Ashley over at Small Measure is having another give away! This time it’s a cherry marmalade!! Ohhhh, Yummy!!! Go over and check her out!
Category Archives: Sustainable Living
July Harvest Wrap Up
From the garden this past month I harvested:
- Eggs – 70
- Lettuce – 1oz
- Chard – 1# (although there is a bunch out there that needs harvesting… we just haven’t felt like eating it)
- Herbs (culinary) – 4 oz
- Summer Squashes – 15# 2oz
- Peas – 6 oz
- Kale – 3# 4oz
- Green Beans – 6# 2oz
- Cucumbers – 50# 7 oz (!!!)
- Onions – 2# (they did horribly)
- Garlic – 11oz (did even worse than the onions)
- Beets – 2# 6oz
- Winter Squashes (just starting to come in) 7#
- Berries – 3 quarts
- Tomatoes (also just starting to turn red) – 6# 5oz
We had 4.9 inches of rain and I put up:
- 7 1/2 pints of relish
- 17 quarts of Dill pickles
- 5 quarts and 9 pints of bread and butter pickles
- 5 1/2 quarts of green beans
- 19 half pints of Mango-Cucumber chutney
- 7 Quarts of Indian Split Pea Soup
- 9 Quarts Curried Zucchini soup
- 12 Quarts Mulligatawny
WOOO HOOOO! I love the way the pantry looks!
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.
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)
Leif’s newest attire
I finally finished his piggy pants!! I love how they came out. They should fit for a few winters. He’s already 20 pounds (and 4 months old!) so as he lengthens out, I imagine his belly won’t get much bigger for a few years :-) Kaia is 6 and fits the pants (though they come down to her knees).
Dinner!
Garden Progress
Things are growing nicely in the garden! It was early blight on the potatoes. But, it was only on 5 of my fingerlin potatoes. So, I pulled them up and burned the tops. The potatoes looked fine, albeit small:
We’ve got zucchini and summer squash starting to come in, cukes the size of my pinky, snap peas galore (yum!) and still lots of greens. I’m having to get use to eating from the garden and not from the pantry… it’s nice…. but major canning time is just around the corner.
Here are shots of the garden from the roof… lots of progress from a month ago
And a shot of some blooms on the roof:
yarrow and calendula
Longbottom Leif
Here they are! Leif’s new fancy pants! Can you see he’s very excited!
He also wanted to pose with his new sweater, even though it’s too big. Doesn’t he look dashing? I’ll knit up a longer pair 9or 20 🙂 for winter.
And his new fancy pants can be casual too. Here he is posing with the cat. Right after I took this photo, he grabbed her ear and wouldn’t let go. Toby thinks Leif looks a bit like a hobbit in his shorts, so we’ve been calling him Longbottom Leif.
Help! What are these??
This is on all of my zucchini…
And this is on one of my potatoes…
And what do I do about it??
Melons and cordials
I know… way to many posts today… I’m just trying to get caught up!
I planted 37 melon plants yesterday while the moon was in Leo… there was only room for 18 in the bed I’d made and I didn’t want to throw away the other seedlings, so I planted them in a big hill of dirt we have in the back yard. We should be flush in cantaloupe, watermelon and muskmelon come late summer!!
Oh, and right now we are overflowing in strawberries, roses, and lemon balm. No use in letting all this yummy goodness go to waste! So, I decided to make cordials out of all of them! I followed Kathie’s recipe and made a quart of each. Tomorrow I will strain them and add the sugar! Mmmm mmmmmm!
Mother!!
We’ve been making kombucha in a continuous brewing system for a while now, but it’s in a ceramic pot, so you can’t see it unless you look in the top. Lately, it seems like I will add some fresh tea to the batch and it will be too strong to drink within days. It’s fermenting way too fast. So, I finally took the scoby out to see what was going on and this is what I found:
That is the biggest, thickest hunk of scoby I’ve ever seen!! I tried to separate a slice of it to put it back in the tea, but I couldn’t. It had grown into one huge mass. So, I took off a small chunk, put it back in the tea, and I’m going to put the rest in the blender and use it on the garden in my compost tea (I hope that doesn’t ruin my garden 🙂
Meet the new addition
Well folks, we finally did it!
