100 foot dinner

I was so excited after harvesting the garden today that I had to rush right to my blog and share! Ladies and gentlemen, I grew my first SWEET POTATO!!!  That's right!  Who says plants from Wal-Mart are subpar? The folks at White Oak Garden center are getting a little snobby...We sprouted one full sized beauty and due to the lack of watering towards the end of summer a bunch of tiny siblings.  All will be eaten with glee.

On to the topic at hand: 100 mile dining.  The hip theory with all the foodies right now is that you should eat local foods that took less than 100 miles to get to your house.  Well I took that to heart with tonight's dinner.  The meat came from my new CSA and all the veggies were less than 100 feet from my house as I grew them in the backyard. 

Starting at 9 o'clock and moving clockwise we have basil, zucchini, veggie stock from the previous blanching blog entry, tomatoes, carrots and green beans.  At 6 o'clock we have a pound of local lean beef.  After the picture was taken I found the last of our backyard potatoes and threw them in as well.  It was four very small red skinned guys.  I diced everything and threw it in the pot after browning the meat.  It came out looking something like this:

As usual I have no idea the name of the soup as it came from the Lebanese neighbor of my friend Lisa who moved to Port Clinton two years ago.  So we call it Lisa's Lebanese soup.  Trust me friends, it is phenomenal and you should try it some time.  Happy Tuesday!

Welcome Fall!

Well, sort of...I'm not completely convinced that this fall weather is here to stay.  However, I welcome you with open arms since it marks the beginning of crafting season for me.  When it gets cold I love to cook, bake, sew and crochet!  I tried to ease into the season with a little project for my nephew of a felt play pizza.  Take a small pizza box with no grease stains on it:

 Then cut out felt toppings and add to top of box:

 

 And you are ready to make pizza!!

We've also been busy picking an assortment of winter squash out of the garden including a delicata, a spaghetti squash and several butternuts!!  Aren't they just beautiful??

Happy Crafting!

Before and After!

Here is a little trip down memory lane to remember what a difference two months and a lot of sunshine can make...

Peas and carrots in April.

Peas, carrots and a few beets up front in June.

 Swiss chard and spinach in April.

Spinach is gone so the swiss chard is with peppers in June.

The onions from sets in April.

Extreme close up of the onions in June!!

We started some onions from seed straight outdoors to see what they would do back in April in the front of the carrot bed.  Here is how much they have grown by June in comparison to the sets that we planted.  Now we know...

Preserving Party!!

When you have wonderful friends you can ask them to come over on a Saturday afternoon/evening and get them to do manual labor with you.  For the promise of dinner mine helped me blanch, shock and freeze all the green beans, broccoli and swiss chard that we currently had in the fridge.  It went a little something like this:

Harvest and wash veggies...

Cut veggies into bite size pieces...

Blanch for a few minutes in a pot of boiling hot water.  Then immediately shock veggies by putting them into a bowl of cold water and ice cubes to stop the cooking and preserve crispness.

Veggies will be much brighter in color!

We portioned ours in regular sandwich bags and then placed them all in a freezer bag so that they wouldn't freeze in one gigantic clump.

Lastly, Max couldn't take all that garden excitement and decided to harvest all the potatoes.  The baby russets were volunteer experiments from last year where we simply cut up a few old potatoes and threw them in the ground.  The red skinned potatoes were grown from starters we bought at the store.  That's 20lbs of potatoes you are looking at and we didn't even use the entire bag we bought for only $5!  Yum.

Weekend in pictures

Yellow, purple and green bean, banana pepper, jalapeno pepper and green bell pepper harvest!

Only doors and some trim left then it will be a masterpiece!!!

My first winter squash growing big!!  I think it's going to be a butternut...I'll have to consult the package to see what was in that mixture when I can find it...

June Updates!

A quick update on the shed progress.  We are now sporting siding, roof trusses plus a ridge board:

 We've been harvesting peas, snow peas, broccoli and swiss chard from the garden:

Then for my birthday we turned the backyard into a hippie commune and camped out:

Hope you are all having a wonderful summer too!

