Today I got a call from a friend of mine who also happens to be the president of the NC Herb Association. She’s asked me to be one of the main speakers at next years Wild Herb Weekend Conference! I’m really excited! I get to teach 3 classes that are a little over an hour long and she’s asked me to try to include classes that will draw a younger (20’s) crowd… stuff like ‘herbal mead making’, or ‘tye dying with herbs’ or stuff like that. This will be really fun for me, especially since I usually teach the more scientific stuff at the herb schools. The herb of the year is Bay Laurel, so I’m not really sure how to include that… (last year was lemon balm and this year is calendula… those would have been easy to build a class around… but Bay laurel???) So, you guys have any ideas about fun herbal classes you’d want to attend? It’s funny, when I’m not trying to think of things, I have all kinds of ideas, but when I need to come up with something, I’m blank.
I really wanted to go this year because James Duke was the keynote speaker, and I love him! But, it didn’t work out. Next year they are hoping to get Richo Cech (author and owner of Horizon Herbs).
Monthly Archives: July 2008
Dirt!
Guess what!
Yep, our little soul is back again and it looks like he’s staying put this time! I’m at the end of my first trimester and feeling good. I’ve had very little nausea, moderate tiredness, and couldn’t get enough nectarines to eat. I am not really craving pickles and ice cream, I just happened to get both when I was grocery shopping… I did try a pickle when I was having some ice cream just to see if it fulfilled some pregnant need, but nope.
A friend recently had a dream that we had a boy and he had beautiful dark hair. She kept saying in her dream that his hair was the color of good dirt and she could grow a great garden on his head (she’s a gardener). Then, she decided that his name was Dirt. So, Toby has taken to calling the baby Dirt. Poor child! (oh, and no, we don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl, we just keep saying ‘him’)
Time for a bb gun!
I don’t know what else to do! About a month ago, with in a week, two of our chickens disappeared. First it was Ralph, so I thought that maybe she had gone broody again and was just laying on a clutch somewhere. But then Spike disappeared. I had a weird feeling that it was one of our neighbors, so Kaia and I went for a little hike down the valley. Suki came with us and ran ahead. She came back up from his house with Spike’s wing and dropped it at my feet. Then we found some feathers. I think one of his dogs came up on the property and got them. So, the four chickens left were put in the coop area and were no longer free range. But, today Faye was killed. From what we can tell, a dog pulled her head through the fencing and took it off. It tried to dig a whole under the coop, but didn’t get all the way in. Now I don’t know what to do! I’ve never seen them up here. Usually Suki keeps them off the property. But she comes inside now and then to cool off when it’s hot, and we don’t hear a thing. We may need to move the coop to the front of the house area, but I really don’t want to have to go through all that trouble if there is another solution. Electrify the fence??? We’re down to three chickens!
2009 Herbal Journal is out!
In 2007 I discovered the new Herbal Journal, written by UK Herbalist Zoe Hawes and her friends. It’s a weekly planner with fabulous pictures and write-ups about herbs, herbal history, and anything herbal! I love it! Well, the 2009 Journal has just come out and I have 4 entries in it! I’ve written about Usnea, making herbal root beer, children’s herbal pillows, and Blood Root (which is called red root in the journal). It looks fantastic! If you like herbs and are a planner, like I am, you should definitely get one!! You can get them through Pomegranate publishing, or through Zoe Hawes, though she doesn’t have her site updated yet, you can email her about the 2009 Journals! Tell her I sent you! She’s an amazing woman!!
Delicious day!
Kaia and I have had a great day so far. We spent the morning watching old Bugs Bunny cartoons, then she got completely pruned in the bath, and this afternoon we baked ourself a treat!
The recipe is from an old restaurant that use to be in downtown Asheville. When I was in high school, down town Asheville wasn’t really a place you would go to, unless you were headed to the 2 antique stores that were there. Most of the buildings were run down and uninhabited. At some point, The Stone Soup, opened with an amazing bakery and fun sandwiches. It started bringing more people down town and more people became interested in transforming the place. Now Asheville has a fantastic downtown with great restaurants, shops, buskers, music, etc. I don’t know what ever happened to the Stone Soup. But, here is the recipe for the cinnamon rolls.
Stone Soup Cinnamon Swirls
2 eggs beaten, room temp.
2 T. dry yeast
2 ¼ tsp. salt
¾ cup brown sugar
1 tsp. nutmeg
¼ tsp. Cloves
¼ tsp. Allspice
4 ½ unbleached flour (I didn’t have any, so I used Oat flour and it worked fine)
12 T Butter
½ cup water
1 2/3 cup milk (I used rice milk)
2 ½ whole wheat flour
Filling
3 T. butter
2 T. sugar
1 T. cinnamon
1) Combine dry ingredients, except whole wheat flour, in a bowl and set aside.
2) Combine and heat butter, water, and milk until lukewarm. Put this in your mixing bowl. Add the beaten, room temp. eggs and the dry mixture. Mix thoroughly.
