Dear MOTHER

“All those years, I’d been competing with nature. I began to wonder if there was a way for me to cooperate with her instead.”

EDITORS’ PICK

Cheese Made Easy

When our local library reopened following the COVID-19 lockdown, I found some old issues of MOTHER EARTH NEWS in a recycling bin. With delight, I took as many of them as I could. In the April/May 2018 issue, I found instructions for easy homemade cheese (“3 One-Hour Cheese Recipes”). No offense to YouTube, but I’ve found written instructions to be a lot more valuable than videos, in some cases. With my on-hand ingredients list and the recipe, I made absolutely delicious farmer cheese with no difficulty at all. A jelly bag made a great substitute for cheesecloth, and it was easy to clean afterward. We topped the fresh-baked bread that’s become a staple in our home with cheese flavored with homegrown herbs. Even better, the kids learned an additional skill.

Thanks very much for showing how simple things can be if the steps are broken down reasonably.

M. Glazier

West Virginia

Living Well with Nature

My wife, Dianna, and I moved into our newly constructed lake home in late 1995. The land was a blank slate of muddy clay. I loved writing on it. I designed the entire landscape for our yard, first on paper, and then, with plenty of sweat, in the earth.

I built sandstone walls to break up the steep slope of the property, tossed in a few rock piles here and there, and added seven trembling aspen to the south side of the house for shade in