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Weekly photo challenge: culture
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Wood Rabbit Journey I grew up in the southern United States; food is a tremendous part of my culture. Thanks to family, friends and spending years with a second family (my “North Carolina Grandma“, a.k.a. my babysitter) after school I am too familiar with some pretty tasty foods: macaroni and cheese, fried okra, ham biscuits, green beans and collard greens (or any vegetable) cooked for hours with some sort of ham, fried chicken, potato salad, sweet iced tea, butter on everything, dessert after every dinner. I would watch my friends snack on a livermush sandwich or crunch on a handful of fried pork rinds (two things I just could not bring myself to eat). Most likely, I am still alive because I stopped eating those lovely foods on a regular basis before I turned ten years old. My family tried to eat healthier and I still attempt to do the same. Food is still a big part of my life. I try to disconnect it from love and care and to see it solely as nutrition for my body but I don’t think I wi

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There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.
Post Departum Depression

One of the coolest parts of teaching fifth grade is helping young kids to recognize metaphors.  Kids tend to be pretty literal, and they usually come into the grade level with a fairly concrete way of understanding literature and life in general. Its part of my job to help them understand that sometimes a storm is a metaphor for a really bad mood, or that a sunny kitchen is a metaphor for a happy family life. I love teaching this stuff!  Our poetry unit is one of my favorite parts of the year! All that symbolism.  All those fabulous metaphors. So you would think that I would recognize a real life metaphor when it slaps me in the face (literally). But I missed this one until it rose right up and stared me in the eye. You see, I am a “wannabe” gardener.  I read gardening blogs. I subscribe to “Organic Gardener” Magazine.  Every spring, I visualize a glorious riot of colorful blossoms, a neat row of delicious vegetables, a panoply of growth and life.  And every Jun

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Road Trip
Di's Daily Doings

Last weekend my husband and I went on a road trip to visit our daughter in Illinois. We got on the road around 8:00 a.m., not early enough for me, but my hubby doesn’t like waking really early on his weekend off. So… we took care of the animals and packed up the car. My hubby asked “is all of this stuff going?” and I said, “well DAH, what do you think? ” He proceeded to explain to me we were only going for the weekend, two days, not an entire week. I had to explain that some of the stuff were items my daughter had asked for us to bring from her room. And being a parent, it is my obligation to make a care package of homemade jams, jellies, salsa and some kettle corn popcorn from Trax Farms. Not only did I have my duffel bag with clothes for the weekend but I also had my camera, my laptop, my bag with reading material and a bag with my knitting. I need to stay occupied during the eight-hour drive. As we were getting into the truck to leave, I noticed m

Help feed bees by planting SUNFLOWERS #beeherenow
Valentine Bonnaire

The decline in the bee population is enough to make me sick. Feed the bees! This is easier than you think it is.  One really good pollinator will be sunflowers.  The the bees can make pollen and honey and you will have beautiful flowers to look at. Once you start to realize that the bees have carried toxic pollen back to the hives?   Ask yourself what happened with all the dead bees? What about all the honey? This is a problem for the ENTIRE FOOD CHAIN! What can you do? Get some good seeds for sunflowers like these:                           You just need sun and water.  If you had a large enough container you could grow a sunflower in that! Feed the bees! Last blog post I showed you the cornflowers, today — sunflowers.  We can restore the bee population with NATURAL flowers, and natural pollen.  

Filling the yard with flowers 2013
Emodel your home

Grandma was in town this week and one of her missions was to fill the yard with flowers and help me plant all my annuals. As you can tell we still need to mulch, but I refuse to do this until all of the helicopters have fallen from the maple trees!  This was a lesson I learned my first year.  I was so egar to put the mulch down and have the yard looking fabulous, that I didn’t realize the maple trees and their helicopters didn’t stop until early June!  UGH, it looked like my nice black mulch had a random mixture of light brown mixed into it! We shopped at Home Depot, Walmart, and a local garden center to find the best plants and deals.  Walmart and Home Depot had some really good deals, some as low as .88 and .99 cents!  I purchased the ground at HOBO early in April during one of their sales.  As you can see Grandma…wine glass full, equals plant containers getting emptied Grandma did 99% of the planting while the little one and I made sure her wine glass was full and

Nurture Yourself – Clarity in Nature
Inside the Mind of Isadora
Pretty in Pink
My Photography Journey
Oh Beautiful Promise Gardens, A Sneak Peek
Promise Gardens
Garden update
Captain Erratic
Garden update
Los Rodriguez Life
Haskapberries or honey berries
Greencottagegallery's Blog
Strawberry Tortellini Salad
gettin' fresh!

I’ve been crazy busy this spring, what with buying a new house and getting married! But not so busy that I haven’t been able to pick fresh strawberries almost every day. Our ever-bearing variety, Cavendish, started bearing May 12 and has been going strong ever since. Homegrown strawberries are so delicious that you don’t really have to do anything to dress them up. My favorite way to eat them is straight from the garden, while they’re still warm from the sun. But I also love them on salads. They’re great sliced over a bed of fresh leaf lettuce with some honey mustard dressing. (Mix Dijon mustard with honey and add just a little olive oil to thin it out and make it not too sweet.) I particularly enjoyed the rendition pictured here, with cheese tortellini.

