kids will suffer and you’re a bad parent.

I’m trying to run things through the lens of WWCD (What Would Cindy Do), and channel my own mom’s style of parenting me during the 90s. She passed away in 2011 so unfortunately I can’t seek out her guidance on the subject, which is really shitty (sorry, can’t sugar coat it!). She was a stay at home mom until I was around 12 years old, but did lots of volunteer work and had some side hustles of her own. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, apparently!

But I know that her advice to me was usually to read a book or go play outside, both of which are so deeply ingrained in me from those formative years. I made my own fun, followed my interests, and developed a deep appreciation of quiet time to myself. What a gift to have been given at a young age, honestly. She would always be right there with a delicious snack, homemade meals, fresh lemonade or iced tea, sliced up fruit, but I don’t remember relying on her to be my be all and end all of summer entertainment.

My best memories of summer are, in no particular order:

• swimming in our pool

• riding my bike/rollerblading around the driveway

• pogo-stick, stilts, Skip-it for outdoor toys (again, my only child is showing here!)

• playing catch or soccer or batting practice with my parents

• mini golf

• hanging out in my mom’s office while she worked on her mail-order milk paint business / running errands to buy business supplies

• swimming in local lakes

• climbing trees

• setting up a lemonade stand with freshly baked cookies

• picking berries and food from the garden

• playdates with friends

• going to the driving range with my dad

• making friendship bracelets with gimp and embroidery floss

• playing man-hunt at night in my yard with friends (still scary tbh!!)

• visiting beaches along the coast of New England

• weekly trips to the town library to spin the wheel for reading prizes

• fishing trips

• hikes in the woods

• playing basketball

• playing tennis (which was usually me hitting a ball with a racket against a wall lol)

• summer camp X1000 —honestly the best part of every summer bar none (and once Zach is old enough for full day camp, I want to find one for both of them for a few weeks each summer)

None of these involved ~*the hottest items to buy for your kids this summer!!*~ and they were all incredibly normal, relatively low cost, and didn’t require overly intensive parenting.

Parents in the 90s had, and I’m making assumptions here, no concept of inadequacy because they were not bombarded with thousands of strangers to compare their lives to. Sure, there were magazines and TV shows, but the act of consuming content like that instead of scrolling and watching must have had a dampening effect on it all. A magazine article giving tips for activities to do with your young kids feels aspirational and inspiring —you can clip them out, save them in a binder, and look at them when you need a dose of rainy day inspiration. A steady stream of, “You’re not enough, you’re not doing enough, you should buy this, you should bring your kids here, etc” is death by a thousand cuts for moms. And dads, but IMHO we moms internalize things more than guys do.

This piece from ScaryMommy encapsulates a lot of my thoughts on the reason why moms had it easier in the 90s and why I’m aspiring to have a 90s mom summer:

I blame social media brain rot.

My mom didn’t have social media or the internet at her fingertips to A) waste her time and B) make her feel bad about herself. She had friends, and she had an actual touch-grass policy that was just a natural thing to do. She cooked meals because she had to feed us and that was the only option, and she didn’t worry about what anyone thought about it.

She didn’t have a choice to skip a work meeting or attend a PTA meeting over Zoom, so she did what she could and was satisfied by that. She had fun with us because she wanted to, not because she was trying to chase some influencer lifestyle. She kept up with our home because she wasn’t battling 800 ideas on the best way to clean your floors and wasn’t receiving Amazon packages in the mail every day of must-have seasonal glassware that she had no room for in her cabinets.

The ‘90s moms just lived their lives. Without all of the conveniences we have, like ordering groceries while in bed or texting our friends instead of walking to their house.

So with June right around the corner, I’m trying my best to embrace the 90s style of parenting, both for my own brain and for the benefit of my kids. And the beauty of this? Perfection was never the goal back then, so if I “fall short” then that’s fine!

Below in the “reading” section I mention the two books I’m reading currently, but if this sounds like your cup of tea, here are some other books I’ve read over the years that might be enjoyable:

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt (bookshop.org, Amazon)

Free-Range Kids: How Parents and Teachers Can Let Go and Let Grow by Lenore Skenazy (bookshop.org, Amazon)

Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv (bookshop.org, Amazon)

Balanced and Barefoot: How Unrestricted Outdoor Play Makes for Strong, Confident, and Capable Children by Angela Hanscom (bookshop.org, Amazon)

But I’m Bored!: Discover the Power of Independent Play to Raise Confident, Resilient Kids by Lizzie Assa Short (bookshop.org, Amazon)

Until next week, debating getting a landline phone for ultimate 90s vibes,

Amy

Below for paid subscribers: this week in the garden, what's in season at your farmers market or in your CSA box right now, my strawberry rhubarb crisp recipe, and the usual assortment of things I'm making, eating, reading, and loving!

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“There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colors are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again.” 
― Elizabeth Lawrence

Despite what the tradwives of social media might lead you to believe, gardening with kids isn’t all sunshine and rainbows and childhood magic. I mean, it definitely can be —I have so many photos on my phone of our kids at various ages and stages enjoying the garden and they make my heart want to burst whenever I look at them. Now, depending on what age kids you have, they can range anywhere from incredible helpful to downright destructive-yet-adorable. But gardening with kids can be done, and you can actually have fun doing it! I promise.

More on the nitty gritty specifics on how I prioritize garden tasks, because today will be all about the actual how the heck I actually garden with kids:

Now, on to kids. Those adorable loin gremlins whom we adore oh-so-much but who have an uncanny ability to siphon your time, energy, and on some days, your will to live!

You might not be as productive as you would be without them — for instance, I yearn for the days of being able to knock out a garden project in 8+ hours working with my husband. And since our kids are at the age where no one naps anymore but they’ll occasionally play nicely together in another part of the yard, we can get some bigger projects done. But it’s a rarity.

I know some people who have let their gardens fall by the wayside due to lack of time from sports and traveling and general parental stressors, but I firmly believe that you can garden in a way that is additive to your family’s life, not merely something else that’s on your plate that you have to deal with. That begins with acceptance: your garden will likely not ever look like the fancy gardens you see on social media. And that’s ok! My own garden is usually riddled with weeds come August, but also we harvest hundreds of pounds of food from it all season long, and derive endless enjoyment from being in there as a family.

So while I can appreciate a perfectly tended, weeded, lush garden, I also wouldn’t trade these chaotic years for the world. Because if I do my job right, I know that I’m instilling in our kids a deep love of nature, the importance of a healthy ecosystem where birds and bugs alike flit about the garden, an appreciation of where their food comes from, and the value of hard work.

Not to get too hippy dippy here, but some of my fondest memories growing up are of hours spent gardening with my parents, visiting our local nursery, climbing trees, picking berries and vegetables, and traipsing around our property looking for bugs and flowers and garter snakes.

In fact, I have one distinct memory of setting up my own little oasis underneath an old forsythia bush and befriending a mole that I found. This also might be a good time to mention that I was an only child!

Adjust Your Expectations

If you had a flourishing, impeccable garden before kids and think it’ll be a return to business as usual, then think again. Unless you have lots of help in the form of grandparents, babysitters, nannies, and the like, then you just won’t have as many hours to devote to the garden when they’re young without neglecting other areas of your life. Could I spend more time in the garden? When ours were really young, we would get a couple naps each weekend and I tried to take advantage of them during the height of garden season, but sometimes you’re just exhausted and need to rot on the couch! And that’s ok! There’s a reason why most of the folks in my Master Gardener program are older folks, and it’s because they are mostly retired with lots of time on their hands to enjoy the hobby of gardening. I don’t mean that in a negative way, but I’m a realist.

I’ve tried very hard to shift my mentality from executing on grandiose projects to just…being outside together. And kicking some cans down the road for when we have more time. Though I know when I do have more free time, I’ll deeply long for these hectic days.

And if you have big plans of gardening alongside your little cherubs and teaching them to commune with nature and tend the earth, realize that some days it very well may play out exactly like that. But other times, they may trample on your freshly broadforked beds with the soil fluffed just so, while you grimace and beg them to, fortheloveofallthingsholy, please stay on the pathways!

Give Them Their Own Space

One thing that has been transformational to my gardening life with kids: a mud kitchen. My husband built this in 2023 when our kids were almost-1 and almost-3, and it has gotten so much use from kids of all ages — all the way up to twelve. It’s also a great year-round outdoor toy. Snow pies, anyone?

It’s moved around to different areas —when they were much younger, it was inside the garden fence so I could watch them much more closely, but now it’s just outside. They know the plants they’re allowed to pick to “make soup” with, and it’s a fun way for them to learn the names of various plants. I can just hear my son’s sweet little voice asking if I want some “vio-wet and yah-ro soup” aka violet and yarrow soup. My heart!

I’ve gotten all of the various items either for free from our local recycling center, or dirt cheap from the Goodwill Bins. We have a hose that connects to make the faucet fully functional, but I’ve seen clever tricks where people use old detergent dispensers as a way to let the kids play with water.

Along with the mud kitchen, I’ve let them have a dedicated digging patch —their very own corner where they can dig to their heart’s content without mom freaking out. Good for getting mud for said mud kitchen, but also for “planting stuff” like leaves, seeds, sticks, etc. They also have their own area in the garden itself where they actually direct sow whatever seeds I give them, and take great joy in having a job to do in their part of the garden. They take turns (kind of) watering, checking on the plants, harvesting, and mulching.

…And Their Own Tools!

Because it’s bad enough that I get distracted and leave all of my garden tools lying around the yard (sorry, Kristian!). I certainly don’t need two small humans following suit. And no, I don’t mean those junky plastic tools that will break immediately — actual sturdy tools that they can use. We’ve had this set for 3 years and they’ve stood the test of time with our two mini gardeners:

Additionally, they each have their own pair of kid-sized garden gloves, and their own small watering cans. A watering can is your secret weapon! If you’re trying to do something and they’re getting frustrated because they want to help, but they’re at the age where their help might be exactly helpful, then fill up a watering can and set them to watering something that is hardy. Maybe not freshly planted seeds or new transplants, but an established shrub? Some weeds? They’ll feel helpful and you can have a couple minutes to finish the task at hand.

You’ll also want to have them in good mucking around clothes and/or shoes. One thing you’ve got to be completely comfortable with is that they will get downright filthy. But that’s the point, and what makes being outside so much fun as a kid! And according to Happiest Baby:

Outdoor muddy play provides sensory-rich experiences that encourage curiosity, creativity, and joy—qualities shown to buffer stress and support resilience. And group play in natural spaces—like puddle jumping or building mud pies—encourages cooperation, empathy, and problem-solving skills.

Plus, the little boost you get from dirt play may be supported on a microscopic level too. Soil contains Mycobacterium vaccae, a naturally occurring bacteria shown to have antidepressant-like effects, boosting serotonin and reducing anxiety in mice models. Though human studies haven’t yet been published, researchers believe exposure to these mood-boosting microbes during childhood may support better mental health.

