The Slowcook at Spydog Farm The Slowcook at Spydog Farm

Welcome, Garden Rant Readers

September 12th, 2013 · No Comments · Posted in Blog, farming

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Today I take a step back and ponder our big move from an apartment in the District of Columbia to a farm in Upstate New York, telling the back-story at Garden Rant, the world’s most popular garden blog with an edge.

For Garden Rant readers who may have followed a link to this blog, you are most welcome to look around. For the last several months, I’ve been writing about what it’s like to start a small livestock farm from scratch. If you want to know how I went about building a mobile chicken coop, or how I’ve dealt with several sheep deaths, this would be the place to do that. I update what’s happening on the farm five days a week. Saturday is my day off, and on Sunday I write News from Up North, a somewhat tongue-in-cheek capsule of what’s happening in our neck of the woods.

We may be rural in our corner of Washington County, but as our real estate agent liked to tell us, this is not where civilization goes to die.

For my regular readers who may not be familiar with the Rant, I owe my blogging career to one of its founding writers, Susan Harris. We were classmates in a Master Gardener class in D.C. years ago. That was around the time I first started our kitchen garden at the corner of 13th and Euclid streets, two miles north of the White House. Susan suggested I write a blog. My response: what’s a blog?

Since that time, I’ve been designated “Friend of the Rant,” and wear that badge proudly. The last time I wrote for Garden Rant was to propose a re-thinking of “community gardens,” suggesting that individual plots be replaced with a broader concept of using urban spaces to produce food more efficiently and in greater quantity and divide the spoils, with some designated for the needy. I was tarred as a communist. Irate gardeners  wanted to run me out of town on a rail.

Perhaps they will be less offended by my latest pre-occupation: raising sheep and goats and chickens and pigs on pasture. Already I can hear the vegans howl….

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