Wreath Giveaway!

Edit: Winner is Cassandra Converse!  Thank you so much for everyone who played along and keep your eyes open for future giveaways!

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Hello everyone!  To celebrate the redesign of A Forager's Home, and the upcoming launch of the A Forager's Home Shop I am giving away one of my magazine paper twine wreaths!  To win it leave a comment on here or any other blog post.  Make sure you leave an email address so I can get a hold of you if you are the winner!  If you want to earn some bonus entries play along on Instagram as well!  

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Contest runs until 2 October, 2017 at 11:59 PST.  

Grow Write Guild No. 12 - Fall is Here

Temperatures falling

Colours change to red and orange

Autumn approaches.

Getting to the Heart of the Matter

In the course of my gardening and foraging journey I often find myself in conversation with people who are curious about what I do, and why I do it.  People are interested these days in what it looks like to get back to to the land, and to rediscover traditional skills.  That is a good thing!  I love having these conversations, but at times I find myself feeling like I am defending my gardening choices, or explaining why I am not bringing in huge harvests every day.

My garden is small.  It's bigger than you would think I'd be able to have, but it's not going to be something that we could ever live off.  We have built up raised beds in almost all of the available space, but I have given a good half of it to perennials - herbs, a few berry bushes, bunching onions, rhubarb, and things like that - and most of these are fairly recent transplants so they aren't giving me huge yields.  Another factor in my harvests is that I have prioritized late harvest vegetables this year.  I'm growing dry beans, winter squash, popcorn, cabbage, and things like that.  I'm also not in the greatest spot for tomatoes (although I still try) so mine come in quite late.  Same story with the peppers.  I have some ideas for how I can get a better jump start on these next season, but the fact of the matter is on top of all of these considerations gardening is always unpredictable.  One day I would like to do this in a way that it would support our family, but for now I am mainly growing things that are interesting, or hard to find at the local farmers market. 

I think also some of these questions represent the disconnect people have with their food sources these days.  Growing what we eat takes time, space, and knowledge that most people don't have anymore.  When my neighbour asks why with "such a big garden" I am bringing in these small harvests, I know she isn't insulting my gardening skills, rather the knowledge of what it takes to produce food has been lost.

I'm not sure what the overall point of this post was, but I was wondering how those of you reading feel about this topic.  My past couple of years of gardening and foraging have been so eye opening.  Every new season brings challenges and discoveries, and I am constantly amazed by everything I am learning about creation.  Leave me a comment if you have any thoughts.  What are the challenges you face with choosing more of a homesteading kind of life?  Are people baffled or mystified by the choices you are making?

July Harvest Totals

August Harvest Totals

Asterisk denotes foraged harvest (in the wilderness or the neighbourhood).

• *Arnica: 55 g
• Basil: 6 g
• Beets (Chioggia): 42 g
• Buckwheat: 23 g
• Carrots (Danvers): 864 g
• Chamomile: 17 g
• Garlic Scapes: 9 g
• Lemon Balm: 12 g
• Lettuce (Drunken Woman): 13 g
• Lettuce (Vulcan): 38 g
• Mint (Peppermint): 11 g
• Mint (Pineapple): 2 g
• Nootka Rose Petals: 13 g
• Onion (Welsh): 213 g
• *Orach: 496 g
• Peas (Amish Snap): 85 g
• Peas (Blue Podded Soup): 30 g
• Peas (Green Arrow): 445 g
• Raspberries: 59 g
• Squash Blossoms: 5 g
• Tarragon: 3 g
• Yarrow: 8 g

TOTAL: 2.449 kg

This month was lower than the last seeing as we were away for more than half of it.  Some of these are quite minuscule harvests from the garden, but I am glad that I was able to forage a few different things.  Still not as much as I hoped, because unfortunately the Kamloops area is blanketed in wildfire smoke and has been for about a month.  We've had air quality health advisories out asking us to stay inside and if we do go out to limit any strenuous activity.  Not all my foraging is 'strenuous', but a lot of the time I was with Little Forager, and I really didn't want to expose him to a lot of smoke, so we mostly chilled inside with Thomas the Tank Engine. 