Age-by-Age Task Guide

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“I read recipes the same way I read science fiction. I get to the end and say to myself "well, that's not going to happen”― Rita Rudner

A few months ago I made the case for boring food — giving yourself permission to cook the same 20-ish meals on rotation instead of chasing every new recipe the algorithm throws at you — and it very clearly struck a chord! I wanted to share some comments from that piece that got me thinking more about the topic, especially when it comes to meal planning.

left a comment that I've been thinking about ever since:

Then there was this from :

And finally this one from which basically describes my entire meal planning ethos:

I’ve tried meal planning every which way til’ Sunday over the years —digitally, pen and paper, Evernote (RIP, well it still exists but sucks now IMHO), Notion database, Pinterest boards, binders, you name it, I’ve tried it. There’s no shortage of Substacks, blogs, books, downloadable PDFs, tips and tricks, hacks, proprietary systems, guides, yadda yadda yadda to help us wrestle with the beast that is dinner preparation. But in an attempt to demystify and simplify the task, and save us from cognitive overload, all of these resources and methods only further cause us to flounder.

Almost every meal planning framework I've ever seen begins with recipes — you find something you want to make, you build a shopping list, you go buy the things. This feels logical, but it’s how you end up with a half-used can of coconut milk at the back of the fridge that you end up throwing away, or a crusty lime that's seen better days.

It seems to me that we all want some semblance of control over something that, according to my latest Google search, everyone seems to hate but feel like they have to do anyways. I’ve always thought that if I just had the perfect system, then it would make meal planning a total cinch. All the while forgetting that I think meal planning inherently sucks because it feels too rigid —especially when you add young kids to the mix.

Appetites fluctuate, schedules change from season to season, and even the best laid plans can fall by the wayside when it comes down to executing said plans. If you’re footloose and fancy free, perhaps single and without children, then you may adore meal planning! But for some reason, adding kids to the mix has made cooking, a hobby that I previously used to adore, seem like a downright slog some days.

But once I freed myself from the shackles of what I felt like I should be cooking according to the latest trends, newsletters, and cookbooks, I’ve settled in to something much more liberating, much better for my wallet, and something better for the planet because it reduces food waste. I've already written about how I manage the fridge, freezer, and pantry to avoid waste — that piece lives here if you need it!

Before I write a single meal down, I do a lap of the kitchen. What needs to be eaten ASAP from the fridge or else it’s destined for the compost heap? What leftovers need to be eaten or frozen by tomorrow? Any languishing vegetables? After the fridge I check out the chest freezer, followed by the pantry. Once I have a good mental picture of what’s going on, then I will loosely plan the week.

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"A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule." - Michael Pollan

Paid subscribers, it’s time for the May Garden tasks PDF! See below to download, and may the odds be ever in your favor —this is one wonderfully busy month.

If you search my phone for photos of bees, you’ll see hundreds of photos —here’s just a smattering:

So it might surprise you to learn that I, a bonafide bee lover (I would wear that on a hat if I had one), am not an advocate of No Mow May. Nay, I’m a downright critic of it! I was going to say adversary, but I’m not quite there. Or maybe I am?

No Mow May, for the uninitiated, is an initiative that started in the UK in 2019 by a group of environmentalists, and has since spread across the globe.

I know the people promoting it have their hearts completely in the right place, but I also think the practice itself is far too one-dimensional, lacks nuance, and in the end, causes more problems than it solves. I briefly got sucked into the marketing behind it when we first moved to our home (yay, pollinators, and boo lawn), but after learning more, I no longer partake in the practice.

So this week, while my husband fired up the lawn mower for the first time this year (well, tried to, but the battery was dead lol) I thought this would be a prime time to dive into the idea behind No Mow May, what the science says, and how you can have a lawn in a way that still supports your local ecosystem without letting it get a foot tall and having your neighbors complain.

The problem it’s trying to solve is real

The underlying concern behind No Mow May is legitimate and important. American lawns cover roughly 40 million acres (my brief history of lawns here), making it the single largest irrigated crop we grow as a nation. A conventional grass monoculture, mowed tight and doused in herbicides, provides essentially nothing for wildlife. For all intents and purposes, it’s an ecological barren wasteland. You want birds? You probably can’t have a perfect lawn.

The idea behind No Mow May — letting spring “weeds” like clover, dandelions, and violets bloom for a month to feed early-season pollinators when not much else is flowering — is well-intentioned. Early spring can be a lean time for bees coming out of hibernation, and if your lawn happens to have flowering plants in it, letting them bloom before you mow does provide some forage. That part is great!

And I’m definitely not trying to dunk on anyone who participates. I’m here to make the case that we can do better, and that “better” is actually easier than a month of shaggy grass and the social friction that comes with it…and the potential red carpet you’re rolling out for ticks.

What the science says

The entire No Mow May movement in the United States was built on a single study out of Appleton, Wisconsin, which found higher bee diversity and abundance in unmowed lawns compared to mowed parks. It got picked up by the New York Times, then municipalities across the country adopted it as policy. It became one of those things that just everyone knew was good for pollinators.

Then, in November 2022, that study was retracted. The journal pulled it entirely due to inconsistencies in data handling and reporting. The movement’s entire evidence base essentially evaporated overnight, but I’m not sure how widely publicized the retraction was. The information was out there, spreading like feathers in the wind, unable to ever be fully contained again.

Esther McGinnis, North Dakota State University Extension horticulturalist explains:

Admittedly, I had my doubts on No Mow May for other reasons. I frequently lecture on turfgrass management practices and was concerned that foregoing mowing for an entire month would damage lawns right before summer.

One important rule of thumb for growing healthy lawns is to never trim off more than 1/3 the height of your turfgrass at one time. For example, if you allow your lawn to grow 4.5 inches tall, the maximum length that can be removed at one time is 1.5 inches leaving a 3-inch tall lawn.

No Mow May violates this rule because lawns may grow 12 inches or more during the month. Trimming a 15-inch lawn down to 3 inches on June 1 shocks the turfgrass plants. Even worse, this stress is imposed right before summer and therefore, the lawn is less able to handle heat and drought.

Say what you will about lawns —many of us have them across America, and not everyone can get rid of them overnight. Participating in No Mow May can irreparably damage your lawn, making it a bear of a problem to fix. Because of that, some people may resort to using fertilizers, herbicides, and other products to boost the health of their lawn at the expense of the broader ecosystem. A bit of a “cut off your nose to spite your face” situation, if you ask me.

Even Bee City USA, one of the movement’s biggest institutional supporters, quietly acknowledged that not mowing in May “isn’t right for everyone or every region.”

The paid section covers the four specific problems I have with No Mow May — lawn damage, the pollinator irony, the invasive species problem, and the neighbor effect, plus the research-backed alternative I actually practice. Subscribe to keep reading.

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"The labor of women in the house, certainly, enables men to produce more wealth than they otherwise could; and in this way women are economic factors in society. But so are horses."
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics, 1898

Keep your eyes peeled next week for the May garden tasks PDF that will go out to paid subs. In the words of Sir Topham Hatt from Thomas the Tank Engine, it’ll help you stay on track and on time and avoid confusion and delay with happenings around the yard!

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Recently, I saw a quote from @ajoyfullifelived on Threads, and a subsequent quote share from that sparked something in me:

I haphazardly shared it to my Instagram story, adding my own color: “AMEN TO THIS like can we just not? Can we fucking NOT?! I just came in from gardening for 3 hours and there is nothing soft about it.”

And I finally started reading Yesteryear this week (sidenote —potential future one-off bookclub!?), so between those posts and the subject matter of the book, it’s a perfect maelstrom to finally dive into something I’ve wanted to write about for a while:

the rise of the tradwife aesthetic and the yearning for a ~soft life~

The “soft life” framing and the tradwife aesthetic are two sides of the same coin. Both flatten what is actually skilled, physical, demanding work into something decorative, something frilly, and something that is practically engineered in a boardroom to sell, sell, sell. And both erase the history of the women who did this work before any influencer or trend-piece writer decided it was a lifestyle.

Let me be clear before I go any further: I am not here to tell anyone how to live, what to value, or how to organize their household (as my dad always says, "people make choices!”). But I do want to talk about food skills — specifically canning, preserving, fermenting, baking from scratch — because they’ve become entangled in a cultural conversation that I think is doing them a disservice. While traditional methods like canning and fermenting are fading due to reliance on supermarkets and convenience, a growing movement is rediscovering these practices to reduce waste and connect with ancestral traditions that were born of necessity.

The Aesthetic vs. The Reality

The tradwife trend presents domestic skills like canning, sourdough baking, and food preservation as part of an aesthetic of intentional femininity and a return to a “soft life.” The imagery is careful and beautiful: glass jars catching afternoon light, a woman in an apron looking serenely at her homestead, bread rising in a linen-covered bowl, oodles of children running underfoot while she gracefully moves through her spotless, perfectly curated #sponcon kitchen.

But Marissa C. Rhodes, a history professor at Saint Leo University, writes that many tradwife social media influencers promote incorrect beliefs about the past:

Yet, the picture of the past that tradwife influencers paint is based on falsehoods. Their narratives emphasize archetypes imposed on 19th-century women by men rather than historical reality. Nowhere is that clearer than in the lives of the women of Lily Dale, N.Y. Lily Dale’s women used the Spiritualist town, founded in 1879, as a proving ground for their experiments with authority and activism. They were traditional wives and mothers but not the submissive, conservative figures romanticized by tradwives. Their stories demonstrate that the bucolic past nostalgically portrayed by tradwives was never the historical reality for women; women experienced real oppression and they sought self-actualization beyond prescribed gender roles out of pragmatic need not feminist indoctrination.

Though Tradwife influencers have romanticized an image of women devoted to the home, the reality is that throughout history, most women engaged in income-generating work — from managing estates to selling goods — out of economic necessity. Only a privileged minority of wealthy white women could afford to withdraw from the workforce starting in the late 18th century. Even then, however, contrary to the tradwife narrative, they did not live private lives of domestic bliss.

Women back in “the good ol’ days” certainly were not living soft lives, and any idea that they did is horribly misguided and, dare I say, probably due to heavily filtered and carefully cultivated conservative propaganda.

What Preservation Actually Was

Home food preservation was a necessity in the 19th and early 20th centuries, not a lifestyle choice. For most of human history before that, if you didn’t preserve the harvest, you didn’t eat in February. It was that simple.

The women doing this work were not doing it perfectly coiffed during golden hour with a glass of rosé. Women, mostly, preserved surplus peas, peaches, corn, and other produce throughout the years. Canning was extraordinarily common in the first half of the 20th century, and was considered simply part of the labor of keeping a household alive. It was grueling, hot, repetitive work done in summer kitchens in August heat, often with children underfoot and no air conditioning. Does anything about these women even remotely resemble the tradwife influencers all up in your Instagram feed? You think they’d wear $400 “handcrafted, timeless elegance” organic cotton dresses for a full day of harvesting and canning tomatoes?

Records make clear that while there was a social component and real artistry involved in food preservation, women preserved because it kept hunger at bay, or bolstered home economies, not because it was trending.