3) Add the whole wheat flour slowly until the dough pulls away from the bowl. You might not use it all OR you might need a little more. Be sure you check the dough’s consistency while adding the WW flour. You don’t want the dough to get too heavy, which is easy to do. Knead the dough in the mixer for 7 minutes OR by hand until the dough is smooth and elastic. Cover in a bowl and let double in size. This will take AT LEAST 30 minutes. It will probably take longer. Be patient. You will be rewarded.
4) Make the filling in the mean time. Carefully melt butter and add sugar and cinnamon. Put aside.
5) When the dough has risen, roll it out into a rectangle about 14 inches by 9 inches. Paint the melted butter, cinnamon, and sugar mix on the dough leaving the ½ inch bare at the bottom.
6) Carefully roll it up starting from the top, moving toward you. Pinch the seam together.
7) Cut the rolls into 1 inch (or a little bigger : )) and place them on a baking sheet (lined with parchment) evenly, at least 2 inches apart.
8) Bake in a preheated 350* oven until they have a light crust all the way around, ~25 minutes. The sides should not be soft, but golden brown and delicious!
9) Glaze as desired. I used powdered sugar, rice milk and a few drops of orange essential oil.
Enjoy!!
Roof pictures
OK, so I finally got out on the roof and got some pics for you. Kaia and I woke up early and sat out in the hanging chairs on the roof to eat breakfast. It was nice and cool, and very leisurely 🙂
These pictures show the stones leading from the window/door to the chairs:
Here is some thyme that is thriving on the roof! (and a crazy kid who wants to be in every picture!)
Another shot. There is a dianthus blooming in the foreground. I love the look of this plant. We tried planting some little seedlings, but they didn’t make it. This was was a larger potted plant and did well.
Here is a blooming Monarda fistula, also called ‘wild bee balm’ or wild bergamot’ (sorry for the blurriness.. I have a crappy camera). I have two on the roof that were given to me by a friend. It’s one of the medicinals on the roof, though I’ve not used it much. I love the feathery purple bloom!
Here is a great patch of roof! The Delospermas (or ice plants) are doing fantastic. Here are a pink and a yellow variety. Later in the day, when it warms up a little, this part of the roof is covered in blooms!
Not all of the plants are doing so well. The Roman Chamomile have mostly died. The calendula are blooming and hanging in there, but scraggly. And you can see in this picture that some of the sedum seedlings just aren’t growing very fast. I’m hoping if they make it through the heat of the summer, that they will have time to settle in and establish roots in the fall, before the cold hits.
The California Poppies are blooming nicely, and the red yarrow is sending up lots of new greenery!
And here’s a shot of another area where the delosperma are taking off!
Fungus amongus!
Guess what I got the other day? A huge Kombucha mother mushroom!! I’m really excited. I’ve been wanting to try it for a while, but just haven’t gotten to it. A friend was harvesting from hers yesterday and invited me over to get one. I made my own kefir for a while and we liked it, but paying $11 for a half gallon of raw goat milk just to make it in seemed a bit of a waste, and I never could get the flavor right. That’s why I love the kombucha. All you need is water, tea and a sweetener! We have Water, we have honey, and I’ve got lots of tea. So, right now, I’m making my first batch. I’m using 3 parts Rooibos and 1 part oolong tea, along with sugar and water. I thought I’d start with the sugar since that is what most sites recommend, and experiment with other sweeteners when I get more ‘baby’ mushrooms (a ‘baby’ grows each time you use the mushroom).
So, here’s what I did:
I boiled 3 quarts of water and then added a cup of sugar, and boiled for 5 more minutes. Then I turned off the heat and added my tea (~6 tsp Rooibos and 2 tsp. Oolong) and let that steep for 10 minutes. Then I took out the tea bags and let the tea cool to room temp. I poured the tea into a large glass bowl and placed ~ 1/2 cup of kombucha tea (that my friend had also given to me) into the mix as a starter. Then I placed the mushroom on top. I covered the bowl with a cloth and will let it sit for 7 days in a warm place. I’m excited to try it!! I’ve ordered some books to get more info. This one is specifically about what herbs you can use in making Kombucha.
This is the mushroom and a little of the tea. For scale, it’s in a gallon sized bag.
And here is the mix just before I covered it with a cloth. The Mushroom is floating on top:
The first time I ever tried Kombucha was way before it was an ‘in’ thing. It was in 1996 when I was studying Midwifery in Ireland. I was staying with a German midwife who practiced in Ireland and this ‘fizzy drink’ was about all they drank; and she talked about how healthy it was. I remember really enjoying the flavor until she showed me the actual mushroom and then I was kind of grossed out. (I believe she said it was a mushroom that her mother had given her, so who knows how long they had been making it in her family). But, since then, I’d always wanted to figure out how to make it.
Kombucha is supposed to have all kinds of benefits, but my feeling is if it does nothing by increase the absorb ability of the nutrients in food, that you will see a huge change in many areas of your body, because your whole body will be nourished more.
Do any of you make your own kombucha? What ingredients do you use?
Updating
I haven’t posted about the house is a while, ’cause, well, I was kind of tired of talking about it 🙂 But, we’ve been in here almost 3 months and we are all loving it! I’m really looking forward to our first winter so we can use the radiant floors and wood stove.
