Brunette Gardens Podcast: Recent Episodes

Brunette Gardens

Tips and tales from our homestead habitat.

brunettegardens.substack.com

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.brunettegardens.com

Hi, I’m Lisa Brunette, and this is Brunette Gardens, a podcast about gardening and life, with a little snark and a lot of healing heart.

After two years and more than $5,000 spent, I’m letting go of my chicken-keeping dreams.

This might come as a shock to those of you who’ve followed my poultry obsession from the halcyon days of that adorable mobile coop called the 'chickshaw,’ to the tragic total loss of that first flock, and up through the trials and tribulations of my attempts to rotation-graze using electric fences. It’s been an adventure, hasn’t it?

As it’s been a while, let me offer you a warm welcome back to Brunette Gardens! I’m Lisa Brunette, bringing you a garden of healing 🌱 from autoimmune conditions and the trauma at their root ❤️‍🩹.

No ads, no pop-ups, no auto-play videos. People like you fund my work.

Podcasts are mainly for paying members, except for this first one… and maybe some others I decide to kick out for everyone.

What you’ll hear is my narration of the latest essay, with video and a few ad-libbed lines for additional edification and hopefully entertainment. Owing to his cuddly-yet-mischievous nature, you might also get a video-bomb glimpse of Chaco the cat.

This return/reboot is still evolving, and I might bring on guests for discussion, among other possibilities, so let me know what you think in the comments.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.brunettegardens.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.brunettegardens.com

Each of the chicks I’ve raised since early spring had a 10-20 percent chance of turning out to be a rooster. That’s the “gender accuracy” given by the hatchery. It’s notoriously difficult to sex baby chicks, so an 80-90 percent accuracy rate is actually pretty good.

Ours is a flock of barred Plymouth Rocks, bearing feathers “barred” in black and white, for an overall effect of thick, salt-and-pepper stripes, an Oreo pattern, if you will. One morning the bird with the brightest feathers, whom I named Double Stuff for that reason, issued forth a call that seemed a bit like… a cockle-doodle-do.

This narrated version is for paying subscribers. Upgrade now for further adventures in chicken keeping!

A fine-feathered flock of garden helpers. By scratching and pecking, chickens till the soil, and they also fertilize it with their poops.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.brunettegardens.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.brunettegardens.com

I wasn’t sure I’d get chickens again.

The first time we tried to raise a flock, I lost my favorite feathered friend when she was only 8 weeks old and then the rest of the flock shortly thereafter to predators.

This was all before they’d even started laying eggs.

When asked to describe an herbal family legacy passed down over generations, this writer digs deep to find chamomile tea hiding behind the Nyquil.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.brunettegardens.com/subscribe

Lisa Brunette of the Brunette Gardens Substack interviews registered herbalist Sarah Donoghue of The Herbalist's Diary on what it's like to practice herbal medicine in the United Kingdom.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.brunettegardens.com/subscribe

It was highly ironic to have been positioned as the one who can somehow easily go home again, as the idea of “home” for me has always been loaded and complicated. As I told Stephanie on our video call to plan this week’s collaboration, moving back to this place I have called “home” has been in many ways extraordinarily difficult, and I sometimes think I was crazy to do it at all.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.brunettegardens.com/subscribe

The author shares a personal story of a year in which dying seems to be a prevailing theme. But in the end, nature gently provides sweet signs of life, even in winter.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.brunettegardens.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.brunettegardens.com

Garden tomatoes on Thanksgiving and other unexpected pleasures. The author shares her work to get the garden ready for the winter season, including the removal of a bush.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.brunettegardens.com

Baking your own sourdough bread takes time, effort, and patience. This is no convenience food, nor should it be. So why bother to go to the trouble?

When a reaction to King Arthur's bread flour reveals the company now adds "enzyme" as an ingredient, a baker is forced to ditch her sourdough culture and start over.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.brunettegardens.com/subscribe

A fiftysomething urban homesteader shares a litany of experiences showing just how challenging it is to operate a homestead in the city, from dealing with backyard poultry regulations to feeling the pressures of urban crime.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.brunettegardens.com/subscribe

Walls are always acts of violence.