An 1854 issue of Godey's Lady's Book described food preservation this way:

THE various organic substances furnished by the animal and vegetable kingdoms, which constitute the food of man, are, from the nature of their chemical structure, liable to change and decay; they are also irregular in their supply; hence arises the necessity of storing up the abundance of one season to meet the deficiencies of another. The art of preserving food as much as possible in its original state is therefore of great importance; it has been improved by gradual steps, depending, in great measure, as in so many other cases, on chemical discovery and the diffusion of chemical knowledge among persons engaged in the useful arts; so that, at the present time, the deprivations suffered by our forefathers may be prevented; the commonest articles of food may be enjoyed at all seasons; and even the delicious fruits of our gardens may be made to contribute to our health and refreshment at a season when the trees which produced them are covered with snow.

There is nothing romantic or soft in that language. The necessity of storing up the abundance. This is survival writing.

Home preservation was further bolstered during both World Wars, when canning facilities were converted to wartime production and canned goods were reserved for the military. The government ran campaigns urging civilians to grow Victory Gardens and put up their own food. Not as an aesthetic, soft-life choice, but as a patriotic act of wartime necessity. Women canned because it was either that or going hungry.

This is the context that the tradwife aesthetic erases. When women bang the drum about a return to a soft life or embracing their feminine energy and then show themselves gardening and canning, there’s a cognitive disconnect. Those activities have never, in the history of humanity, been considered soft.

The Glamorization Problem

Once, a few years ago, a friend messaged me saying something to the effect of, “But aren’t you a tradwife?” To which I stated emphatically that I am in no way, shape, or form one. Rather, I’m a stay-at-home mom who just so happens to have some hobbies that have somehow become inextricably intertwined with tradwives and the conservative movement.

But I also make sourdough and keep chickens and make sauerkraut and have a huge garden and preserve nearly all of the tomatoes we eat during the year. So if you were to find that out, you’d be forgiven for assuming that I’m a “tradwife.” And that conflation is exactly the problem I want to push back on.

I am not criticizing anyone for canning, baking sourdough, preserving food, or finding those things meaningful and satisfying. I do some of those things and I find them deeply meaningful. The act of putting up food connects me to something ancient and real about how humans live in relation to seasons and abundance and scarcity. My own mother was a Home Economics teacher — and a staunch, badass, furniture-making, tractor-driving woman. I was raised with an appreciation for from-scratch cooking and knowing where our food comes from.

What I’m criticizing is the aestheticization. The way these skills have been wrapped in a particular set of cultural signals that obscure rather than illuminate their actual history and meaning. The framing that taking up “a traditional life” is liberation, even when the content, directly or indirectly, extols serving a husband or children as a woman’s highest possible calling.

But the women who preserved food for days on end in the 1800s and 1900s weren’t engaging in a soft hobby to reclaim their feminine energy. They were doing what had to be done, often without financial independence, often in very difficult circumstances, with no ability to opt out. The choice to find meaning in it and to build community around it was something admirable that emerged from the work itself — but they did not have the option of not doing it.

An article from UPenn’s Almanac titled, “The Rage of Tradwives” posits that the conditions that make the tradwife aesthetic appealing today are legitimate grievances:

Tradwives cite the lack of comprehensive maternity leave policies and exorbitant childcare prices in the U.S. as another reason to justify their lifestyle, the researchers say. But rage at this crisis of care is a core pillar of many feminist movements, they argue: feminists want all families to have access to affordable care, whether or not they live “traditional” lives.

“The material and economic conditions for parents in the U.S. are woefully inadequate,” Dean Banet-Weiser said. “From the tradwife perspective, this is fodder to advance their argument that women belong in the home, but for many feminist movements, it is a reason to insist on interdependencies rather than individualism, to push for federal maternity leave policies, universal pre-K, or childcare subsidies.”

The exhaustion is real. The desire to step off the treadmill is real. You don't want a soft life…you want off the hellish late-stage capitalist hamster wheel that provides a pittance of support to women while expecting them to take on the lion's share of household labor AND work 40 hours a week outside the home AND do it all with a smile on their faces.

The conservative movement swooped in and was able to capitalize on incredibly shitty societal conditions and mold the narrative like play-dough into something that they could spoonfeed to fed-up women. Instead of "you deserve better structural support," the message became "you were happier before you tried to have it all — go back to the kitchen." One of those solutions requires dismantling decades of systems in place to subjugate women.

The tradwife movement found a very profitable way to monetize women’s exhaustion and frustration. A societal crisis of care has been repackaged as a lifestyle brand rather than a call to demand better.

What I'm Actually Doing

I preserve food because I grow food, and I grow food because I believe it matters — ecologically, economically, and in terms of my family’s relationship to where our food comes from. It’s also what I grew up knowing. We always had a vegetable garden, and I grew up on the same road as a few farms. It’s the way life was! I want to can tomatoes this year because frankly, I need chest freezer space — my current lazy method of preservation is just tossing bags upon bags of tomatoes in and using them throughout the winter. I make my own bread because it’s cheaper and better than store-bought bread, and because with the advent of technology, I can throw ingredients in the bread machine and push a button. Sure, I still make sourdough, but our weekly loaves are automated, baby!

None of it requires a particular vision of gender roles or marriage or what women are for. I shared a reel recently that I was marked safe from the “crunchy to alt-right pipeline” — it seems insane that these hobbies have been so conflated with morality and have been deemed almost anti-feminist.

The food skills themselves (canning, fermenting, baking, preserving, growing) are not inherently political. They are not inherently feminist or anti-feminist. They are practical human skills that people have used across cultures and centuries to feed themselves and their families, and they belong to everyone. They do not require an organic cotton scalloped lace trim peasant dress and an artisan-crafted linen apron from France in the latest colorway. And the skills didn’t come wrapped in a ribbon of submissiveness and demurity.

Yesteryear is making me think hard about all of this. The meaning we attach to these skills changes depending on who has the power to choose them and who doesn’t. When preservation was a necessity, it was invisible labor. Now that it’s a choice, it’s an aesthetic.

Reclaiming the Skills Without a Side of Misogyny

I know there are loads of us out there — women (and the few guy readers, perhaps) who feel the pull of the old-timey hobbies like gardening, from-scratch cooking and baking, and food preservation, but who want to take part in these without all of the baggage that’s now associated with them.

• Learn to preserve food because abundance is real (for now) and waste is awful (reduce it!). And because there is nothing in the world quite like opening a jar of strawberry jam in January, no Handmaid’s Tale bonnet required.

• Learn to bake bread because it is cheaper and more delicious than store-bought and because there is something nourishing about feeding people food you made yourself. Not because it signals anything about your values or your marriage.

• Grow food because it connects you to the seasons, because it tastes better, and because it saves money. Not because it photographs well. Although damn, it really does.

The labor of women who did this work not as a choice but as a necessity, often under very difficult circumstances deserves to be honored rather than erroneously viewed with rose-colored glasses by the influencers laughing all the way to the bank.

Resources for learning food preservation

On my nerdy metaphorical reference shelf as I embark on a canning and food preservation journey this year, with the help of some mentors I’ve met through Master Gardener!

Safety:

National Center for Home Food Preservation — The single most authoritative free resource on the internet for current research-based recommendations for most methods of home food preservation. Run by the University of Georgia Cooperative Extension and funded by the USDA, every guideline here is rigorously tested. If you’re ever unsure about a recipe or method, check here first.

USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning — The foundational government document for home canning safety. Dense but thorough — covers water bath and pressure canning, processing times, altitude adjustments, and everything in between. Free to download.

Your State’s Cooperative Extension Service Every state has one, connected to the land-grant university system, and there you’ll find excellent, regionally specific guidance. Search “[your state here] cooperative extension food preservation” and you’ll find tested recipes and local resources. Massachusetts readers, this is the one I have saved!

Books

Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving — Widely considered the bible of home canning, this book has 400 innovative recipes for salsas, savory sauces, pickles, chutneys, relishes and, of course, jams, jellies and fruit spreads. You'll find comprehensive directions on safe canning and preserving methods plus lists of required equipment and utensils. (bookshop.org, Amazon)

So Easy to Preserve — The official companion to the NCHFP guidelines, written by food scientists. Less glamorous than Ball but deeply thorough. Covers canning, pickling, sweet spreads, freezing, and drying. Available through the link on their site —very old school, which I dig.

The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz. The most comprehensive guide to fermentation ever written — over 500 pages covering vegetables, fruits, grains, dairy, meat, miso, vinegar, alcohol, and more. Foreword by Michael Pollan. This is the book that made fermentation approachable for a whole generation of home preservers, and it holds up completely. For the science-curious and the deeply committed fermentation nerds (me!). (bookshop.org, Amazon)

Wild Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz. The more accessible, beginner-friendly companion to The Art of Fermentation. Start here if fermentation is new to you. (bookshop.org, Amazon)

Fermented Vegetables by Kirsten and Christopher Shockey. Practical, thorough, and beautifully photographed. Covers 72 vegetables with fermentation recipes ranging from simple krauts to complex kimchis and beyond. Excellent for expanding beyond basic sauerkraut. (bookshop.org, Amazon)

Further Tradwife Discourse That I Loved Very Much!

Embrace the Vibe With Me: Jam Girl Summer (You Don’t Have to Be a Tradwife to Want a Slow, Beautiful Life) by

The Rise and Fall of the Trad Wife by Sophie Elmhirst for The New Yorker

you don’t want to be a tradwife, you just want to escape capitalism by

“Tradwives” Is Just Influencer Speak for Patriarchal Subordination from DAME Magazine

The Runaway Tradwives of TikTok by Sarah Stankorb for ELLE

Until next week, covered in blisters and dirt from so much mulching, and yearning for a matriarchal society,

Amy

Based on Worcester, MA data

Sunrise: 5:40 am | Sunset: 7:47 pm | Day length: 14 hours, 7 minutes | Moon phase: Full Moon | Weeks until last frost: 2

I have 5 trays of cool weather plants that will be tucked into the garden on Sunday, after spending hopefully most of tomorrow finishing the garden beds. Between moving compost and mulch throughout last weekend and this week, I think I’ve made well over 75 wheelbarrow trips to the garden and all around the yard. At what point does one invest in a small tractor? Because holy moly, every muscle in my body is aching. Soft life, my ass!

All of the warmer weather plants are still tucked safely in the basement, getting a 50% diluted fish and seaweed fertilizer feed every time I water them. They smell horrible, but look fantastic.

Other goings-on:

• While cleaning up the garden, I dug up lots of black raspberry canes to post in our town’s Facebook page —I offloaded a dozen small plants to folks.

• Close call with a hawk recently, in that a hawk chased one of the chickens into the chicken run. It was traumatic for all parties involved, but everyone was safe and sound (minus some tail feathers). Thank goodness for roosters, who managed to get everyone else to safety.

• Garlic got some balanced organic granulated fertilizer scratched in around the plants before rain this week.

• I picked up an additional cattle panel and T posts for one more garden archway (how I make them here).

