To The Surbiton Manor Born

  Princess Poppyseed Watson and her Magnificent Tail It is never too early to start planning. This is the indoor part of it. You can do it with your cats. In fact, I think that planning is half the fun. It is part of the process. It might be argued that too much planning removes one from the moment. As Allen Saunders put it in the January 1957 issue of Reader's Digest , and later John Lennon put it, "Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans." But the answer to this half-baked argument is that the making of plans is in fact part of the process of life, and it is worthwhile in itself, because it is more than just a mental exercise, it has practical repercussions on your future. My future involves a summer of gardening. Here are some of the things that we're going to be growing: Fresno peppers (Tasty! Just had one. We've tasted blood, and we want more !) Snow peas Pole beans Bush beans Hubbard squash Pumpkins (They can share the trellis with the bea...

  Helko Werk Nordic Splitting Axe Over the last couple of weeks, I've acquired more than one axe, based on new information. While readers who know about cutting wood may find this a bit dull, like my old fiberglass-handled felling axe from a big box hardware store, if you haven't cut a lot of wood, it may be new to you. I was scrolling through Instagram and I came across one of the folks I follow, Rowdy Claude, the cross-dressing homesteader who gave a wood splitting 101 class. Aha! This was why my axe continually jams in the wood. The "cheeks" of the axe head are the wrong shape. Great for cutting a tree down. Lousy for splitting.  This should not have been news to me. My dad used to heat with wood. This is our third year heating with wood at Steepmeadow. And yet... So I purchased a really good splitting axe. It turns out that there's a whole world of axes. There is the brand with the big recognition, the Gransfors Bruk. There's Helko Werk from Germany. There...