We’d been talking about getting a new car for years, we just couldn’t find what we wanted. There are no environmentally friendly family cars. To have room you have to get a mini van which get horrible gas milage (compared to our 45 mpg Jetta), and to get good mileage you have to get a small car. Plus, we did have a vegetable oil kit in our jetta so that we could run our car off of straight vege oil, which was free from the right sources. (But, we’d taken that kit out a while ago and now just run it on biodiesel.) So, it was hard to think about going back to gas. But, after much looking around and realizing that the jetta was just tooooo small and costing us toooo much in repairs, we decided on a Toyota Prius. It is roomier than the Jetta, gets great gas mileage, cost less to repair, and seems like the best option out there for us right now. So, meet the new car! a 2010 Toyota Prius… arrived on the lot yesterday morning and we drove home in the afternoon. Isn’t she a beauty!! I’m going to have to get use to the fact that it is very, very quiet when it is running, especially compared to a diesel engine. But, really, you can’t hear it at all. It’s really nice, but you have to be extra careful when you are in parking lots, ’cause pedestrians might not hear you coming!
Harvest Totals
Last month I decided to start writing down all the food we harvested from our land. In April, I only kept track of eggs, but this month I tried to remember to measure everytime we brought something in the house. I keep a little scale on the kitchen counter for just this.
April Harvest
- 146 eggs
May Harvest-
- 110 eggs (we were down because 3 of our hens were broody and not laying)
- 5 pounds 4 ounces strawberries
- 2 pounds shiitake mushrooms
- 4 ounce rose petals
- ~2 pounds of greens (this included chickweed, kale, lettuce, pea shoots, and spinach. I’ll try to be better about separating then next month. Sometimes we would go grab some greens for a sandwich and forget to measure.
In May, we also had 11 inches of rain!!
Feeding the garden
Quick question…
How often do you fertilize or feed your vegetables? I’ve not done anything since they’ve been planted, and everything looks great, but I imagine they would like a little food boost every now and then. I checked on my comfrey compost tea, but it’s not ready yet…
Monster Pudding
I’ve been experimenting today… thought you’d like the recipe. It’s really good! It even gets ‘Kaia’s Gold Star of Approval!” (I got the original recipe from Darcey)
Monster Pudding:
4 small avocados
1/2 cup coconut milk
1/4 cup coconut oil
1 Tbsp. Cardamom powder
1/3 cup (or less) honey or other sweetener
Put all in a blender and mix up.
You can eat it like this, or if you can’t stand looking at green pudding and would like a little ‘dirt pudding‘ instead, add 1/3 cup carob or cocoa powder…
If you want to get even more creative you can also 2 drops of orange or mint essential oil.
Mmmmmmm……!!!
It’s dairy free and full of lots of good fats and oils! And it’s really tasty!!
Yummy giggles!
Leif found his giggle tonight!! It had us all laughing up a storm! I’ll see if I can upload the video for you!
I also finally finished his kimono for next winter. It’s a pretty easy pattern, I just haven’t had a whole lot of hands free time. I’m going to knit some pants to go with it.
(Sorry for the horrid color, the lighting sucked!)
Oh, and the strawberries are coming in! YAY!
Gardens a growin’!
Kaia’s flower garden:
Looks like we will have a nice strawberry harvest this year:
Onions are doing well!
Potatoes are up and growing strong:
Lettuce and other greens are overwhelming us!
Here’s a view of the front gardens from the roof
The plants on the roof are doing well… well, the ones that survived. Almost all of the delospermas (ice plants) didn’t survive the winter. We have large dead spots on the roof. We’ll see how things grow over the summer. Hopefully the plants that are living will fill in the gaps.
