Change of Seasons

For some reason this fall has been kind of special among fall seasons for me, I've always been more of a spring person. Perhaps it's having such of a high energy child who wants and needs to be outside. Looking forward to going outside at least once a day in the blazing heat just isn't as fun. So we have been LOVING the cooler temperatures!

Thanks to Daniel we replanted our garden. I kinda skipped the summer posts about it because it was kind of a failure. We planted too late again and didn't mulch well. The weather was weird, but other people I know had far better gardens than us:( Oh well here's to the fall garden. We planted some plants from seed: "weird" greens- broccoli raab, lettuce (our only true successful endeavor), and carrots. Then we set out a few tomatoes and swiss chard from the nursery and half of them died after a weekend of rain from the tropical storm. I'll try to post pictures later. I'm trying to stay upbeat really so I won't go into the compost issues...

And it seems we are changing in other ways too around here: our baby is getting to be such of a little boy. Before he turned two he went through a phase of eating less and nursing more which was odd to me, but this book warned me it would happen. A few weeks and we are definitely past that phase. There were also signs that changes were happening, he has started independent play and you momma's with babies that have been entertained with staring with their own hands for hours might not see the significance of this. But my boy really hasn't been that into many of his toys which I carefully selected at all until a few months ago. We received a play table that is in our living room and it is a great place to put his hand-me-down train, legos, blocks, colors, etc. and keep the clutter on the floor to a minimum for me:)

He is less interested in the comforts that momma can provide and really craving more social interaction, he asked for his good friend all the time and wants her right beside him. He says her name and points beside him. It is so sweet. And if there is a group of kids he wants to go stand in the middle of them, his verbal skills aren't quite up to conversing and he mostly likes to observe. He is talking more and more, but only Daniel and I can understand him much of the time. It's kind of a sweet phase in my opinion:) He is more and more ok with going on a Daddy outing without as much concern of where Momma is. Interestingly enough he is more snuggly than ever, briefly but he is into hugging and kissing us. We love it! He's always been too busy to snuggle much.

Personally I have gone through a stressful patch of Daniel working a lot, trying really hard to do it all here and kinda burning out. When I was unable to sleep one night two thoughts came to me: "Acquire a peaceful spirit, and around you thousands will be saved." St. Seraphim of Sarov. I love this quote and when I reflected on my life I haven't done a good job of acquiring peace in my life. And in my former life of listening to many podcasts on Ancient faith radio I remembered a priest's wife saying that in a very busy and stressful time of her life a nun told her that if you are feeling overwhelmed with the load that has been given to you pray that your capacity to handle it will be granted to you. It was to me an answer to my prayers. So I have restarted two podcasts via ancient faith radio: one scripture readings prescribed for the day and the other one a saint or two of the day. They are short, but with a very busy two year old sometimes it takes a while to have 7 minutes where I can really listen ! I think this has greatly blessed my life. I still struggle with trying to balance everything but I'm trying to put first things first. I hope everyone else is enjoying the beginning of Fall.

Garden July 2010 Edition

So I'm going to try to make this brief. As I mentioned in previous posts the garden seems to be taking a turn for the worst again this year. The good news is it isn't a total failure, we have harvested a few things. But it has not been nearly as successful as I would have liked. My plants aren't producing much and what they have produced has been small. I need to check into having our soil tested. Instead of rolling straight into planting for the late summer or fall, we are going to pause to work on the dirt. My friend Hal recommended continuing to build up the dirt with compost. Daniel fixed the composter after I called the company and failed to get a replacement part. We did a little research and we need to add some more green material to balance out the food waste decomposition. Felder Rushing said that shredded newspapers are fine, so I need to bum some of those off of my parents. So we haven't given up hope yet! I did make a variation of a Julia Child's stew from the carrots and onions pictured here, it was yummy:)

Garden 2010: Try again

Look at my boy, trying to eat a leaf. That is kinda the story of our lives right now, Simeon learning about his world and me trying to keep him alive! We have had a difficult few weeks, the death of a dear friend, then Daniel and I had a terrible stomach bug, and Simeon had two more teeth come in. But we are very thankful for our blessings: the gorgeous weather, our healthy little boy, introducing Simeon to the joys of playing in a baby pool, and our families and friends. So we have been trying to make the most of our spare time and while the weather is nice we've been trying to get outside.


