Garden Update!!

The garden isn't doing all that well, but I've got some cool pictures to share anyway!  I think that the square foot garden boxes are too shaded.  Next year, we're going to have to look at moving them or building additional ones, maybe out in the field or in the back yard where they won't be so shaded.  Another problem, pointed out by a friend, is the lack of bees to pollinate the squash and eggplant!  Bees are a struggling species in the southeastern US, and although that might sound at first like a blessing, it's really kind of scary!  What will happen to all the bee-pollinated plants, especially vegetables and fruits that we eat, if the bees die?

Anyway, here are some pictures of our tiny cherry tomatoes!  They are delicious!

We also have cucumbers.  I love how the little tendrils curl around things.  They are so deceptively delicate!  And they grow at a crazy rate!

We also have a few shell beans drying in their pods, but I didn't take a picture of them.  And finally, just for your viewing pleasure, a very unusual bug in extreme close up!

Square Foot Gardening

We've got lots of pretty plants growing, both uncultivated and in our square foot gardens!  Hopefully later in the summer, we'll have some delicious fruits and veggies to enjoy!

Decades ago my grandparents grew grapes.  They were supported by wires strung between three huge pylons in the back yard.  Today, they grow in a wild tangle with blackberries (below) and brambles and other fun stuff.  I've spent a considerable amount of time out there, working to clear out things that aren't grapes or blackberries and generally make that area more accessible.  Maybe by next year, I'll have it so under control that we can restring the wires, retrain the grapes, and mow around them!

 I planted beans!  They are called Lazy Housewife beans, which made me smile.  They can be eaten young, as snaps, which are not my favorite, or they can be left to dry on the vines and eaten as shelled beans.  They've really taken over, which makes me think they'll live up to their name, as I have done absolutely nothing except plant them and give them a trellis to climb.

 The sweet peas are still small, but they are blooming!

 One of the tomato plants has blooms too!

 And our garden has a tiny guardian!

 I bought a pitcher plant and a Venus fly trap at the Farmer's Market yesterday!  The vendor said to leave them in their peat moss/sandy soil and leave them outside.  In other words, leave it alone!  :)

The Venus fly trap bloomed as soon as I got it home.  Can't wait to share these with my students next year.

The soybeans, which I will harvest while they're young and green and eat shelled as edamame, have tiny purple blooms!

Memorial Day weekend fun!

For our three day weekend, our friends Lindsey and Johnathan came up to civilization Greensboro to hang out and shop!

On Saturday morning before they got here, Daddy and I attacked the jungle behind the house.  We cut down trees, tore out vines, and hauled off tons of debris.  We are gradually unearthing some grape vines and blackberry canes!  I'm super excited about what our yard might yield this year, and even more excited about how it will look in the future.  I haven't taken any pictures yet, but I'll get them up soon!

Once the Beams arrived, we immediately bundled Jazzi and Macy into their crates and headed out for the afternoon.  We grabbed a bite to eat at Chick-fil-A (civilization has Chick-fil-a!), then visited Ed McKay's (civilization has used books) to kick off our shopping spree!  I found Season 4 of NCIS for $20!!  I also bought some books, of course.  :)

Then we stopped by Fifth Season Gardening for Matt so he could pick up some supplies.  After that, it was off to YumYum's for ice cream (civilization has ice cream!).  Mmm...Cokes in glass bottles make me smile.

After driving all around the world to show Lindsey and Johnathan the beautiful campus of my future school, we headed for the Target shopping center on New Garden, we Lindsey and I shopped for shoes and clothes.  I got some Mimi shoes: my grandmother loved sparkly metallic shoes, so I try to find a pair of sparkly sandals every summer in her honor.  :)  We also acquired Season 1 of the BBC's Being Human for $13...score!

Then we took them to the Moose Cafe ("D'ya see the moose?") for all-you-can-eat BBQ!  Even though they were out of ribs, it was more than worth the $10.  Everything I've had there has been delicious, although my favorite things are the meatloaf and the hashbrown casserole.  Yum!

By that point we'd stuffed ourselves so full that we desperately needed to walk around a little more (well, at least that was our excuse), so Lindsey and I walked around Old Navy (I found a cute dress and a patriotic t-shirt for cheap!) while the boys investigated Dick's next door.  Then we reconvened for a quick and fruitless trip through the Target near our house (no DVD's on sale).  Then it was home to crash on the couch, where the boys killed things on X-Box 360 while Lindsey and I played online.

