*snicker* *snort*

Oh man. It doesn't get any better than this. Eating local and organic, Star Wars, and painfully bad puns...



Clearly, someone out there has too much time on their hands.

Crack for 2-year-olds

Four words: Ring Around The Rosie. Bean wanted to play and after one time through Beeb had to join in and would not let us stop. Maybe I'll have to enlist some of the bigger kids at the park tomorrow to play it with him. All. Afternoon.

Yes I Can!

and have been doing so frequently. Can, that is. I got a pressure canner for my birthday and have been using it a lot. So far this summer I have "put up" strawberry and raspberry (both red and yellow) freezer jams, concord grape jelly, pickled beets, watermelon pickles, crushed tomatoes, tomato sauce, tomato paste, sauerkraut, beans, greens, creamed corn, and pinto beans. I did the pinto beans as an experiment with my new pressure canner and many other kinds of dried beans will follow when the weather gets cold! The low price tag of dried beans without the hassle of always remembering to soak them the night before? Priceless! At some point, I need to get some pictures of my stash. The grape jelly is particularly lovely if I do say so myself. When I held it up to the light for Miss Bean, she said, "It shimmers like purple diamonds!"

Also, it turns out that the veggies in my chili recipe fit nicely in a quart jar:

So this winter, if I get kidney beans canned, there will be some super easy batches of chili this winter! Other than dumping jars and cooking, the only thing I will need to do is measure and add seasoning, water or beer, and ground been and/or TVP.

There will be at least one more trip to the orchard for apples for apple butter and apple sauce. We got a big bag of eating apples and all the grapes for jelly there last weekend. The concord grape jelly? Between that and the freezer jam, I don't think I am ever going to buy jelly at the store again. The homemade is SO GOOD, that I believed I have been completely spoiled rotten for the other kind. This weekend will be another big batch of sauerkraut as we currently have two CSA cabbages in the fridge.

There are FOs to post and lots of other stuff coming soon...I hope!!!

Wisconsin Sheep and Wool was...

well, sheepy and wooly. The whole famn damily went up to Jefferson around noonish and we saw sheep dogs and sheep and shearing and lambs and vendors and lunch and shaved ice and all the wooly wonders. Since we had taken two cars, Kitty Daddy and the kids left around 3:00 and I got serious at the vendors. I found buttons for my February Lady Sweater and was viciously attacked by a couple of spinning projects. It turned out that Gale's Art booth was nearly fatal for me. First, this lovely jumped off the shelf, roughed me up, beat me into submission:

It's a merino/bamboo blend and it is as soft and cushy as it looks. While trying to get up and dust myself off, this subtle little lovely on a bottom shelf started flirting with me:

This one is an alpaca/silk blend and quite possibly even cushier than the ruffian above. Her booth also had trindles which captured my eye and my fancy, but they were out of budget after feeding my flock lunch and snacks. Next year, they can starve so I can have more fun at the vendors. Well, probably not, but the trindles did make my fiber encased engineer-type heart go flippety-flop. The etsy pictures hardly do them justice. I haven't tried them, so for now I am trying to convince myself that they couldn't possibly be as wonderful as they look.

Anyway, after the family left and I spent my money, I had some quiet spinning time by myself and did some people watching until it was time for the after-party and Ravelry meetup, organized by our very own Chocolate Sheep. The dinner was yummy and the cheesecake was practically illegal!

Still here...

Um, er. Yeah, we are still here. The summer continues to fly past and I think I finally figured out where the unaccounted for time went! I had been on top of our scheduled activities: park dates with friends on Monday and Tuesday, library on Wednesday, getting together with our adopted grandma on Thursday or Friday, CSA on Thursday, and sometime other things with friends late in the week. So I knew we were busy, but since most of our stuff is half days or less, I couldn't figure out why I never got around to blogging. However, I think I finally solved it! Both park days plus some of the Thursday and Friday things are up in Madison, which adds a half an hour of driving on each end. It doesn't seem like much when we are driving it, but it sure adds up.

We have started listening to books on CD in the car, which makes the drive more enjoyable for everyone! We are almost through The Birchbark House, which Bean has really enjoyed. She and I are all about the 19th century these days. We have been reading the Laura Ingalls Wilder books at bedtime all summer and are almost through with The Long Winter (the sixth book in the series). The Birchbark House is slightly earlier than the Little House books, but tells the story of Omakayas, an eight-year-old Ojibwe girl. Although we haven't gotten there yet, the story continues in The Game of Silence and The Porcupine Year and we plan to get those from the library once we finish the first book.

More recent garden pictures

These are from just two days ago! The front porch tomato has gotten taller than its cage and has several green tomatoes:

The pumpkins appear to be planning world domination, starting with the entire rocky area. Tomorrow, the whole yard; the next day, you might want to be careful when you go out your front door...I'm just sayin'

We have had tons of blossoms, but have only found three little pumpkins so far and all three are sugar pumpkins (pie pumpkins). I really hope we get some jack-o-lanterns, too, or the kidlings will be disappointed! There is plenty of time yet, so I'm not worried yet. Here are two of our tinies (the third picture was even blurrier than these two...)

Next, the main garden with tomatoes growing tall and quite a few green tomatoes. The beets are few and still pretty scraggly and I think there ended up with a grand total of four carrots. Yeah, live and learn, I guess!


The herbs. Top row: cilantro and basil, second row: oregano and sage (not rosemary as I said in the last post)

And last, but certainly not least, Hin the topsy-turvy tomato.

It was clear from the start that Hin was more than slightly neurotic and refused to have anything to do with upside down. If you look at the previous post the vine is grosing in a very insistent U-shape. However, just a couple of days after the last batch of photos, a wind storm finally managed to make Hin see the error of his ways. After a windy night, I went out to check on Hin and discovered that the bottom of the U was now the middle of an S:

Right after the wind, you could see daylight through the broken stem, but the branches beyond the break have continued to flourish, so it appears all is well and no major veins or arteries (or the plant equivilent thereof) were severed. The broken part has even filled in a bit since then.

Old Garden Update

These pictures are over two weeks old, so already woefully outdated, but I'll get them posted and then try and get a set of new pictures in the next day or two.

Container tomato on the front porch:

Pumpkins beside the house:
The whole garden:
Close-ups of the herbs - cilantro:
Basil:
Oregano:
Rosemary (I think, need to double check):
Topsy-turvy tomato with actual tomatoes:
A quick comment about the topsy-turvey...I had been trying to heft the watering can over my head and hit the smallish hole in the planter. The usual result was water all over the deck and me and no clue how much I had given the tomato. After several weeks of this, I finally hit on a solution. I now fill a 12 oz. pop can and put it upside down in the hole. The lid is tapered and the hole is slightly smaller than the can so it just sits there and empties. I am inordinately pleased with myself for coming up with this.

And finally watering the garden:

Hairdo(n't)

We have already discussed Beeb's dire need for hairstyling products, so I shouldn't have been surprised when he took matters into his own hands. The process went thusly:

1. Flip open cap

2. Pour into hand


3. Apply to hair

4. Snap lid shut

5. Wait about a nanosecond

6. Repeat over and over and over and over and...

The only catch? He was using Dr. Scholl's peppermint scented foot lotion. You could smell him a mile away. I think we may finally have to give in and get him a container of gel or mousse. Oh, and dude? The hairstyling would be more effective if you applied it to BOTH sides of your head.

Garden Update

I can hardly believe it, but at least some parts of the gardening effort are thriving! The front porch tomato plant (with buds!) and its friend, Bean's pink snapdragon:

Four little pumpkin hills with almost vines (instead of just big leaves sticking out of the ground):

The garden with no longer free-range tomatoes (into the cage with ye!) and a lovely (except for holes in the green...darn buggies) row of radishes. There are some tiny beets intermixed, but I'm not sure they will survive radish harvesting. There is the odd fluff of carrot greens in the carrot row. I don't know if they are just slowpokes or if someone is dining on them.

The herb plots appear to be kind of a bust so far except for one little lonely fluff of cilantro:

Again, they may just be slowpokes, so I'm not writing them off yet. And, finally, our newest addition Hin II, a sungold tomato plant in a Topsy-Turvy. I thought we would give it a shot since we really didn't have another place for out new tomato plant!

So far the poor thing is trying to do gymnastics to get right-side-up. Hopefully, it will bow to the inevitable and give in to gravity. I'm considering this an experiment...I'm curious to see how it comes out!

Little brother

Can you tell how much this little guy wants to be *just* like his big brother? This picture doesn't show it, but he wants to be just like his big sister, too. He watches both of them like a little scientist making important scientific observations and imitates them and tries to join in whatever they are doing. It's adorable, but baby dude? I know you want to be a big kid in the worst way, but can you stay a baby for a while for Mama's sake?

We have been enjoying the spring weather as much as we can. Just this past week, we spent parts of two days at parks, we walked to the library on Wednesday, and we went to an open house at our new CSA. After getting a tour each family got to pick out a bedding plant. We got a sun gold tomato and since Miss Bean was disappointed devastated by the choice, Farmer George helped her pick out a flower. He asked her what color (pink, of course), she rejected a geranium as not quite the right color before settling on a pink snapdragon that was just perfect!

Today, Bean and I went to The Sow's Ear to knit in public and watch the parade for Verona's Hometown Days. We had fun and it was a good reminder that I really need to make more one-on-one time with the kids. It turns out I'm a lot more fun when I don't have kids screaming at each other and bickering. They do play so well together a lot of the time, but they can both from zero to intergalactic crisis in about four seconds when the need arises. The more crises that Mom gets marinated in, the crankier she gets.