After our garden fail last year we've been working on some changes to our garden. A friend of ours got us this book about raised bed gardening Square Foot Gardening. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in a small backyard or in our case side yard garden. So the author has a specific dirt mixture he recommends, we tried to add to ours rather than discarding everything we had. Daniel marked the bed off into squares to help us plant without overcrowding.

We also purchased a tumble composter from Lowes and got rid of the nasty rotten "compost trash bucket" we had going. We haven't harvested any of our compost, but I'm looking forward to using it.

I started some carrot and lettuce seeds, and being I started them too late and too deep it's a miracle any of them came up. Then we bought tomato, peppers, onion, and an eggplant and set them out. Once again we have invested a good chunk of change in the garden and are really hoping to actually harvest some veggies this year.

Garden Lessons

So I haven't posted much in the last month about my garden or anything else. I feel like me and my garden have fallen victim to heat stroke! Daniel and I worked hard to set up the garden, start our seeds, and transplant them. But after that everything seemed to stall. We had such of a hot June and our yard seemed to suffer in the heat. As did I, just running an errand in 100 degree weather seemed to steal all my pregnant body's energy reserves. And I guess it's no fun to blog about failures anyway.

So the last few weeks have been a blessing, we have gotten rain and a drop in temperatures. Both of which I am so grateful for. Our yard has greened up and I have felt more energetic the past few weeks than I did in June and early July.

As for our garden I will comment on our successes and failures. It has been a hard year for gardeners, even experienced ones. My grandparents garden has not been nearly as successful as it has been in the past. June weather was not good for gardens. My grandparents had a great corn crop, but everything else was either a complete failure or the yield was far less than it has been in the past. They live out in the country and have too big of a garden to water in times of drought. My Granny and PopPop were disappointed, but told me to not give up because this year was bad. They're already getting their fall tomatoes going.

As for our garden I will list some lessons learned:
1. Get started early or on time, but not late. This was a big mistake for us this year because it got so hot so early.
2. Pick out appropriate plants for your area. The cool weather tomatoes and onion seeds I bought were not such of a bright choice.
3. Plant carefully for your space, the melons (that have produced one melon) are overrunning our side yard, as you see from the pictures.

I planted some garlic last fall and I was really excited when I dug it up a few weeks ago and it had plentifully multiplied. I'm planning on planting some more this fall. It was super easy and successful. I got our seeds from our health food coop because I am interested in growing heirloom variety plants. The seed company the coop carries is Seeds of Change. And I will say I have already ordered a catalog and plan on spending far more time selecting the varieties I plant next year. I don't consider our garden a total failure, as you can see from the pictures our garden is really very pretty, beautiful plants (even without much fruit). Daniel told me to do the research and I'd figure it out like I did with my whole grain bread, I had to bake a lot of bricks before I could bake a good loaf!

Dog Days of Summer

I am so very hot, of course it's no wonder I am 33 weeks pregnant! It's not even officially summer here, but it sure feels like it.

My pampered puppy is not enjoying the heat either. I walked him this morning without my dear husband, who is feeling a bit under the weather. And we had a late start, because I wanted to do a few little projects in the yard while it was cool (like a humid 78 is cool!). And shortly after we started he kept pulling and wanting to go back home. If I didn't know how much we both need exercise I would have given in. Don't worry about my furry friend, he has all day long to recover from our walk while everyone else is working:)

So Daniel says I have been nesting and it is true. I only have a little time left before Simeon is here! Yesterday my parents were so kind to give me a very nice chest of drawers to go in his room. The nursery is a little room so a big dresser was out. I have white furniture in there, which was also given to us. God has really blessed us with good friends and family! So today I changed out hardware, trickier than I thought it would be, cleaned the chest, and now I'm taking inventory of the clothes we have and washing.

As far as new food things, my garden is so slow and I'm so impatient. We have one green tomato, but lots of blooms. Our melon plants are thriving and have lots of blooms also. When they start producing I think we'll have many melons. Speaking of melons I may have to go to the farmers market and buy a watermelon. That sounds very cool.

A Gracious Plenty

A Gracious Plenty indeed. I have done a few cookbook reviews on my blog and I'm adding one more to my list.

The link above will take you to Amazon's website where the books is tragically no longer in print, but you can get it used. I would highly recommend buying this book, you need it.

It is a little ironic that I'm blogging about this cookbook now. It is a great resource for many different recipes, but especially great southern vegetable dishes. I have really enjoyed using it to cook simple and delicious okra, tomato, or almost any other southern vegetable. The irony is this year has been so tough for farmers, and my grandparents, the great source of our summer vegetables have had a horrible garden year. I always really appreciate what they send us, as a child I didn't know how blessed we were to receive "groceries" from Granny and PopPop. Now I absolutely cherish them and have tried to carry on the tradition by growing our own. And to think last year I canned tomatoes because we had such of a surplus!

