MUSINGS ON LIFE AND WRITING WITH SARAH BUCKLEITNER
Jordan and I excel at making our lives more difficult than they need to be. Maybe it's the product of a chaotic past decade that we don't know how to come down off of. Or a desire to distract ourselves from more difficult tasks. Whatever the reason, sometimes we make choices that I look back … Continue reading On Planting 208 Baby Trees
For some reason--despite years and years of doing it and a year as the co-President of the Sustainable Foods club (and thus co-director of the campus community garden)--gardening has never felt in my comfort zone. The concept is simple: you stick plants in the ground. You give them sunlight and water. And if the conditions … Continue reading On Travails in the Garden
Ever since I was a child, I've wanted chickens of my own. I remember visiting the local farm near our house, and my best friend, Amanda, and myself hunting for eggs to hide in our pockets, so that we could bring them home and try to incubate them. Once, I even brought home an egg … Continue reading On Feathery Friends
With a new house comes a new garden, and this time we're ready to to take it to a new level. A quick note though: to be clear, we're not trying to homestead here. Neither Jordan or myself has any interest in trying to grow all of our own food. That takes a level of … Continue reading On The Start of a New Garden
When we first moved to this little plot of land in Upstate New York, the overgrown cow pastures that made up the field behind our house seemed almost devoid of animal life. In our first forays to explore it, we waded through densely growing goldenrod and gorgeous (invasive) purple loosestrife. Our clothes caught on (also … Continue reading On Abundant American Woodcocks
Back in January of 2020, I wrote a post about some of our goals related to living an environmentally conscious, slow--but also attainable--life (read the post here). Since then, I've watched the world get slammed by a global pandemic, we lost our childcare, we at times had upwards of 8 people living in our small … Continue reading Living in accord with the land: how we’re doing
As the wife of a wildlife biologist, I know more about the comings and goings of the whitetail deer in our neighborhood than I'd like. Every time we ease around the corner of the wooded bend in the road near our house, Jordan studies the trees.
(Warning--this is an excessively long ramble about gardens). I have a thing for failed gardens. We go way back. Every spring a fever of desire comes over me: the desire to plant seeds in the ground and watch them grow. Every spring, I start a garden. And every summer, I still fail to have homegrown … Continue reading On Plants and Persistence
We woke to slate grey skies and helterskelter leaves flapping violently on their twigs in the trees. Jenna and I had been having a celebratory post-MCAT sleep over (complete with sticky buns, Oreos, Tarzan, and the Office) and as she rolled over to check her phone, her eyes got wide. "There's a tornado warning!" she … Continue reading On the business of survival
Feathery Thoughts 