• Triumphant return of the Baltimore orioles, right on schedule. My daughter spotted one yesterday morning on the archway where we have our feeder, so I scampered outside to fill the cup with grape jelly. We’ve had a steady stream of them ever since. I purchased this feeder in May of 2021 when we first saw an oriole and it has held up great!

• While grilling dinner last night I heard the loveliest birdsong, and assumed it was a grey catbird —they’re so chirpy and have also been frequenting the jelly since I put it up. However much to my delight, it was a red-winged blackbird!

• Goldfinches have swarmed the yard —we routinely see 6+ males at the thistle feeder that I put up recently. We always have them flitting around, but now they’re here in droves.

• I’m building out some border gardens around the vegetable plot, and trying to use a mixture of existing perennials that I can divide from around the yard, and some new native plants. This is stretching my abilities as designing a flower garden is outside my wheelhouse, but it’s fun, and a nice challenge.

I’m nearing the end of the academic portion of the year, and my final is due next Friday (eek, I am procrastinating!), which means that I’m heading full bore into accruing my volunteer hours from May - end of October. These run the gamut from working in various gardens across Central/Eastern Massachusetts, continuing education, answering helpline questions, and more. This week, I had the opportunity to spend a few hours in a local teaching garden in Worcester, prepping beds, tending to the seedlings in the cold frame, and lots (lots) of weeding.

I wanted to share a resource that I learned about during a recent talk on native plants for biodiversity: Native Plant Trust’s 2026 plant list, available in both PDF and spreadsheet. I’ll be visiting Garden in the Woods later this month and am making plant selections now, and this list is hugely helpful! On the shortlist:

• Spotted Joe Pye weed (Eutrochium maculatum)

• New England aster (Symphyotrichum novae-angliae)

• Rough goldenrod (Solidago rugosa)

• Canada wild ginger (Asarum canadense)

• Common golden Alexanders (Zizia aurea)

• Cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis)

• Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica)

I'm writing from zone 6a in Central Massachusetts — if you're in a warmer zone you're probably a few weeks ahead of me, and if you're further north you might be a few weeks behind. Adjust accordingly, but the general rhythm applies!

• Watch for rain. We’ve got a soggy week ahead in Central MA — take advantage and get anything direct-sowable in the ground now while the soil is moist and workable. Carrots, radishes, spinach, arugula, peas, and lettuce are all still fair game and will germinate beautifully in this cool, wet weather. And weed well after the rain!

• Still hold your tomatoes indoors — we’re roughly 2ish weeks out from last frost (May 20 is my target date but depending on my schedule I might go earlier or later) and nighttime temps are still too unpredictable. Keep them under lights, pot up into bigger containers if needed.

• Hardening off: go time! If you have brassicas, lettuces, and kales under lights that are looking strong, this week’s mild temps are ideal for the hardening off process. Set them outside in a sheltered spot for a few hours a day, bring them in at night, and increase exposure gradually over 7 days. Rainy days count — just skip it if it’s truly stormy.

• Start cucumbers, melons, and summer squash indoors this week if you haven’t yet — these want to go in the ground about a week after last frost, so starting them now gets the timing just right. I direct sow these as well, but starting a round indoors gives you a reliable backup and a head start on the season.

• Sunflowers, zinnias, and cosmos — now or never for indoor starts. You have maybe one more week before it makes more sense to just direct sow these outside. If you’re starting indoors, do it this week. If you’re waiting to direct sow, mark your calendar for mid-May.

• Asparagus: final call. If you have an established bed, this is the tail end of peak harvest season. Check daily and harvest at 6-8 inches before the tips feather out. Once the weather warms consistently the season wraps up fast — let what’s left go to fern to feed the crowns for next year.

• Finish pulling mulch back from around trees/shrubs — if you haven’t pulled mulch back from fruit tree trunks yet, do it this week. Wet weather plus mulch against trunks is exactly the rot and pest situation you want to avoid. See: code red tree-mergency: mulch volcanoes.

This is a new section I’ve been testing out —I know not everyone has a garden of their own, but options abound for seasonal, local eating. Farmer’s Markets, CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) boxes, local farm stands, and more mean that fresh, in-season produce is available if you seek it out. And because I love a bargain, that usually means it’s also the best price.

What’s in season late April in the Northeast: Asparagus, chives, green onions, spinach, arugula, radishes, pea shoots, ramps, overwintered kale, greenhouse lettuce, fresh herbs (parsley, cilantro), rhubarb!

How to use your goodies:

1. Asparagus Caesar with Pecorino A brilliant spring riff on a classic that uses asparagus as the star rather than the side. And nothing beats a homemade Caesar dressing, honestly. It takes minutes but is miles ahead of anything from a bottle. But as Ina would say, store bought is fine!

2. Almond rhubarb shortbread bars. Smitten Kitchen recipes never miss, and this one is an oldie but goodie.

3. Spring spinach and radish salad. I always adore all things WyseGuide and have made this salad in the past. Easy peasy!

4. Rhubarb scones. I’ve never met a scone recipe I didn’t like, and while I usually am drawn to more savory options, this one would be perfect to use up some stunning rhubarb. Also let the record show I can’t see the word “rhubarb” without getting this song/dance stuck in my head for days:

5. Parchment-Steamed Fish With Buttered Radishes. I immediately saved this NYT recipe (gift link!) in my “spring meals” section of Notion. And luckily, I’ve got some cod in the chest freezer and radishes that should be coming up soon —perfect if you’ve got early radishes in a CSA box or from the farmer’s market.

6. A peach honey kale salad. This recipe came across my screen recently and it sounds absolutely divine. While I’m not blessed with Southern peaches currently, if you’ve got them available now locally (I’m jealous, honestly) then whip this up! I’m saving it for later this summer when it’s stone fruit season in New England.

7. Rhubarb crumble — I’ve made this one from RecipeTinEats in the past and usually do a riff on it when I have some lying around. Although this year I’ve got a hankering for a strawberry rhubarb pie — something my mom used to make when I was growing up and is such a nostalgia hit.

I listened to this podcast while shoveling many, many wheelbarrows full of mulch this week and I cannot recommend it highly enough! Shaun McCoshum, PhD is a landscape ecologist, botanist, conservationist who focuses on pollinator habitats, restoration, and declining species. Hint: it takes more than putting in a few native plants and calling it a day. If that sounds like your cup of tea I think you’ll enjoy it as much as I did —I also ordered myself a copy of his new book, Natural Habits & Wildlife Gardening (bookshop.org, Amazon).

• My Grandpa’s Weeder. Generally, I take a fairly laissez-faire approach with weeds in the yard. Dandelions? The more the merrier. Clover? Bunnies and groundhogs love it, which means they leave the garden alone. But we have lots of dock which has the most wicked taproot and is usually a royal pain in the butt to dig out with my hori-hori knife. I’d seen videos of the grandpa weeder over the years but turned up my nose at it…until one day I caved. And you know what? Every time my husband and I use it we marvel that, “Wow! It comes right out?!” And then you just kick a little dirt to cover up the small hole instead of smoothing out the monstrous pit that I would have to dig previously.

• Outdoor grilling weather. It’s back, baby! I fancy myself something of a pit master and do mostly all of the grilling (because if I’m cooking dinner, I can also bird watch and chill by the koi pond in peace and quiet!). We have a regular Weber grill, and a few years ago my dad bought us a Big Green Egg as a housewarming present, which is so much fun to use. This year, I have my sights set on adding a Blackstone griddle to the mix — so we shall see! I do, however, have to strip and reseal the deck at some point…which is not a task I’m looking forward to. So maybe that will be my reward for finishing the unpleasant task?

• GROWING_EDIBLE_PLANTS on TikTok is one of my longtime favorite followers, and while he’s not on Instagram, he does have a Facebook page now (for all the TT haters out there!). I’ve learned so much from watching his videos, and his no-nonsense NY attitude —plus the accent —is such a breath of fresh air these days.

Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

Want a Riot of Color in Your Flower Beds? Definitely Make a Plan. [NYT]

The Truth About the Past That ‘Tradwives’ Want to Revive [TIME]

A Snorkeling Biologist Snapped the First-Ever Photo of Newly Hatched California Giant Salamanders in the Wild. Here’s Why That’s a Big Deal [Smithsonian Magazine]

Alaska’s Thawing Permafrost Could Shape the Future of Farming [Civil Eats]

Home Permaculture: A Conversation with Brandy Hall [Modern Farmer]

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“Wherever there are birds, there is hope.” ― Mehmet Murat Ildan

Before we start today, reminder that the first seasonal Q&A for paid subscribers is this Sunday, April 26 at 8:30 PM EST. I’ll be hosting it here on Substack video, and you should get a reminder via the app/email — bring any gardening/chicken/what have you questions, pour yourself a bevvy, and let’s chat. Save this link!

Every May, my best friend Jess and I celebrate what has become one of my most cherished annual traditions: we abandon our respective households, foist the entirety of the morning routine unto our husbands, and abscond at the crack of dawn for our annual Brimfield Antiques Flea Market gal's day. Walking for miles through acres of antiques and old-timey wares, stopping for coffees, chatting non-stop — it is my idea of a perfect day.

Last year, we found ourselves smack dab in the middle of an adorable shop filled with handmade birdhouses (mental note: get one this year) and much to my surprise, I found out that Jess didn’t have a birdhouse on her property. Word travels fast in close quarters and with nosy fellow junkers, so pretty soon a handful of strangers and I were haranguing her to buy one, and insisting with great conviction that, “The birds need houses!” She acquiesced, picking out a darling little birdhouse to everyone’s excitement. Yay birds!

Cut to a spring check-in message I shot her last month:

Naturally I bombarded her with tips and articles on how it’s not enough to just put up a birdhouse, and that there’s other factors that play into creating a hospitable environment for the birdies.

As a matter of fact, I took a break writing this to grab another cup of coffee and had some various bird activity to deal with. First, I put our block of birdseed back out (we bring it inside at night because of black bears) since I saw the birds flitting about where it usually hangs. Then, I heard quite the commotion coming from our Purple Martin house — which is usually overtaken by sparrows, which we’ll get to below — and I noticed a European starling trying to take over a nest. I shooed it away, then told myself that next year we need to add something to make the entrances smaller so sparrows can’t fit.

So yes, the birds need houses. But they also need the right house, in the right place, with the right hole size, AND native plants, AND clean water, AND no pesticides. A birdhouse is just one piece of a hospitable habitat, and we have to make sure we’re providing the rest of the essentials if we want to attract feathered friends to our yards. Also keeping our outside lights turned off at night!

Why Should We Care About Birds Anyways?

From the Missouri Department of Conservation:

• Birds eat insect pests that would otherwise decimate agricultural crops, gardens, and other vegetation. Birds eat 400–500 tons of insects per year.

• Birds like crows and vultures scavenge carcasses, reducing the spread of diseases such as rabies and distemper.

• Birds disperse seeds, spreading plants into new areas.

• Birds such as hummingbirds help pollinate plants.

• Birds like hawks and owls help keep the mouse and rat population in check.

• Birds eat millions of mosquitoes and other biting insects each year.

