I was so excited to harvest my first honey this past weekend. Lady Grey had amassed an entire deep box of capped honey, and Darjeeling looked well on her way as well. The plan was to harvest Lady Grey now, then wait until after the buckwheat flowering to harvest Darjeeling. I just assumed that after […]
Sofía loves to help me bake in the kitchen. And she really loves it when we’re baking a cake – she knows she gets to lick the bowl when I’m all done. This time she was especially excited because she knew it was for her own birthday cake. And I guess she liked it. But […]
My little girl is three! We celebrated in style. Cupcakes, cake pops, and healthier snacks too. I love the gingham cupcake wrappers I found! Cucumber water is one of my favorite drinks, and so timely with the garden surplus. The punch is cranberry juice and ginger ale – a tip I got from a wedding […]
Sofía’s third birthday is coming right up, and we’ve been getting crafty. She wanted a “star” themed birthday party, which was just fine because then I could grab a bunch of Fourth of July decorations at 70% off! But for the life of me, we could not find a star-shaped piñata. Not in three different […]
Lately the pickling cucumbers have truly come into their own. I’m not sure how many I planted – more than 12, less than 20 – but I was desperate to make up for a dismal lack of cukes last year. (What the deer didn’t destroy, the cucumber beetles did). Guess I overcompensated, because we’re hauling […]
I mentioned last year that I was going to be tracking the garden’s harvests closely. We spend more on the garden than on any other one thing around the house except maybe the pool… it’s a constant black hole that sucks in seeds, fertilizer, manure, chicken feed, etc. So in an attempt to salvage my […]
Meet our latest project… I’m 11 weeks along. I’m due January 28th, which gives juuuuuuust enough time for me to visit family for Christmas. None of this seemed real at all until I saw that little baby wiggling around on that screen. When I was pregnant with Sofía we went in at only 6 weeks, […]
The garlic is in! This was just the first batch I pulled last week. I have yet to weigh any of it – it’s drying on the front porch. The heads look small, but respectable – not ideal, but a big step up from last year’s nonexistent harvest. Along with three tiny onions, pulled up […]
All that manure, man… I am definitely doing that again. Look what it’s got me! This is 4.5 pounds of Red Russian Kale, our third cut-and-come-again kale harvest of the season. I should have flipped one of the leaves upside down so you could see the beautiful purple stems along its back. We mostly use […]
Good news and bad news on the homesteading front: as I mentioned in the last post, the pullets have finally started to lay! They are healthy and happy, though their cropped beaks do seem to seriously hinder their foraging. They can’t peck well into the dirt. Thus they find less of their own food, eat […]