Most years I write about the magical trillium flowers that bloom around here each spring. Last year I wrote about our yearly trillium walk in the woods. Well, guess what? B discovered some trillium seeds last year sometime in late spring or early summer. It felt like a truly magical find, and he put them in a seed packet to save for planting this year.

He also told me that ants help to spread trillium seeds, which I thought was so cool. A friend shared a wonderful field guide with us called ‘Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast: Washington, Oregon, British Columbia & Alaska’ by Pojar and MacKinnon.

Here’s a write-up about ants spreading trillium seeds from the book:

“Each seed has a little, oil-rich appendage that is attractive to ants. The ants lug the seeds back to their nests, where they eat the appendages or feed them to the larvae and then discard the remaining seeds on their rubbish piles. This is a reasonably effective mechanism for seed dispersal, especially for plants of the dim, becalmed forest floor. Ants disperse up to 30% of the spring-flowering, herbaceous species in the deciduous forests of eastern North America. Our forest flora is less dependent, but we do have several spring-flowering ‘ant plants,’ including bleeding heart, inside-out flower and wild ginger, as well as trilliums.”

I thought that was really neat, and that some of you might enjoy learning about that too! Wouldn’t you just love to witness a tiny ant carrying a trillium seed back to it’s nest?

Hello friends. It has been a bit quiet here on the blog this winter. Are you still visiting this little corner of the internet? I appreciate you coming here to read these words, even when there are no new posts for a time.

What have you all been up to this winter? Discovering any new favorite recipes? Dreaming about the garden season? Creating anything with your hands? I hope you’ve been weaving some creativity throughout your days.

Where have I been? My body has been needing some extra attention and care this winter, and I’ve needed to pull my energy inward. We simplified our schedule, and have been doing our best to make the most of town trips, for more efficiency and less running around.

My body is always ready to slow down and regenerate by the time winter rolls around, yet I find it challenging to slow down (there’s always more to do!) Do you find it hard to slow down too?

It’s funny… sitting, resting, and relaxing doesn’t sound like a difficult thing to do at all. In fact, it sounds super easy, right? And yet… I always think of one more thing to do… and another… and another. Actually sitting down to relax feels like the hardest thing sometimes.

But at some point, there are many things that require energy from us, and we need the balance of regenerating that energy. I’ve been thinking about things that help me feel renewed and regenerated, with the intention to do those things more often.

What regenerates you? Is there anything in particular that comes to mind?

For me, some of the things that come to mind are: relaxing in an epsom salt bath, slowing down and drinking tea, putting clay on my face, candlelight and watching the flame, knitting (the instant I have wool and knitting needles in my hands, my breathing deepens), and looking through cookbooks with beautiful pictures.

Spending time in nature is essential for my wellbeing, and I make a point to get outdoors everyday, and to move my body. The area where I could use more balance is in sitting and not doing anything for awhile.

I sit down during homeschool time and meals, but some days I’m on my feet for most of the day, and hardly sit at all. I’ve been having the intention to enjoy quiet time in the evenings, doing something relaxing before bedtime. To finally take a break from the to-do list for the day, and do something for me.

Do I make time for myself each night? Sometimes yes, sometimes not so much. But I’m making a point to find the humor in my usual excuses not to do it. How many excuses can we come up with before we just say “Okay, I’m going to sit down now.”

I’m writing this for those of you also needing to give yourself permission to just stop and relax.

We were surprised with two rosebuds in the garden this January. On frosty mornings, they looked so beautiful with the first light of the day shining on the frosted petals.

I felt funny bundling up in wool, and hearing the crunch of frosty grass beneath me as I walked over to capture a picture of roses.

A welcome surprise, to be sure, on a cold, winter day.

We’ve had some frosty mornings here. Everything looks so beautiful all covered in frost.

The night skies are especially beautiful in the cold weather too, so clear and bright.

We adapt our daily tasks with the weather and seasons. Colder nights mean we drain and turn off the hoses in the evenings, after animal chores.

