The Best Place on Earth

100% Organic blueberries ripe for the pickin', a yoga studio with views of the blueberry fields, a massage and acupuncture... all in one place?! It kinda brings tears to my eyes.

All these blueberries for $25! The place is honor system based, so I don't know how many pounds of blueberries I got but I do know I had 14 cups of blueberries. I washed them all in a huge strainer. I tossed 5 cups into a freezer bag to be used for snacks for the tiny humans or 'ice cubes' in champagne or ice cream toppings or a smoothie add-in.

But the bulk of the berries went to Jam. I cannot wait to spread this stuff on my morning croissant. Speaking of, if you know a great croissant-from-scratch recipe or a biscuit-from-scratch recipe- link it up!

Have you been to a Pick Your Own yet this year? What goods have you scored?

NKOTB

The new kids on this block:
1 green bell pepper plant
1 red bell pepper plant
3 strawberry plants

(all planted in the second quadrant in from the left)

The green spring onions (far left) are looking great. They definitely enjoy their water. The lettuce still looks great too, and also enjoys lots of H2O.

The tomato loves being in a pot on the deck. I'm not sure how the herbs feel about the window box... they're alright... but cilantro usually is a trouble maker and this season is no different.

I believe Sylvia Plath and I have an understanding

About the high jinx and the sarcasm, not the electroshock therapy. Today we went to pick strawberries at a local Pick Your Own (click to find one near you!). Since my townhouse is on a plot of land slightly larger than my bathtub any real farming is impossible. So when we want to get the goods we go to the farm and pick them ourselves. I was told by a few friends that the crop of strawberries was not-so-hot this year, but I figured "What the hey!"

I'm glad I went! Jack made a friend right away and his mom and I seemed to agree that as long as they weren't hurting anyone or bothering anyone we'd let them entertain themselves.

With one less kiddo to watch I was able to pick LOTS of strawberries. (Maybe I got a lucky row or something.) There were a few little old ladies (with their husbands in tow) muttering about slim pickin's, but that didn't seem to be true for me.

So with Henry on my back I squatted and stood and squatted and stood and squatted and stood.

Workout for the day- CHECK!

6.67 lbs of strawberries later we were ready to go!

I dusted off my Ball (bell) jars read some very complicated Jam-making instructions. Which must be followed exactly or the house could blow up like a meth lab. (Remember that episode of Grey's Anatomy...)

But here's the thing with making Jam- there is probably instructions inside the pectin (which you should buy from a store if it's your first time, don't be a hero and harvest it from apples yourself). The instructions in your brand of pectin are going to be the most exact because every brand of pectin is slightly different.

I used my potato masher to smoosh the berries before cooking. Sterilize the jars & lids while making the first (of three) batch of jam.

Funnel into jars.

Put on both lids, and place using special tongs (on right) in boiling water. This pot is youge!

One of the ladies I was chatting with was talking about making strawberry ice cream with some of her take. She just mushes and freezes some and then adds it to the ice-cream maker when she's ready. With 6 jars of jam I decided to save the remaining berries for some ice cream of my own. Yum!

Water

The thing with water is, when you have it it's easy to take it for granted. You could leave your tap running every time you brush your teeth and hardly notice a difference on your water bill. (If you have well water -I'm very jealous of you- and you would notice a difference on your power bill.)

You turn on your tap and have access to safe filtered water any time for any purpose. But you don't need to water the garden with drinking water. You don't need your kids to swim in drinking water. You don't need to wash your car with drinking water. But there's rarely an alternative to using water from the tap. Fortunately, now we have a choice. While it's impractical to wash my car from my rain barrel I can water the veggies and fill the kiddie pool with rain water. We put it right next to the garden to make it even easier to get the water where it needs to go.

The tomato plant likes it.The garden likes it.

The radishes like to be rinsed in it.

I love that this change is more eco friendly. I love that we're saving money (even if it's just a little bit). But I really love that this makes caring for the veggie garden even easier. No more lugging the hose out there and then needing to wind it neatly back up when I'm done. This is one of those "Why didn't we do this before?!" type of projects. It's genius!

Go green! Save money! Do nothing?

Now, I'm pretty green, as per the organic eating, cloth diapering, recycling, etc. But my husband is crazy green and crazy cheap. He prefers that everything not actively in use should be turned off and unplugged. TV, Computer, even the alarm clock... okay not really the alarm clock but everything else is true in his ideal world.