So said the playwright Eileen Cherry when I interviewed her for a theater magazine back in the 1990s. I thought the notion was profound at the time, so I included it in my profile of Cherry and her work.

But now I think it’s a profoundly illogical thing to say.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.brunettegardens.com/subscribe

It has recently come to my attention that the supplements I’ve been taking on a routine basis in order to reduce symptoms of an autoimmune condition might actually be triggering those very same symptoms.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.brunettegardens.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.brunettegardens.com

There was another reason we just sat with the house and yard that first year, 2017-2018. For many of us, gardens become an extension of ourselves, maybe even of our very souls. They represent our hopes and dreams, our deepest wishes and yearnings, and even our sorrows and losses. That first year was one for the books, and in the aftermath, I turned my energy toward that quarter-acre expanse of lawn, invasive plants, and exotic ornamentals, and the vision that came to me was clear: We needed a fence. One that would cordon off the entire backyard perimeter.

What happened, exactly, to warrant fencing? I alluded to it when I said the job I’d taken that brought us to St. Louis turned out to be “challenging.”

That’s an understatement.

I’d been feeling a little blue, and losing the lucky frog didn’t help.

It happened when I cleaned out the bird bath. The lucky frog sits on a broken paver in the middle of the bird bath, and I’d set it or dropped it somewhere when I scrubbed the green slime from inside the bath, switching out to a fresh stone for the birds to perch on. I looked everywhere: In the ferns around the bird bath, all over my little cleaning spot near the hose. The lucky frog had vanished.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.brunettegardens.com/subscribe

An urban farmer draws on the wisdom of his ancestors, and that’s just common sense.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.brunettegardens.com/subscribe

Tyrean 'Heru' Lewis takes up a career path that's incredibly rare today: farming.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.brunettegardens.com/subscribe

St. Louis hosted the 1904 World’s Fair, a moment that has been immortalized in film with the movie Meet Me in St. Louis. This was the river city’s claim to fame at the turn of the previous century, and folks here have never forgotten it. The vestiges of that boom time dot the city as remaining relics of its glory days, when St. Louis was fourth in the nation in terms of population, and we were on par with our chief rival to the north, Chicago, in terms of wealth and prestige. Our ‘farmhouse’ is one of those relics.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.brunettegardens.com/subscribe

They say you can’t go home again, but I did.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.brunettegardens.com/subscribe

Let me tell you a weird story about our cat. We had some problems with water seeping through our basement walls. When this happens, the water is muddy. Even if you clean it up, it leaves a very fine silt behind. One place that ended up having a pretty thick layer was behind the furnace. It was out of the way and hard to get to, so it just sort of built up. We fixed our gutters and created a water garden in the backyard. Our roof runoff fills some drums, and then when they overflow, it runs out to the water garden, as does a French drain to draw water away from the basement. After we did that, we haven’t had as many problems with water in the basement. But that silt just set back there getting dryer and dryer. One day I realized I had not needed to clean the cat’s litter box in a while. He seemed OK. He wasn’t lethargic. I thought, “Maybe that silly cat is pooping somewhere other than in his litter.” I looked and looked and looked and finally found a nice pile of poop behind the furnace in that lovely, soft silt. Well, I guess you can’t really blame the cat. The silt is as soft as down, and the furnace makes that spot nice and warm. But still, I had to clean up the cat poop and then clean up the silt. The cat went back to his litter box, and all was well.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.brunettegardens.com/subscribe

As of today, all five chicks are still alive.

So, yeah, we haven’t garnered any losses yet, and the chicks look… healthy. Happy, even. They run around playing games with the “treats” I give them, with beet peels and red pepper bits standing out as apparent favorites.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.brunettegardens.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.brunettegardens.com

My father is a very handy man. He’s the type of guy who sees a brick patio and thinks, “I could do that.” And then he figures out how to do it. And then actually does it. And it looks awesome. As his son, it is both heartening to see what can be done and discouraging when you see how often your attempts at doing something awesome falls short. But as my grandfather used to say, “It’s good enuf fer who it’s fer.” It took me years to translate that from his Oklahoma twang to my more prosaic American standard into, “It is good enough for whom it is for.” I always liked Grandpa’s attitude towards life.