• Birds are sensitive to toxins and pollutants, problems detected in wild birds can serve as an early warning system that something is wrong in the environment.

But the State of the Birds 2025 report shows how bleak things are looking for the health of our nation’s bird populations. A 2019 study published in the journal Science sounded the alarm—showing a net loss of 3 billion birds in North America in the past 50 years. And those losses are continuing, with declines among several bird trend indicators.

The alarming numbers on the breakdown by habitat are pretty grim:

• Grassland birds: –43% since 1970 — the Great Plains is losing grasslands at 1 to 2 million acres per year, and more than half of grassland-dependent bird species are in steep decline. Mountain Plover, Chestnut-collared Longspur, and Baird’s Sparrow have each declined more than 67% in 50 years

• Aridland birds: –41% since 1970 — since 1968 the West has lost almost half (46%) of aridland habitat. Nearly a quarter of aridland birds are Tipping Point species

• Shorebirds: –33% since 1980 — the most imperiled group, with 19 of the most Tipping Point species of any bird group in North America. Almost three-quarters of declining shorebird species are suffering continued losses despite conservation efforts

• Eastern forest birds: –27% since 1970 — obligate eastern forest birds have lost more than a quarter of their populations, with two-thirds of species declining across 40% of their breeding ranges

• Western forest birds: –11% since 1970 — over 50% of western forest birds are declining

Seabirds in Hawaii and Alaska are down between 55% and 95% in recent decades. In 2014–2016, a heatwave in Alaskan waters starved 4 million Common Murres in what the report describes as “the largest documented wildlife mortality event in the modern era.” Half of Hawaii’s endemic bird species that once existed are now extinct.

The report identifies 112 “Tipping Point” species, or birds that have lost more than half their populations in the last 50 years. Of those, 42 are on Red Alert, meaning perilously low populations and steep, accelerating declines. These include birds you might actually know: Allen’s Hummingbird. Rufous Hummingbird. Chimney Swift. Tricolored Blackbird. Pinyon Jay, which has lost approximately 70% of its population since 1970.

The main culprits across all of these groups: habitat loss, intensive agriculture, climate change, pesticide use that crashes insect populations (the foundation of most birds' food supply), and invasive species. These are all human-caused, which means that at least in theory, they’re all human-solvable.

So even if you’re of the opinion that birds are gross and you don’t give two hoots about them, these numbers should alarm you. Because everything in nature is so deeply entangled, and where there’s smoke there is fire. You can’t see numbers like this and think that everything else in the environment is hunky dory.

Additionally, 96 million Americans are birders — 37% of the adult population. That birdwatching activity pumps $279 billion into the U.S. economy every year, generates more than $38 billion in tax revenue, and supports 1.4 million jobs. It seems these days that TBTB (The Powers That Be) only care when money is on the line, so perhaps that would be enough to shock people into action?

McGill University wildlife biologist David Bird said in this LA Times article that:

“The biggest impact of agricultural intensity though is our war on insects. Numerous recent studies have shown that insect populations in many places throughout the world, including the U.S., have crashed by well over 40 percent. [Birds] They feed us, clothe us, eat pests, pollinate our plants and crops, and warn us about impending environmental disasters. With their songs, colors, and variety, birds enrich our lives … and recent studies show that their immediate presence actually increases our well-being and happiness and can even prolong our lives! To me, a world without birds is simply unfathomable.”

Which brings me back to my dear friend and her sadly empty birdhouse. But not for long, if I have anything to do with it!

Below: why your birdhouse might be empty, the surprisingly specific things birds actually need in a nest box, my favorite resources for budding bird nerds, and everything beyond the birdhouse that makes a yard perfectly hospitable to the birds that are left.

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"There are no days in the whole round year more delicious than those which often come to us in the latter half of April... The sun trembles in his own soft rays... The grass in the meadow seems all to have grown green since yesterday... though there is warmth enough for a sense of luxury, there is coolness enough for exertion." ~Thomas Wentworth Higginson

I had an entirely different newsletter topic noodling around in my brain this week — well, actually a few, ranging from groceries, to gardening for birds, to gardening with kids. All of those can wait though, as we’re currently enjoying what I’ve been referring to as peak spring week here in Massachusetts. Just when you think your scraggly brown grass will never grow after winter, and you have a hard time remembering what your shrubs look like when lush and flower-laden in the summer…SPRING hits.

You know how it goes. You wake up one morning to the birds chirping extra effusively. Magnolias start to open up and join the daffodils. Buds start to swell on all of the trees. And there’s the delicious, warm smell of spring on the breeze. I remember in college when we would finally get that first true spring day up in Central Maine, and it was dubbed Skirt Day. We’d ditch class (sorry Dad, you didn’t see this!) and laze around on the lawn, drinking up the sunshine after a long, hard, brutal winter.

I think that’s what makes New England so special, honestly. You hibernate all through winter and brave the arctic temperatures, only to be rewarded with the return of glorious spring. And as someone who lived in Santa Monica, CA for 4 years and swore up and down that she didn’t miss seasons because, “It’s the perfect season year round!” I can tell you that as soon as we moved back to the East Coast, I realized the error of my ways.

There’s something so poetic about seasons, and even more so when you tune in deeply to the rhythms of nature — the world looks different from week to week, and sometimes even just day to day. Last year, I wrote a newsletter about phenology, and it’s worth a read if you missed it when it came out:

I’ve been wandering around all week marveling at how I blinked and everything is in bloom or leafing out. Also dictating garden to-dos into my phone like Martha Stewart, except she has a team of professional gardeners to execute her well-laid plans, while I have a fantastic husband and two enthusiastic-but-occasionally-whiny kids to execute mine!

What’s Actually Happening Right Now?

If you look closely, you’ll notice that trees don’t all leaf out at the same time. There’s an order to it, and once you know it, you’ll never look at your neighborhood the same way again. Each spring, you’ll greet the trees as you would an old friend you haven’t seen in a year —and that’s exactly how I feel seeing this one big ol’ magnolia on a nearby street. It’s always the first to bloom, and my son brought petals home for me the other day when he accompanied my husband on his morning dog walk.

The sequence, from first to last in New England:

• Witch hazel has long since come and gone, with some blooming as early as February depending on the variety!

• Red maple is one of the first native trees to bloom in the late winter or early spring.

• Willows start around March/April.

• Cherry, Crabapple, and Pear trees will often bloom in quick succession.

• Birches happen roundabout mid-April, and I’ve started noticed them begin to leaf out.

• Eastern Redbud and Flowering Dogwoods start putting on a show (I also keep meaning to plant a redbud tree! Mental note.)

• Sugar maples in the middle — they need up to 2,000 hours of cold before they’ll flush. Still worth the wait.

• Oaks, ashes, and hickories are last — delayed leaf-out is a survival strategy for long-lived trees to avoid damage from early warm spells, and also allows spring ephemeral flowers and shrubs to photosynthesize before they’re shaded out by large canopies

Before the canopy closes, there’s a window of a few short, precious weeks, when full sunlight reaches the forest floor. The spring ephemerals have evolved their entire lives around this window. Bloodroot, trillium, Dutchman’s breeches, trout lily, and more emerge, bloom, set seed, and vanish underground, completing their entire above-ground life cycle in about six weeks before the shade closes in. Fast and the Furious: spring ephemerals edition, if you will!

However, rising temperatures are causing spring ephemerals to bloom earlier, but tree canopy closure is also happening earlier, and not necessarily at the same rate. The carefully synchronized timing these plants evolved over thousands of years is being scrambled, and it's the kind of quiet ecological unraveling that doesn't make headlines because it doesn't happen all at once. And it’s hard to see unless you’re paying attention. Who would worry about some dinky forest flowers for a few weeks in spring aside from nature nerds? Everyone should, honestly.

It’s a bit of a canary in a coal mine situation.

Also, this is why leaving the leaves matters. Spring ephemerals photosynthesize in nutrient-rich soil from decomposing fall leaves. The leaf litter you left in your garden beds and on forest edges this winter is exactly the substrate these wildflowers evolved to grow in.

Talk Nerdy To Me

Trees fall into two categories based on how their water-carrying vessels are arranged:

• Diffuse-porous trees (aspens, birches, maples) have small, numerous vessels scattered throughout their wood that resist frost damage, so they can start leafing out early without risking their plumbing.

• Ring-porous trees (oaks, ashes, hickories) have large vessels arranged in rings that are easily damaged by freezing and have to be rebuilt every spring before leaves can unfurl.

This ring-porous structure is mainly present in regions with contrasted seasons. (Science Direct) Kinda cool, eh? Essentially, every tree is making a calculated bet. On the one hand, it can leaf out early and get more photosynthesis time, but a late frost has the potential to wipe out your leaves and you have to start over.

On the other hand, it can leaf out late and stay safe but the tradeoff is that it has given up weeks of growing season. Different species have landed on different strategies over thousands of years of evolution, and you can watch all of them playing out simultaneously right now, in your own backyard. Or city block, botanical garden, or neighborhood park. Or all of the above! Hooray for nature and spring and trees!

And really, my words don’t hold a candle to Thoreau’s treatise on trees here: The Succession of Forest Trees.

What to Look For Next Week

• Look around and try to name which trees are green and which aren’t yet. Can you spot the late-leafing oaks?

• Find one bud that’s just opening and take a photo of it every day for a week. You’ll be amazed at the changes.

• Notice which flowers in your yard the early bees are hitting first.

• If you have woods nearby, walk them now before the canopy closes up. The light is different in ways it won’t be again until October or November.

• Do you always see flowers that you love but are unsure of the variety? Download a free plant ID app and figure it out! My personal favorite is iNaturalist.

• Heck, grab an old notebook (or buy a new one, because there’s nothing like a brand new notebook amiright?) and start your own phenology journal.

One more thing worth pausing on before we talk about everything you should be doing out there: the smell of spring.

I don't know how to describe it scientifically, but there is a specific smell that happens during peak spring week…it’s a return of humidity on the warm soil, something green and alive, maybe a little rain on the horizon. I’ve been walking around the yard taking deep breaths, throwing open all the windows in the house, and drinking it all in.

I’ve always had a penchant for funky words, and a while ago I learned of the name for the smell of rain on dry earth (petrichor) and then recently learned about the smell of warm soil itself (geosmin).

So when you step outside this week and take a deep breath and feel inexplicably happy, that's not just spring fever — that's bacteria, baby!

April is a deceptively busy garden month, and I've put together everything I actually do this month (or ideally should do in a perfect world!) on our property into a checklist PDF for paid subscribers down below.

Subscribe now

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"Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better." — Albert Einstein

This newsletter is a long time coming, since every year around this time I circulate my tick tips to friends and family as they, inevitably, start to find those little suckers emerging from their cozy winter hibernation to lay waste to our nervous systems.

A few years ago, Emily Oster, who is famously calm and data-driven about nearly everything, wrote a newsletter (that I can’t find in my inbox anymore, ugh) in which someone asked her what she does worry about, since she seems so level-headed about parenting. Her answer: ticks. Not helicopter parenting, not screen time, not the sugar in your kid’s birthday cake. Ticks. She went on to pen a full article on the subject with a helpful decision tree: A Decision Tree for Ticks and Lyme Disease.