He even has one of these things which tells you how much power every single thing you own draws. I'm not saying our marriage was on the rocks because of this... but it was close... He has plugged everything we own into it. Reporting to me (each and every time) how much power something draws and how much money to the nearest cent it costs us.

I may be exaggerating a little. But only a little.

Ever the man of compromise he came up with a solution- This power strip is smart, and kinky. It's an S&M power strip. Get your mind out of the gutter!

Your TV is plugged into the 'master' and when the TV is on your Wii, XBox, DVD player, AV system is powered too. When your TV is off NO POWER is drawn to any of the 'slave' systems. Those aux. systems always draw some amount of power if they're plugged in and they're cosing you money- dollars per month or more. But they don't need it because they aren't in use. The power strip senses the TV turn on (when you use your remote from the comfort of your couch) and then starts up everything else instantaneously (while you remain comfortably on your couch). Are you sensing a theme here?

There are 2 slots for 'always on' items like DVR and Internet.

The thing costs less than $25 and we'll earn that back before the first year of using the thing. That's an awesome rate of return!! Also? My husband gets to geek out over the tech, and I get to say things like "Yes, dear."

I'm just telling you about this because it's cool, not because I'm getting a kickback or anything like that. Also, I like to save the planet because it gives me warm fuzzy feelings. If you can swing the $25- you should totally get one!

Getting Organized

In an effort to live more simply we've set a general goal of suburban homesteading in our house. Which to us means: make what you can, be efficient with what you have, grow what we can (clearly that one will be waiting till the spring) and be organized. Since we're not ready to grow things yet the least we can do is make the soil rich. Instead of ordering one of those super cute composter bins on amazon (which is really tempting, BTW) I'm using something I already have. This is both green and frugal. Go me!

I recognized my limitations when it came to handcrafted spice racks. Limit reached. Amazon ordered. Very cheap, so points for frugality. And now instead of searching for what seems like ever for the friggin' garlic powder, every spice we have (which is many) is now in plain sight!

In order to streamline our lives we're putting most of our DVDs on our hard drive and storing them in the attic. We don't need the cases sitting around taking up space and honestly with those fancy new pull-down stairs putting things in the attic is kinda fun!

Yes, Jack is watching Apollo 13. (I know you all were dying to know!) When the Husband started ripping it Jack looked over on the screen and saw astronauts and space ships. There was no turning back. He's obsessed. Seriously, obsessed.

Finally our fourth new project so far this year has been to give some love to the storage room. We used to just stack things on top of the washer and dryer, and then when they ran they would vibrate and whatever was on them would fall crashing to the floor. Not good.

I think total we spent maybe $70 on both sets of shelves and the boards to run between them. Now we have room to keep the laundry, TP, night-time pull-ups and booze organized. But even better is we now have the space to store more things we don't use every day and when we start picking blueberries in the spring we'll have a place to store jars of jam!

Coming up: real estate vultures. They don't mess around.

Apples & Pumpkins

We went to the local pick-your-own to let the boys pick out their pumpkins and to stock up on apples. We go every Columbus day and I look forward to it for the whole month ahead of time. Henry enjoyed his locked and loaded position.

Jack loved having his own bag of apples to fill. He took the job very seriously!

We got a picture underneath some Stayman apple trees.

Then we picked.

Jack showed us how it's done.

Then we took a picture next to the prize winning pumpkins. I think they could have been bigger... or maybe it's that Jack is bigger and thus the pumpkins seem smaller...

Harvest Moon

The harvest moon and the fall equinox signal that it's time for change. Change that you cannot fight (good luck getting the weather to stay summer-hot in November). It signals to me that it's time to start picking apples. I love a good pick-your-own, great for the planet and a great activity for the kiddos. Today we met up with Susan and Emily and their kids.

Sophia, Jack, Henry, Carter and Brooks.
(We miss you, Cady!! Tell your Mommy "Happy Birthday!)

After picking apples we wandered over to check out the broccoli.

Jackpot.

Jack got a workout pushing Henry back up the hill. -I love the jump-seat for the Phil & Ted... so many uses... like toddler-height handle.

Here is Henry, sitting like a big-boy! I'm so proud!

Farm Fresh

Not only did we come up with a almost completely farm fresh meal but all but one ingredient was from within 100 miles of our house. I'm pretty impressed with us, because I didn't think we could eat meals from our normal repertoire and have the ingredients comply with the 100 mile diet. (We're not necessarily strictly following the diet, but we're enjoying the challenge of eating locally whenever we can.)Here I am getting the goods.The boys look skeptical.But we found everything we needed to make shepherds pie. And it was delicious!

