Cookbook Club Podcast
HipChickDigs
by Renee Wilkinson
2y ago
Modern homesteaders are often avid home-cooks, and I am no exception. In case you are too, I wanted to make sure you all knew about the podcast I’ve launched called Cookbook Club with my friend Sara Gray. We’ve belonged to a “real life” cookbook club for a few years now, but ever since pandemic life began it’s become a lifeline for me. Making delicious food, trying new recipes, and sharing the results with one another has kept my spirits high through isolating times. Our podcast is a way to offer that community to you all, near and far. Each month we pick a cookbook, make a bunch of recipes f ..read more
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Backyard Rain Garden
HipChickDigs
by Renee Wilkinson
3y ago
Incorporating a rain garden into our homestead allows us to weave natural processes into our backyard. We can still grow lots of food, keep chickens and bees – all the fun homestead-y stuff – but we can also devote a little space to help protect our urban watershed. Our finished rain garden with a stone “bridge” crossing Portland receives a lot of rain for nine months of the year and downspouts connected to the sewer can cause backflow into the river during major rain events – gross. The city encourages homeowners to disconnect their downspouts from the sewer, so rain can soak back into the gr ..read more
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2020 Vegetable Garden Plan
HipChickDigs
by Renee Wilkinson
3y ago
This is the most well-thought through vegetable garden I’ve ever created. Take a look at the plan I created, get tips to make your own, and get a jump on the season while we’re all cooped up at home. Photo: Helpful items for crafting a veggie plan include coffee, local growing calendar, time to maturity, graph paper, more coffee1. My Garden Goal My primary goal is to feed my family over as long of a growing season as possible. That means I’m choosing kid-friendly crops and varieties – not rare and experimental vegetables. I made a list of the most important crops – the ones we eat on the regul ..read more
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Perfect Pumpkin Puree
HipChickDigs
by Renee Wilkinson
3y ago
You can easily substitute fresh pumpkin for canned pumpkin, but a couple extra steps are needed to ensure the final product is perfect. Follow these steps to ensure you end up with a perfectly roasted pumpkin that is superior in both flavor and texture. Homegrown Rogue Vif d’Etampes pumpkin with a decorative pumpkin resting on topSelecting the Right Pumpkin Your journey to the perfect pumpkin puree begins with choosing the right variety of pumpkin. Those big pumpkins we carve for Halloween have flesh that is watery and stringy, so leave those for just decoration. For cooking and baking, cho ..read more
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Homesteading with Kids
HipChickDigs
by Renee Wilkinson
3y ago
Unripe San Marzano tomatoes This is what homesteading with children looks like. Fox, now a toddler, picked these precious San Marzano tomatoes, which he’s been doing periodically all summer. And, yes, it drives me I.N.S.A.N.E. But the alternative is to keep the kids out of the garden or, worse, stop gardening altogether out of frustration. And then everyone loses. Let me tell you why. Continuing to homestead on our urban plot teaches our whole family important stuff. Fox will eventually learn how to tell when our crops are ripe. He’ll assume everyone has tomatoes in his backyard and all tomato ..read more
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Homestead Update: Year Five
HipChickDigs
by Renee Wilkinson
3y ago
Can you believe we’ve been digging our roots into this homestead for five years already? I’m returning for intermittent blogging after taking a couple years off. And I wanted to let you all in the garden gate and show you how things have grown. Food production central are the four large raised beds adjacent to our chicken coop/shed Modern homesteads are about some degree of self-sufficiency, so our space has always been intended to offset our food supply. The heart of our homestead is our intensive food production: the raised beds and chicken coop. Weeds and bolted veggies go to the chickens ..read more
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Welcome Baby Fox
HipChickDigs
by Renee Wilkinson
3y ago
Here we are on the winter solstice, nearly three months after welcoming our sweet baby Fox. I hope you spend this darkest day of the year somewhere warm surrounded with love, with bright days ahead. Here’s the story of how we welcomed our biggest gift this year. One of my last days of pregnancy. This pregnancy was savored more than any other because I knew it was my last time on this journey. But it was also the most challenging with so much already on my plate. I suffered through the morning sickness followed by exhaustion like so many other working mothers – still meeting every deadline, r ..read more
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One More Seat
HipChickDigs
by Renee Wilkinson
3y ago
It turns out there was one more seat at our family table. We get to welcome a baby boy into the world in early October, just as summer is fading into fall. Although I am not blogging regularly anymore, the news just feels too big to not share. Life feels very full, but somehow I just knew we weren’t quite done with our family. Juniper and River are both excited for their new baby brother. Jay and I feel so privileged to be able to make room in our lives for one more child. Gosh, it was agonizing at times when we were trying to decide if three kids made sense for our family. It means ..read more
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ASLA Award Winner
HipChickDigs
by Renee Wilkinson
3y ago
I was recently presented with a Community Service Award from the Oregon Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architecture (actually it was months ago, but better late than never!). This award puts me up in the company of leading regional landscape architects like Carol Mayer-Reed who have received the same Community Service Award in past years. It’s a real honor! ASLA is the professional organization for landscape architects and landscape architectural designers (like me). Landscape architecture is a really vast design field that includes designing public parks, urban waterfronts ..read more
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Roasting Chanterelle Mushrooms
HipChickDigs
by Renee Wilkinson
3y ago
I spend a good chunk of the fall foraging for wild mushrooms, specifically chanterelles, around the forests of the Pacific Northwest. As I’ve gotten better, my harvests have gotten bigger and bigger – leaving me with the dilemma of how to process and preserve so many in a short period of time. After years of experimentation, I finally discovered the perfect preservation method: roasting, then freezing these golden jewels. My latest mushroom hunting adventure yielded 50 pounds of chanterelles – half picked by me and half by my sister You start to develop a sixth sense for mushroom huntin ..read more
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