Tiller Day, FINALLY!!!

There it is, at long last, the tiller!  Mother Nature has been conspiring against me lately causing the postponement of tiller day until today.  Apparently there was some wedding going on that everyone else was interested in today, but not around here.  At our house today was Tiller Day!  As you can see I rented a good old fashioned front tine tiller.  That's the only kind this city girl knows how to use.  My mom goes on and on about how rear tines are so much better, but frankly, I'm not a fan.  I can't seem to find a way to get those rear tines to stay in one place and dig in, they just skitter across the soil.  With the front tine I can just lay back on the handles like a waterskier and force it to stay put.  The funny part of renting the tiller was everyone else's reaction to my renting it.  My husband asked me if I knew how to work a tiller...hellloooooo, this is not exactly my first dog and pony show.  I used to rent or borrow a tiller about twice a year before I moved here and started using raised beds instead.  Then the guy at the rental place asked if I wanted him to show me how the controls worked.  "Sure" I said, "it's been a while since a used a tiller."  He then proceeds to keep telling me to remind my husband to cut the gas on.  I laughed and said my husband was going to get it out of the car and then hand it over.  He wants no part of the tiller usage.  The man still insisted on reminding me of what to show my husband.  Whatever, Dude.  Just put the tiller in the minivan, jeez.

Then I waited for the kids to fall asleep.  You can see the monitor way in the background in the tiller photo.  Like I was really going to hear that thing over the tiller noise.  Fortunately they slept the whole time.  The whole process took about 45 minutes.  I have to say I'm pretty proud of it.  Now we just need a dog proof fence and we can get started planting.

Not bad for one day's work.  I have so many things that I want to do that I'm having trouble remembering what I swore to myself at the beginning of this...start small.  Baby steps.  I just want to get everything done today.  We've made a lot of progress though.  Now to get to planting.  In the meantime I've got a race to run.  Tomorrow I'm doing 10 miles in the local ultramarathon to raise money for our cancer center.  Hopefully I'll have the energy to think about tomato plants, etc, when I'm done!

Cupcakes, Tillers and Monkey Pants...oh my!

This afternoon I am hanging out in the living room floor with Bryan and Daisy, a cup of hot tea (flavored with my Aunt Brenda's yummy Passionfruit-Guava flavoring) in my hand, looking out the window every 3 seconds to see if Jessica has arrived with my CSA box.  We've made some interesting strides in our handmade endeavors this week.  First of all, Tiller Day has been rescheduled for Wednesday, April 27th.  This is, of course, weather permitting AND provided Bryan and the pager will let me get some sleep Tuesday night.  Bobby has made great strides knocking down the wall in the backyard.  As you can see from the pictures the kids and the dogs are quite enjoying their new, bigger yard.  They are also enjoying a new black lab friend from the yard behind us.  The squirrel population is NOT enjoying the partnership of these three dogs, however.  We've already found 2 dead ones and pried another out of Daisy's mouth...YUCK!  

So my homemade cooking goal this week was to try to make things that I am used to buying.  First let's say that I did draw the line at mayonnaise (the bacterial growth issue freaks me out) and Easter egg dye.  I had beets to use for the pink dye but when it came to yellow I couldn't figure out what in the world I would do with the yellow onions after I had skinned enough of them to get 2 cups of skins.  And blue, well, why would I want to do anything with frozen blueberries besides eat them?  What I did discover is that homemade Caesar dressing is fabulous, even without a coddled (a.k.a. raw) egg and that homemade croutons are totally worth it.  Croutons = bread cut up into squares, sprinkled with olive oil and roasted in the toaster oven for 5 minutes...what could be easier?  So yummy on the lettuce from our garden.  We're also continuing to make bread instead of buy it.  I've always loved to make bread.  I love the way it looks when it is a giant ball of dough rising on top of the stove and I love the smell of it when it is baking.  The bread machine is less delightful, but certainly makes it easy.  Then, yesterday, Ruthie and I made cupcakes for her school.  I started to buy frosting and cake mix but one look at the ingredients made me stop and stick to my homemade goal.  Thanks to The Joy of Cooking, yellow cupcakes with buttercream frosting turned out quite yummy and really, weren't that much more work in the end. 

Sewing has been quite the challenge too.  The monkey pants are from a pattern for "Big Butt Baby Pants" at one of my favorite sewing blogs www.made-by-rae.com.  They turned out cute but there is a definite learning curve there.   Either that or I'm just not that sewing savvy.  First of all, I made a 6-12 month size but my nine month old son is definitely more of a 12-18 monther.  Then I had trouble matching parts up and the edges ended up all wonky.  Fortunately the hems hide a multitude of sins.  Then if you look right at the crotch, the front and back seams are off by about a mile.  I ended up tearing out a lot of seams and redoing them.  Then at one point my sewing machine decided it had had enough and just couldn't go on until I cleaned it.  It was a mess.  Monkey Pants 2, the sequel, is well underway, however, and going much better.  Stay tuned. 

Please ignore Ruthie's just-woke-up-from-nap-pull-up-clad butt in the above photo.  Focus on the cute cloth diaper clad butt just below it! 

Today has been focused on Ruthie's school party.  I had such a blast hiding eggs and sugaring all the kids up with cupcakes!  Our CSA box has finally arrived and we have been blessed with more strawberries.  I think I feel some freezer jam coming on!   I wonder if the hospital would object if I mixed that up in my call room tomorrow :)   Happy Holy Thursday, everybody!

It came! It came!