Shed Project

It seems that lately all my time has been eaten up by this gigantic project we only work on during the weekends.  We have decided to build a shed from scratch.  We heard horror stories about the kits that you can buy and how the wood is so awful and warped.  We wanted our own design, our own dimensions and definitely wood that we could hand pick out.  I'd say we have a couple of weekends left and then we can stop storing all our gardening supplies in the garage in the front of the house!!  Yay!  Here are the pictures of our progress so far:

I've missed the sun

I think it has only been raining for two months in Cincy but it feels like it has been raining for 2 years without stop.  I know that I could never live in London or Seattle if it rains this much.  I, the woman who is not physically able to tan, miss the sun.  In celebration of the small amount of sun that we have managed to soak up I've snapped a few photos of what I've been up to lately.

 It actually got warm enough to make our spinach bolt and force us to harvest it all in one final swoop.  It was rinsed, blanched and split into freezer bags to await future use.  If you can see in the upper left hand corner we also had a harvest of sugar snap peas which was about two palm fulls.  Super crunchy and very yummy.

 For the first time in my entire life, and not for lack of trying mind you, I was able to get a fairy rose to bloom after the initial blooms that were on it in the store had gone.  This little beauty has been only foliage since this past Valentine's day when I picked her up to come home with me.  I am extremely proud.  Flowers and indoor plants are not really my specialty.  Looks like my luck may be changing. 

Lastly, a little update on the paper mulch garden project for all you inquiring minds.  We had a ton of mail.  It filled four office paper boxes (the nice ones with the lid that holds 10 reams) and when shredded each box filled about a 22 gallon trashcan once I crushed as much air out of it as I could.  I am on my last box of paper because the "mulch" really breaks down fast when it rains and then the weeds start poking through.  It was a fantastic way for us to use the mail that Max was so diligently not throwing away for the past 6 years or so...however, I don't recommend this for someone looking for a cheap mulch for permanent beds.  It will severely disappoint.  It looks fantastic until the first rain storm and covers a large amount of space but that's about where the goodness ends.  Happy Gardening everyone and I hope you have more sun than we do.

A Few Pix

Brook's Good Side

The Beginning of the Stockpile

First Ever Rhubarb Harvest!!

Savings are addictive

I'm sure you've probably all at least heard of TLC's show Extreme Couponers by now.  It is all the rage and we had to check it out by sheer curiosity.  At first I couldn't really get into the concept...we are watching people shop?  I do miss the days of Supermarket Sweep!  Watching contestants race down the aisles to grab as many frozen turkeys (I think there was a 7 turkey limit) and vitamins as they could, grab the secret item of the day and rush to check out.  What a great show!!  Then we watched an episode and instantly...we were hooked.  These people are insane with stockpiles of cereal and pasta taking over their kids bedrooms with toilet paper stashes.  What madness!?  Then Max gets the bright idea...we could totally do this.  I quickly squashed his dreams of rolling down the aisles with four shopping carts and taking 2 hours to check out.  I won't do it.  However, if we started small we could make a reasonable stockpile and see if it's worth repeating.  Oops.  Shouldn't have started this one...

We did start small but Max's dreams quickly took over and my 10 item dry run turned into a 40 item anxiety attack.  If your numbers are off (mine were), if you don't pay CLOSE attention to the item description and don't make your cashier nervous by hawkishly glaring at her every move then a mistake will be made and you'll actually end up spending money.  The upside is that we both have jobs and do not have 7 children like some of the people on the show so I can afford mistakes and we learned a lot for next time.

Here is the good part!  It actually worked.  We bought three papers, started following the blog of Savings Lifestyle and even traded a few coupons with friends.  We set our sights on Kroger's Mega event, compared, counted, created email addresses to sign up for crap and BAZINGA...SAVINGS!!!  Granted, we only bought items we currently use and a few items that weren't part of the mega event but our total was $117 which we brought down to $41.  Yup, that's a 60% savings on our bill.  Just by doing about 3 hours worth of homework.  Now that I know what I'm doing it won't take so long but man did that feel good.  We are crazy about coupons.  I have always loved coupons.  It used to be my job when I was little to cut out the coupons from the paper for Mom and I still enjoy doing it to this day.  Of course now it reminds me of Mom which is pleasing too.