Kaia and I planted 45 Gladiola bulbs this spring, and Heidi created a little heart garden around them for us!
In the garden
Things are really looking nice in the garden! The greens are growing strong, my cucumbers and summer squashes are peaking their heads up, the potatoes are up, and the new asparagus has just broke ground. Yesterday, in Virgo (a fruit sign), I planted a hops vine, put in 22 tomatoes seedlings, seeded 3 types of winter squash, 2 types of pole beans, and seeded 3 types of melons into soil blocks. With almost everything in the garden, I realized that I have nothing to feed the plants with. I can’t use anything fishy or seaweedy, ’cause Suki will dig to china trying to find the source of the smell. So, I’m going to try an herbal fertilizer. I filled a 3 gallon bucket half way with comfrey and yarrow leaves (they were slightly wet from the rain). Then I put a large rock on top of them to weigh them down, and covered the bucket. I’ll let it sit like this for 3-6 weeks. I should end up with a concentrated fluid vegetable food. I’ll water it down with 10 parts water to one part concentrate and then spray the veggies. I’ll let you know how it works. What do you use?
The only pests I’ve noticed so far are flea beetles and white flies. I’ve sprayed a little neem oil to see if that will do the trick. May have to get some diotomacious earth for the beetles. What are your preferred methods of pest control?
this is a bloom from the “pavement rose” (a rugosa type) that I picked up at the herb festival this past weekend. Isn’t she lovely? The fragrance fills the garden!!
Birdies at the feeder! There is one I’ve seen lately that is an iridescent midnight blue! I don’t know what it is, but it’s beautiful!
My Child is driving me crazy!!
sdlkrnyiod!! ltionadfshlk!!! Did you understand that??? NO!! That’s because it is crazy language! I know, all you parents out there are saying “yeah, I know what you are going through”… But OH NO! She is driving me up the wall, out the window, and over the yellow brick road!! How can a 5 year old have such control over my emotions? I truly believe that at the exact moment of her birth, the stars aligned to create a mother-daughter relationship that would encourage me to bang my head on the wall… or the floor… or the door…
Example 1:
“MOOOOOOOOOMMMMMM! (said in a loud, whiny voice) YOU WOKE UP BEFORE ME!!” (I’m sitting in bed, not yet having opened up both eyelids!)
“MOOOOOOMMMMM! WHY DID YOU CHANGE LEIF’S DIAPER WITHOUT TELLING ME????!!!” (Oh, I didn’t know I had to inform you of my every movement!!)
“YOU CARRIED MY SIPPY OUT TO THE CAR, SO YOU HAVE TO CARRY IT BACK IN MOOOOMMMMM!!! (While I stand at the door with my hands completely full with groceries and a baby, and she carries nothing)
And as I try calmly to tell her why she needs to help carry things from the car, she puts her hand to her ear pretending to talk on the phone, holds the palm of her hand up to me, and turns the other way! OH no you didn’t just tell me to ‘talk to the hand’!!
Oh My God, child! Get over this phase fast, will you please!!!
OK, end of rant! Momentary sanity has returned…
In other news, we had our house featured in the New Life Journal again. It’s a great article and makes me feel very proud. Though we certainly didn’t build our house to get recognition, it’s certainly nice to get a pat on the back for it!
One of the bee hives survived the winter and one died… I think they starved. But, the hive that survived seems to be going strong. I went into them today to be sure they weren’t getting ready to swarm… but no signs of swarm cells. They were actually very calm and it was nice to work with them without feeling intimidated. This is the first time I’ve gone into the hive by myself.
Two of our hens have gone broody… our silkies. We built a little make shift broody nest for the first one, but now that two are broody, Toby is working on a little broody house for them. He should finish it tonight, so I’ll take pictures and post them.
