Nicky and Dave Schauder are passionate about helping families grow their food, and medicine and find God in the garden. Learn how to build your own permaculture garden Get our 10 Steps Garden Workbook when you sign up!
Our beans molded in the jar
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Hi Reader! A Seed Saving MistakeThis summer our kids shelled a big batch of beans and cowpeas. We poured them straight into glass jars. A few weeks later, every jar had molded. The pods weren’t dry enough. Why We Save SeedsEvery seed has a future inside of it.I love the word “steward,” because saving seed lets us keep that future for the next generation. Our seed shop (pictured above) is our little Noah’s ark, keeping seeds safe through the winter. It reminds me of the enslaved Africans who hid seeds in their braids and carried them across oceans. A woman once told me after a seed talk, “I can do a whole meditation just on the seed.” Start with these 3 seeds
They pollinate themselves, so they rarely cross with other varieties. What you save is what you’ll grow next year. How long saved seed lasts on average:
Save Your Own SeedsFor a quick guide on how to:
And the beans? One more thing. Something is changing about how we teach permaculture. More on that next week. Grow abundantly, |
Dave & Nicky Schauder
Nicky and Dave Schauder are passionate about helping families grow their food, and medicine and find God in the garden. Learn how to build your own permaculture garden Get our 10 Steps Garden Workbook when you sign up!
Hello Reader,Last weekend, Bethany Farm opened its gates for the Loudoun Fall Farm Tour. We walked neighbors through the garden beds, showed off our farm robot, and even had a cooking demo going under the tent. Shout out to the VA Cooperative Extension for hosting our farm-to-table workshop! Emily Jacobs and Jean share a laugh while cooking freshly harvested produce It was a full day, and it was good to meet so many of you in person.Tonight, we’re back at it, this time online. Join us at 7:30...
Last Friday, Dave and I welcomed something new to Bethany Farm. A robot. When Dave powered "Gather," the robot, up for the first time, the chickens were curious. Why a Farm Robot? Most agricultural technology is built for large commercial operations. Very little of it is designed for small farms like ours. When Suma Reddy and her team reached out about piloting the robot she’s been building, I asked her why this project mattered to her. Her answer: She wants to make farming possible for...
Dear Reader Why We Grow You may already know what first got us into growing food. Our first two children were born with food allergies. Ethan, our second, had eczema so severe we could see it on his face after every meal. 2 year old Ethan with eczema Dave and I started questioning everything. What was in the food we were buying? What were we actually feeding our children? We wanted to know where our food was coming from. And we wanted to be the ones growing it. We switched to organic. At the...