I first heard about making homemade toothpaste back in high school, from a science teacher named John McCullough. “Commercial toothpaste is a scam,” he declared, and then he broke down the science behind why you could get at least the same or maybe even better results if you simply took hydrogen peroxide and baking soda, mixed them together into a paste, and used that to brush your teeth instead. He assigned this little craft experiment to all of us enrolled in his freshman Introduction to Physical Science class, as homework.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.brunettegardens.com/subscribe

I’m so full of enthusiasm for these two beautiful herbs that I hardly know how to start talking about them. They tick just about every box on the list! What are they?

American mountain mint, or Pycnanthemum pilosum (above left)

Anise hyssop, or Agastache foeniculum (above right)

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.brunettegardens.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.brunettegardens.com

We’ve latched onto the idea of “permaculture,” drawn to the movement’s emphasis on independence through a garden stocked with human-use plants. So rather than only enjoying the sight and smell of the spring season’s plethora of petals, we challenge ourselves to make use of them as well.

There’s a new trend on TikTok. Mercy. I wrote that sentence, and I realized that is the modern equivalent of “Scientists recently…”. It’s that sentence that you know is going to end badly. Or as someone put it to me once, “If you only watch the first act of the movie, the new scientific discovery works out just fine!”

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.brunettegardens.com/subscribe

After an overall mild but strangely prolonged winter, we’re finally looking spring squarely in the buds. And that means it’s time to put the past three months of dreaming and planning into action.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.brunettegardens.com/subscribe

Referenced in podcast:

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.brunettegardens.com/subscribe

It’s fitting that I first learned about the subject of this season’s giveaway through another… giveaway. That one was over at Permies.com, an online permaculture community where I spend a fair amount of time researching, reading, and contributing. I did not win that giveaway, but Kate Downham’s book A Year in an Off-Grid Kitchen: Homestead Kitchen Skills and Real Food Recipes for Resilient Health caught my attention enough to warrant immediate purchase. I’ve been her fan ever since. Affiliate link for the book: https://amzn.to/3XZxrEu

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.brunettegardens.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.brunettegardens.com

There is a Chinese MMA fighter named Xu Xiaodong. Xu is not a professional fighter. He is more in the top-tier amateur. He lost his most famous bout against Andrew Pi even after he broke his opponent’s arm with a kick! So, he is never going to appear on TV in a million-dollar MMA fight.

In our continuing effort to “collapse now and avoid the rush” here at Brunette Gardens, for our recent road trip, I decided to shift to paper maps.

But first, I needed to obtain one.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.brunettegardens.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.brunettegardens.com/subscribe

It had been about a billion years since Anthony and I took a road trip. Sure, back in our footloose-and-fancy free youth, we frequently engaged in this great American pastime. I’ve made more than one trip from the Midwest to Key West and back, and once a bunch of girlfriends and I piled into a van and trekked to the Grand Canyon via Route 66, our Thelma-and-Louise gal-pal sojourn, minus the tragic ending. Anthony’s longest round trip was between his mom’s house in Oregon and college stomping grounds in Minnesota. As American Gen Xers, we saw road trips as a right of passage; like Jack Kerouac, we were supposed to heed the call of the open road before settling into stationary lives.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.brunettegardens.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.brunettegardens.com

I always like to credit where I can, and this particular truism came from a former boss of mine named Mary Kirchoff. Mary was a VP at Wizards of the Coast, in charge of the “publishing line.” This meant that novels, roleplaying games, and magazines were under her. This was a sweet little business that was worth somewhere in the region of $20 million per year. But she was part of a company that had an ongoing game, Magic: the Gathering, that regularly made $150 million and was about to launch a game that would bring in nearly $1 billion (Pokemon trading cards).

