Trusting my gut: How I got here

Dear Friends,

I hope this finds you well in your corner of this big blue marble we call home.

Yesterday evening, the sun had set on our hill, but the temperature was still spicy. The remains of a hot day blew down the hillside. Warm wind carried the scent of cooked blackberries, like opening the oven and being hit with the moist hot air of a just-baked blackberry pie. (That reminds me, I need to remind Christopher he promised he’d bake me a pie this weekend. He’s amazing at baking and I just don’t bake. But, I will ferment just about anything.)

Where the brambles have found underground water, the fruit is fat, sweet, juicy, and oh so purple. The plants that haven’t have berries that are already drier than raisins. There is one spot on the hill where the fruit dried out before it ripened.

There is smoke, but it is likely you have some as well. The air quality map I looked at this morning showed most of this planet has “orange or red” air. Here the peppers and tomatoes are still green. There are a lot of peppers, but the tomatoes are barely setting fruit. When I am at the local coop and see that peppers and most tomatoes still are from far, far, away I feel impatient.

But we have more zucchinis than we can keep up with. I’ve been fermenting a lot of shiso. We have had a few eggplants. The beans are just flowers. Maybe a cucumber or two will be ready this week.

Something I made this week for lunch. Fresh zucchini, because they are showing up at every meal, flavored with last year’s rich, deep umami, fermented zucchini. (This ferment is still delicious and crunchy.) You might look at this post from last year for tips on fermenting zucchini and other watery August veggies.

How to Ferment Cucumbers, Zucchini and Eggplant

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September 1, 2025

For those of you keeping track, this is a lot of salt. It is because I want this to last for months, not weeks, and salt is the way to achieve that with cucumbers. It isn’t too salty to enjoy, and I will add this to unsalted food, and it will bring zing and flavor.

In the past months, I have put letter writing, as in snail mail, pen-on-paper notes, stuffed in envelopes, licked shut, stamped, and dropped into the mailbox to head to distant friends, back into my life. I’ve missed it. And I have to say, it has brought back the fun of meandering through a thought and a story. Texts take away the search for just the right word, and video calls have taken away the need to write the story when you can tell it.

While this isn’t landing in your mailbox—though I have honestly thought that might be next—I think it has qualities of a wandering mind. I hope you keep reading.

Anybody interested in an analog newsletter or zine? I would love your thoughts.

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During the hot part of these days I have been going through things tucked in boxes, things in deep closet corners, things in the attic, that isn’t a proper attic that we have managed to fill with the clutter of life that found its way up there because didn’t want to deal with it at the time—but for some reason couldn’t be sent on at the time.

You know how when you are standing at the edge of the surf, and the last foamy bit of a wave churns up sand, bits of shell, plastic, or plankton that are churning around and around until they are dropped past the surf or sent back out to sea. In this churn are memories, physical items, photographs, junk, treasures, questions, and Lordy, so many decisions!

Today, as I sit to write to you, I am compelled to dip into the past, as that is where my head has been, but also as it informs where it is now. I’ve written a bit about the years I homeschooled our four children while working through a small-holding homestead dream. The dream grew from the place we found ourselves—a poverty-ridden, hard-scrabble, mountainside homestead. Instead of the cabin tucked in a forest we’d been looking for, we found a home on a hill with a barn and fields. We weren’t urbanites looking to fulfill a homesteading dream.

We moved to a little house on a rural property because I wanted our family to live amongst trees. I wanted my children to feel connected to place and to feel part of, not separate from, nature. Was it the falling in barn? The century-old apple trees? The new friends I made? The turn of the millennium? At some point, I realized I also wanted my children to know where their food came from and how to grow it. A small garden, fruit trees, and maybe some goats as part of learning to tend and care for other than human life felt, to me at a time, like part of a well-rounded education.

We were able to move out to “the middle of nowhere” because Christopher’s job was remote. This was early on, when that meant dial-up internet and landline conference calls. At the same time that Christopher’s job was demanding more and more of his time in-person (meaning long absences), I made friends with amazing local women who were part of a robust small farming community. I’d been interested in organics and better food systems since college, and now I found myself in a community where people were working toward this in real time.

Let me back up for a moment. Those of you who have been reading my letters for a while might remember I was a child who was moved from place to place. As a young mother, I was compelled to give my children the opposite. I dug in my heels. And slowly, the dream of our labor on land took hold. Most compelling was to find a way to get us out of the cycle of Christopher coming and going. I, and then we, imagined our family working together to make the frustrating economic details of life work. In our minds this looked like growing all our food (well, most) with a small production scheme of some kind, cheese, cider, ferments, to pay for the rest of life. I won’t get into all the ways that was not, nor would ever have been, realistic. Suffice it to say it was magical thinking based on a complicated mix of idealism and lies nearly two centuries old.

It was this first attempt at a small farmstead fermented veggie producer that eventually brought me to what I do now.

Christopher found a personality test online and asked me to take it (today, while I was writing you)—so we could compare. He used to work for a group that did assessments to help folks understand their working styles; as he has a deeper understanding of these tests, he likes to see how they work and what they do. (This one is called The Coached Personality Test.)

I didn’t think it would have any bearing on this, but now (because I don’t always plan 🤷‍♀️ where things are going) I am including this part of my “result” because I think it is part of the question that I get asked often. How did you end up doing this work? Worse is: What advice would you give to a young person starting out that wants to do what you do? Because is trust your gut an answer? It is a worn-down phrase as it is, and then in the context of fermentation it is just plain cliché.

My answer is often some variation of it just was a series of paths and I took the one that felt like the right one at any given moment. Here’s the secret truth, there was never a plan. It worked because it worked. I can’t say how anyone else’s path will work, though I am happy to be a sounding board.

I wanted my kids to have good food, we grew food, we had to preserve that food, enter fermentation. The kids grew, we tried a business, people wanted to learn, I taught, we wrote a book to teach more, the kids moved out one by one, I wasn’t a business owner type, I liked to share knowledge and now had time to travel to teach, (I am still bad at promoting my books and work…), we wrote more books, and so on.

Here I am doing work that delights me, by lucky timing or following my gut, or both.

Thank you for taking this journey with me.

GF Blackberry Pie made by Christopher. (Last week, still waiting on one for this week.)