Change Your Life - Break Free From Your Rut - Farmer Mary Field Notes (Week 38)

September 15, 2025

Did you know that your daily habits and our pastures have a lot in common? This week, I’m musing on the impact of routines, corralling escaped turkeys, and venturing into soup season. Stick with me, because I could use your help.

Most of the animals on our farm eat grass, which makes grass pretty darn important to us. We want it to be lush, and springy, and vibrant. Here’s the thing, though: we don’t have a lot of roads between our pastures. If you drive over a patch of grass once, it’ll bounce back pretty well. If you drive over the same patch, or along the same path, many times, the grass stays flat and very quickly becomes a visible path, and before you know it, the grass is gone and you have a dirt track. Once the dirt is revealed, and the rain makes it squishy, then you get a rut, and the rut gets baked in, and it’s really hard to fix. So what do we do about the ruts we make in our minds? The negative thoughts we come back to over and over? The habits we bake into our days and weeks and months?

Do you ever feel like you’re stuck in a rut? That you just do the same things on a different day? I will readily admit that I am a creature of habit. I typically start my day with the same order of operations (bible verse of the day, triage my email inbox, coffee, wake the kids), I have a favorite coffee mug that fits my hand just perfectly, and I generally keep my farm chores in the same order so that I am less likely to forget steps. For all of my lovely, comfortable routines, though, farm life keeps me on my toes more often than not.

Day 2 of school found us running out the door just in time to miss the bus, so I drove the kids to school and I was a bit late starting my chores. The animals didn’t seem bothered, so I was sleepwalking through my routine, filling a water tank to deliver water to the chickens in the field when I heard the saddest turkey noise ever. Usually the turkeys come running over to say hello when I’m filling the water tank, so this was enough to snap me out of my daydreams. When I looked up, there was one, lone turkey hen in their fenced-in enclosure. There should be thirty. Frantically scanning the barnyard, I spied the rest of the flock fifty feet away, milling about among the diesel tanks and the hay bale underneath the barn overhang. I stood rooted to the spot, suddenly afraid to spook them and send them running.

My horse trainer loves to remind me that it’s never our turn to freak out. The horses get to freak out, but never us. Panic stops us from thinking and being able to work through the problem at hand. This was definitely a problem. Our barnyard is not completely fenced, and if the turkeys went east, they would end up crossing the property line and disappearing into the woods. John was barricaded in his home office, booked into conference calls all morning, and the kids were at school, so it was up to me to solve this one.

My threadbare plan was to take advantage of their nosy nature and their familiarity with me (the food lady) to see if I could play the Pied Piper and lead them back in. If I pushed forward to chase them, they’d go the opposite direction. Sure enough, I started cooing and calling and making happy turkey noises, and they started slowly moseying in my direction! My heart was racing and I was trying to play it as cool as a person can when they’re desperately sweet-talking small dinosaurs. Eventually, I got about half of them within a few feet of the gate to their enclosure. Luckily, there are two gates, so I snuck around the far side and flanked the bunch so I could put pressure on them from behind. Once they figured out that the gate was open, they walked right back in…well, except for the five lazy ladies that promptly laid down in front of the gate and made me pick them up individually and carry them home. Crisis averted. Apparently, the turkeys like their comfortable routines just as much as I do. These birds. Honestly, though, they’re my favorites on the whole farm. Don’t tell the other animals. I should probably do an entire post or episode devoted to them. There’s so much.

Anyway, It’s probably a good thing that the animals present these sorts of challenges. It’s impossible to be bored when you’re making sure that everyone stays where they are supposed to and that they can’t get themselves into trouble. Plus, if we’re never challenged, we never have the chance to innovate and find better ways of doing things. The other day John asked me why I don’t think bigger, and why I stick to my usual routines even when they’re inefficient. I didn’t have a great answer. Habit? Fear? Both? He’s not wrong. Of the two of us, he is the big-picture thinker, the strategist, and the innovator. I do a much better job of maintaining what he invents, with the occasional light-bulb moment to improve things. And so, with that new perspective in mind, I offer two things this week: a cry for help, and a reward in the form of a tasty recipe that celebrates change.

