These Two Hands

The perennials in the orchard promise a good harvest this year (if the deer don’t get there first!)

The gala apple tree was the only one of the apples that flowered this year. I don’t know if the other two varieties are younger, or just in poorer soil.

Millions of peaches! A groundhog (I think) already stripped all the lower branches of fruit and leaves, but there are plenty left on the upper branches. We are so excited!

The blackberry vines are beastly, but absolutely covered in flowers. I’ve decided their thorns are just too nasty though – after they’re done fruiting I’m going to rip them out and replace them with a thornless variety.

Here’s to fresh fruit! And sorbet! And jam! And juice!

Certain parts of the garden are starting to mature and become more like what I had in mind for them.

For instance, remember what the pool bed used to look like?

I ripped out the ivy only to find that the beds had been filled with rock. I opted to layer good soil on top and make this an herb garden, because mediterranean herbs are hardy plants that don’t mind poor conditions. Two years later it’s starting to look better and better.

I’ve still got a four-pack each of basil, garlic chives, marigolds, sage and dill to incorporate. I can’t wait to see what it looks like next year.

Chipmunk laid an “oops” the other day!

It may have been tiny, but it was still tasty.

While tile demolition is half over, no remodel is complete without its own set of problems. Nothing ever goes by the book – at least for me!

I ran into our first problem during the very first step, removing the toilet. The bolts had rusted so badly that I had to bust the toilet bottom to get it off – I was disappointed that we wouldn’t get to recycle it at the second-hand facility. (I could have packed both kids back into the car and gone to the hardware store to buy bolt cutters, I suppose… but perhaps I’m not as dedicated to recycling as I should be.)

And a couple problems (bad underlayment and weak plaster walls) later, I prepared to remove the vanity and ran into this:

What is that!?!

For some reason the pipes on the wall had been discontinued and cut off in the basement but never removed. New pipes were drilled up directly from the basement into the vanity and then built out inside the cabinet.

This picture is after I managed to knock the back off the cabinet to disconnect it from the wall pipes. Can you see how it would be impossible to move the vanity with these pipes in place? I had really wanted to recycle this whole vanity, but I had to knock off the back and cut out the bottom as well. So unfortunately it’s landfill fodder.

We had our hearts set on a new pedestal sink, but because of the floor location of these pipes we may not be able to get one. We are having a plumber come give us an estimate on rerouting the pipes back into the wall… but that doesn’t exactly jive with our “do this as cheaply as possible” goal. Sigh.

Cross your fingers that this will be the last problem we have!

Nothing says May like the first strawberry harvest.

Sofía loves to help me pick them. She actually ate very few, and we got close to three pounds today! She wants to make jam with them tomorrow.

I didn’t even amend the strawberry beds at all last year – I’ve just been using them as groundcover in the orchard. These are just a bonus!

We are blessed to have two full and one half bathrooms in this house; none of them up to date but all in good working order. Anyone else would probably be fine with them… but the designer in me is just itching to bring them up to their full, gorgeous potential.

The main hallway bathroom, with its turquoise tub, is the most in need of updating; but that is going to be a BIG project, hopefully involving a skylight and steam shower. So I had the (bright?) idea to remodel our half-bath first instead.

My goal in tearing apart a tiny bathroom by myself is to acquire as much DIY experience as possible while not spending a whole lot of money. With that experience under my belt I can decide how much of the BIG remodel to do myself, and what to contract out. I figured the small bathroom would be easy and quick… at least compared to the much bigger hallway bathroom. And I wouldn’t have to worry about plumbing too much like with replacing a tub.

Sorry about the wonky photo; I couldn’t get a good full photo in such a tiny space.

Everything’s gotta go – from the oversized over-the-toilet cabinet to the blue floor tile and matching toilet and vanity.

And sweet Sofía, who loves watching “Mommy TV” (home and garden remodeling shows) with me, is sooooo excited to “smash and crash that old tiles and squeeze in the new bathroom!”

Though when she started hammering and found out that it was loud, she started to cry and then went to take a long nap. Ah, well. She wants to try again tomorrow. It’s so fun when she gets excited about stuff!

I’ve never been a mix-buyer. Cake mixes, bread mixes, pancake mixes… they can save you a few minutes in the kitchen, sure, but man do they charge you a premium – and for inferior, stale ingredients too.

