Bent Tree Farms

06/18/2026

06/17/2026

☀️Sloppy Joes☀️

-Recipe-
•6 pounds ground beef
•2 cups onion, chopped
•1 cup bell pepper, chopped
•6 garlic cloves, minced
•3 tbs Worcestershire sauce
•4 cups tomato sauce
•1 tbs mustard
•1/4 cup brown sugar
•1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
•2 cups beef broth
•salt
•pepper

-Instructions-
•in a large saucepan, cook the ground beef, drain fat, then return to saucepan
•add Worcestershire sauce, bell pepper, garlic and onion, cook for 5 minutes
•add mustard, tomato sauce, beef broth, vinegar and sugar, simmer for 10 minutes
•ladle into hot jars leaving 1 in headspace
•process in pressure canner at 10 lbs pressure for 90 minutes
*yields 5 quarts

06/11/2026

Today's mountain word is TARNATION, and if you grew up in Appalachia somebody in your family said this at least once a week and meant every syllable of it.
What in tarnation. In tarnation. For the love of tarnation. However it arrived it meant somebody was frustrated and the frustration had reached the point of needing a word big enough to carry it properly.
Tarnation is what linguists call a minced oath, a softened version of a stronger word that kept the emotional weight without crossing the line that mountain people generally did not cross out loud. It is a blending of damnation and tarnal, an old dialect form of eternal, which means what you were actually expressing was something considerably more pointed than the word itself suggested.
Mountain people were creative about their expressions of frustration. They understood that a truly satisfying word in a difficult moment needed to feel big in the mouth and land hard in the air and tarnation did exactly that. It had the right number of syllables. It had the right sound. It communicated everything that needed communicating without saying the thing that granny would have looked at you sideways for saying.

What in tarnation is still one of the most satisfying things a person can say.
Did your family say this one?

06/09/2026

We keep being told lately: "It’s your generation that ruined the planet!"

Well, if you'll allow us, we’d like to respond calmly, but completely honestly.

Back in our day, we didn't buy single-use juice cartons or plastic jugs. We got our milk in heavy glass bottles that were washed, returned, and reused for decades.

Baby diapers were made of cloth and washed by hand. Clothes were hung outside to dry on a clothesline, smelling like fresh air and sunshine. We had exactly one radio for the entire household, and our alarm clocks had to be wound up by hand every night.

We fixed what was broken, mended what was torn, and kept our belongings for as long as they could hold together. A school backpack lasted through your entire childhood, not just one school year. A pencil was sharpened down until it was a tiny stub, too small to even hold between your fingers.

We drank water straight from the garden hose or a public water fountain. We walked. We rode our bikes everywhere. We took the city bus or the train. We didn't need a thousand-dollar electric treadmill to simulate walking—everyday life was our gym.

We were resourceful. We built things, we kept vegetable gardens, and we made do with exactly what we had. It wasn’t because we were staging an environmental protest—that word didn't even exist back then. It was just old-school common sense.

So, maybe we haven't mastered your modern vocabulary. Maybe we don't know how to create viral posts, choose the right hashtags, or upload stories... but we absolutely knew how to live a life that was simple, sustainable, and naturally respectful of the earth.

Please respect the memory of a generation that moved through life being eco-friendly without even knowing the word for it. We might not have saved the planet, but we sure as hell weren't the ones who ruined it.

05/21/2026

Our ancestors always had several of these planted around their homes and in gardens.. they knew their benefits.

05/21/2026

A little morning chuckle

05/10/2026

The native flowers in your beds aren't just ornament. They're the nursery for nearly every butterfly you've ever seen.

Adult butterflies sip nectar — but caterpillars are choosy, and most can only eat one or two specific plant genera. Without those host plants in the garden, the butterflies people love can't reproduce. Native perennials carry the host plants. Most garden-center cultivars don't.

🌿 Native perennials ranked by how many caterpillar species they support:
- Goldenrod — the late-summer bloom people blame for hay fever, which is actually ragweed flowering at the same time. Goldenrod hosts more caterpillar species than any other native perennial in the eastern US, and feeds migrating monarchs critical late-season nectar
- Aster — the catch-all genus for the small daisy-flowered perennials that bloom when little else does. Their leaves host pearl crescents and checkerspots; their flowers fuel migrating bees and butterflies deep into October
- Wild strawberry — not the supermarket variety. The native species works as a groundcover, hosts dozens of caterpillar species, and the small fruits feed sparrows, robins, and small mammals
- Native sunflower — perennial native sunflowers, not the giant annual, host more caterpillar species than people realize, support specialist bees, and feed goldfinches and chickadees with their seed heads in fall
- Joe Pye W**d — the towering pink-purple flower heads of late summer are a magnet for swallowtails, fritillaries, and migrating monarchs. Underused in gardens, dominant in natural meadows
- Violet — the small ground-level plant most lawns try to eliminate. Violets are the host plant for fritillary butterfly caterpillars. Pull the violets and the fritillaries vanish with them
- Switchgrass — the native grass homeowners replace with manicured lawn. It hosts skippers and several small moths, and its seed heads feed sparrows through winter
- Black-eyed Susan — the cheerful yellow daisy widely planted in pollinator gardens. Hosts multiple specialist caterpillars and seeds out for finches in fall
- Milkweed — host to about a dozen caterpillar species, but one of them is the monarch. Milkweed is the only plant on Earth that monarch caterpillars can eat. No milkweed, no monarchs

Tidy is not the same as alive 🌿