I felt so seen. I have been banging this drum for years, mostly from my Instagram stories and in my mom friend groupchats, but I felt less crazy when I saw that someone known for not being crazy is kinda crazy about ticks. So I’m going to say it one more time: ticks are genuinely worth taking seriously — especially if you live in New England, especially if you garden, and especially if you have kids and pets who spend any real time outside.

I’ve shared my personal tick protocol in my highlights for a while now, and it keeps coming up in my DMs every spring. So this week I’m putting it all in one place: the education piece here, free for everyone, and then my actual personal protocol (what I do on our property, the products I use, how I manage it all organically) behind the paywall for paid subscribers. Let’s get into it!

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My goal today is to educate and empower, while bringing a healthy dose of awareness (though mine is more akin to paranoia, but a healthy level IMHO) to tick habitat, and what we can do as nature lovers to keep things as organic as possible while also protecting ourselves and our loved ones from these little bastards. I’ll bring you through how I’ve evolved in how we deal with them on our property, and how to garden in an eco-friendly way while taking proper precautions against ticks.

Related articles:

Growing up in Massachusetts, I was constantly outdoors romping around the 40 acres that I grew up on in Lunenburg. We had woods surrounding our house on two sides, and the third was hay fields that we rented out to a local farmer. But my only memory of ticks, and I’ve checked this with my dad who has lived in Massachusetts his entire life, is that we’d really only find them on our dogs sometimes during the summer. Ticks on humans in Massachusetts were almost never an issue in the 80s and 90s.

According to New England Journal of Medicine (bold emphasis mine):

Ticks and tickborne diseases are increasingly becoming a major health concern for humans, domesticated animals, and livestock. Reported cases of bacterial and protozoan tickborne disease doubled in the United States between 2004 and 2016. More than 90% of the nearly 60,000 cases of nationally notifiable vectorborne diseases reported in 2017 were linked to ticks. As the geographic ranges of multiple tick species continue to expand, invasive tick species are being discovered, new tickborne pathogens are emerging, and coinfections in ticks are surging. Rising global temperatures, ecologic changes, reforestation, and increases in commerce and travel are all important underlying factors influencing the rate and extent of range expansion for ticks and tickborne pathogens.

Now, however, ticks are everywhere. But don’t just take my word for it!

In spring and summer, it’s a near constant refrain with my mom friends in New England. Who found a tick where, what body part they had to yank a tick off, how disgusting we think they are, voice notes talking each other off tick ledges…it’s insanity.

Why Ticks Actually are a BFD (Big Fucking Deal)

While they seem like annoying little things you pull off your dog, they can, in incredibly scientific terminology, fuck up your whole world. I personally know of people who have been horrifically sickened by tick bites, and they never even saw the tick. And while some folks like to pooh-pooh celebrities who claim to have chronic Lyme disease (the disease we are most familiar with when it comes to ticks), I am inclined to believe people when it comes to their personal accounts of health issues after tick bites. The CDC lists out just some of the symptoms associated with long term (months after a bite), untreated Lyme disease, which include:

• Severe headaches and neck stiffness

• Additional EM rashes on other areas of the body

• Facial palsy (loss of muscle tone or droop on one or both sides of the face)

• Arthritis with severe joint pain and swelling, particularly the knees and other large joints.

• Intermittent pain in tendons, muscles, joints, and bones

• Heart palpitations or an irregular heartbeat (Lyme carditis)

• Episodes of dizziness or shortness of breath

• Inflammation of the brain and spinal cord

• Nerve pain

• Shooting pains, numbness, or tingling in the hands or feet

Big, big yikes. And that’s just Lyme! There's a whole host of other bacteria that these little shits can transmit, none of which should be taken lightly.

Yale School of Medicine explains that, “Lyme disease is the most common vector-borne disease in North America. Since it was first described in the 1970s, the disease has rapidly spread across New England and the Midwest. Reported cases of Lyme disease have more than tripled since 1995 and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now estimate that more than 300,000 Americans fall ill each year.”

The reason ticks are expanding their range and population is largely climate-driven. Milder winters mean more ticks survive to the following season (read on for more tick life cycle info), and a growing white-tailed deer population gives those ticks more hosts to feed on. So what was once a problem concentrated in a few New England counties (it’s called Lyme because it was discovered in Lyme, CT in 1976, but actually is way older than that) has quietly spread across much of the eastern United States.

Here in central Massachusetts, we are squarely in the highest-risk zone in the country. This is not fear-mongering. It’s just where we live — and knowing that is the first step toward protecting yourself and your family without losing your mind about it.

While Lyme disease is by far the most common concern with tick bites, it’s worth also knowing about Powassan virus, a rare but serious illness also spread by deer ticks that has been on the rise in New England. Unlike Lyme, Powassan can be transmitted in as little as 15 minutes of tick attachment, which is exactly why the habits we’re talking about today matter so much. It remains rare (Massachusetts sees roughly 6 cases a year), but it’s a good reminder that prompt tick checks and removal are your best defense against everything ticks carry, not just Lyme.

The Tick Life Cycle or Why They Seem to Always Be Everywhere

Because this is relevant in how you treat your yard and when to be extra vigilant, I’m sharing the nitty gritty on their disgusting life cycles that climate change is now messing with.

From Mass Audubon:

Deer ticks have a two-year lifespan, and have three feeding stages—larva, nymph, and adult. Eggs are laid in the spring, and in the summer they hatch into larvae no larger than the period at the end of this sentence. In August, the larva reaches its peak of activity, waiting on the ground until a suitable host (bird or mammal) brushes up against it. The larva then attaches itself to the host. If the host animal is infected with the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, then the larva becomes infected as well when it feeds.

Once it has fed, the larva does not feed again until it becomes a nymph. Therefore, larvae aren’t able to transmit Lyme disease. The larva molts and transforms into a nymph in the fall. The nymph doesn’t become active until the following May, and it remains active through July. As in the larval stage, the nymph waits for a host to brush by so it can attach itself.

Once attached to a host the nymph will feed for 4-5 days, engorging itself with blood until it is several times its original size. If the tick was infected with the bacterium as a larva, the nymph may transmit it to its host. Since a nymph is only the size of a poppy seed, it’s often goes unnoticed until it’s fully engorged. The nymph stage is responsible for the majority of human Lyme disease cases.

I always tell myself that it’s a good thing that A) ticks can’t jump or fly and B) they’re relatively slow-moving. Ticks do something known as “questing” which consists of a tick stretching out its forelegs in search of a host to latch onto. This can occur on leaf litter (we’ll come back to this below!) and on understory vegetation, and can vary in heights. Once a tick crawls onto your body, it then needs to latch into the skin and, in many cases, feed for a while, from several hours to several days, before they can transmit the bacteria that can make you sick.

Know Your Enemy: The Ticks You’ll Actually Encounter in The US

And just as a point of order before we continue on — ticks are not insects. Before becoming intimately familiar with them (hello, tick nervous breakdown of 2021) I always assumed they were, but they’re actually arachnids, in the same family as spiders, scorpions, and mites. The giveaway: adult insects have six legs and antennae. Ticks have eight legs and no antennae. It’s a bit of a case of splitting hairs, because it feels pretentious to refer to them as arachnids for some reason!

All images courtesy of the CDC

American Dog Tick (Dermacentor variabilis)

• Transmits tularemia and Rocky Mountain spotted fever; highest risk of being bitten occurs in spring and summer.

• The silver lining: much larger and easier to spot than deer ticks. Cannot transmit Lyme.

Asian longhorned tick (Haemaphysalis longicornis)

• Asian longhorned tick appears to be less attracted to humans.

• Asian longhorned ticks are light brown in color and are very small, often smaller than a sesame seed.

• Female ticks can lay eggs and reproduce without mating, and thousands may be found at once on a single animal.

Blacklegged Tick / Deer Tick (Ixodes scapularis)

• Transmits Lyme disease, anaplasmosis, ehrlichiosis, Powassan virus, and babesiosis across the northeastern, mid-Atlantic, and north-central U.S.

• Nymphs are especially dangerous: about the size of a poppy seed, actively questing April through July, and difficult to see.

• Adults may be out searching for a host any time winter temperatures are above freezing. Stages most likely to bite humans are nymphs and adult females.

• The 48-hour rule: in most cases, a tick must be attached for more than 24 hours before Lyme disease bacteria can be transmitted — prompt removal can prevent infection.

Brown dog tick (Rhipicephalus sanguineus)

• Transmits Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever

• Dogs are the primary host for the brown dog tick in each of its life stages, but the tick may also bite humans or other mammals.

Gulf Coast tick (Amblyomma maculatum)

• Mostly in Southeastern US

• Transmits Rickettsia parkeri rickettsiosis, a form of spotted fever

Lone star tick (Amblyomma americanum)

• This is the one you might have heard people talk about that can cause a meat allergy. Growing evidence suggests that alpha-gal syndrome may be triggered by lone star tick bites.

• Expanding its range northward into New England

• Transmits Bourbon virus, Ehrlichia chaffeensis and Ehrlichia ewingii (which cause human ehrlichiosis), Heartland virus, and tularemia.

Rocky Mountain wood tick (Dermacentor andersoni)

• Transmits Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Colorado tick fever, and tularemia, mainly via adult ticks.

• Typically found in elevations of 4,000 to 10,500 feet.

Western blacklegged tick (Ixodes pacificus)

• Found along the Pacific coast of the United States, particularly northern California.

• Transmits anaplasmosis, Lyme disease, and hard tick relapsing fever.

The Plant in Your Yard That’s Making It Worse

Here’s another thing that sent me spiraling down a research rabbit hole last spring: Japanese barberry.

Japanese barberry (Berberis thunbergii) is a thorny ornamental shrub that previous owners had planted in two spots on our property. It’s extremely common in New England landscaping — it’s deer-resistant, low-maintenance, and has pretty red berries in the fall. It also, according to multiple peer-reviewed studies, creates an ideal microhabitat for blacklegged ticks.

From Tikipedia:

A study that was done in Connecticut found that if there are large amounts of Japanese Barberry bushes there is a higher chance of ticks being there. Ticks can die from dehydration if the humidity is lower than 80%. Since the Japanese Barberry has a higher density foliage than most native plants, it can hold a high humidity level which makes it the best place for a tick to be. Normally ticks are active for 15-16 hours, but since Barberry bushes give ticks protection, they are active for 23-24 hours making it more likely to get bitten by ticks. Not only are Barberry bushes a nursery for ticks, but it is also a nursery for white footed mice and other rodents which are also one of the main food sources for ticks, and reservoirs for Lyme disease.

Japanese barberry is invasive, ecologically damaging, and banned in some states. We’ve successfully removed the barberry plants that the previous owners planted, and good riddance!

Where to Look for Ticks During a Tick Check

Pits and bits, as I tell my kids! This image from the CDC calls out specific body parts where ticks are prone to nestle in, and they all happen to be dark nooks and crannies.

