Leif just ate his first food!!!
Drooly, chewed up envelope!!
He grabbed it while I was typing and when I took it from him a few minutes later he had already chewed some of it up…
Do you think tree is an OK first food? 🙂
Monthly Archives: July 2009
Keeping a healthy home
I’ll be posting over at Homemakers Who Work today about my struggle with keeping sugar out of our house.
garden post
Sorry for the lack of posting lately. It’s hard to sit at the computer during these busy summer days. Especially with a 5 month old banging on the keys 🙂
I have started planing my fall/winter garden already! Seems crazy in these summer days to be thinking about what I will harvest in Jan! But, this year, I’m going to try to keep some things going all winter long. I’m right on the edge of zone 6b (Asheville is 7a, but I’m in a little cove that keeps us a tad bit cooler), so it’s possible to have a harvest all year long without too much work.
Last week, while the moon was in Taurus, I planted peas, broccoli and cabbage (the cabbage would do fine under a leafy sign too). The peas will hopefully be ready to harvest before the first big frost, and the broccoli and cabbage I plan on using row covers and hope to keep them alive through the winter.
During the weekend, in Gemini, I put in some carrots and bunching onions. These are in a raised bed that I could put some glass over and make a cold frame out of it. That will also help keep the heat in during the winter.
Later on, I plan on putting in Kale, garlic, winter lettuce and maybe a few other things.
The garden has done well this year. No major losses (the squash and pumpkins recovered from the vine borrer and are putting out new leaves and flowers). Still, the garden will need to be a good bit bigger to produce what our family needs to carry us through the winter.
Meet The Slugwings
The Family Photo
Mother, Father, Daughter, and Son Slugwing can often be found playing in the garden. Mother and Father enjoy long slow strolls through the pumpkin patch, while Daughter and Son can often be found flittering about among the flowers.
Mother and Father met among the greenery and it was love at first sight. Mother will often say that there was no way she could have resisted father’s charms, his luscious lips and tight tail!
Mother
Father
Mother and Father, though both flying slugs, had the perfect mix of genes to produce a sweet and delicate butterfly Daughter, and a firey but laid back dragon Son.
Daughter
Son
Soon the Slugwing family will be taking off to travel the world. I can’t tell you any more than this. Hopefully I can reveal more details in the month to come.
Cordwood workshop
Picture by Richard Flato
I know some of you began following my blog because of the cordwood home we’ve built. So I thought it might be of interest to you that there is a cordwood workshop coming up in Asheville the weekend of Oct 10th and 11th. “This project will be the 18†cordwood infill of a post and beam framed greenhouse. The workshop host is the editor of Backhome Magazine. It should be a gorgeous time of year to learn the cordwood technique in a beautiful setting.” You can find more details on www.daycreek.com, click on Cordwood Workshop near Asheville, NC. The instructors, Richard and Becky Flato, have been doing cordwood workshops for over 20 years!
Ma and Pa Ingalls
Contest!!
I have to admit, I wasn’t going to post this because I want to be the one to win that Peach Lavender Butter. But, these books look to good not to promote!!! So, check out Small Measure to find out more about her “Can-Do” contest.
Ashley English, the blog and book author, and I actually went to high school together and now live close to one another and are still good friends (yes, I’m bragging, ’cause she’s really cool :-). I always admired her for her snazzy taste in glasses.
She has been working on a series of books focused on homemade living… The first is Keeping Chickens with Ashley English:
All You Need to Know to Care for a Happy, Healthy Flock and the second is Canning & Preserving with Ashley English:
All You Need to Know to Make Jams, Jellies, Pickles, Chutneys & More… They are both coming out in April of 2010, and I plan to get them both! Check her out at http://small-measure.blogspot.com/
My squash have been decimated!!
I just pulled one or two squash vine borers from every single winter squash, summer squash, and pumpkin in the garden!!! The leaves have become yellow and wilted, and growth has been stunted all in the past few days! I doubt I will get much of a harvest at all! I’m really sad, ’cause I was looking forward to having squash throughout the winter, carving my own pumpkins, canning up lots for the pantry! Do plants come back to health from vine borers??? I sprayed everything off with neem to protect the plants from reinfestation where I slit them open (I don’t know if neem will even do this, but I don’t fugure I have much to lose now.)