What was the non-compliant ingredient? The Parmesan cheese the Husband put on top.

I like cloth butts and I cannot lie...

We've kinda been potty training Jack since he was 6 months old. He's been sitting on the potty at least once a day. So as he's grown he's sat on the potty more times a day and as of a few weeks ago he was using only the potty 3 out of every 5 days or so. One of my mommy friends asked what I was waiting for (honestly, I was just waiting till we were having no accidents ever before putting him in underwear full-time.)

So I bit the bullet and made the switch. Sometimes he wears Little Beatle training pants- they're a little more bulky which means they catch accidents much better than Lightening McQueen. We've been in cloth at nap and a regular Huggies Natural at night because when he does go at night, he goes A LOT and cloth, even with extra inserts, doesn't catch it all. We've had about 4 total accidents in the last 7 days, which I think is pretty good! So this makes me think, how do you define potty trained? I wouldn't call Jack potty trained, because to me he still doesn't seem potty trained, but I don't know. I can't imagine that no accidents ever is the only way to qualify as potty trained. I mean, what about all those pregnant women who sneeze-pee? So please share your thoughts in my poll about potty training, and obviously, feel free to elaborate, or discuss anything else in 'comments'.


In addition to potty training my toddler this week I decided to bring on the cloth. You know, because I'm a sadist. This is Henry's picture of his "First Fluff". Seriously, I lurve cloth diapers. I mean, they're eco-friendly, cost effective, good for the skin and AH-dorable! We're using disposables when we go out, because the thought of washing out a cloth diaper in a public bathroom while trying to keep my toddler from touching every disgusingly dirty surface, makes my blood run cold.

Another reason to buy organic.

I saw this. Aside from the eco-friendly-ness of going organic (or better yet organic and local) organic phosphates might be 'to blame for ADHD.'

Now, I'm always a skeptic about these sort of news stories because one could argue that families that ear fresh fruits and vegetables are more likely to have involved parents who would advocate for their kids, and thus get them testes whet something like ADHD is suspected. Who knows... but it's pretty clear to me:

Produce rinsed and scrubbed is safer, organic produce is safest.

Farm Fresh

Here are the goods from last weekends Farmers Market.

Also, I know I said I was going veggie, I think for now I'm going to go "If I've met the guy who raised the animal and he knows the guy who 'prepared it' and it tastes DELICIOUS then we're cool." I picked up some bison at the market the weekend before and it was ah-mazing, so since I feel really comfortable with this meat and this vendor, I'm going to go for it.

Cinco de Mayo!

Now that we have the ABC song down we clearly need to branch out and learn what the actual letters are, right? We used these stickers today and had fun arranging them together and then he carried it around the house pointing at the letters and pictures and singing his ABCs. Pretty cool little activity off-the-cuff, if I do say so myself!

Best. Soap. Ever. We have a great dislike for 'smelly' detergents, when we had to make the switch to scent free when Jack was born it seemed really hard not to find scented stuff completely overwhelming- in the bad way. This soap actually says on the back "If you want flowers go pick some." Hilarious! We've been using it for about a year and a half and love it. This time I decided to branch out and get the 'all purpose cleaner' and it says "Cleans everything from false teeth to diesel engines." Awesome.

The best part? Aside from being COMPLETELY eco-friendly (unless you want to wash your clothes on a rock down by the river) each bag lasts 80 loads and cost $11.50!

Then I made myself a margarita. It is Cinco de Mayo, after all!

Also- please vote on my poll and tell me if you could be anywhere but here, where would you be?

Playing catch-up

This weekend we installed new energy efficient windows in the whole house. I was SHOCKED that we got through it all in one weekend. It was SO much work (and that was before we realized we had to re-frame every. single. window. So we're done and the inside of the house is cleaned up (there was dry wall dust everywhere) and the inside of the windows look a mess and the outside of the windows look all fancy and new. There is garbage on the deck and garbage under the deck. We still have to re-dry wall 7 of the 9 windows (we've done 2) so there's spackle, tape and sheet rock up to my eyeballs.

But hey, we now have windows that A. actually open (because some of them did not before) B. will save us tons of money on heating and cooling costs C. will make our house more appealing to a buyer in a few years and D. look shiny and new!


A special thank you to my parents for being our weekend warriors yet again!!
The Workers.


The Watchers.





Playing with food.