What to Plant in May
Simply Stated Blogs

The extended weekend presents the perfect opportunity to spend time outside giving your garden a little TLC. Take advantage of warmer temperatures, long days, and moist soil to do the bulk of your summer plantings. Start with early-season crops like radishes, spinach, onions, leeks, lettuce, cabbage, beets, peas, Brussels sprouts, and carrots. If the soil temperature is consistently above 70ºF, you can also begin to plant heat-loving plants, like tomatoes, squash, melons, eggplant, peppers, sweet corn, cucumbers, potatoes, and herbs. See more gardening tips.

Weekly Wendell Berry #4
hutchhomestead

our garden in progress. “One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener’s own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race.” -Wendell Berry

Birdbrain
Hen island

Is it me or doesn’t this spud look like a bird? Hard to get any work done around the house with the cute little chickens but I planted potatoes and started on a temporary henhouse. I’m usually very optimistic with my projects but trying to build a proper, big, insulated henhouse while tackling the barn and planning workshops and a wedding… no I will try to be nice to myself and limit the stress.

Gardening
Charming Prints Quilting

So I decided this year to get back to my garden. It needed some work – the side boards had sort of caved under the pressure and weight of the soil (not dirt, it’s soil), and bowed out. It was also a bit difficult to reach the back of the bed, because of it’s depth and the backside is close to the brick wall. I began the overhaul earlier this spring, deciding to break the one long box up into smaller boxes. If and when I need, I can add additional boxes in front of these, as I do not plan to fill in the spaces between the boxes with grass. I’d rather put mulch or stones in there, and eventually end up with a backyard oasis rather than a grass field that we don’t use. Not sure what I would use for the box edging, I went to Lowe’s to look at my options. I decided that moment on some inexpensive decorative cement blocks. So I bought a bunch and hauled them to the backyard. I basically lined the beds just outside the boards with the blocks, and knocked of

Lilacs.
Simple. Food.

Dead lilacs? Really? I’ve got a great new neighbour here at the Red Brick Church. He allows me to come and cut lilacs for my bedroom. There is NOTHING as wonderful as a bedroom just bursting with  the aroma of a lilac. (even the kids agree! Last week we drove by some particularly large bushes and the kids made me stop to “sniff” them with our windows open. Apparently, lilacs are the most “delicious” thing they’ve ever smelled. Good thing! That’s why a room full is  perfect…cause my morning breath certainly is not!) Trouble with lilacs though, is that they die rather quickly once they’ve been cut… I’m illustrating for those of you who don’t know, with a photo I found online. Of course, the above dead lilacs don’t have the nasty green algae that mine seem to develop overnight. And the rotten stench. And I do mean rotten! Alex pointed it out to me. He walked in to the room and yelled “MOM! These lilacs STI

Garden Update…Pumpkins & Strawberries
Sproutside at the Flint Children's Museum

The pumpkins were planted in the garden today! They are just baby plants right now, with the seed coats still on the leaves. Stop by throughout the summer to watch them grow!   The strawberry plants we showed you last week are really growing, too. Look at the little berry that is already growing. All of these strawberries sure will be tasty! Send us your yummy strawberry recipes to us so we know what to do with our harvest

Working the Soil
Pentacles and Pastries

In addition to adding compost and other amendments, a gardener needs to fluff up and aerate the soil to make it more porous for water and air. The conventional way to do this is to till the top few layers of soil, but this practice actually strips the rich topsoil and damages microbial populations. Instead, double digging or simple aeration of the soil by poking it with a pitchfork maintains the soil’s fertility. Adding mulch on top of the carefully worked soil helps keep moisture in and extreme heat away from plants’ roots. The first year I begin a plot, I usually choose to double-dig the soil if it has been packed down and ignored for years. This method retains natural, living soil levels while aerating and loosening soil much deeper than conventional tilling. It also raises the soil level, giving you a raised bed with greater surface area than a flat plot. Raised beds help keep the soil warm –useful in areas prone to mold. They also improve drainage and soil consistency. You end up

Rediscovering blogging
Car-free, meat-free runner

Today is May 24 and I haven’t written a blog in a few weeks. I don’t think I have writers’ block. I think it’s more a case of writers’ laziness. I’ve been lazy in my writing this month. Throughout April’s 30 Days of Biking Challenge, I blogged regularly. Since the calendar turned over to May, for whatever reason I haven’t been blogging regularly. I’m afraid my faithful readers have forgotten all about me, so I might have to go about winning over new readers. Earlier in the week, I put in five tomato plants. We got the plants a week ago at the Historic Main Street Market, which runs every Friday evening May through October. We have tomatoes and carrots growing together. In another part of garden, we have red cabbage and broccoli. I have a Thai pepper plant that still needs to go into some dirt. We’ve restarted our compost pile. I need to be an attentive gardener and keep the pile turned over so that we get some good compost. I