How are you supposed to keep these buggers out of the vines in the first place???
My garden helper…
Or should I say, the thing that makes my back ache 🙂
Watering the garden is not so easy when there is a cat attacking your head!
Kaia Camp Days 4 & 5
We started Kaia Camp Day 4 off with a little exercise! We headed to the Dojang when Kaia, Toby, and I take Tae Kwon Do and did a little hooping. It’s the first time I’ve hooped since last November when I was 32 weeks pregnant. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to dance/hoop like I use to, but I fell right back into it and it felt great!
We went from there straight to the local library where the Balloon Fairy was teacing everyone how to make balloon hats.
Then it was back home to make some flower fireworks. We got the idea from 5OrangePotatoes (I love that blog:-) We went outside and picked all the white flowers we could find and put them in wine glasses of water with food coloring in them. We had Queen Anne’s Lace, Yarrow, Daisies, and Onion scapes. It took a full day before we really noticed any changes, but they came out pretty. The darker colors worked much better for us. (oh, and that’s a pink cosmos in there! Not a white daisy turned pink:-)
After a little lunch break, we made an “I Spy” jar (This idea from The Magic Onions, another blog I love). Kaia gathered lots of little trinkets and put them in a glass jar. Then she filled the jar with sand, and shook it up. (rice probably would have worked better, ’cause the sand ended up making the jar a little cloudy). I would say “I spy, with my little eye, something with a hole in it” and she would have to turn it around until she found the shell with a hole in it. It’s a fun game… maybe we’ll make another one with rice to keep in the car for road trips.
Leif enjoyed the jar too, but he was really only interested in the effects of cold on the gums 🙂
For the last day of Kaia Camp, we took it pretty easy. We started out with a little Tae Kwon Do. (Kaia took the adult class with me and did great!! I’m so proud of her… she’s really doing amazing! And the whole belt system works great for her because it gives her something to strive for and she feels like she’s really accomplished something when she gets a new belt)
After that, we had a lot of reading time, knitting time, garden time, and just relaxing fun!
By the end of the week, everyone was tuckered out!
Kaia Camp – Day 3
We started the day off with Zucchini Pancakes!! Yum yum!! Yep, gotta get the veggies in my girl any way I can. She said she really liked them. How do you make them? Glad you asked.
- 2 1/4 cups flour
- 2 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- 2 tsp cinnamon
- 1/4 tsp nutmeg
- pinch of salt
- 1/3 cup sugar
Mix all of this in a large bowl. In a separate bowl mix:
- 2 cups coconut milk
- 2 tsp vanilla
- 1/4 oil (I used olive)
- 2 cups zucchini or squash (I julienned them, but puree works fine too)
Pour wet into dry and mix. Pour ~1/2 cup onto a med-high buttered pan and cook as you would any other pancake.
We enjoyed ours with a black raspberry drizzle!!
After breakfast, Kaia and I tried our hand at making our own lava lamp. Here’s what you do:
Gather an empty clear plastic bottle, cheap cooking oil, water, food coloring, and alka seltzer.
Pour the cooking oil into the plastic bottle until ~5/6 full. Then add water almost to the top.
Add your food coloring. You can do one color or a mix. After a while, the colors will mix up.
Break up a tablet of alka seltzer, put it in the bottle and close the top. Watch your lava lamp bubble! (the carbon dioxide created by the mix of alka seltzer and water carries the coloring in bubbles to the top. When the bubbles pop, the color falls back down.
Try putting it over a flash light in a dark room!
After this, we thought we’d start our Rubber Egg experiment. We boiled an egg and put it in a jar of white vinegar. The vinegar reacts with the calcium in the shell and dissolves it. After 2 days, you change out the vinegar and let it sit for a week more. After this time, the egg should be so rubbery that we can bounce it. I’ll let you know how that goes :-) (oh, if you use an egg that isn’t boiled, you will be able to slosh the insides around, but don’t try to bounce it!!)
And the fun just kept on going!!