Our first CSA box arrived on Thursday and we have been cooking like crazy ever since.  For the uninitiated, CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture and is a wonderful idea for people who want homegrown food but can't grow everything they want in a garden and don't always have the time or the forethought to hit the farmer's market.  Our first box contained collards, curly kale, sweet potatoes, turnips, strawberries asparagus and cabbage.  Our dinner the first night consisted of cheese pie (it's really a white cheddar quiche but we call it cheese pie because that's what Angelina Ballerina eats) sauteed collards, and strawberries with whipped cream.  You can see Ruthie enjoyed hanging out in the box while she licked the whipped cream off the spatula. 

 The fun part has been trying to find ways to use new vegetables.  So far the kale has been featured in vegetarian lasagna and kale and Parmesan risotto.  The asparagus was roasted and topped with kalamata olive vinaigrette and the strawberries have just been eaten up, no chance to make jam or marmalade.  Today I'm trying to work with the rest of the veggies.  We're making crock pot barbecue using pork tenderloin and George's Barbecue Sauce and then we'll have cole slaw and carmelized turnips to go with it.  The other half of the cabbage is going to be used to make Borscht, along with some beats I found at the store.  If any of you haven't tried Borscht, you should.  It is easy as pie and delicious.  Beware, it does make your pee pink.  It is also one of the prettiest foods I've ever eaten.  Just a big bowl of dark pink yumminess.  I'll have to take a picture of it when I'm done.

Well, for some reason the creative juices just aren't flowing and I am starting to feel the pre-call stress of trying to make my house tidy and functional with an abundance of decent food for Bobby and the kids (and ME if I make it back here for any meals tomorrow.)  So I'll leave you with a link to an interesting discussion of CSAs and Farmer's Markets and other summer veggie options.  Happy Monday!

http://www.kitchenstewardship.com/2011/04/18/monday-mission-where-are-your-summer-veggies-coming-from/#more-10702

Book Links

I tend to quote books, quite frequently, actually.  So to avoid any copyright infringement, here are some links to the three I have quoted thus far!


http://www.amazon.com/Little-Amber-Stewart/dp/0192727354/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1302814865&sr=1-2

http://www.amazon.com/Groundhogs-Garden-Grew-Lynne-Cherry/dp/0439323711/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1302815022&sr=1-1

www.amazon.com/But-Not-Hippopotamus-Sandra-Boynton/dp/0671449044/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1302814978&sr=1-1

The Hog and the Frog Hurry Out for a Jog...

I won't say which of us is the hog and which is the frog but since Chubs is wearing green and I ate a big honkin' piece of red velvet cake two days ago I'll let you figure it out. 

Sadly, running is about the only productive thing I have done today.  I put in 4 miles pushing Chubs in the BOB which took at least one minute per mile longer than it would have without BOB and left me feeling pretty beat.  At least it was BOB 1 with only one child on board as opposed to BOB 2 which carries both of them and adds at least 3 minutes to each mile. 

Today is one of those days that has taken a very different course from what I was planning when I went to bed last night.  It was supposed to be "Tiller Day," the day I break ground on the our new, nicely marked off, 10X10 foot area of garden.  My husband, however, intervened with a very rational "is it really such a good idea to plant things right before we go on vacation."  Ummm, no...but that kind of rational thinking doesn't usually enter in to my whole shoot-first-as-questions-later approach.  So tiller day has been postponed until we get back and today became more of a Clean the Kitchen, Do Laundry, Get Ready to Be at Work for 24 Hours kind of day.

Yet somehow CKDLGRBW24H Day hasn't happened either.  Bryan's nap was cruelly interrupted by the fact that he spits up every time he poos and the lack of nap/prunes vomited out the nose has left him cranky.  He just wants to be held or nursed.  So we sit here the two of us, tummy to tummy.  He nurses and I drink my lukewarm beverage previously known as "hot tea."   We listen to the sonic booms from the fancy fighter jets practicing for this weekend's air show.  The laundry will still be there this evening.  It will probably still be there Saturday morning when I get home from work, interfering with my dreams of a productive weekend.  But in the grand scheme of things, who cares.  Right now I have this little moment with my baby boy and I'm going to enjoy it! 

Today is the Day to Start Small...

A blog.  I've been thinking about this for a long time.  When I'm at home I tend to have all these random thoughts and musings running through my head and I've noticed that I have a tendency to use Facebook to share them.  I keep thinking that maybe it would be nice to have somewhere else to record all these random musings and to be able to expand upon them a little bit.  I'm not much of a writer, that's my brother's area of expertise, but why not give it a whirl.  So today I am starting small.  My first blog post, and maybe a picture if I'm feeling particularly industrious.

Our family is "starting small" in other ways this year as well.  We're trying a bit of an experiment, a DIY experiment you might say.  Trying to see how many things we can truly do ourselves.  It's a bit of an expansion on a few of the things we already do:  gardening, cooking, cloth diapering, etc....  I guess a blog is a good place to chronicle our efforts.

The first and most important change is that our garden is growing.  We've marked off a space in the backyard for a much larger garden than we've ever had before.  We've also knocked down the wall in the backyard giving us more room and a place where we can finally have a compost heap.  We've subscribed to a CSA (community supported agriculture)  for anything we can't grow.  Hopefully we'll have more veggies than we know what to do with.  This will lead me to my next project:  CANNING!  Roo is my big garden helper and she loves it.  Her new favorite book is called "How Groundhog's Garden Grew" and it is the inspiration for the blog title.  Little Groundhog learns all about how to garden and cook and share the food with others.  Hopefully we will learn to be as productive as Little Groundhog. 

But today, as a character in another of Roo's books states, we are "starting small."  Homemade Ranch dressing, bread with dinner, washing diapers and maybe a few minutes to work on some monkey-print baby pants for Bryan, not a bad beginning.