This morning, we lazed around the house (after the dogs finally convinced us to get up), watched the pilot episode of White Collar, and otherwise did nothing.  Then we gathered ourselves and went out, where Lindsey bought me a really cute Vera Bradley wristlet for an early birthday present.

Then we saw Pirates of the Caribbean On Stranger Tides!  It was better than Pirates 3, but not as good as the first two.  I missed Elizabeth and Will.  I wondered who they would get to be pretty in this one since Orlando Bloom was out, but they did well: Sam Claflin is adorable.  :)

This evening, we grilled out, in the time honored Memorial Day tradition.  We had steak, baked potatoes, asparagus, and shrimp.  Later, we roasted marshmallows over the coals and made s'mores (civilization has s'mores!)!

Tomorrow, to end our weekend, Lindsey and I are going back to Old Navy to acquire our Gay Pride t-shirts (civilization has Gay Pride t-shirts) before they get on the road.  :)

Doesn't everyone do this in January?

I am thinking of resurrecting the pedometer habit I developed awhile back. My cute new iPod nano, Yoda, has a built in pedometer, and I can even connect it to a Nike website that shows how far I've walked and how many calories I've burned.

I am quite willing to tell people that I weigh 150 pounds. They usually look at me, aghast, and ask where I've put all that weight. While this is flattering, I wish I knew. My size twelve pants are getting tighter by the day, though, and I'm not ok with that part.

Our Rush membership expires this summer. I'm grateful, really, because I don't think we've been nearly good enough about going. It's nice to know there's a pool if we want it, but honestly, it's been over a year since I set foot in the place. There are many, many things I can do that don't cost nearly as much (although I'm not even the one paying the fee).

It's very difficult to make myself exercise after a long day at school. I'm usually frustrated and tired when I leave here, and I yearn for a blanket, a salty snack, and a book or some internet time. Or retail therapy with a fast food snack. I have no interest in changing clothes, getting all sweaty, and then having to shower before bed, etc. Yuck. Exercising before school seems to be beyond my capabilities as a human...I'm good, but not that good. :) Morning is my worst time of day.

I need exercise. My body is way out of shape. So are my habits.

9 Ingredients to Avoid in Processed Foods

I was skimming the Yahoo! homepage when I noticed the teaser for this article. I thought it was very interesting. :)

A convenience or an abomination?

We were shopping at Home Depot last weekend when I discovered a new tree I've never seen before! It's called a Fruit Salad tree and it produces peaches, plums, apricots, and nectarines, all on one dwarf tree!

I am 100% sure that there are people in the world who see this as a wonderful thing. How exciting, to have one tiny tree which will provide a family with a variety of fresh fruit throughout the year! What a novelty, as well!

I just can't get on board.

I think that if God had wanted us to have fruit trees in pots on our back patios, practically dumping different kinds of fruit into our hands throughout the year, He probably would have provided that. I think this particular garden innovation leans toward the abomination end of the spectrum.

Getting involved

I added a button to the blog today. It's a link to Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution. He is advocating for better school lunches, something vitally important as more and more families in this country depend entirely on school cafeterias to nourish their children and educate them about food. It's frightening to walk through the lunch line every day and see the same endless parade of brown foods...breaded and fried chicken strips, fried veggies, rolls...nothing with any real nutritional value.

I also skimmed the Facebook petition to ban High Fructose Corn Syrup from the United States. I completely agree that we consume entirely too much of this artificial sweetener ("fine in moderation", as the commercials say, but how can it be used moderately when it's in everything?). I lost about 10 pounds simply by cutting back the number of Cokes containing HFCS I consumed every day. It's disturbing to shop the center aisle and even the dairy case at the grocery store! Everything has corn in one form or another, or was fed corn when it was alive. While that's truly a post for another day, I was interested in the Facebook petition. However, I decided not to sign. I want to see a change in the ingredients in food in this country, but further legislation will not bring about positive change. The only way to truly influence the food industry is to put money behind my beliefs. If I believe that HFCS is bad, then I will stop buying products that contain it. While my personal statement is very small, if enough people make the change, eventually the economic pressure will be substantial. Also, in the meantime, I can use the money I'm not spending on HFCS products to support products that use more natural ingredients.