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit brunettegardens.substack.com

I suppose I’ve just cemented my status as a true nature nerd with this act: As promised when I invited all paid subscribers to witness this in person, I volunteered to speak at the Shutterbee Symposium on the topic of sheet mulching.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brunettegardens.substack.com/subscribe

Kitchen Gadget Links

Metal sieve press with a wooden pestle.

A potato ricer.

Foley food mill.

Spiced Persimmon Cookies

Ingredients

1 cup persimmon pulp
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. allspice or ground spicebush berries
1 tsp. ground fresh or powdered ginger
1 stick butter, softened
1/2 cup raw turbinado sugar
1/2 cup dark brown sugar
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 egg
1 cup whole wheat flour
3/4 cup all-purpose white flour
1/2 cup walnuts or pecans, roasted and chopped
1/2 cup raisins, chopped
Preheat your oven to 350°F and line two cookie sheets with parchment paper.
Combine the pulp, spices, and baking soda. Stir and set aside. Here’s the cool science element to baking: The pulp-and-baking soda mixture will turn into a gel!
Using a hand or stand mixer, cream the butter with both sugars. Mix in the vanilla and egg. Then add the pulp mixture.
Mix in the flour, forming a stiff cookie batter. Stir in the nuts and raisins.
Using an ice-cream scoop, drop batter onto the parchment, leaving 2” between them. Bake 12-18 minutes until golden brown. Let them cool on parchment before moving, as they need time to solidify.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brunettegardens.substack.com/subscribe

My grandfather was a dairy farmer. When my family went to visit him, we would inevitably end up helping him with the farm. Sometimes we would mend fences, or herd cattle, or feed cattle, or milk. It depended on what needed to be done, and (it being a farm) something always needed to be done. Very often, as we were coming close to finishing a job, my grandfather would intone, “gednuff fer oo es fur.” My grandfather had an Oklahoma accent that was further conflated with a Midwestern accent and then rolled into a Western accent. He then used this mélange to regularly sauté all kinds of bon mots.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brunettegardens.substack.com/subscribe

As a followup to two previous pieces, first a review of the landmark environmental warning Limits to Growth and second, my take on it called “Welcome to the slowpocalypse,” I want to wrestle with green energy as a solution.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brunettegardens.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit brunettegardens.substack.com

Maybe my endorsement of the groundbreaking environmental warning Limits to Growth blew your mind. Maybe it angered you… or galvanized you into further action. But even if it simply made you roll your eyes and move on, I think there’s one thing we can all agree on:

‘Climate change’ isn’t going away anytime soon.

Every once in a while, a great book comes along that takes the threads of ideas you’ve thought about and wondered over and crystalizes them into a cohesive narrative. Limits to Growth is one of those books.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brunettegardens.substack.com/subscribe

As many of you know by now, Lisa and I are of the “Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse” school of thought. But we are also practical. How long will it take for things to get really bad? Weeks? Months? Years? Longer? Who knows? Not us. And if you think you know how events are going to play out, you’re probably wrong.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brunettegardens.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit brunettegardens.substack.com

Those of you who’ve been following us for a while know I love garden plants with “stacked functions.” This permaculture phrase basically means “plants that multitask.” They have more than one use; for example, native violets are a pretty, soil-stabilizing ground cover, a host plant for fritillary butterflies, and they’re edible. Similarly, maypop and persimmon, both native to North America, are:

Easy to grow, as they’re right where they’ve evolved as a plant species and need no extra care

Important food sources for native insects and animals

Edible, nutritious, and medicinal for humans

A source for other human-use products, such as wood

With all of the above, maypop and persimmon more than earn their place in your garden, and I recommend planting them this fall. Here’s what you need to know.

So far this late summer, I’ve encouraged you to plant now for a fall crop of carrots as well as put in some asparagus, the perfect perennial for years of spears to come. This time I want to talk about alliums.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brunettegardens.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brunettegardens.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brunettegardens.substack.com/subscribe

Who, what, where, and why...

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brunettegardens.substack.com/subscribe