Urban Farmer, Police Wife, Mother, Potter, Fiber Artist...Living in the Mountainwest

I graduated from Westminster College with a dual degree in Art and Mathematics. I have taught pottery and worked as a potter for over 15 years. My functional clay work is heavily influenced by Utah's beautiful landscape, and I use local clays for much of my work. I lived and worked on the Navajo Reservation outside of Blanding, Utah as part of a pottery internship, learning the traditional Navajo pottery way, and also how to bead and weave. I fell in love with Navajo-Churro sheep while living on the Reservation. I've participated in multiple national gallery shows in the past 17 years, and taught pottery for many years at the Pioneer Craft House in Salt Lake City. I'm also a full-time statistician. Sixteen years ago, our little family started with a tiny apartment garden and the vision of a simpler life. Two acres in suburbia, an 11-year old son, a 100-year old house, some deeply troubled roosters, heritage turkeys, endangered chickens, a couple of goats, some gorgeous dairy cows and a flock of Navajo-Churro Sheep later, we are fully embracing the simple life. We actively breed many endangered livestock breeds and are members of the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy (ALBC). We homestead in the heart of the Wasatch Mountains. The views are beautiful and the challenges never-ending. Currently, we raise almost all of our own food, including meat.

Jan 28, 2013

Compost and Tea Bowls...

After weeks of sub-zero temperatures, we finally had a weekend above freezing! We used the warmer weather as an opportunity to check our beehives and see how they were wintering over. The Queens in most of the hives are already laying brood, which the workers are feeding out of their stored food in preparation for Spring. We will need to keep a close eye on the hives since we snapped back to cold with a snowstorm this morning, to make sure we don't lose the brood or our colonies.


We mucked out cow stalls on Sunday, too, adding to our compost pile. It is amazing how it always shrinks over winter as it cooks down. The cows were excited about the dry straw, but my arms needed a nap when we were done.

We are getting close to calving and lambing - we will start having babies at the farm within the next 45 days.


I've worked hard to keep my etsy store stocked, while trying to balance out my time to make inventory for farm stands and events during the Spring and Summer.


I made these little carved teabowls last week, and can't wait to glaze fire them.


What are you doing to prepare for Spring?

4 comments:

Rian said...

Are your teabowls for tea candles... or something else?

This semester we're working on individual chess sets. Should be interesting. Don't know if they'll be much time for throwing.

January 28, 2013
cookingwithgas said...

Babies!!we are just working away waiting g for spring to come....love the bowls.

January 28, 2013
Lori Buff said...

Very nice tea bowls. I'm just making pots to sell this spring and in shops until then. Actually, it got up to 70 today so that really felt like a breath of spring.

January 29, 2013
Anonymous said...

You should really have a link to your etsy shop right on the sidebar of the blog, and/or a link to it each time you mention it. I wanted to take a closer look at your pendants, and it took me a ridiculous train of clicks/google searches to find your shop!!

January 31, 2013

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