With our delicious ice cream from Monday, I really wanted a nice magic shell topping. So, I decided we should make it ourselves. So we mixed equal parts of cocoa powder, coconut oil, and agave syrup and heated it on the stove, just until melted. Simple!!! And it worked like a charm. Then I found this link for Home Made Magic Shell. I might try their recipes next time and jazz it up a bit.
To finish off a wonderful day of Kaia Camp, we sat down to watch a bit of Little House on the Praire.
Garden assesment
I thought it was a good time to take a look at how the garden is faring, then in the years to come I can repeat (or not) those things that worked (or didn’t):
Tomato bed – so far, they are all looking great! No ripe ones yet, but should be soon. The dill and parsley in this bed are doing wonderfully, the basil not so much. It’s genovese basil, but it wanted to bolt early and hasn’t gotten as big as I would have expected.
Pea bed – they did wonderfully and are now on their way out. Next time I will have many more and taller strings for them to climb. Our harvest would have been much larger if they hadn’t fallen all over each other.
Summer Squash bed – The Raven Zucchini and Saffron yellow squash started out with a bang. They still look good, but aren’t producing much… lots of flowers but not fruit. The Tromboncino squashes seem to be doing well. The Jarrahdale Pumpkin squash is very slow going… lots of blooms but no fruit yet. The eggplant is growing slowly and small as usually with me. I don’t know what it is about me and eggplant, but I can never seem to get a good harvest. The bees are loving the garden, so I know I have lots of pollination going on.
Raven Zucchini
Trombonccino squash
Cucumber bed – the cukes are booming!! I’ve harvested over 13 pounds so far and there are many more little ones growing. I’ve noticed some spots on some of the leaves and I don’t know what it is. I don’t want it to take over and kill the plants! Ugh, that would be tragic… they are looking so great!
Cucumber leaves - what is that?
Brassicas – The kale has done wonderfully and still going strong. The beets not so much. I planted varieties for lots of greens, but haven’t gotten much. The spinach all did poorly. I planted 3 different varieties and none of them grew very large or produced very much…. I’ve never had much luck with spinach. The broccoli has gotten eaten up by some bug that I dont’ recognize. But we’ve had almost no harvest from it.
broccoli bug
Broccoli bug (blurry close up)
Potatoes – so far so good… no major complaints
Lettuces – they all did fabulous. We weren’t a fan of the mixed greens… there was something in there that was too bitter and too spicy. So they ended up just bolting, but this created a nice shady spot for the lettuces to grow, and they have done great. The chard in the bed is also doing wonderfully.
Bright lights chard
Pumpkins – doing well. Not too much fruit yet, but there are a few.
Cinderella Pumpkins - Rouge Vif d'Etampes
Green beans – going strong. I’ve noticed some spots on the lower leaves… trying to figure out what it is.
Green Beans
What are the spots?
Winter squash – The Zeppelin Delicatas seem to be doing great, the David’s Dakota Delight is growing, but I haven’t seen much fruit yet. The Squisito Spaghetti squash seems to be doing ok…. I’ve not grown much squash before, so I don’t know what a good yield is from one plant.
Spaghetti squash
Yellowing spaghetti squash leaves??
Melons – so far so good. The vines are only a few feet long but there are flowers and small fruits.
Garlic – The garlic bed has done horribly. Partly because one of the cats is using it as a litter box, but mostly because the soil is too hard. I need to plant it, and the onions in one of the deeper, raised beds next year.
And for Junes Harvest: (Some of it seems so piddly, especially the greens, but we really aren’t harvesting and eating it like we should… there’s a bunch out there!)
4.25 inches or rain
90 eggs (the count is down ’cause we have 3 hens either sitting on eggs or raising chicks, and the other hens seem to have slowed down a bit with hot weather)
1 ounce garlic scapes (the garlic has done poorly this year!)
1 pound kale
14 oz lettuce
4 oz. chard
~6 ounce of herbs (parsley, dill, basil…)
5 # sugar snap peas
2# 4oz potatoes
6# 6oz. summer squash
2 baby onions
12 oz broccoli
13# 9oz. cucumbers
total of ~31 pounds of produce in June  (not too bad for a new garden)