Blog reflections and future directions

The history of this blog

I started The Nourishing Hearthfire ten years ago. Our youngest child at the time had started eating solid foods, we were in the process of buying land after what seemed like a lifetime of dreaming about it, and a whole new world was opening up for us. I had many ideas and photos, a stash of recipes and posts drafted up, with the idea of creating a place of my own on the internet to share recipes and homestead stuff, free from corporate ads.

A few months after beginning this blog, I was pregnant again, and at the same time our life on the land got thrown into turmoil by discovering we had a nasty new neighbour that my instincts told me in all certainty to get away from. I followed my instincts and do not regret it: had we not gotten away when we did, we would not have found the beautiful land we are on now, and would be living next to a McMansion subdivision development.

At some point I began writing Backyard Dairy Goats, and then later a cookbook, a cheese book, and a bread book… I really enjoy a good homesteading book, and sought to create just the kind of books I would like to have on my shelves. I put a lot into my books, and did not have much energy left for blogging.

Sometimes I would still get ideas for blog posts, but not everything I write ends up seeing the light of day, because some stuff is not polished, some stuff is only partly written, some stuff is still ideas floating around in my head or scribbled on a bit of paper, and some stuff seems too personal – the things that I am most comfortable putting in public seem to be “how to” kind of posts, so these are the ones that usually end up on the blog.

I find it harder in some ways to write for a blog rather than a book – when I write for a book, I know it’s going to checked over many times before it’s published, and by more people than just me. With the blog, it’s usually just me looking at it, and I don’t feel as confident with this as I do books. But some of the stuff I write is more suited to blogs than to books, so I need to get over my perfectionism and just post it up.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m not pouring all my creativity into another book at the moment. I have more time to work on other stuff, so I’d like to publish some more posts on this blog.

Changes coming

I’m moving this blog to new hosting and a new design. The biggest change for you, if you are reading this as an email update, is that the email format will change slightly. I’ll be sending emails out separately, rather than it being an automated WordPress thing, so there is the opportunity for me to include some links from the blog archives at the end of a post, or to highlight several posts at a time rather than just sending out the new post and the new post only. The emails will be addressed from me (Kate Downham) rather than The Nourishing Hearthfire.

If you get sent these posts through WordPress itself, rather than through email, you will need to switch over to email updates. Visit hearthandsoil.kit.com and sign up there if you’re reading this in a WordPress feed and would like to keep getting new posts sent to you. If you’re reading this in your email inbox, you don’t need to do anything, I’ll switch it over automatically.

My questions to you

How would you like the emails to appear? Do you enjoy reading the full post in your email? Or would you prefer a short excerpt with a link to the new post so you can read it on the blog?

Are there any topics you would like me to cover?

Anything you would like to see more of?

Anything that I would have a unique perspective on that is not written about elsewhere?

Please feel free to leave a comment here, and if you’re shy about leaving public comments, you can request in the comment that I keep it private (to stop spam, all comments here get moderated before they are made public). Your responses will help me to direct my limited writing time to what you would like to read, as I am writing for the lovely people that read this blog, and not for big tech.