First: help! What are your strategies for getting unstuck if you find yourself in a rut? Do you go all out and reinvent yourself, or do you go for small goals? (Bonus points if you can help me restyle myself out of the bootcut jeans and hoodie uniform I seem to have adopted. I feel like I should be more creative and grown up than this at 41, but I also work outside all day and I don’t ever go anywhere fancy. I think fear is holding me back on this one.) Or, tell me your strategies for baking in new, GOOD ruts. How do you forge new paths and make them become permanent? I would love to hear your thoughts.

This Week's Recipe

And now, the reward. The burnished cornstalks standing sentry along the roads out here proclaim that fall is here and soup season has arrived. This week I took advantage of the dwindling garden produce to make a really comforting veggie soup with Italian sausage. I’ll post the full recipe in the blog and video description, but the general idea is this:

Gather tasty veggies: onion, celery, carrot, green beans, potatoes, cabbage, tomatoes, okra, sweet corn, and canned white beans. Dice everything but the beans into bite-size pieces that will fit on your spoon nicely. Prep Italian sausage (I used our sweet Italian chicken sausage and removed it from the casings so it was in bulk form). Collect spices: garlic, dried oregano, dried basil, red pepper flakes, fennel seeds (optional, for extra oomph), fresh parsley, fresh basil, salt, pepper, and a bay leaf or two. Have bone broth or chicken stock at the ready (likely 6-8 cups, depending on how many veggies you choose to include). If desired, choose a noodle to cook separately and add at the end.

When everything is ready to rock, brown the sausage, then set aside. Add veggies next, starting with harder veggies first (onion, celery, carrot). Once those begin to soften, add chicken broth to cover, making sure there is enough liquid to make it a true soup (I always end up with more stew than soup), then potatoes, okra, tomatoes (use the liquid, too, if adding canned tomatoes), green beans, and cabbage. Dried spices go in now. Simmer for a bit, taste-test for spices, add more broth if needed. Sweet corn and white beans go in last, with just a few minutes needed to cook. Add your noodle at the end so it doesn’t steal away all of your liquid and end up soggy. Ta-da! If it needs an extra boost at the end, splash in a tiny bit of lemon juice to brighten the flavor, or stir in a bit of the hot sauce of your choice (we are currently obsessed with Truff). And, in the spirit of change and getting out of a rut, these ingredients are all just recommendations. You can add or subtract as desired!

Happy soup season! Check back next week to see if I’ve managed to get out of my rut and what antics the animals are up to this time. You can get my updates directly in your inbox by subscribing to our email list or our YouTube channel. Or both! Thanks for coming along with me on this adventure. I have been delighted to see folks reach out with comments and questions; it seriously makes my day. So much fun. Talk to you soon!

Vegetable Soup with Italian Sausage

Ingredients:

1 lb. Italian sausage, bulk (or remove casings)
½ onion, diced
3 stalks celery, diced
2 carrots (or handful of baby carrots), diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
⅓ to ½ head green cabbage, cut into thin ribbons or diced (choose a small head of cabbage, save the rest for another recipe)
1 pint green beans, cut into small pieces
1 can diced tomatoes (do not drain) or 3 large plum tomatoes, diced
1 pint okra, sliced cross-wise
1 can white beans, any variety, drained
2 potatoes, scrubbed, diced
½ cup (or more) frozen corn kernels
1 Tbsp. dried oregano
1 ½ tsp. dried basil (or a handful of fresh basil leaves, crushed and torn, add at the end)
½ tsp. red pepper flakes (add more to taste)
Optional: ½ tsp. Fennel seeds
1 bay leaf
Fresh parsley, a few stalks, minced
1 cup dried pasta or noodles
Salt and pepper to taste
6-8 cups bone broth or chicken stock (Note: I probably used more veggies than this to make mine, so I kept adding broth to keep it a soup rather than a stew. We have bone broth in our store to ship to you, but we also like Better than Bouillion’s jarred paste for making small amounts at a time in a pinch.)
Optional: splash of lemon juice for the very end

Instructions:

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