Eliza Blue

Happy Leap year! Might be a good day to do something unexpected 😊

It’s that time of year!! Time to sort the seeds!!
Which also happens to be the topic for the first episode of …
There’s still time to share your favorite seed catalogue and seeds varieties. Let me know what you love in the comments 👇

Waiting for our flight out of LaGuardia yesterday and this happened…magic really is EVERYWHERE 💫

Photo dump of 3 days in NYC…

So to continue the previous post about how ended up in NYC for my birthday…I fell in love with then then . All were pivotal in my development as an artist and human. So when I saw Ani was reprising her role from the original recording and would be debuting on Broadway, I immediately thought: I have to go!
Reality quickly overtook me, and I decided that was a completely crazy idea. But not so crazy that I didn’t do a google search for flights from Rapid City to NYC which is how I found out I could get a ticket for almost nothing (because apparently no one in South Dakota wants to fly to the East Coast from a Wednesday to a Saturday in Feb.) Even crazier the cheapest flight of all was over my birthday. It had to be fate. I was meant to see Ani in Hadestown.
Well, tonight, after flying halfway across the continent, spending nearly as long in transit as I’ll spend at the actual destination, I found myself at the theater and guess who wasn’t going to be performing. (If you know the production the photo is a spoiler: Ani is Persephone)
Yeah. I’d actually joked about this with a friend—what if I fly all the way there and Ani is sick?— but really, what are chances, I’d said, because really what were the chances?
As it turned out, they were 100%. “Well played universe” I texted to one of my best friends, the same one I had been joking about Ani being sick with when I was trying to decide if it was completely crazy to try to make this trip happen.
But what did I get instead of the performance I’d been expecting? A beautiful whirlwind family vacation. I’ve been telling my kids I would take them to NYC someday, a place that felt more like my home than perhaps any other, and suddenly it was possible because of a google search.
And coming here has reminded me of the girl I once was. It has reminded me of a time when I knew very little of the world and I was still a human waiting to discover her place.
Back then, I thought I was waiting to ARRIVE but this trip is reminding me we are just here for the journey. For the discovery. For the sacred uncertainty. For the story that just keeps unfolding, full of unexpected twists ❤️

So here’s a little more backstory on how I ended up in NYC for the first time in more than a decade…
When I was 19 I fell in love with . I heard her first in a friend’s dorm room on a CD, if you can imagine back that far, and I was like “What IS this?” I’d never heard anything like it before. The raw, unapologetic emotion of her vocals and lyrics were nothing short of life-changing for me at that moment. I had no idea how to be what I was supposed to be and what I wanted to be—they seemed mutually exclusive. and suddenly here was this person taking up so much sonic space and calling it folk music and all I could think was: so this is possible then?
I felt the same way the first time I heard the original version of ’s musicalHadestown. I already loved Anais as a singer-songwriter, but here was this whole epic opera that felt expansive and intimate and unbelievably powerful in scope. I listened to it over and over—literally thousands of times and I never got tired of it….

(More in next post because they are telling us to turn off cellphones for the performance, lol)
Edited: definitely read my next post for the plot twist

I’m in NYC and it’s my birthday! The whole story is up on my s u b s t 🌸 c k…

I’m writing a longer post right now with more details, but I have to share this first…we are in NYC and the snowdrops are blooming…it feels like the best possible confluence of endings that become beginnings that become endings that become beginnings aka LIFE

Shepherding friends, I need some advice! I’m making plans for summer rotational grazing and contemplating electric fence. What do you use? What do you like? Any tips for training your flock? I’ve heard horror stories about lambs getting tangled and dying so I’ve been reluctant to give it a go in the past, but I’d also like to try some different management strategies that will require temporary fencing…maybe there’s other suggestions? My flock will be pretty small (by the standards of our area anyway…) maybe 40 head…I’d love to hear what’s working for you all! TIA 🐑🐑🐑

Look at my earrings from ! I love them so much ❤️

I was laying plans to restart a project called the 'Perkins County Almanac'...when I came across a post from our local NPR affiliate about Ida McNeil, who started one of the first radio stations in South Dakota by accident. In a time before most homes had a phone, Mrs. McNeil became a conduit for information and connection, and in some cases a literal lifeline as she shared information about patients at the Pierre Hospital so their families would know their status.

We have the opposite problem now, at least when it comes to information. Connection can still be hard (maybe harder than ever) to come by. Will the ‘Perkins County Almanac’ be able to provide a little slice of the service Ida McNeil did 100 years ago? I don’t know, but I’d like to try. Read more in this week's newsletter!