Now we have a mini stockpile that doesn't fit in my tiny cabinets which forced us to move the stash to the basement.  It is nestled in the new organizing system of metro racks that we started using a couple of months ago for camping and gardening equipment.  It's kind of exhilarating to know that I don't have to buy pasta for the rest of the year.  I find that I'm really looking forward to Sunday when I get to find out the next deal.  I"m telling you savings are addictive!!

Goodness and Yum!

The mushroom box is really a lot more fun than I thought it would be.  All I have to do is mist the surface with water and it produces food in my basement!  There is a lot of satisfaction in that.  The box is still happily producing yummy mushrooms every couple of days we get a handful.  According to the instructions they start out as little white button mushrooms that I featured in my previous post.  However, if you let them grow a couple more days the tops flatten out, they form gills, they are more nutritious and they become baby portabello's! 

Which we promptly turned into omelet's for breakfast with our homegrown spinach!!  I can't wait for the onions and peppers to grow so that we can have completely homegrown breakfasts.  Until then, we wait...

Most posts that you read about home gardening always advise to grow things that you already eat and then you will just not need to buy them.  Our garden approach is a little bit backwards.  We tend to plant and explore things that we don't usually buy at the store, have never bought or only buy once in a blue moon.  Ironically, if we grow them ourselves and put the time in to nurture the plants then we end up eating more of that vegetable regardless of whether or not we favored it before.  The garden makes us expand our horizons and it is an exciting journey.  Almost all of the beds have some life in them now and as it gets warmer we will add more and more seeds to the existing groups.  I love this time of year!!  Now if only this torrential April rain would go away before it drowns my May flowers!  

Week at a Glance

I have been up to a few bouts of creativity this week.  Tuesday brought a fabulous mission of making a cape for a sisterwife who had been tasked with bringing it to a bachelor party.  Not only was it an awesome cape of goodness and fun but it was also supposed to be as embarrassing as possible. This was achieved with pink satin, purple disco sparkles, lots of gems and one iron-on patch of a unicorn.  It took us two nights to muscle through all that fabulousness and in the end I am left with wanting to make a cape of my own.  I even asked if it was possible that the cape would not be left in NC but brought back for future use by us...verdict is still out on that one.  However, I am willing to bet that it will immediately be adored by the intended recipient and will not grace OH with it's presence again.  Have I kept you in suspense for a picture long enough??  Here it is:

 Unmatched creativity my friends.  That is all I have to say.



Wednesday brought me a lot of sunshine so that I kept being drawn to the backyard for small tasks like weeding and prepping our beds for planting the second round of garden goodness.  However, I am an avid recycler (which is part of what makes me a minihoarder) and have a hard time throwing away anything that might have another use/second life.  This week I decided it was time to make use of all that mail that Max was ignoring and I have been diligently shredding.  I could have taken it to the curb and sent it on it's merry way with the other recyclables and I could have used it to start a fire in the backyard pit.  These uses are far too ordinary and mundane for my tastes this week.  I decided to go the path less traveled and use my large collection of paper shreds as mulch for my perma garden bed.  Out of the 13 there is one bed that is home to my  3 year old oregano and thyme plants so it never gets tilled or mulched like the others.  It is now the proud bearer of my mulch experiment:

I think it looks pretty neat.  It had to be watered down to keep it from flying all over the yard but once it was soggy it stuck perfectly well and reflected lots of rays to help the plants along.  Also, it is currently doing it's mulchy duty of smothering out the weeds that had started to form in the bed.  I should have taken a before picture but I didn't think of that until now.  So there you have it.  We'll see how it progresses through the summer and if it really is worth all the trouble. 

Pretty Things

Just wanted to share a couple of the pretty things that were making me smile today:

Pea shoots stretching for the sun!!

 An amazing purple azalea that I picked up at my local nursery.