In the mornings we use the extra buckets of water for the animals we’ve filled the night before. (After breaking the ice off the top.) We let the hoses thaw throughout the day, and have been able to use them later in the day.

But I might be boring you with all this talk of hoses…

Did you have any goals for the new year?

A friend told me their year started off with thing after thing going haywire, to the point of ridiculousness, having so much all at once. Our year started out that way too. With so much breaking down, we’ve been taking it day by day, doing our best to just keep on rolling.

I hope you’ve been having a good start to your year, but if the start to your year has been bumpy too, take heart.

Some things that might help:

Breathing deeply.

Getting outside and finding peace in nature when we’re able to.

Seeking humor, and things that bring us laughter.

Listening to music if it brings joy to our days.

Moving around, getting a change of scenery, and freshening our perspective.

Remembering to be grateful.

It’s up to us to be the calm in the center of the storm. That can be easier said than done sometimes, but breathing deeply is a good place to start.

I’ve always loved candlelight.

How about you?

Watching the flame is calming, and mesmerizing.

For many years I’ve read stories aloud before bedtime.

It’s one of my favorite ways to end the day… connecting with my family and enjoying a good story together.

Lately I’ve been reading by candlelight on some nights, instead of next to the lamp like I normally do.

Such a simple change, but one that makes the evenings feel a little extra cozy, and peaceful.

On a cold winter night, when it’s dark earlier in the evening, lamplight is fine, but…

There is something about glowing candles that gives a magical feeling to a winter night.

Happy New Year friends!

In our usual tradition, we celebrated with sparklers.

Been flipping over the calendars today, amazed that it’s 2025!

Growing up, I always looked forward to my grandma’s squash pie during the holidays. My grandma makes really good pie, and her squash pie was always my favorite. I thought of it as “pumpkin” pie, even though it wasn’t made with pumpkins, it was made with squash.

This year I decided to make some of my grandma’s squash pie with winter squash from the garden. I dug through my recipes until I found the recipe card, in her dear handwriting. I wanted to share the recipe with you here.

Squash Pie
Recipe from: Grandma Jensen

Serves: 3 pies

4 cups squash (baked and put through food mill)
3 cups milk (she uses evaporated skim)
1 cup sugar
1 cup brown sugar
5 eggs
1 tsp. pumpkin pie spice
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. ginger
1/8 tsp. cloves

Mix sugars and spices- then beat all ingredients until smooth. Pour into three 9″ or two deep dish 10″ prepared pie crusts. Bake 15 minutes at 400 degrees or 35-45 minutes at 350 degrees. *Done when knife inserted in center comes out clean.

…..

I had my squash all ready to go, and got started on pies one evening. I had one pie pan, and another type of pan close in size to a regular pie pan, so I made two crusts.

I substituted a few ingredients for what I had on hand- coconut milk, and coconut sugar. I didn’t have any clove powder, but had everything else.

I decided to just go ahead and put the filling for three pies in the two pie crusts, figuring it would just take a little bit longer to bake. Well, it ended up taking a whole lot longer to bake.

I kept checking the pies, and then putting them back in the oven to bake longer. I stayed up past my bedtime waiting for the pies to finish baking.

By the time the pie centers were done baking, the crusts were overdone. As you can tell in the picture above, they were not the world’s most beautiful squash pies…

But… they tasted good!

That very first bite I tasted, when it was still warm from the oven, brought tears to my eyes. I was instantly transported to my grandparent’s house, and I was a little girl again.

It is truly amazing the way a scent, a flavor… can completely transport us in time and flood us with feelings and memories.

While I have a lot of practice to do before my pies are anywhere near as tasty as my grandmother’s, my version of her pie brought the memory back.

I could close my eyes and still taste hers, feeling the warmth of her love through pie.

My grandma will be delighted when I tell her I made her squash pie recipe, and glad that I’ve shared it here for more to enjoy.

P.S. The next time I make my grandma’s squash pie, I plan on making three pies like it says in the recipe. 🙂

This holiday season, I have been thinking about loved ones a lot.