What to Do After a Tick Bite according to the CDC

If you find a tick attached to your skin, remove the tick as soon as possible. Do not wait to go to a healthcare provider to remove the tick. Delaying tick removal to get help from a healthcare provider could increase your risk of getting a disease spread through tick bites, known as tickborne diseases.

1. Grasp the tick as close to the skin’s surface as possible using clean fine-tipped tweezers. If fine-tipped tweezers are not available, use regular tweezers or your fingers to grasp the tick. Grasp the tick close to the skin’s surface to avoid squeezing the tick’s body.

2. Pull tick away from the skin with steady, even pressure. Don’t twist or jerk the tick. This can cause the tick mouthparts to break off and remain in the skin. If this happens, your body will naturally push the mouthparts out over time as your skin heals. You can also remove the mouthparts with tweezers. If you cannot remove the mouthparts easily with tweezers, leave them alone.

3. Dispose of the live tick by taking one of these steps: place it in a sealed container; wrap it tightly in tape; flush it down the toilet; or put it in alcohol. Do not crush the tick with your fingers.

4. After removing the tick, thoroughly clean the bite area and your hands with soap and water, rubbing alcohol, or hand sanitizer.

5. If you find a tick attached to you, there may be other ticks on your body. Do a careful tick check to look for other ticks and promptly remove them.

Now that you know what we're dealing with — here's exactly what I do about it. My full personal tick protocol, the products I use and why, how I manage our yard and property organically, and what I do the second I find one on my kids or the dog.

Read more

"That is one good thing about this world...there are always sure to be more springs.”
― L.M. Montgomery

Hello, hello!

I have some news, and I’m a little nervous to share this, but here goes nothing.

Starting this week, Front Yard Veggies has a proper paid subscription tier (before this it was essentially a tip jar), and it’s something that I hemmed and hawed about for a while so I’d like to explain.

When I started this newsletter back in 2021, I had one daughter and, while not tons of free time, I had more than I do now with two kids. Being home with them, volunteering at their schools, holding a volunteer commission role in my town, and now in a beefy yearlong Master Gardener training program means my free time is almost nonexistent! But as this newsletter has grown and taken on a life of its own, it’s a space that I very much treasure and have heard wonderful feedback on.

And I know it can be even better. As it stands, I’ve been carving out a few hours each week to work on this, and it continues to take up more time. I’ve always had a weird hangup about charging for my work (trust me, when I was a personal trainer I had embarrassingly — nay, pathetically — low rates in LA because I felt guilty charging more!), but I’ve decided to channel a mediocre white man and place a value on my work. It is very scary!! If I went to therapy I would definitely be hashing this out there.

First, and most importantly: nothing is going away. My YouTube videos, Instagram posts, TikToks, and blog are all still happening. I have been putting free content into the internet void for years and years, but the landscape has changed and it’s exhausting trying to keep up with mercurial algorithm changes.

But here’s the thing. I’ve been thinking a lot about what I actually want this newsletter to be, and the answer is: the place where I get to slow down. So much of gardening, intentional living, and really embracing the seasons — both outdoors and in our lives — is nuanced and messy and not suited for short-form video. Our attention spans are fried!

Paid subscribers will get deeper essays, seasonal guides, homestead updates, behind-the-scenes content that doesn’t fit anywhere else, and the kind of writing I love most but that doesn’t do well in a world of social media that rewards outrage only. Plus, I’ll be hosting quarterly Q&A sessions where we can dig into the nitty gritty of gardening, sourdough, how the heck to manage gardening with young kids, and anything else we’d like to chat about! I have always tried my best to keep up with Instagram DMs and comments but I’ve let so much slip through the cracks, and this will be a space to really dive deep and get some tailored advice.

This year’s sessions will tentatively be:

→ Late April / early May — spring planting panic season

→ Mid-July — midsummer chaos

→ Late September — fall harvest and preservation push

→ Late January — seed catalogs and dreaming season

Paid subscriptions are $10/month or $72/year. I’d really love for you to consider the annual — it works out to $6/month, which is less than a seed packet, and it means you’re locked in for the whole growing season and then some.

If paid isn’t in the cards right now, that is completely fine and I mean that sincerely. I know finances are tough for everyone right now (see: cutting our grocery bill and ditching streaming!) and I completely respect that — I joke that I’m a frugal hippie, so I understand. Stay on the free list, keep reading, and keep gardening. Free subscribers will still get one full post a month plus free previews of everything else. And thank you for being here!

But if you’ve been following along for a while — whether that’s on Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok (yikes, I’m chronically online lol) — and you’ve ever gotten anything useful out of my content, consider this your chance to support the work directly.

→ Subscribe annually for $72/year (best value — 40% savings!)

→ Or go monthly at $10/month

Thank you, genuinely, for being here. I don’t take your time or attention for granted — and I can’t wait to show you what’s coming. In 2026, when so much feels scary, uncertain, and overwhelming, I firmly believe that getting our hands dirty — whether that’s in the garden, baking and cooking from scratch to make simple delicious food, or embarking on a craft, DIY project, or hobby — is a recipe for staying present and protecting our peace. It feels good to take action on something within our control when everything feels like it’s spiraling around us.

Until next week,

Amy

P.S. The first seasonal Q&A is coming up in late April — keep a running list of anything that comes to mind and we can hash things out! I think I’ll be hosting it here on Substack, but stay tuned for more information on that! And I would love to know days/times that would be best for everyone, so let me know in the comments.

P.P.S. Please bear with me as I make these changes! Substack has about a bajillion fields to fill in and boxes to toggle on and off, so if anything looks wonky, just holler! I am but one lady with a computer and usually too much coffee, so I can guarantee there will be some hiccups. Just email me or drop a comment if something is messed up and I’ll fix it!

Based on Worcester, MA data

Sunrise: 6:24 am | Sunset: 7:16 pm | Day length: 12 hours, 52 minutes | Moon phase: Waning Gibbous | Weeks until last frost: 6

All the seeds from last week are up and growing under their respective grow lights, and it’s about time to start my sunflowers, zinnias, and cosmos indoors. I’ve also got another big tray of lettuce seeds that I want to start, and I may get a little crazy and even pop out to the garden and direct sow my carrots.

It’s taking every ounce of restraint I have to not succumb to the peep peep peeps of baby chicks in feed stores right now, and it’s becoming increasingly hard to avoid since my daughter is now a bonafide chicken lover. I’ve told her that the only way we’ll be adding a few chicks is if we have a broody hen, preferably one of our friendly, docile Buff Orpingtons, that we can tuck a couple under. I’m not letting anyone sit and hatch eggs, as that’s how we’ve ended up with our two roosters, Frank Reynolds and Charlie Kelly.

If you’re in Central MA and want to swing by a seed swap next weekend, shoot me an email for details! I’ll be hosting one and would love to see some local gardener friends there.

Other things of note:

• The toads have started coming out of hibernation, and one in particular awoke to a surprise when one of the chickens picked it up and trotted it around proudly until my husband heard a commotion and ran out to rescue it. The toad recovered from the shock and hopped off to greener, less chicken-y pastures!

• The red-winged blackbirds have made their triumphant return and are always such a joy to spot.

• Indy, in typical guard dog fashion, alerted us to a few turkeys sauntering through the yard. Watching the chickens reaction to giant birds in the vicinity is always hysterical because you can just see them being like…what the actual heck are these freaky things?

• After saying I would get one for the last…3 years, Kristian ordered a broadfork for me for loosening compacted soil in the garden without needing to till it. I’m going to test it out before recommending it, but he’s the king of BIFL research and I always trust his finds. I mean, he married me so obviously he’s got great discernment! ☺️

• The largest swarm of vultures I’ve ever seen was circling around our yard this week, and it seemed incredibly ominous but also maybe they were just looking for chicken or koi snacks? I counted at least 40, and upon further research learned that a group of vultures in flight is called a "kettle", while the term "committee" refers to a group of vultures resting on the ground or in trees. A group of vultures that are feeding is termed a "wake.” You learn something new every day!

• The ticks are officially out and about, and next week will be a wholeeeeee entire newsletter all about ticks because knowledge is power, and we can’t let those pesky demon insects keep us from enjoying the great outdoors! Take it from me, a borderline tick-phobe. Also I’ve got some great resources to share from my Master Gardener lecture this week — a brilliant entomologist gave some valuable resources we can use to keep ourselves safe and having fun outside.

• We unfortunately had one of our 30 year old koi, Data, pass away this week, which was really, really sad. The fish enter a state of torpor in the winter, essentially a hibernation, and usually come through totally fine —but I think because of how old this one was, his immune system couldn’t properly recover. We started the waterfall back up, did a fungal treatment (just in case), and added a big aerator to the pond all to no avail. They’re like little pond puppies and he will be greatly missed!

  

Seed starting information that will live here for a while:

• The Ultimate List of Trusted Seed Companies Recommended by Real Gardeners

• Starting Seeds Inside: A Beginner-Friendly Guide

• How to Start a Vegetable Garden as a Total Beginner

What We Ate This Week

• Sunday - baked chicken thighs (boneless skinless from Aldi - $2.49/lb!) with yellow potatoes, carrots, and onions + homemade spätzle + gravy

• Monday - leftovers from Sunday night

• Tuesday - Just Bare chicken + random veggies…one of those nights!

• Wednesday - baked sweet potatoes with Real Good chicken

• Thursday - I cooked up a batch of dried adzuki beans to have for the next few days (fibermaxxing!) and paired them with previously frozen rice that I steamed, some shredded cabbage and carrots with a sesame miso dressing kind of like this one from Love and Lemons + hoisin glazed tempeh

• Friday - deep dish pizza because I have been wanting to get a deep dish pizza pan for years and years and I finally bit the bullet and used a gift card to get this one. Life’s tough, but there’s always pizza!

• Saturday - I’ve made this cheesy white bean tomato bake before and it was so flipping good — plus some fresh sourdough for dunkin’.

• Banana bread from Joy of Cooking

• Blueberry bran muffins (riffed on a bran muffin recipe from How to Bake Everything and coming to the blog soon because they disappeared in two days and my daughter said they are “10,000 thumbs up!!”)

• Chia pudding for morning snacks

• Cordon Rose banana cake from The Cake Bible

• A batch of lemon/raspberry iced tea (lemon zinger + raspberry zinger a couple bags of each and steeped in hot water then cooled)

• I have had this recipe saved for a while so I’m going to try making the Crowded Kitchen peanut butter Easter eggs this weekend! Fingers crossed they turn out well —I have no clue what Reese’s is doing to their candy but I refuse to buy their eggs because it’s all tasted like garbage the last year or so. Am I crazy?! It’s like…just oil?

Since cancelling Spotify last summer, I’ve been kind of floundering with workout music. I find the freemium version of Spotify to be practically unusable, since you get 4 ads in a row seemingly every two songs, so I’ve been on the hunt for an alternative. Thankfully, I remembered Pandora and promptly redownloaded it and made a, if I may be so bold as to say, completely fire mix station consisting of the following:

Linking it here in case you, too, like to jam out to artists like this while * Arnold voice * getting your pump on.