Perkins County Almanac: More Love! More Fun! The return of one of my favorite things...

My favorite thing in the world is growing and making good food. So much so that I periodically wonder if I’ve missed my calling and should be running a restaurant…then I remember when I lived in Portland, ME and worked at a restaurant owned by one of my best friends, and how stressful it was for her and I think , nope, I would not be good at running a restaurant.
I had a great chat with a friend a few weeks ago about how stories can be just as nourishing as food and I was so happy, because, yes! That’s my dream, to make a restaurant of beautiful stories and invite you all in for a meal ❤️

Thank you so much everyone who responded to my last post about the ! Your support is so appreciated!!
So, I’m going to start it back up, and I’m very excited ❤️
Our first episode will be about Seed Catalogue Season! If you read my essays on s u b s t 🌸 c k you already know my favorite seed company is , but I’d love to share YOUR favorites as well. Where do you buy your seeds and what have you had the most success growing? Include your zone if you know it so we can share resources! I’m going to mention as many of these in the show as I can. Yay for seeds! 🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱

December ‘22 I uploaded the first video of the . I was super excited because I was pretty sure I’d cracked the code of being a folk-singer who lives in one of the most remote regions of the country. I could do weekly “live” performances from my tiny house studio and connect with audiences without having to travels for days or weeks.
Little did I know I would get sick the following week and not be well for a year….the best laid plans, as they say…
I honestly forgot I’d even gotten this video uploaded, but I came across it looking for something else today, and was pleasantly surprised. I was immediately flooded with contentment. Boy, I loved doing this!
Maybe you can guess where I’m going with this? I’m doing SO much better (thank you alternative medicine! Looking at you naturopaths!) and trying to decide what threads I’d like to pickup again…
What do you all think? This format, a 1/2 hour ish show of stories and songs, does it seem like the kind of content you’d regularly watch? Or should I go shorter? Rewatching this video I felt like my stories were a little rambling but maybe it’s charming, lol.
Anyway, I’d love your feedback. ❤️❤️❤️

Made some moderately successful bao for lunar new year…and there’s an essay up on my substack about my time in China and the first time I celebrated lunar new year…

Today marks the Lunar New Year, a holiday celebrated so ubiquitously in China that it is sometimes simply called Chinese New Year. This week also marks the 26th anniversary of my arrival in Shanghai, China to begin a semester abroad. I didn’t know about the Lunar New Year then, or much of anything about China, honestly, but I was young and naive, and consequently undaunted. You can’t know what you don’t know until you know it, or anyway, that was true of me at 19.
The veil of naviete dropped away the moment I saw the bathroom facilities in the dorms where foreign students stayed. The lavatory was a tiled trough with a few waist-high aluminum dividers that were open to the rest of the room, the showers just a grouping of pipes sticking out of the walls. To “flush” the toilet, you pulled a string and a gush of water sluiced down the trough to an open hole at the end. Staring at the trough in the gloomy half light of evening, exhausted from 72-hours in transit, I began to sob. “I can’t do this,” I said aloud.
But I also couldn’t go home–the price of a plane ticket alone meant I was going to have to tough it out.
At our orientation the next day, the director of our program introduced us to the concept of culture shock. “Expect to sleep more, maybe more than you ever have. Expect to be exhausted,” he said. “Expect to feel like things aren’t going well. That’s normal. Expect for things to feel awful and then worse. But by the time you go home, you won’t want to leave.”
“Great,” I thought to myself, the months stretching before me impossibly vast. I was fairly certain coming to China was the worst mistake I’d ever made.
Everything the director predicted came true. In addition to navigating vast cultural differences in privacy as evidenced by the bathroom situation, there was a new language, new food, and a complete dismantling of all the customs I assumed were universal, but in fact were simply the social constructs of my home country. It was overwhelming, degrading, and the most intense personal growth I’ve ever experienced. And when it came time to go home, I was ready to stay.
This weekend, as I have almost every Lunar New Year for the past twenty-five years, I will make jiaozi, a special kind of pork dumplings, as a treat for the holiday. Near the end of my stay, I’d told my host mother how much I loved them, so she taught me to fold them, her deft fingers filling and sealing the wrappers over and over while I clumsily tried to imitate her movements.
When I make them now I think of how lost and afraid I felt those first months, but I also think of her taking me to a street market just before I left to help me buy souvenirs for my family. By then I spoke Chinese well enough I could negotiate with the vendors by myself. “But you’ll get a better price if you’re with me.” she said with a wink.
As we passed by blankets and folding tables spread with jade bracelets, silk table clothes, calligraphy, and brightly painted wall hangings, I remember one of the vendors nodding toward me and asking her in Chinese, “Who is that?”
“My daughter!” she replied.
I never made it back to China, but I’ve carried it with me everywhere I’ve been since. I know I’ve taken it to the barn and to the pasture. It’s the reason I started listening to the stories the wind tells the trees in a language that was once incomprehensible, but I am now slowly learning. Same for the sheep and the horses and goats, and the pheasants wintering in the underbrush. Same for the planets that rush through the vast, black expanses of the prairie sky at night singing songs in a voice as old as time.
(This was 1998...It's hard to imagine now, but that was back when you had to send film to be developed before you knew what your pictures looked like. I bought a used camera at a pawn shop before I left because I was a college student and had no money. It broke within a week of arrival. Consequently, I only have a few blurry pictures from my whole time in Shanghai. I'm still pretty bummed about that.)