The ones who are still in my life, and the ones who have passed away.

Remembering random, and funny memories from my childhood.

Appreciating how each person’s unique spirit has shaped my life and left a lasting effect.

Every ornament we put up holds a memory.

I look at each one and remember, before hanging it on the tree.

I love watching the twinkling tree at night.

When the world is dark outside, and the winter cold is in the air, simply being inside in the warmth and looking at the tree feels so cozy.

I know the holiday season can be bittersweet for many.

It can hold so much joy and love, and time spent connecting with people we cherish.

It can also be a sad time for those who are missing loved ones.

Loved ones who have passed away, or loved ones who live far away.

I want to acknowledge that part too.

Tears of joy, and tears of sadness, can go hand in hand sometimes.

When I think of the loved ones I miss, it makes me look around and appreciate all the people who are in my life right now.

It reminds me how precious the time is.

When I look back on my life, all the best parts are the people.

Loving one another. That’s what it’s all about.

Happy Solstice!

We felt like celebrating as elven folk this year. Thank you to our friend for sharing this picture with us- “the mystical elf overlooking the wild sea” -and for creating such a fun and festive Solstice celebration each year. ❤

Hello! I wanted to let you know about a sale we are having.

We are celebrating all of the handmade goodness bursting out of the shop right now with a sale! December 10th through 18th, enjoy 10% off orders over $40 in the shop with the code: HANDMADEHOLIDAYS

We get asked what our biggest discount of the year is, and this is it, so if you are wanting the discount, now is the time!

Head on over to the shop at: http://www.woolymossrootshandmade.com (or find us over on Etsy) to see all the new things and make the most of our biggest discount of the year!

Also, I want to share something on my heart about shopping small ❤

When you purchase something from a big box store, how much does it mean to them?

When you purchase something from a small family business, how much does it mean to that family?

When you shop from small family businesses, your support means SO much! Your purchases are directly going towards families buying groceries and filling the gas tank. Around here it also means providing seeds for the garden, feeding the critters, and keeping us making things.

In a world where most things are not made by hand, we LOVE creating soulful, handmade things to share! At WoolyMossRoots, we truly thank you for your support of handmade! ❤

There are some things we grow in the garden every year. The garden “staples”, the things we eat a lot of, the things that grow well here, and the things that we preserve for the winter.

Then there are some experiments in the garden each year. Things that we grow because we’re curious. They are sometimes things that don’t necessarily grow the best where we are, but we want to try them anyway. Things like sweet potatoes, for instance, and watermelon (we haven’t given up on that yet.)

Growing corn was not really an “experiment”, we’ve grown it in the garden plenty of times before. We don’t grow it every year, though, because we have limited space and limited sun, so we usually devote that growing space to other things.

Honestly, corn doesn’t grow the best in our little garden spot, but we like to grow it from time to time anyway. These pictures were from corn that we grew in last year’s garden. Jeff and B saw so many beautiful, colorful varieties and wanted to give them a try.

That blue corn? So gorgeous. The variety is called Hopi Turquoise, said to originate from the Hopi people. We’re not remembering the other corn varieties that we grew, but we sure did enjoy growing all the colorful corn.

B was curious about “popping” some of the corn for popcorn. Just for fun, we took some of our homegrown corn and put it in the popcorn popper. It didn’t work. Good to know. None of the varieties we grew were for that purpose specifically, they were for eating fresh or grinding into corn flour.

I think this about sums up what I was going to share with you here about garden posts for the year. It will be fun to see what new things we’ll try in the garden next year!

Do you love mushrooms? Would you like to grow some in your yard, and gather your own mushrooms right outside your door?

I told you how much we enjoyed growing oyster mushrooms in the garden over the summer, and shared with you our process of growing them vertically in straw in a laundry basket. If you would like to learn more about that, be sure to check out that post.