Still, some days those extra few minutes can be a lifesaver. Like this past weekend, when Sofía got food poisoning. It was way-too-early-am and I knew she was going to need easy-to-digest foods for the rest of the day. I started some chicken stock simmering in the slow cooker and threw a whole wheat bread mix into the bread machine.

Yes, I used a bread mix… but one I made myself. If you knew how easy mixes are to make, you’d make them yourself, too!

The last time I’d made bread, I had lined up a few quart-size freezer bags on the counter next to the machine bucket. I filled them all, assembly-line-style, as I filled the bread machine bucket: mixed flours, yeast, salt, sugar, gluten, bran. (Did you know that’s all that goes into bread? You don’t even actually need the gluten or bran. If you buy mixes, you’re mostly paying for flour!)

Then I labeled the bags – “Whole wheat bread. Add 1 1/8 c water and 2 tbsp oil.” And popped them in the freezer to keep the flour fresh, since I don’t use preservatives & chemicals like those big companies do.

Voila, ready-made bags of a basic whole wheat bread mix that I can fancify to my heart’s desire by adding extras (herbs, nuts) later on. I think it took maybe an extra 5 minutes? And boy was it convenient to just throw a bag of premeasured stuff in the bread machine and go! But the best part was knowing that it was easy and wholesome.

Eggs hollandaise. Just-grilled English muffins (recipe here) topped with home-smoked bacon, perfectly poached homegrown eggs, and fresh, lemony hollandaise (recipe here).

I love weekends.

I manned up and went out and inspected Darjeeling much more closely today – even though all I wanted to do was nap! But I’m really glad I did because the results made me very happy.

I had been worried because I saw all these ejected dead nearly adult-bees on the ground in front of the box – not Lady Grey, just Darjeeling. I wondered if the colony had contracted chalk brood or something.

But there was no sign of disease and in fact the population is booming! The frames look great, both the bottom and top boxes. No need to switch them around, growth looks even.

We’ve got a hard working queen here!

Not so great was that they’ve been building brood between the boxes, so opening them was like the slaughter of the innocents. Poor bees. They swarmed over the exposed larvae just like nursemaids freaking out about their dying babes. I felt pretty terrible.

I probably should have scraped that mess off between the boxes, but they’ll just rebuild it anyway. So I left it.

They haven’t touched the honey super I put on, even though it’s full of crazy comb and just waiting for honey. In fact there weren’t many stores of honey throughout the hive itself either. This is bad, bad news because the biggest part of the nectar flow is happening right now. If I understand right, the hives should be bursting at the seams with honey. Siiiigh. We’ll just have to wait and see what a May or June inspection reveals.

And the important thing is that they’re thriving, right?

Lady Grey looked pretty anemic by comparison. I did see a bunch of eggs in her so there is a laying queen, but she’s not producing anywhere near the population that Darjeeling’s queen is. There were no supercedure queen cells that I saw, so the colony must be happy with her; I wonder what’s the matter. She could have swarmed without my noticing; though she didn’t look all that populous 3 weeks ago either. Her honey supers were completely vacant, with no new comb drawn.

Maybe I’m just destined never to get any honey. Sob.

It’s hard to write while you’re holding an infant who screams at you with the rage of a thousand suns, but they say a picture is worth a thousand words anyway.

Today was our MOMs Club Easter Party, and I made carrot cupcakes with maple cream-cheese frosting. I loooove carrot cake.

The toppers are made of royal icing (1.5 tbsp meringue powder, pinch salt, 1 cup powdered sugar, 1/4 cup water, more powdered sugar to desired firmness), piped with two different tips, and let dry overnight. I think the cuteness of tiny sugar vegetables can never be underestimated.

The kids were only allowed 11 eggs each, so I helped her with her “creative” counting. She’s been talking about easter egg hunts since before Christmas, and was so excited. I’m glad we’re going to have another hunt of our own on the actual Easter Sunday.

Sofía and Alea wore the matching Easter dresses I made them. (Love those frilly sleeves!) I’m slowly getting over my fear of working with knit fabrics.

I tried to get a picture of them together, but I was too nervous to back up out of arms’ reach. This is what I got:

Even better.