This cookbook is great even if you must go to the farmers market to buy your own vegetables to cook. I cooked a great and super simple okra and sausage recipe that Daniel really liked. That is always the marker for whether a dish is successful or not. I will really eat almost anything, unfortunately I think most of my taste buds are dead. I can taste things, but I don't pick up on subtle notes of bitterness or the like. Plus texture weirdness doesn't bother me. Thankfully Daniel is not picky, but if he doesn't like something I probably won't fix it again. Most everything I have prepared from this cookbook has been a hit. The techniques are fairly simple, the ingredient lists short, and the recipes are fairly healthy. Yes sausage and bacon are used, but I'm not going to get in that debate now. I have several past posts on that subject.

I love that many of the recipes are probably similar to what my great grandparents cooked. One of my favorite PopPop lines is "if you'd come to Hebron 70 years ago talking about a canola (oil) people wouldn't know what you were talking about", this was during one of his favorite stories, rendering a pig. My grandparents grew up doing things very differently than we do now. And I'm certainly not saying all progress is bad, but these recipes are definitely worth preserving. If you can get your hands on one of these cookbooks please do and cherish it like I do!

Being producers not just consumers

So I'm really excited about me and Daniel's new project. I have blogged about in the past about how we're trying to live a frugal and healthy lifestyle (not frugal- eat value meals from McDonald's everyday!) One of the things we try to do is be producers rather than only consumers. We all know we live in a very consumeristic society. In my grandparents days they had their own cows, pigs, chickens, gardens, made their own soap, clothes... I'm interested in this, but not ready to forgo all modern conveniences. Using a clothes line part time has made me grateful for my washer and dryer. People had in rough, they really worked hard back in the day.

Anyway, my neighbor cut a tree down in the side yard beside our garage so we decided we had enough light for a little garden. My brother sent me a link to a site with detailed instructions for building a raised bed. My friends at the market who have very successful gardens swear by raised bed vegetable gardens for many reasons: good drainage, less insect problems, you can easily create a little area of great dirt among a clay yard (ours:), and there are probably other reasons too.

So Daniel got some wonderfully beautiful cedar boards for me; I love cedar- the smell, the knots, mmmm. You could use pine like my more frugal brother did, both will probably hold up well. But the wood needs to be untreated. So Daniel didn't exactly follow the lady's instructions, but he is very handy so we have a lovely bed. I can't exactly give you instructions, so follow the pioneer woman's. Me and Barley tried to help, but we were definitely the dumb labor:) After the bed was assembled we put some cardboard down to kill any weeds (or grass if you have a lawn, not a weed bed). We dumped some leaves in to facilitate drainage and compost down. Daniel then dumped out all the potting soil we had in unused pots, and it was a lot. We then disagreed about what to fill the rest of the bed up with. My farmer friend told me to put compost, we don't have much compost yet. So Daniel wanted to go get a truckload of cheap clay dirt, trying to be frugal. I on the other hand, know from my years of working at the yard and garden center that if you use crummy dirt, you will get crummy plants. So we were in a gridlock, not wanting to spend a fortune on good dirt but wanting to have good dirt for our seeds. I went to my friends at Callaway's Yard and Garden center where I worked for half of my life. We asked for broken bags and they cut us a good deal. Frugal tip: ask for broken bags at smaller yard and garden centers, they're messy but will save you some bucks.

So after our dirt dilemma was peacefully resolved we started some seeds. I bought some heirloom seeds from the health food coop, any seeds would do. I want to save my seeds from year to year (assuming I actually produce any fruit), and heirloom vegetables usually taste better and are more disease resistant. We used cardboard egg cartons, punched little holes in the bottom, used seed starter (special little bag of dirt), and kept moist. Our seeds have been going for about 3 weeks, other than the few honeydew melon sprouts Barley decided to snack on they are doing great. We are in the midst of a cold snap, 40˚ this morning! But hopefully we'll plant the seedlings soon. My farmer friend says as soon as they have their second set of leaves and it is warm enough. I stocked up on organic fertilizer and bug treatments from the coop, so we'll see how my organic garden is going to progress. Hopefully the future posts won't be as late coming as this one. I hope my garden produces well, I feel like I have much to learn!