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40 Ways to Find Solace in a Storm
“I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.” ― Oscar Wilde Call your dad Sip a hot cup of coffee Take 10 minutes to soak up some sun on a warm, sunny front porch Feet up & a good book Jump on your bike and take a ride Grab the music player, pop in the ear buds, play your favorite upbeat music and ask the vacuum to dance (Bonus you get some clean floors) Give a lingering hug with someone you love Look through old photos, create a collage of someone you love using Picasa or other photo editor…
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“Mondays in My Garden”: Four Easy Ways to Save Money when starting your Garden
There are a few blogs that I just love. Household 6 Diva is one of them. Ann Marie is a down to earth Army spouse recently relocated from Germany to Texas and there are so many times that I think, “Wow, would we be good friends if our lives had ever crossed.” She started a series called “Mondays in My Garden”. Be sure to read her inaugural post here: Welcome to “Mondays in My Garden” Ah… my garden. Just the thought of it has my heart smiling. Yesterday it was 72 degrees out in NE Ohio. The back door was open all day. The front door was filled with sunshine. Smiles, laughs, giggles…
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Starting Seeds in Milk Jugs
I’ve got the itch as anyone who follows my Gardening Pinterest Board very well knows. It’s the beginning of March and I want to be outside, in the dirt, enjoying the sunshine, hard work and noises and smells of Spring. But it isn’t that time in NE Ohio. Instead the forecast still includes snow, the temperatures are still in the 30s and getting the rototiller out is no where in site. Sigh… That is why I LOVE starting seeds this time of year. I get my hands dirty. I get to watch my plants start. I get to dream about what my garden will look like this year. A good…
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Attainable Goals and the Sky-Blue Hue of Celery
It started as a simple experiment. My four-year old neighbor was over and she had never done the ‘celery experiment’. Imagine that! So I dug in my produce drawer and pulled out two stalks. We put a piece in each cup and then added food dye to the water. Red and blue. We watched them through the day and we saw the change. We noticed how the celery was drinking the water as the celery turned from green to a shade of the color of its water. We talked about the importance of drinking and how, yes, even plants drink. Her eyes were widened at this thought. Then my mind started spinning…
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Disregarding Allergy: A Sweet Sensation
Allergies… disgusting.Disgruntling: scratchy throat, drainageDisparaging: headacheDisrespectful of our happiness!But my goodness seems everyone has an allergy of some type, and at some time.Our household has hay fever, pine pollen, and yucky moldy oak leaves. However, we LOVE being outside. So, will allergies stop us…. no way.So on this Earth Day… it is time to get out and check out the garden for tiny spinach leaves or pea plants that should be poking out.Time for Kleenex, hydration and hot drinks.My elixir is coffee. I know… not the best for hydration, but oh how it soothes and gives me a bit of zip.Dale cuddles his cup of tea. And today, for a…
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Tasty Tuesday Banana Pepper Gratin
Summer is so over… so very over. Temperature dipped to the twenties; leaves are brilliant red, orange with faded yellow edges; sunshine hours have slipped to dark morning and evenings. Autumn is here.. no doubt. The gleaner in me came out this weekend when I heard of the temperature forecast. Dale and I picked anything living out there that could be touched by a freeze. Whoa, I already have packed a peck of pickled peppers into the pressure cooker. My imagination has been running overtime as to how to use plant after plant that over produced this year. Yeah for that… but I can’t let them die on the plant.…
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Crazy Carrots
I have always loved art. I see beauty in some of the oddest of places. Don’t we all? However, there are times when the normal is the ‘piece de resistance’: garden carrots.Art… it appears wherever it can, whenever the whim arrives.I prefer the pencil straight carrots that my grandchildren draw. I have several of their colorful creations taped on my cabinets displayed as art in my kitchen. Now to the carrots themselves. We did all the right steps, fertilized in fall, rotor tilled prior to winter, staked the fence posts late winter, rotor tilled to get that soil up to fluffiness. I still don’t know the proper farmer’s terms for…
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Tasty Tuesday: Basil, Basil Everywhere!
Now that the rows of plants are up, thick and fighting for room, I am thinning them. Basil is such a hardy plant and will grow well neatly stretching next to branching plants left and right. But since I want to use some now, it is a good idea to pull some plants, use them and in the mean time credit my farmer’s sense with thinning the crops! (Born and bred right by the George Washington Bridge did not lead to gardening! But a Hoosier hubs taught me this love!)A large dehydrator has 5 shelves. One plant per shelf fills the dehydrator which takes 24 to 36 hours to dry…
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August First
It is August today. The first of the month!We are smack dab in the middle of summer. The heat attests to this, the air conditioner’s hum certainly reminds us of this fact. I am still harvesting lettuce, fragile herbs and broccoli. Plants that popped up early in spring. Can someone explain how this wafted down in front of me as I walked to the garden this morning?Beautiful shades… but I am not ready for this season! I think my favorite season is the one in which I am thoroughly immersed. I’m going for another swim. Leaves… cool it! Your colorful time will be here soon enough!byDeborahonSunday, August 01, 2010Email ThisBlogThis!Share…
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Peppers, Green, Banana, Hungarian Wax A’Plenty!
The garden just didn’t appear out there over night. And to my recollection, little gnomes haven’t been out there weeding, hoeing, rotor tilling, etc…. Especially the rotor tilling part… that machine is a monster that wants to go anywhere but where I feel is straight. (Yeah for Dale on this and so many parts of the pre-harvest work.) At the sound of our behemoth, those little gnomes would have jumped straight out of their gourds and be headed so far out of Michigan as to be fictional memories. So, maybe that’s the story!The beauty of a vegetable garden is that crops sweep in at their own pace and then demand…