Garden, take 1

I've been reading. Not that that's news, but I've been devouring everything I can find about sustainable gardening, eating locally, and being a good steward of our planet. Sounds cheesy, huh? Not so much when you consider that popcorn, cookies, and gas station crackers have a preservative made from butane...or that a cow fed solely on corn wouldn't live past two years old because its liver would explode.

OK, with that preface, where can I go now? Hm...stepping down off my soap box for a bit, I suppose. After doing all this reading, the next logical step was to start a garden. I want very much to take control over what Matt and I put into our bodies. I feel that we have a responsibility to our bodies to keep them as healthy as possible by making good choices. We can also do our part to influence the food industry in a positive way by putting our money where our values are: at the Farmer's Market, with the locally grown veggies at HT, and at restaurants that support local food.

On Saturday (4-3), Matt and I spent the morning wandering around the Piedmont Triad Farmer's Market. It has been a seriously cold winter around here. Lots of snow and super-low temperatures. As a result, there was almost no locally-grow food available yet. We saw collards, kale, mustards, and spinach, as well as these awesome planters full of lettuces. There were also sweet potatoes and regular potatoes galore.

However, the most abundant items were plants. It was so lovely to spend the morning walking along rows of green growing things. :) We bought eight heirloom tomato plants (four German Johnson and four Mortgage Lifter), garlic, Moroccan peppermint, African blue basil, stevia, Greek oregano, creeping rosemary, parsley, Cuban oregano, and aloe. I potted them all in plastic pots with the cheapest topsoil I could buy from Home Depot. I went ahead and installed those cheap, ugly metal frames for the tomatoes and put multi-colored aquarium rocks on top of the soil to help retain water and keep the squirrels out. Awesome.

The same day, I planted some seeds I bought before Spring Break! I bought long rectangular planters and filled them with the same cheap topsoil (which is gross and full of clumps and sticks, but oh well). I planted organic Swiss chard, spinach, and two varieties of lettuce. I also planted an heirloom cucumber that's round and yellow, like a lemon. I covered the soil in these pots with aquarium rocks too.

I chose the heirloom and organic varieties for a very specific reason. There are a tiny handful of major corporations (six, if I remember correctly), that control 98% of the seeds distributed world-wide for food purposes. Many of the seeds and plants distributed by these corporations have been genetically modified. Possibly the scariest modification is one called a "terminator gene", which prevents plants from reproducing naturally. This requires farmers and gardeners to buy new seeds or plants every year. There's another modification which increases resistance to diseases or pests, but only with the application of a specific chemical to "turn on" the resistance. Guess who sells the chemical? Ten points to anyone who said it was the same corporations which sell the seeds. So anyway, I don't really want all those genetically modified foods in my system. Who knows how the altered DNA might affect me? I mean, a terminator gene. Scary.

Spring Break Road Trip!!

Matt and I took advantage of our week off by driving across the country to visit Liz in Lincoln, NE and then to Memphis, TN to visit Sharon! :) We drove 2,600 miles and spent something like 30 hours in the car. It was a wonderful trip!!

Trip stats:
- 2,600 miles
- 30 hours in the car
- 11 states (NC, VA, WV, KY, IN, IL, MO, IO, NE, AR, TN)
- 2 great friends

The pictures are posted on Facebook, but I'll put up a couple here too!




In Nebraska, we walked around downtown, went to the UNL bookstore, ate at an AMAZING Greek restaurant, the Parthenon, and saw a really cute play, That's What Makes Them Pirates!. We also ate burgers at Culver's before we drove to Omaha and went to the most amazing zoo and went to dinner at Rock Bottom Brewery. It was, all in all, a wonderful visit with my Lizie! :)

In Memphis, we explored Beale Street, ate yummy catfish po' boys (farm raised, sadly), and spent hours exploring the Rock and Soul Museum. Then we rented 2012 and hung out with Sharon and her roomie, Rachana. The next day, we drove to Tunica, Mississippi, where we ate lunch at Paula Deen's buffet and blew $10 on penny slots at Harrah's. :) Then we drove to the river front and explored a little before we drove back into Memphis and relaxed at Mud Island. Sharon and Rachana took us out to B.B. King's restaurant on Beale Street for dinner (delicious ribs and excellent mac 'n cheese).

Hm...I think there is a theme here...food! Everything we ate in Lincoln and Memphis was excellent!! :) The fast food in between, not so much. Ah well.