Hello There, I’m Kendra.
Along with my husband, Scott, and our three children, we are lucky enough to call the lovely little town of Sonoma, California home. We garden on a 2 acre plot surrounded by beautiful vineyard. When we aren’t busy outside, we’re typically busy running after our three children, herding chickens, managing bee hives, creating things, or cooking. (Okay, Scott cooks and I eat. I’m a lucky lady.)
We began this blog back in 2008 as a way to chronicle our gardening passion. At the time of that first post we were starting out our sixth year of gardening together on our 1/3 acre plot right in the heart of town. We built our raised beds out of old fence boards and saved pennies out of our slim budget to buy fruit trees. We read countless books, university research documents and newspaper articles on organic gardening and really got that backyard in good shape. Along the way, as I raised my children I became more and more interested about our overall health. We read The Omnivores Dilemma along with a slew of other books which made us change our eating habits to eat both native plants (ie weeds) and grass-fed beef. We even switched which milk we bought, which is now always whole, organic milk and grass-fed, non pasteurized when we can afford it.
As the years passed I saw two of my babies struggle with eczema. The doctors told me to slather them liberally with lotion. Since we were already looking at the ingredient panels for all of our store bought food, I started to look at the ingredient list of the lotions that were recommended to me. In alarm I realized that I did not want my precious babies covered in those things, which lead me to learn how to make my own handmade lotions. I haven’t turned back or bought a store bought lotion since.
A reality wake up call in 2007, showed us that life is short. So on a whim, we fulfilled something we’d talked about since our dating days and bought chicks. At the present moment, we have 9 laying hens and one rooster named Francesco.
In 2010, we had our daughter and realized after that very rainy winter, that our once perfectly small house on 1/3 acre was all of a sudden claustrophobically small. In spring of 2011 we moved out of town to a slightly larger house on two glorious acres. It is here now that we make our home.
Join us as we learn and grow and make and cook. We are welcome to have you along on our journey. Enjoy!
We’d love to hear from you. Both with your comments and via e-mail. You can reach us at kendra@kendraspencer.com if you’d like to say ‘hi’ or ask us a question.
(oh, you’ll notice we don’t post pictures of our children’s faces. It’s not that they aren’t as cute as buttons, because they are, we just like to keep a little privacy. Thank you for understanding.)
