Melissa K. Norris inspires people's faith and pioneer roots with her books, podcast, and blog. Melissa lives with her husband and two children in their own little house in the big woods in the foothills of the North Cascade Mountains. When she's not wrangling chickens and cattle, you can find her stuffing Mason jars with homegrown food and playing with flour and sugar in the kitchen.
By Melissa Norris | Gardening , Podcast , Raising Your Own Food
No till gardening pro’s and getting started using a no till method in your garden plus some fun tips for growing amazing tomatoes in containers! My guest today, Joe Lamp’l from the Joe Gardener Show Podcast as well as the Growing a Greener World TV show, is passionate about organic gardening methods and is a […]
Read MoreBy Melissa Norris | Podcast , Raising Your Own Food
How to plan your homestead year and prioritize your food and livestock goals. I confess I have not always been a planner. In fact, for many years of my life, I was the fly by the seat of my pants type of gal. Always thinking we’d just get it done when it needs to be […]
Read MoreBy Melissa Norris | Gardening , Podcast
How many fruit & berry plants per person for a year’s worth of food do you need to plant? Oftentimes there isn’t a lot of focus on how many fruit trees or berry plants to put into the garden in order to feed your family for a full year. The focus is typically on annual […]
Read MoreBy Melissa Norris | Gardening , Podcast
One of the most asked questions I get is what specific variety of plants we use on the homestead. So in today’s episode, we’re diving into all the varieties of plants we grow in our garden! Before I tell you the exact specific varieties that we grow here on my homestead. I do need to […]
Read MoreBy Melissa Norris | Gardening , Podcast , Raising Your Own Food
Where to buy heirloom seeds and what’s the real difference between an heirloom, hybrid, or GMO seed? These are questions I get asked quite a bit. I’ll cover all this and more in today’s episode as many of us are planning out our garden, figuring out what plants we’ll be seed starting, and ordering the […]
Read MoreBy Melissa Norris | Gardening , Podcast
Learning how to assess seed packet information and reading those seed packets can make a big difference in your gardening success. Back when we first started raising our own garden which was, *cough* 20 years ago. I didn’t really understand as much as I do now. I especially didn’t know about what seed variety that […]
Read MoreBy Melissa Norris | Gardening , Podcast
The biggest garden planning mistakes and how to avoid them! Planning a garden is one of my favorite subjects although I didn’t always recognize or realize how much value it has. Today I’ll be sharing my tips on planning a garden and mistakes to avoid…including one common tip that you’d find when doing a Google […]
Read MoreBy Melissa Norris | Gardening , Podcast
My top takeaways from the vegetable gardener from this past year’s garden and how you can use the same evaluation for your garden. Why do this? I think in all aspects of our lives it’s important we take time to reflect and to look back and analyze what went right (what we want to do […]
Read MoreBy Melissa Norris | Dessert , Recipes
This old-fashioned molasses cookie recipe is the perfect holiday cookie, especially if you’re after down-home simple recipes that Great-Grandma would have baked. You can almost hear the harness and bells jingling as you pull these from the oven. They have just the right amount of spice paired perfectly with the molasses. I’ve used all […]
Read MoreBy Melissa Norris | Gardening , Podcast
It doesn’t get much better than a from-scratch Christmas dinner menu based on what we raised in the garden this year. Let’s be real, that’s how the homesteaders and pioneers of old did it. While we tend to have more of a traditional Thanksgiving menu, when it comes to Christmas it tends to vary from […]
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