Speaking of pictures, we spent Wed. afternoon getting family pictures taken. The man who took pictures of my earth belly offered to take family portraits in trade for my time posing for him. Of course we took him up on it. He is such a great photographer, but also a really nice guy! It was fun spending the afternoon with him. Here are some of the pictures… there are a bunch more, but he hasn’t posted them yet. I’m not a fan of the first picture, but that’s my own vanity finding fault with my double chin and squinty eyes… I love Leif’s smirk in the second picture, and Kaia and Leif’s twin stares in the third… and the fourth one just melts my heart!
Keeping busy
We had one of those wonderful weekends where you stay really busy with all kinds of fun stuff!
Though we don’t really celebrate Easter, Kaia and I wanted to do something crafty for spring. First we made sweet little birds nests (and ate way too many M&M’s) We brought a few to a birthday party on Sunday, but what we left at home is all gone now 🙂
We dyed some of our eggs, too. But, since we get dark eggs from our chickens and you can’t see the dye well, we tried a new dying tactic.
First, you set up your dyes in glasses and hard boil your eggs.
Then, you roll the cooled eggs around, cracking the shell, but leaving it on the egg.
Plop the eggs in the glasses of dye and leave them for a few hours, at least (we left ours overnight).
Then, take them out of the dye and peel off the shell. The inside of the shells are just as beautiful as the egg.
The darker colors came out best. Some of the eggs didn’t peel well at all, I think they were a little too fresh when we boiled them.
We plan on having deviled eggs later on this week.
Yesterday, while the moon was in scorpio, we planted spinach and chard seeds out in the garden beds, and started cilantro and fennel in soil block in the cold frame.
With the weather warming up, I really need to go into the bee hives and check them out. But, the weather has been either rainy or too windy. Soon, hopefully, so I can add more supers if they need more space (to keep them from swarming).
Roots and wood
I put out some roots yesterday while the moon was in Virgo… potatoes of all colors (red, blue, white, yellow fingerling, new potatoes). I did intensive planting of 50 potatoes in a small raised bed, each potato was placed 9 inches apart in all directions. We’ll see how it goes. I also planted beets (Lutz’s salad beets, which make good greens as well as large beet roots, and Chioggia, which are the red and white bull’s eye beets). And since the onions I grew from seed are still looking puny, I put in a pound of onion starts, too.
I also planted a rose bush. I know that’s not a root, but I’d just received it in the mail and it needed to get in the ground. It’s a Rosa canina rose. I’ve been looking all over for it and found only one supplier, and it was going to cost $70 to get it shipped to me. Even though these aren’t the showiest of roses, the hips they produce are huge and I use them a lot in cooking and medicine. Many other roses produce nice rose hips, but this is the kind you will get when you order them from an herb supplier. So, I thought I would have to be without…then Lizzy Lane found one on Ebay for me… in Italy! I contacted the seller and they were the nicest people! They said they would send me a small start for $11, including shipping. It arrived in beautiful condition on Wed. so I plopped it in the ground yesterday. Yay!
Here’s a rose hip recipe for you:
Rose Hip Jam
Fill jar 2/3 full of cut, sifted & deseeded rose hips.
Cover with apple juice.
Let sit 4 hours to overnight. May be blended for smoother texture. Refrigerate.
Slather it on toast, use instead of jelly, or just eat it with a spoon!! Mmmm
Toby’s started work on a wood shed. It seems to rain every time we need to bring wood in for a fire, so we thought it would be nice to have a dry place to stack it for next winter 🙂
And, I don’t think I ever put up pictures of the guest house once we finished it… well, almost finished it. Heidi’s been living in it since late last year, but it still needs water, electricity and finish work. It’s cute though, eh?
plantings
I set out my broccoli, kale, and lettuce/greens seedlings today. (The moon is in Cancer, a water sign good for planting leafing vegetables.) And tomorrow the moon moves into Leo, a fire sign good for planting fruiting plants, so I am going to start my tomatoes and eggplants. From reading other blogs it seems like I’m way behind on my plantings, but if I calculate my plantings by the average last frost date around here (April 21st), I’m not supposed to start tomatoes until about now… am I way late??
