Easy As Pie
Anyone who has ever made a quality pie knows that this idiom is outlandish. There is nothing easy about constructing that tender-yet-flaky crust, or making filling sweet enough to hold your attention, but not so sweet to overpower everything else. There's nothing easy about getting your dough and filling to cook in unison. You may have to make a few bad pies before you get a good one. When you understand the roles of time, temperature, and texture, you break the process down to simple steps, and only then can you bake a great pie. I write this with confidence—I can make a great pie—but it's never been easy, nor will it ever be. What even is easy?
Stacking firewood is easy. It's almost as satisfying as splitting wood, but with less shoulder injury. The firewood arts—stacking, splitting, sorting—is the dopamine delivery system of the homesteading world. Activity that sets your mind on vacation while you receive constant rewards in the form of taking pieces apart or putting them back together. Before you know it, there's a trickle of sweat running down your back, and a pleasing ache in your quads reporting that you have been lost in physical exertion. Of course there's always a point where the pleasure ends—the day gets really hot, you get really thirsty, you have to pee. But unlike weeding, which is all about creating more negative space, 'firewood therapy' delivers results. I think I just came up with a new business idea.
More taxing than firewood therapy but still rewarding is preserving, which is full swing. As of the end of August 2026, I have produced peach jam, peach-cardamom jam, peach mostarda, dried peaches, and plum jam. Paid Bucolia subscribers can look forward to enjoying something from Bucolia Pantry very soon, and that's all I am sharing on the subject for now, but if you are not yet a paid subscriber, there is no better time to become one.
No one says "Easy as a vegetable garden" for good reason. I have learned a lot this year, and I still know nothing. The fact that my most successful plant, from seed, was a kabocha squash that volunteered itself from the compost is all you need to know about my competence and dumb luck. I do think I am falling in love with gourds, and there's a nice sunny patch in the corner of the property I have my eye on for a future attempt at three sisters planting (raising corn, beans, and squash successively to create a biodynamic system).
August is the month that a vegetable garden should be winding up for a full-flourish September harvest, but mine does not have such a trajectory this year. I just harvested all of the onions and the rest of the brassica, with zucchini, yellow squash, and the aforementioned kabocha left. For almost all of the thirty years that I lived in Portland, most of the produce I ate from May through October came from a CSA. I loved how CSA's make it easy and (more) affordable to eat seasonally, and I liked the challenge of cooking with what was in the fridge, because the paradox of choice is real. Now I find myself in a different paradox of choice: how to design the 2.0 version of my vegetable garden. I'm looking at seed catalogs and planting guides, and a dull panic is already settling in. How many kinds of cucumbers is too many? Will I have time for my day job once my garden really gets going?
No one would argue that writing is easy as pie and we have large language models taking over the jobs of writers to prove it. I meant to write more over the course of the summer. I mean to write more over the course of the autumn. I have dozens of excuses for the scarcity of time: grad school, practicum, work, co-regulation with 13 year-old Sarge. But as the world is changing—violently, aggressively—I am struck by how wonderfully lucky I am—in this moment—to live in a place where change is still constant but much more gentle.
The delay of updating my Bucolia readers has been eating away at my conscience. For my 54th birthday, today, I decided to give myself the gift of satisfaction that I got a thing done, and the grace to end this without a killer closing sentence. Happy Birthday to me.
If you enjoy reading Bucolia, please consider supporting my writing through a paid subscription. Paid members receive seasonal products from Bucolia Pantry. You can also support Bucolia by simply sharing this blog. Thank you!
If you enjoy reading Bucolia, please consider supporting my writing through a paid subscription. Paid members receive seasonal products from Bucolia Pantry. You can also support Bucolia by simply sharing this blog. Thank you!