I am really happy about how my carrots are doing.  I have never had very good luck with them before, but this year they look really great!  My garlic isn't in the total for this month, but I did pull them in July.  I had to wait for them to cure before I was able to weigh them.  There's a picture below because I still wanted to include them in some way.  I also have a photo of one of my alpine strawberries because I haven't really been weighing them since I only get one or two per day and usually Little Forager gobbles them right up before we even get inside, so here's a photo so they can be included in this month's post as well.

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Also just a note that you can now find me on Bloglovin' so Follow my blog with Bloglovin! 

Road Tripping and Cloth Diapering

This is not my usual topic for this blog, but today I wanted to talk a little bit about cloth diapers.  Yup.  If you think about it, this is not as off topic as it might seem.  I care about the earth and care to continue my foraging, and gardening for many more years so I feel being as close to zero-waste as I can is important.  Vital, even.  Let's just say that all the disposable diapers you wore as a baby are still sitting in a landfill somewhere.  Just hanging out.  Basically completely intact.  No matter how old you are.  That grosses me out way more than washing a soiled diaper ever could especially with how hassle free cloth diapering companies make their products.

If you've seen my Instagram, you are probably aware that we love using cloth instead of conventional diapers.  This is a huge way we can reduce the garbage that comes along with raising Little Forager, and it is also a major help financially since we are not always buying diapers.  I don't want to spend all my time here talking about why cloth diapering is the way to go - there are many other resources you can find on that topic via a quick google - rather I wanted to talk about whether or not it is practical to use cloth diapers when travelling

As enthusiastic as we are, we are not cloth diapering purists by any means.  There are often times we decide that a disposable diaper is needed.  If we know we are going to be visiting somewhere that doing laundry is going to be really inconvenient for us or our hosts we leave the cloth at home and buy as eco-friendly an option as possible.  This time we knew we knew the laundry wouldn't be a problem, so we decided to pack up the cloth and try them out on a really long road trip and blog about how it went.

This is basically all of my stash.  For the most part we use a combination of Mother Ease and Nuggles diapers.  The Mother Ease diapers (one size fitted diapers with their "air flow" covers) we bought used at a very reasonable price.  These are not the fanciest diapers - there are other styles offered that are, however - and they don't have the trimmest fit, but they are so durable.  We are the second to use them and after two years of our use you can barely tell they are getting on a bit.  Most of our Nuggles products are accessories (Tuck-Wrap-Go covers, wet bags, wallet), although we do have one of their Simplee diapers and it is amazing.  We are seriously considering adding more of them to our collection.  We also have a couple reusable swim diapers, use basic washcloths for wipes, Delish Naturals Therapeutic Yum Bum Butter, and Bummis flushable liners (indispensable now that we have a toddler eating solids), and that basically sums up everything we use for diapering.

The biggest challenge I figured we would have is changing Little Forager during the driving.  Thankfully the travel sized wet bag (pictured above) makes this just as convenient as it would have been using conventional diapers - if changing a wriggling toddler in a public place is ever truly convenient.  The only thing that I had to remember is that since we just use regular baby washcloths for wipes, I had to get them wet first at a sink before I started the whole process.  I could have planned ahead and carried pre-moistened washcloths in a container, or there are even plenty of DIY wipe solution recipes people have made available on the internet.  These wet bags are awesome, because there is a front pocket where you can keep clean diapers, and the back pocket is made of waterproofed fabric (the same kind of thing as the diaper covers) where you can throw the dirty stuff and leave it there until you get a chance to do a load of laundry.  The best part is how well they contain the smell!  I'll be honest that it's not completely 100% smell-proof if you get up close, and if you have dirty stuff and clean stuff in at the same time for a while you're going to want to air out the clean stuff a bit before using it.  Despite those minor concerns we drove all the way from Kamloops, British Columbia to Prince Albert, Saskatchewan and you couldn't tell there were dirty diapers in there.

There were a few times we went to the park, or stopped at a water park, and that was all super easy as well thanks to the Nuggles Reusable Swim Diaper and their Simplee diaper which are both really easy to use on the go.  Thanks again to the travel sized wet bag no one knew we were packing dirty diapers along with us!  

Well, thanks for bearing with me through all my gushing about cloth diapers.  It really was easy to use them even on a long road trip, and I really think it's important to do as much as we can to reduce our garbage.

For those of you who are interested, Nuggles has given me a link to share with my readers to shop their site at a discount!  Click here and happy shopping!

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Nuggles Diapers and Mother Ease have provided me some of their products free of charge, but all thoughts and opinions expressed in this review are my own.