We usually wean our lambs right before we sort off who we are keeping from who needs to go to a different flock. This fall, as usual, that happened in early September. We sold all the ram lambs but one who I wanted to keep to be our 2nd ram this breeding season. He spent the fall in a separate pen from the ewes with our other ram until it was time for “date month.”
Well! Apparently date month started REALLY early…like early September. So, here’s your PSA for the day: Generally 5 months is considered early for a ram lamb to breed a ewe, but not wildly unusual…apparently 3 months is also not too young 🥴
Thank goodness for this mild weather! And at least now we know that little guy is good at his job!

Sharing about "Imbolc"...the point between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. "Beneath our feet the earth begins to stir..."

Definitely NOT Spring... (but we are getting there!)

We had about 24-hours off from the fog, but it just came rolling back in…I’ve never seen it like this! We are going on almost 7 days of dense fog. If you are a believer in the “fog calendar” this is NOT a good sign…

Just spent a whirlwind 24 hours in Montana with .in.ranching and it was SO awesome. I drove through fog so thick on the way out (and back) that I thought about turning around. Thank goodness I didn’t. Very proud to be working with such a great organization. Amber & April, you filled my cup. Big thanks also to for hosting us. ❤️

A lot of my flock can trace its ancestry back to the British Isles…I often wonder if these damp, foggy days are their favorite…

I love growing food, preparing it, and feeding the people I love with it. Making good food and serving people is 100% my love language. It’s just in the last year that I realized I deserve that kind of care too…Making myself fancy, beautiful food is my favorite form of self care ❤️
And it’s well timed, because both of my kids are in a picky phase and don’t appreciate my cooking as much as they used to. Thankfully I appreciate my cooking enough to (almost) make up for it 🤣

When I tell people we’ve moved to town, I think I might be giving them the wrong idea. Our new house is on Main Street…a portion of the street is paved and has a few businesses, but by the time you get to us, it’s back to gravel. Walking today and was tickled to see the most recent traveler to pass this way was hoofed…

January Thaws = Rancher's Holiday

January Thaw This week we are enjoying the blessing of a January thaw. We get them most years here on the western prairie, and most years I am tricked into thinking maybe, just maybe, this year spring’s coming early. It never has, but the hope remains… Meanwhile, this is an essay from a few years back when m...

You might be South Dakotan if…
The prairie version of the cold plunge 🤣

Full moon in Leo rising over prairie town…
Sometimes it’s less important how you get there, and more important that you’ve ARRIVED 🌝

Camouflage 🤣

It's seed catalogue season!!!

Seed Catalogue Season I’ve lived mostly in northern climates where long, cold winters are expected. In Minnesota and South Dakota, the two states in which I’ve spent the most time, one can expect winter to last through April and sometimes even well into May. Considering that November is also almost always cold, this ...

This winter’s obsession so far has been sourdough…which is great because it’s so cold and it’s nice to have the oven running…but is bad because it’s so cold the house never warms up enough for the sourdough to rise properly…the consequence is VERY sour bread. Way too sour for the kids. So I’ve been eating a lot of sourdough and imagining starting a micro bakery because it’s a very good daydream for subzero days when the wind is howling across the prairie…and I might be getting the tiniest bit tired of eating so much bread and I’d like to share. And seriously, I can’t stop when THIS is what I get to pull out of the oven!

You might be a South Dakotan if you wake up every morning and check your weather app as soon as you open your eyes. I can’t how excited I am about 18 degrees above zero 🥴