Oyster mushrooms are not the only mushrooms we’ve been growing around here, there is another mushroom we grow in our yard that is by far the easiest mushroom we’ve grown. That’s the one I came to tell you about here today, and it goes by the name of Wine Cap Mushroom. (Stropharia rugosoannulata)

If you are new to growing mushrooms, and would like to start with something easy, wine cap mushrooms can be grown in the yard in woodchips. It’s a great mushroom to grow for beginners!

Wine Cap Mushrooms are also known as Garden Giants or King Stropharia. The name wine cap comes from the color of their caps. They are some beautiful mushrooms!

Wine cap mushrooms love growing in wood, but can also grow on compost piles, on decomposing straw, soils enriched with sawdust, and even in the garden. We love growing them on woodchips, where they proliferate like crazy. They prefer hardwoods, but they are not a super picky mushroom.

Many years ago we got a load of woodchips from the power company. After Jeff spread the woodchips around the yard for pathways, wine cap mushrooms came up wild all over the yard. We were delighted!

I have pictures of B helping to collect them around the yard when he was one (and now he’s a teenager, so he’s been a part of the wine cap mushroom gathering for a long time.)

We didn’t see any wine cap mushrooms for a time after that (we didn’t refresh the woodchips), so the next time we had a source of woodchips, Jeff wanted to order wine cap mushroom mycelium to get it going again.

We ordered wine cap mycelium from North Spore, and spread it around the yard, wherever we had woodchip pathways. It went nuts! There were flushes of wine cap mushrooms everywhere.

Spreading the wine cap mushroom mycelium, covering it in fresh woodchips, and then watering it here and there (if it’s a dry time of year), is a great way to get a patch of wine cap mushrooms going.

The pictures in this post are all from harvests in 2022. Since that time, we have been spreading fresh woodchips over the top of the pathways multiple times per year, and we’ve had continual harvests for YEARS. Lots and lots of wine cap mushrooms!

We cook the wine cap mushrooms right after harvesting them, and also dry a bunch for the winter to add to soups. We love them! It is wonderful to not only have fresh mushrooms available right outside our door to add to meals, but to have such an abundance that we can store mushrooms for the winter as well.

Buying that wine cap mushroom mycelium was a very good use of our money because the mushrooms harvests have just kept on rolling! We harvest regularly throughout the spring, summer, and fall. This year, we had some especially huge flushes throughout September and October, and still had some wine cap mushrooms popping up in late November.

If you order the wine cap mushroom mycelium, you can keep it going by providing new woodchips on a regular basis, and by continuing to spread the newly forming mycelium around the yard.

Something that’s so great about wine cap mushrooms are how easy they are to establish and spread in new areas! If the wine cap mushrooms become too large and bug eaten, you can spread them around new areas with woodchips. We also use the ends of the stems, with the mycelial roots, to spread around the yard.

One thing to know about wine cap mushrooms in particular is that you don’t want to eat them for multiple days in a row because they can cause an upset stomach. The reason for that is because you need time to rebuild the enzymes needed to digest them.

Don’t let that discourage you from growing and eating them, though. Our family did get a stomachache after eating them for more than 2 or 3 days in a row, before we knew about that. We typically eat them once or twice a week, and haven’t had any problems since.

If you harvest more than you can eat all at once, dry the extra. To dry wine cap mushrooms, we slice them and put them on trays in our oven on the lowest temperature. You can also dry them in a food dehydrator.

What I include in every post about mushrooms: Of course, always be sure you confidently identify any mushroom before eating it, and start with a small amount at first to see how your body reacts.

We have found it best to harvest the mushrooms before they get too large. The more mature the wine cap mushrooms get, the less “meaty” the caps are, and the more bugs we find in them. (And they become less flavorful.)

It can be challenging to get them while the caps are still fresh and smaller though, because they grow so incredibly quickly! Like I mentioned earlier, however, if a mushroom goes too long, simply use it to spread to another area in the yard.

If you feel inspired to grow wine cap mushrooms in your yard, we hope you will enjoy abundant harvests of delicious mushrooms for many years to come!