Weekend Basics

Friday we attended a farm workshop and dinner with members of the Richmond Food Coop. We visited a new farm out in Woodford, Virginia called Lockhart Family Farm. It's a small scale family farm that specializes in raising heritage breeds of turkey, chickens and pigs — and they do it all with what they call old world sustainable practices.

One aspect of the tour that particular sparked our interest was beekeeping. Mary and I have talked about how cool it would be to be able to keep a hive or two of bees on the roof of our garage but weren't really sure it was something we'd have the experience or know-how to do. Josiah from the farm is an expert and told us he'd be happy to come out at some point to help us set something up and teach us as we go. He explained that city bees keep and produce exceptionally well since there are actually a multitude of different plant varieties for them to interact with as compared with the more monocultural type settings of rural areas — this came as a surprise to us, but made complete sense once we thought about it further. One of our favorite things to do while walking Basil through the city neighborhoods has been recognizing and trying to identify all the different types of plants people cultivate in their yards. It's definitely peaked our bee keeping curiosity and just might be something we look into further.

We had fun getting a firsthand look at what it takes to run a farm and enjoyed dining by candlelight while making some new friends.

Speaking of events, yesterday evening we attended Kendra Baileys Morris' book party at Pasture to celebrate the launch of her newest cookbook, The Southern Slow Cooker:

There was a fun potluck style aspect to the party where guests could bring their favorite recipe — can you tell which crockpot was ours in this lineup?

Ha, if you guessed the vintage "nanny-style" one you would be correct. No shame! Jokes aside, we love the cookbook and are big fans of Kendra — look out for a book giveaway coming in 2 weeks over on E.A.T.

Now that I'm home full time, I've had time to tackle a few of those lingering projects on the list like switching out the lighting systems in our cellar and garage:

The fluorescent lighting in the cellar was hit or miss as to whether or not it wanted to turn on when we'd flip the switch and just all around dreary — so an update to an LED bulb with a new fixture makes life that much better each time we head down those steps. Isn't it funny how sometimes the littlest updates make the biggest impact in your day to day.

In garden news, many of you know we've been trying to propagate several different types of herb varieties. We got a bunch of rooted cuttings into soil filled planters this weekend to hopefully help them along:

Anyone else feel autumn coming? Here's an obligatory autumn flower shot Mary wanted me to post:

These guys earned me some additional husband points and gave Mary and excuse to pull out one of our mason jars!

We hope you each had a wonderful weekend and are soaking in these last days of summer!