• This post from on moths. How stunning! And coming just on the heels of my entomology lecture, to boot.

• The American woodcock migration in NYC. If we still lived there I would take a sick day from work and be posted up in Bryant Park with binoculars and my camera. They’re also known as timberdoodles, which is just about the cutest name for a bird I’ve ever heard.

• Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t on YouTube. Specifically his series called “Spiritually Depraved and Misery-Inducing Landscapes of North America” — his tirades about ecology and rants on modern society are truly god-tier, and you’ll find yourself both laughing at his delivery and feeling slightly depressed about the state of the world.

Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson

But I’m Bored!: Discover the Power of Independent Play to Raise Confident, Resilient Kids by Lizzie Assa

How To Pick A Peach: The Search for Flavor from Farm to Table by Russ Parsons

Why Grocery Stores Keep Rotisserie Chicken So Cheap—While Other Prices Climb [Serious Eats]

Trained Dogs Are Hunting the Spotted Lanternfly [Offrange]

Hard Times A’Comin’? – Build a 3-Month Food Supply [ ]

What to Know About the EPA’s Proposed Revision of the Clean Water Act [earth.org]

Is fibre the new protein? The surprising health benefits of the latest wellness trend [BBC]

"The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it."
— Henry David Thoreau

Ever since vowing to watch our grocery budget like a hawk this year, I’ve been going over receipts with a fine tooth comb to see where we can shed some excess spending. And much to my chagrin, I honed in on my favorite bubbly beverages that have been silently sabotaging the budget. First, some math.

• a 32 pack of Polar seltzer runs around $11.99 where I live

• the cost per can is $0.37, which is pretty good!

• Much better than buying an 8 pack for $4.19 (the price at Target on the day I’m researching this)

• That means each can is $0.52 —slightly more expensive than $0.37

• But wait, I thought seltzer used to come in 12 packs!?

• It did, but may I introduce you to the concept of shrinkflation, in which companies reduce their product size but retain the existing price, or even gasp increase the price.

• As a family of 4 with two seltzer drinkers, we were averaging between 2-6 seltzers a day, mood and season and kids depending. This doesn’t factor in entertaining (we will still buy cans when we have guests! we’re not monsters!)

• That was ranging from $0.74 - $2.22/day, or $22 - $66 per month

• This does not take into consideration the Diet Coke habit that I picked back up a couple years ago after being a teetotaler for 11 years —hey, I’m sober and had 2 kids during a pandemic, I needed a vice! But my little vice was costing ~$40/month (2x 35 packs from Costco at ~$19/pack).

• That right there is how $100 can easily sneak into a grocery bill!

• That $100 over the course of a year is around $1,200. YIKES.

If the thought has crossed your mind that, “Wow, the price of soda and seltzer feels like it is 2x what I remember it being!” then, my friend, you’re right. According to a recent analysis by FinanceBuzz, over a period of just five years, the price of a 12-pack of name brand soda has almost doubled. What was once considered a cheap staple in many homes has now turned into a luxury item.

Mentally, I still think of seltzer and Diet Coke prices in 2015 terms, when it was common to find them for sale 2/$5 for 12 packs, with the usual price being $2.99. But my brain has had to rearrange itself to come to grips with the absolutely ghastly inflation (and greedflation) that has hit the beverage industry, especially since 2020. And while the prices aren’t apples to apples comparable, the price for both has gone up significantly enough that I’m lumping them together for the sake of discussion, and since they’re directly applicable to our grocery budget.

NOW, let me say that we previously were SodaStream owners, and I believe we purchased one back in 2012 so we didn’t have to lug cases of seltzer around Brooklyn on our weekly grocery trips. We loved it, would purchase refills of the CO2 containers, and happily imbibed in our nightly aluminum-free bubbly water fix! It made two cross-country moves with us, then one evening a few years ago completely crapped the bed —I’m talking loud-sounding explosion that scared the bajeezus out of me, ohmygodwhatwasTHAT kinda noise.

Turns out, some hose inside the machine exploded, and because we are a repair-minded, anything is fixable household, figured it would be an easy replacement! Dear reader, it is unfortunately not an easy fix and the company actually discourages repair and instead recommends replacement. However, I’ve become so disillusioned over the years that we have just come to accept everything as disposable, this didn’t sit right with me. We’re BIFL nerds here (Buy It For Life), and try our best to purchase items from companies that are focused on right to repair. And frankly, I’m wary of purchasing another almost $200 item only for it to potentially break again in a few years! We’re currently researching other options, including getting our own bulk CO2 tank and DIYing a seltzer setup at home.

Every purchasing decision right now feels simultaneously financial and political and confusing and downright exhausting. And it’s going to get even more so over the coming months. Obviously, we’re not going to solve late stage capitalism in the seltzer aisle, nor can we insulate ourselves fully from the turmoil of the global economy. But being aware of the prices of what is coming into your house every week, seeing costs going up while the actual amount of product goes down, knowing the psychology of pricing, and identifying in hard numbers the way convenience items are quietly bleeding the budget, is one small step to take control over your dollars.

I’m not trying to optimize every single purchase into oblivion, but rather I’m trying to really examine our purchases and be intentional about them. And also weigh the cost/benefit analysis of purchases that we make. In 2026, gone are the days of fun canned drinks.

Until next Friday,

Amy

P.S.: Get a free month of YNAB here! YNAB (You Need A Budget) is the budgeting software we have used for almost a decade. I’ve put quite a few friends onto this and they’ve all said that it has transformed their relationship with money. As a former broke-bitch who had to track every single penny and used to overdraw her bank account fresh out of college, I will budget until the day I die honestly lol

Based on Worcester, MA data

Sunrise: 6:38 am | Sunset: 7:07 pm | Day length: 12 hours, 29 minutes | Moon phase: Waxing Gibbous | Weeks until last frost: 7

This week I got around to potting up the leafy greens I started a couple weeks ago, and forced myself to sit down and sow so. many. seeds. Tomatoes, cabbage, chard, collards, basil, you name it, they’re tucked in and ready to germinate.

Tomatoes

• Amish Paste

• Piennolo del Vesuvio

• Super Sweet 100

• Italian Heirloom

• Paul Robeson

• Mortgage Lifter

• Striped German

• Cherokee Purple

• Sungold

• Juliet

• Kellogg’s Breakfast

• Black Krim

• Yellow Brandywine

• Brandywine

• Gold Medal

• Mexico Midget

Herbs & Lettuce

• Basil (x30) —every year I way underplant basil so I am going balls to the wall this year because I want to make an ungodly amount of pesto to preserve for the winter

• Bauer Lettuce (I still have to do another full tray of lettuce but I’m out of room on my heating mat!)

Dahlias & Kale

• Dahlia seeds (found some $1 packets I got last year so it’s a bit of a YOLO trial —I forgot to dig up my tubers and am not letting myself buy any this year as punishment lol)

• Dino Kale

• Dazzling Blue Kale

• Thousand Head Kale

• Walking Stick

• Mamba

Chard, Greens & Brassicas

• Red Rhubarb Chard

• Firebird

• Champion Collards

• Georgia Southern Collards

• True Magenta

• Silverado

• Peppermint

• Tatsoi

• Fordhook

• Bright Lights

• Melissa Savoy

• Gunma Cabbage

• Savoy

• Vates Kale

• Dazzling Blue Kale

• Dwarf Blue

This is a lot of seeds!! I know! I am organizing a seed swap in my town next month and want to have some seedlings to share, and I may sell some locally as well. Also I usually give some away to friends and neighbors. Also I am crazy! :)

Other things of note:

• the rhubarb plants have started to crest the soil — I am absolutely dying for the first rhubarb crumble of the year.

• the local bears are still making their rounds, and the neighborhood text chain is lively about the sightings

• we had our first goldfinch at the koi pond, which the entire family was very excited by

• speaking of the koi pond, that will be getting started up this week and the fishies will be very excited once the waterfall is back in action and they start getting some dank fresh oxygen. I also will start feeding them some spring food this week as well.

Seed starting information that will live here for a while:

• The Ultimate List of Trusted Seed Companies Recommended by Real Gardeners

• Starting Seeds Inside: A Beginner-Friendly Guide

• How to Start a Vegetable Garden as a Total Beginner

• Sunday - Rice + frozen pork dumplings that I got at H-mart recently with a sweet chili dipping sauce

• Monday - Maanchi’s multigrain rice (from this cookbook) + baked tofu + steamed mixed frozen veggies from Costco

• Tuesday - burger bowls similar to these but subbed shredded cabbage for lettuce, and added 1 cup of cooked lentils to the ground beef mixture. And roasted a sweet potato to have with it.

• Wednesday - Leftover multigrain rice + edamame + Kam Yen Jan Chinese sausage from Costco

• Thursday - pasta with butter, salt, and pepper for the sickies in the family (currently my son and husband), and RealGood chicken with steamed broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots + Chick-fil-A sauce (for those nights you just can’t even ya know?)

• Friday - pepperoni pizza but specifically I want to try to make pepperoni boats if that makes sense

• Saturday - A big batch of chicken noodle soup

• Pastina for sickness remedy since strep throat raged through our house this week)

• Sandwich bread for kids’ sandwiches

~caveat that I know Huberman has been problematic, but I really enjoy Dr. Rhonda Patrick and will listen to her on basically anything she’s on. She has her own podcast that is fantastic albeit much beefier and science-heavy than a popular science podcast.~

• I recently started a new strength training program that I’ve been really enjoying —I’m aiming for 4-5 days a week, and it’s a lower body, push, pull, upper body, lower body split (for my fellow meat heads out there!). Despite having been a personal trainer and CrossFit coach, I have always hated doing my own programming so I picked up the book Thinner, Leaner, Stronger that I’d heard good things about and I’m doing the program from that. Ugh, I know the name is not great and I wish training programs didn’t sound so cheesy but the programming is very sound!

• I think I’ve shared this before, but with the return of spring and nice outside walking weather, and as I am within spitting distance of the big 4-0 this year, I cannot emphasize enough how much I love my weighted vest. I got it around this time last year and I love it as much as I did on day one. It’s a USA-made weighted vest, specifically for women, and while pricier than the cheap Amazon versions I found, it is wonderful because it doesn’t squish the yitties, if you know what I mean. If I’m buying something, I try to adhere to BIFL a.k.a Buy It For Life. This vest has a lifetime warranty —something you’d never find on a random Amazon vest. Warning: it does look like something G.I. Jane would wear and my husband jokes that it’s my tactical vest.

Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson

But I’m Bored!: Discover the Power of Independent Play to Raise Confident, Resilient Kids by Lizzie Assa

Scientists watch sperm whales work as a team to assist a birth [NPR]

Plant Breeding Isn’t Easy [Offrange]

Beyond the Buzz: Why Pollinators Matter More than You Think [earth.org]

‘Native Foods Have Sustained People for Generations’ [Civil Eats]

An unstoppable mushroom is tearing through North American forests. Fungi enthusiasts are doing damage control [BBC]