Blog – Page 105 – Cerakko Farm

Gena’s Farm Memories

December 8, 2010November 12, 2014

Ten years ago, our free-spirited friend Gena moved into one very old farmhouse on 115 acres in Jonesville, Va. Her dream of living in the country was finally realized but, sadly, also short-lived, because she found it just too difficult to make a living in such a rural remote area. But her memories of that time are lasting. Here are a few of her reflections from that special time in her life.

We bought 115 acres. I moved out of Atlanta because I thought that I could provide a better life for my little girl. We would bounce down the mile-and-a-half dirt driveway for our walk. We would walk up the mountain and pick berries. We laughed. We danced. We had a food co-op where neighbors, including a doctor and an ex-CIA agent who had also run to the hills from the city, traded produce and friendship. Our house was built in 1929. On the first floor, I once fell through some wooden planks in the kitchen and found dirt. It also took some time to figure this out, but remnants of fabric were left on a wall in the bedroom. Guess that was before wallpaper. In the beginning, I slept upstairs in a sleeping bag. Using the bathroom in the middle of the night was tricky, as you needed a flashlight and a piece of toilet paper to go to the hill. We bathed in the front creek and learned that we did, in fact, have neighbors. We enjoyed cows, daily deer, snakes, wild turkey and chickens…for a day. We quickly found out that chickens and dogs don’t mix. Lord, Lord, did we have blackberries. We love blackberries. To this day we have a difficult time buying them as ours were much better off the bush. I miss the farm.

‘Our Consistently Surprising Alabama’

Mod Birds

More Cucumber Inspiration: Tzatziki

Blog-Spot: DallasWineChick

Mikey Builds A Doghouse

December 6, 2010November 12, 2014

Mike D’Avanzo is getting handier and handier. Last month he designed and built a 7’x4′ doghouse in the new dog paddock
to acccomodate our three Great Danes – Linus
(165 lbs.), Lola (150 lbs.) and their pup, Sammi Lu (70 lbs. and counting). The house is vented, heated, will have insulation, and now Mike says he may add a wet bar. He even recycled old wood from the pasture fence we tore down and sided the house
to look like a rough old barn. And if all that wasn’t enough, Dad decided to finish it with a tin, errrrr, woof.

The Contents.

Are you ‘green’ with envy?

December 4, 2010November 12, 2014

This is a picture of our greenhouse

…on a good day.

Lessons in Beekeeping

(: First Harvest 🙂

How does your garden grow?

Do you craft?

December 2, 2010November 12, 2014

Guess we’ll just stay on the fun-books-to-read theme this week while we keep our noses to the ol’ client grindstone. (And if you’re a client who’s reading this, please don’t take offense. It’s just an old expression, really…we still love you.) Anyhow, Amy Sedaris tackles more of life’s tough questions in her book Simple Times: Crafts for Poor People. Whether you’re rich, poor or somewhere in between, this one’s a throwback to days of yore. You can learn, or relearn, about some cool stuff – like how to make sausage cookies, how to make a doll-wig doorknob, or even how to create your own crab-claw roach clips.

Simple Times confronts the hard-hitting craft questions that other books of this genre have refused to even acknowledge: Why should every room look like an attic? What is the quickest way to obtain feathers from a bird? What are the best crafting options for the criminally insane? Why is there a half naked man wearing a short canary robe on page 250? Simple Times does more than answer the tough questions, it also transports us back to a golden time when we wore handmade sweaters, carved our cooking utensils out of bark, and the best people would buy books based on a whim.

P.S. Oh, and in case you missed Amy’s chat with Craig Ferguson: