Another Hit to my Garden

While I have been enjoying the bounty of my 1st organic garden, I have come up against some interesting and frustrating problems as well. First was the stray cat who thought that I constructed several large litter boxes for him as he continually dug up seeds and seedlings while doing his business. Despite his sometimes daily visits to my gardens, most of my plants and seeds managed to survive. Next came the painters who started to pressure wash the house with a bleach solution blasting bleach water & old paint chips all over my garden beds. When they came back to paint, though they covered one bed, it apparently wasn't good enough since all the plants in all my garden beds were misted with white paint. I had to throw away loads of lettuce that was painted. I had to throw out some beans and peas as well, but many plants were flowering and have since produced plenty of paint-free edibles. 

Today, I discovered another little surprise in my garden as the kids & I were playing in the sprinkler on this hot & humid day. Many of my pepper plants were leafless! They looked like twigs sticking up out of the ground! I wondered for a few minutes what could be causing that sort of damage. A rabbit? A deer? But why just the pepper plants? Then I noticed a leaf that didn't look quite right. It was curled up kind of odd. I looked a wee bit harder and I saw the leaf moving ever so slightly. Then my eyes focused on it a bit more clearly. It wasn't a leaf at all but a huge, fat, green caterpillar with a red spike on it's end! It was hungrily devouring a pepper leaf at an amazing rate. I looked around for something I could use to get it off my plant. I ran to the house and found the mini pet cage and went back to the garden. I used one of my bamboo garden stakes to try to pop it off the plant, but it put up quite the fight, spitting loads of icky looking green goo out at the bamboo. I'm glad I didn't try to touch it. I finally managed to pull it off the plant and into the cage. He was at least 3 inches long. I couldn't believe the amount of damage he had done to the pepper plants. I started back to playing with the kids and a few minutes later, I noticed another one on another plant! This time, I went inside and grabbed a pair of metal tongs to try to make it a faster removal. This one spit green goo as well, but it ran down the plant. I hope it isn't harmful to the plant. I ended up snapping a small bit of the plant off in the process because the caterpillar just wouldn't let go. After a couple moments in the cage, both caterpillars were clinging to the stem. I don't know what will become of them now but I am quite angry at them for destroying my peppers!

Aren't they ugly? I looked them up online and they are some sort of sphinx moths though I wasn't sure exactly which one. 

How quickly they can strip a plant! Several plants actually!

Even with the caterpillars gorging themselves on my plants, a couple of the plants have a wee pepper on them. I am hopeful that we may get 1 or 2 more peppers before growing season is over. 

The rest of the garden is doing surprisingly well and I plan to have an update post on that soon. Maybe even later tonight!

Keeping Cool and Odds & Ends

We don't have air conditioning. It's been over 90°F for the past several days with wicked high humidity. That means there is just one sure way to cool off.

Yep, the hose! Laural & Micah have been having a ball playing in the sprinkler.

I think I might join them tomorrow since it's supposed to be another 90's kind of day.

We've had a lot going on here lately. We finally found a source for raw milk and got 3 gallons on Saturday. Besides drinking the yummy goodness, yesterday, I used some of the cream I skimmed off it to make home made butter. It's different but super yummy. I only used a pint of cream so I didn't get a whole lot of butter but it should be enough for about a week.

We've also begun in the process of eliminating certain things from our diet. The two biggies are gluten & soy. So far it isn't too bad but we are totally bread people so the gluten free bread is going to take some getting used to. So far, I've made a loaf of bread which turned out okay but not great and pancakes. The pancakes were really, really awesome! After the kids and I had eaten our fill, I cooked the rest of the batch to put in the fridge for later. They lost a lot in the texture and flavor after cooling & reheating but butter and syrup kind of covered that over. I think I'll cut the recipe in half next time or maybe I will just keep the batter uncooked in the fridge and see how that works when they are cooked up later.

Finally, my garden has been starting produce a few more yummy goodies for us. My cucumbers, zucchini & broccoli are still pretty questionable, probably thanks to the cat that keeps using it for it's litter box, but the other garden bed is coming along pretty nicely.

Today, I picked this nice handful of purple beans and sugar snap peas. We had more snap peas than that but a bunch got eaten already. Laural and I love them! 

We had an uninvited visitor come in with the beans though...

One of the bean leaf beetles that have been chewing on my plants since day one. They nearly killed my green beans but they managed to survive and are still giving me a a few beans. This little guy got to live just long enough to have his picture snapped. I think a little Neem oil is going to find it's way to the garden tomorrow.

This is a little bit of how our week has gone so far. I've got big plans for tomorrow too! Homemade yogurt from raw milk and another try at gluten free bread. Wish me luck!

Rainy Day Summer Fun

Since the weather was cold, rainy and stormy today, we stayed inside and entertained ourselves with some summer themed activities. First, we watched Lilo & Stitch. While the movie itself isn't summer themed, it takes place in Hawaii which immediately invokes thoughts of summer activities - swimming at the the beach, luaus, surfing, alien monsters grooving to Elvis... ok, so not the last thing, but definitely the others. 

Then we did something that was totally new for Micah - we painted. A couple weeks ago, I saw a craft kit for kids that had seashells that you put on sea creature shapes and then decorated. I decided to make my own version since we already have all the stuff we would need. The first thing I did was do an image search for various coloring pages of the various sea creatures I wanted - a fish, sea star, turtle, crab & seahorse. I sized them to about 3.5 inches, printed them and cut them out to use as a template. Actually, I couldn't find a crab that I liked, so I drew my own. Then I traced my creatures onto different colors of craft foam sheets and cut them out. Finally, I gathered everything else: paints, brushes and seashells that we collected on our trip to Florida last year. 

Next came the fun part - the painting. Like I said before, this is something Micah has never done before, so I wasn't sure what to expect - a mess for sure, but how bad... LOL

Micah didn't quite get the idea of one color at a time and he mixed a lot of his paints before he got them on the sea creature cut outs. 

He really got into it though. Both figuratively and literally. We had a lot of paint to wipe off the boy when he was done. He thought it was hilarious and I thought it was pretty funny too.

Laural put a lot of thought into how she wanted to paint each figure. I would post more pics of Laural but since the kids just stripped down to their underwear to paint, I will just post one of the more modest ones.

Painting is done! Micah's are on the left and Laural's on the right. We decided to wait until tomorrow to glue the shells on since some of the paint was pretty thick (especially on Micah's) to give it lots of time to dry.

Finally, to end our day, we went outside to watch the fireflies. We signed up to be "citizen scientists" at https://www.mos.org/fireflywatch/ to observe fireflies in our backyard. This was our second week of observation. The kids really look forward to it! When I told them we would be going out to watch the fireflies, Micah shouted, "Oh yay! I wuv firefwies!" I love his sweet 3 year old enthusiasm! And the cute way he says his Ls like Ws. So, we broke out some more dollar store glow sticks (blue again because according to the Museum of Science website, fireflies don't see blue light) and headed outside to observe. It was quiet (except for the kids arguing about who got to sit or stand where) and we saw loads of fireflies! Such fun! And I never noticed that there were 3 distinct colors of the little buggers until we started watching them. You learn something new all the time, huh?

Can I Go Back to How I Was Before?

Have you ever stopped for a moment and realized that certain aspects of your life are totally different from how you imagined they would be? Or how you want them to be? I think that certain changes sneak up over time and before you know it, things you loved in your younger days are things you hate in your more seasoned years. And the thing is, that you may not really like the way things have changed. Ok, so maybe this is just something that has happened with me. Regardless, here's my story. 

When I was a kid, even a teen and a little beyond high school, I was very much an outdoor person. I spent hours outside - from playing in the creek (or crick as we used to call it) to playing in the pool to just simply sitting in a big chair out near the wood line reading a book or watching the sun set behind the trees across the field. I loved being outside. Maybe it was because we didn't have computers waaaay back then to take up our time cruising around facebook. Maybe it was because we still had an antenna for television and got only 2 channels - on a good day. Maybe it was because I needed some sort of escape from my 3 younger brothers (yes, three younger brothers - c'mon mom & dad - you couldn't give me a sister? On second thought, that would probably have been worse...). Whatever the underlying reason, I spent a lot of time outside.

Now, not so much.

And the more that I think about it, the more I realize that I'm not happy with that. So, I thought for a little while. It didn't take me long, really, to figure out why. First, I got married. No, my husband or getting married weren't the actual reasons I stopped enjoying the out of doors. Where we lived after the wedding was a big factor though.

First, a little more background. I grew up in a fairly rural setting. We had neighbors, but they weren't super close. If you looked over at the neighbor's house, you had to have pretty good eyesight to see what they might be up to. Across the street from our house was a big - BIG - cornfield. Behind our house was "the hill." It wasn't really a hill. That's what we ended up calling it though. It was, in fact, a rather deep and wide ravine carved out by the winding creek (crick) that I mentioned earlier. Whenever we talked about taking the short hike down to the creek (crick) we said we were "going over the hill." On the other side of "the hill" (the ravine) was woods and beyond that was a wide open meadow. Beyond the meadow was more forest that had trails running through it that were actually part of an archery practice course that local bow hunters would use occasionally to hone their shooting skills. I spent a good deal of time "over the hill" and wandering the woods and the trails in the area.

So, back to our first marital home. It was in town. A somewhat busy but not too terribly huge town. We lived rather close to the downtown area. To our left was a house so close that you couldn't really walk between ours and theirs. To the right, another house, this one barely wide enough for a car to park there. Across the street (the street being maybe 10 feet from the front door) was another house and beside that another house that was only a driveway's width away. Our back yard was small - 20 feet by 36 feet approximately - and just beyond the fence at the back of the yard was yet another house with another close to it. When I went out into our back yard - besides feeling like I had no privacy - it was just unpleasant. Traffic noise, people noise, road dust, exhaust fumes, and a complete lack of shade made the yard a bright, hot, annoying place. There was nothing relaxing about it. We had 8 foot privacy fence around it so it often felt as though I was caged in to this little enclosure and since all the homes surrounding and including ours were 2 story, an 8 foot fence really didn't help me feel like we had any real privacy when we went outside. We had a bench on the front covered porch area and there was a small hedge, but when you are sitting just 2 feet away from where people are walking past on the sidewalk, well that's not so very private either. After a while, I quit going outside. Especially once we had central air conditioning installed.

Once we left our first home and came to our current place of residence, my reasons for shunning outside time changed. Where we live now it quite nice. There are a couple of industrial buildings nearby but the noise from them is minimal and they keep 9 to 5 hours. So our evenings are quiet enough. We live on a main road and at the bottom of a hill so we regularly get the sound of tractor trailers cruising past with their jake brake rumbling, but it isn't so bad. What keeps me from venturing outside now is --- bugs! Besides the industrial buildings and the main road, we also have a swamp land and creek fairly close to our home. This means tons of bugs - especially spiders which are my personal nemeses. We also get tons of mosquitoes which apparently have not been let in on the little secret of how insect repellents are supposed to work. Last year, while outside with the children, I got bit on my ring finger by some tiny little insect - pale white and wedge shaped. The pain and swelling I had were horrible and lasted for days - from a teeny, tiny little bug that you almost need a magnifying glass to see! Well, that was enough for me AND I certainly did not want my children to get bitten by one of these things, so inside we stayed!

This year, however, I really, really, really want to change. I want to be an outside mama. I want my kids to play in the dirt, catch fireflies & butterflies and sit on the lawn and make funny whistling sounds with a nice broad blade of fresh green grass. But can I change myself back to the way I was before I became a bit jaded by the unpleasant aspects of being outside? The answer is - I hope so. I don't know. I'm trying! I've done a few things to make it easier for me get myself outside. I built the Enchanted Garden for the kids and I've planted a vegetable garden. I've rearranged a few things in the yard to make them a bit more accessible and in the past week, I've spent at least a couple hours each day this past week either planting or tending to the gardens or sitting in my camp chair watching the kids play in the sand box or their garden or with their ring toss game & glow sticks. I'm making progress. I admit though, I totally freak out at least once every time we are outside when my all boy three year old says "Look Mommy!" while holding up a spider. Oh. Dear. God. Help me. I usually start yelling, "Put it down! Put it down! Put it down!" And he does, but still... My skin is crawling just thinking about it. *Shudder* But the point is, I am doing it. We are doing it. Slowly and with a little stress on my part, but we are slowly becoming a more outdoor oriented family. At least for the summer. We won't even get into how much I hate the cold weather. 

Oh, and by the way, one of those stupid little pale bugs bit me again. Just yesterday. On the ankle. It hurts. But we still went outside today.

My Thoughts on Crocs

It seems to me that every person who has an opinion on Crocs has an extreme opinion. They either love them or really, really hate them. I vowed, shortly after they came out, that neither I, nor any of my children or immediate family would ever, ever wear them. The shape is rather awkward looking and the colors they come in can be a bit on the garish side - neon pinks and greens. Ugh. I totally hated Crocs. Even worse were the cheap knock offs you could buy at Walmart. I quickly hopped on the bandwagon of people making fun of other people who wear Crocs.

On our recent vacation to Florida, I was bitten, rather viciously, by flies that looked similar to the deer flies here except they were yellow. After swatting and killing one from my big toe, I noticed a little trickle of blood running down my toe! Brutal. I was bitten at least ten times on my feet and ankles. I didn't think much after it until later that night at the hotel when I noticed that my feet were breaking out in bright red, but smallish, blisters. I figured after a shower and a good night's sleep, all would be fine. When I woke up, the opposite was true. The blisters had grown and were rather painful and itchy. They didn't put a damper on my spirit though, until I went to slip on my sandals. The straps that go between the toes were rubbing very painfully against some of the blisters that had spread between my toes. 

At this point, I had two choices, stay at the hotel while Steve and the kids went out to Epcot or try to find some new shoes that wouldn't rub against my blistered feet. Our first stop was the hotel gift shop. They had only a couple choices. I could go with flip flops - more rubbing the blisters between my toes or Crocs. The only other option I had was to try to find a different style of shoe at a local Walmart or similar store but that would mean a lot more walking around in my current, uncomfortable shoes and that did not appeal to me at all. I looked at the Crocs again. I couldn't possibly buy Crocs. I had, after all, made a vow. I forced myself to pick up a pair to examine. I was surprised at how little they weighed. The pair I was holding was pastel pink and the holes on top were shaped like Mickey Mouse rather than the usual round holes that Crocs have. I shuddered a little inside as I actually thought that they were cute. I made a vow. I made a vow! But a day at Disney was at stake.

I looked around and saw an employee. I asked her if she had ever worn Crocs. She had. So I had to ask: Don't your feet get all sweaty and uncomfortable in these rubbery shoes? She told me that she found them to be quite comfortable and that they allowed more circulation that a person would think. I pondered a little longer. The price was a little off-putting as well - everything at Disney is pricey. I ran through my options again: miss a day at Disney - including our dinner with the Disney Princesses or buy the shoes. I put one on. It didn't hurt my foot and it felt quite comfortable. I hemmed and hawed a few moments longer before making my decision. I would buy the shoes. They didn't have my size in the pink or the pastel blue but they did have a pair that fit me in tan. Not very girly, but I was getting desperate. I went for the tan but I also decided to get a couple of Jibbitz to "girl" them up a little. I let Laural pick out the Jibbitz. We went with Cinderella for one foot and Tinkerbell for the other.

With my purchase in hand, we walked (I hobbled) over to the food court to remove the tags and install the Jibbitz so I could put them on. Once on, I gave them a test run (hobble). They felt really good on my feet. My inner self balked. No, no, no. How could this be? I hated these shoes! Sigh. I was now the owner of Crocs and the reality was that I already liked them. Further, I'm already contemplating buying more Jibbitz for them. So much for vows about shoes.

Micah's 2 Year Check-Up

Even though Micah has been 2 for nearly a whole month now, he just finally had his 2 year check-up today. I have to admit, I was a little nervous because he has been such a slow gainer that I was afraid we would see another tiny weight gain. I was thrilled, though, when I saw that he gained 2 whole pounds since his last check-up! Good job little man! He also grew 1 inch which makes him 33 inches tall now. He's finally starting to pick up! He might even have been heavier if it wasn't for the fact that he is just getting over a stomach bug. 

He did ok with the exam - he clung to me while the doctor listened to his heart and lungs. He started crying and seemed a little panicked when the doctor tried to look into his ears and freaked when the doctor tried to look into his mouth. He quited right down when the doctor handed him back to me. We got a new prescription for his skin condition and wll begin using that tonight. Hopefully it will alleviate some of the itchiness for him. I really hate drugging him up with Benedryl all the time like the doctor suggests, so I really hope this works for him. I hate it when I see him scratching at himself to the point of making himself bleed. His little fingernails grow so fast that I need to clip them every other day so he doesn't cut himself up. He's still getting over his intestinal ills and has a bit of diaper rash as a result. I hope that it clears soon for him. Poor guy. But other than that, I have a healthy and happy little 2 year old. It's amazing to think that 2 years ago, he was just finally getting out of the hospital. He's come a long way! And to think, there was a time that they thought he might not live to see these days. God is AWESOME!

Lady Bugs, The Return

It seems our lovely lady beetles are quite hardy little bugs because they have been with us for quite a while this year. We only would see 2 or 3 at a time around the house through the winter, but now that we are enjoying absolutely gorgeous 80°F weather, Laural's little pets have made a major comeback. There are about a dozen wandering around my kitchen as I am typing this - and that is not counting the one that Laural has captured to be her pet of the moment. She has a rather unique one at the moment, actually - no spots!

Yep, I took a pic. Several actually.

Ok, she did have one spot - clear down on her side.

PS. In case you are wondering, all of our ladybugs are females. And most of them are named Alaina. Just ask Laural.