I have another question… When I start my vegetable seeds, unless the seed package tells me otherwise, I always just stick the seeds in the soil…. I know some seeds need cold, some need scarring, some need soaking, but which seeds? Is there a list of seeds needing stratification or scarification?
hello…
… I’m still here 🙂 I’ve just been away from the computer a bit… It’s hard to type with a baby in your arms 🙂
We are all doing really well! Leif is a total sweetie! He’s very laid back, although he is a total snuggler and doesn’t like to be put down. Kaia is still in love with him and is taking on the role of ‘big sister’ very well.
We’re getting some much needed rain here. Looks like the week ahead will bring even more rain! Maybe the spring will start flowing again (it dried up last July with the drought). With the rain, I’ve gotten a few shiitake from my logs. They dried up last year and hadn’t produced in a long time. I really need to move them to a more moist and shaded area, too.
In the garden, I’ve planted asparagus. I’m the only one in the family that likes it, so I should have lots to enjoy! I planted the crowns last Sunday, under capricorn, an earth sign good for planting roots. I know asparagus isn’t a root crop, you harvest the spears, but I thought it might be good to plant them under an earth sign to get the roots established well for better harvest later. We’ll see…. I have 10 more crowns, maybe I will plant them under a leaf sign and see which patch does better.
Kaia thought she’d try out the chair to see how well it works to calm you down.
The most awesome home baked bread EVER!
I love home made bread; The aroma that fills the house, that first bite that permeates the senses, the crisp crust and soft, warm interior! Mmmmmm! I use to think that I couldn’t bake bread well, so I bought a bread maker in hopes that I would have more home baked bread. The results were mediocre and I stopped using it. Then I found a recipe for home baked bread that seemed pretty easy and realized that kneading the bread wasn’t really that bad. I made that recipe for a few months, but with the time it took to mix it, rise, knead, rise, bake…. I had to be home for most of the day to tend the bread. So, that recipe fell by the wayside. That’s why I was so excited to hear about this book. I can’t remember where I first learned about “Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day” but I was really excited when it finally arrived in the mail the other day. Their website had a number of contests to win a free book, but I couldn’t leave it to chance and bought one instead 🙂 Today I tried my hand at their master recipe and was Very Happy with the results! At 2 pm, I mixed together the flour, yeast, water, and salt, and let it sit on the counter. Then I planted some onions and picked up Kaia from school. When I got home, the mix had risen over twice it’s size and pushed the top off the container it was in. I cut off about a pound of dough from the mix, shaped it and let it rest while I feed Leif. (The rest of the mix, enough for 3 more loaves, went in the fridge where it can stay for for days, until I’m ready to cut off another hunk of it to cook up!) Then I plopped the dough in the oven and went out to plant the leeks. When I got back inside, the house smelled fantastic and there was a perfect loaf of bread ready for the tasting. I let it cool a little while and heated up the soup and greens for dinner. Here’s what the bread looked like just out of the oven
.
Thirty minutes later, there was still some soup and greens on the stove, but…
… the bread had disappeared! Kaia even ate her salad without a complaint because she knew she could have more bread once the salad was gone! She said “Mommy, this is just like store bought bread, and that’s a good thing!!” Ohhhh, it was so good! It had a great crispy crust and was soft and fluffy on the inside! The taste was almost sourdoughy!! I’m a little worried that I’m going to have to put limits on the amount of bread we eat in the house, ’cause at this rate, we could have a couple loaves of bread a day!! MMmmmmm
After the master recipe, the book give you lots more recipes that work off the main one… sweet breads, peasant loaves, flat breads, etc…
Now I have to decide which of the tons of recipes in the book I’m going to try next!!