So, in the last 3 months, we’ve finished up some projects, like shelving in the bath closet, built a computer nook desk, rearranged the furniture about 178 times… we have to mount the door to the secret nook, and finish building the kitchen book shelf and I think the inside projects will be pretty much done! Wahooo! Then there’s tackling the outside (if you can’t hear the dread in my voice, it’s there, believe me!) We’ve still got a boat load of construction waste to deal with. All the left over wood (that is not usable for building) needs to be chopped up and stacked for fire wood. There are big piles of gravel, sand, and roof dirt to deal with, and trash here and there. It’s not actually too horrible, it’s just dealing with it! We’ve given ourselves until the Fall equinox to get stuff cleaned up, ’cause that is when we are finally going to have our house warming party! I would really like to get working on preparing the ground for a garden next year, but I have to say, that totally intimidates me! Our ground is complete hard clay and nothing but ragweed grows in it! So, I guess I need to till it all up and add a ton or two of compost and minerals. We’re not sure if we are going to plant in the ground or use raised beds. Any thoughts on what you prefer? I’d like to pack as much food into as small a space as possible so the space is used as efficiently as possible. I’m also hoping to plant lots of fruit trees and bushes and maybe some nut trees. Right now we have one peach (with about 10 fruits on it), and one nectarine.
Oh, and we’ve had lots of rain in the past 3 weeks, so the living roof is really taking off!!
Right of passage
Well, Kaia has had her first big right of passage… Yesterday, we took a family trip to the Mall (which is a rare thing for us) to hit Claire’s boutique! And you know what that means!! Yep, Kaia got her ears pierced!! She’s been asking for a while to do it, and I kept saying ‘talk to your daddy!’. I got my first piercing when I was 3 and never had a problem with my ears and loved having earrings. So, I was fine with it. Toby, on the other hand, was not ready. This is his baby girl getting metal stuck in her ears so that she can look more like Barbie. So, I totally understand. But, yesterday, she talked him into it.
I happened to have a lidocaine cream, so I put some on her ears before we left for the mall. She was so stoic! She said it stung a little, but barely flinched and then wanted to look at more earrings. She chose her birthstone to pierce with.
Thank you!
Thank you Robbyn, for the beautiful Arte y Pico Award! It’s for creativity, design, interesting material, and contributing to the blogging community (in any language). I’m humbled. Thank you!
Though so many are deserving, I would like to pass this award on to:
–Daisy the Curly Cat – for keeping me laughing everyday with her creative thoughts!
–Suburban Tomato Liberation Front – for her beautiful and inspirational photography
–Greenwoman – again for lovely photography and thoughtful/informative herbal posts
–The Unusually Unusual Farmchick – for inspiring me to try new things
–Eco-Child’s Play– for putting lots of eco-friendly child rearing ideas out there for all of us!
I hope you enjoy flipping through some of these blogs.
Second Annual Hoop Path Retreat
Last weekend I spent 3 full days in Chapel Hill, NC for the second Hoop Path Retreat. I went to the first one last year and had such a wonderful time. The main teacher is a man named Jonathan Baxter and he’s been hooping for ~7 years. He has amazing hooping skills, but it’s his words that are so potent. It’s like going to a meditation retreat and using the hoop to focus your mind and get past your issues instead of just sitting. Here’s a video from some of the classes and jams. At the end of all the classes, there is always a “hooper’s ball” where we get dressed up and hoop our hearts out! I didn’t take many pictures this time of classes or hooping, but I did get lots of the outfits for the ball!
These are my hosts from last year and this year, Erica and Beth. They are both amazing hoopers. Beth has one of the most beautiful, graceful hooping styles I have ever seen.
This is Martine getting ready for the ball. She’s originally from Canada (and has a cute little french accent:-) ) but is living in MD now with her new hubby.
This is me and Geof. We didn’t get to hoop together too much, but he’s amazing… and I like his tiger outfit :-0
Here are Jessica and Victoria, beautiful hoopers from Alabama. Man, I need to whiten my teeth!!
And here are Natasha (san.fran.), Nicki (milwaukee), Khan (san.fran.), and I getting ready to hoop at the ball. (I know, my outfit isn’t as daring or sparkly as most… maybe next year:-)
Getting an allowance
Now that Kaia is 5, we’ve decided to start giving her an allowance to teach her about money. We tossed around lots of ideas of how it would work, but then we ran across this article. So, Kaia now has 4 jars and each week gets $2 to put into each jar. “Spending” is for immediate satisfaction… to spend on what she wants. “Savings” is when she wants to save up for big purchases (she can take her ‘spending’ money and put into her ‘savings’ jar if she doesn’t want to spend it that week. “Donation” is for giving to her favorite causes… maybe 2-4 times a year we will empty this jar out and give the money to whatever cause she wants. “Investment” is a more long term thing so she can learn about putting money away for the future when she gets older.
She already had a piggy bank where she would put money that she got for gifts and stuff. So she decided to break the piggy bank and buy a doll with that money. The rest of the money will be split between the jars.
Here is her new doll (it’s a porcelain doll she got for $10 from our local fabric store!) and her money jars.
