It's That Time of Year!

I am always so excited for the official start of Spring and am often looking for the tell-tale signs that it is coming. One of the key indicators, in my opinion, is the moment the seeds and gardening supplies make their debut in the stores. I always find this to be incredibly premature (much like Valentine stuff appearing on the shelves the day after Christmas!!!), but it is an exciting milestone, none-the-less.

On the home front, I know Spring is right around the corner when the seed catalogs begin pouring into our mailbox with gusto! I LOVE to garden and will spend as much time as possible pouring over seed and bulb catalogs whenever I have the chance (which isn't often, but you can find me with a catalog shoved in my purse, one in the door of the car, a few stacked on the nightstand and you even might find one hidden in the homeschooling books - just in case I get a moment to thumb through it while Eli is contemplating an assignment).

Every year I try to set aside a small portion of the budget to expand my perennial beds and to add to/improve on the hardscaping around our house. Plus, there is the large vegetable garden that I love to toil over each year as well. Any excuse I can make to get out and play in the dirt, I do. I love spending the time outdoors in God's beautiful creation and I don't even mind getting dirty when it's for the right reasons. I also see that there is so much work to do on the landscaping around our house and I am motivated to get out there to experiment and beautify things, as the kiddos allow. We started with a blank slate at this house (I think it was as blank as it could possibly get) and all I see is there is still so much to do! I haven't even ventured to putting in the landsscaping around the front of our house yet (I have to wait for Kevin to fix the grading first)! I am both looking forward to and am completely overwhelmed by that project. :)

This year is going to be a HUGE challenge for me, however. With the birth of our fourth child due in late May, I am afraid my gardening abilities will be nil. Before the baby comes I will be too big and uncomfortable to really get down and dig in the soil. And after the baby comes I know I will be too sleep deprived and busy to devote much attention to the outside of our house (not to mention the inside of the house . . . the laundry . . . the cooking . . . the - oh, you get the idea!). However, this reality does not stop me from dreaming and devoting too much time to flipping through the seed and bulb catalogs page by page. I am sure that even if I do not get any flowers in this year, at least I will try to plant a few of the vegetable basics. Most years I start a lot of my own seeds, but this time I am already resigned to buy starts from the local nursery. The time commitment is much less this way, but the cost factor is majorly limiting. I will purchase as much as the budget will allow and pray that the baby will let me spend time in God's great outdoors. I'm hoping I will be coherent enough and not too bleary-eyed to enjoy the reprieve that being outside in the nice weather can be. Oh, how I am looking forward to the much anticipated arrival of Spring!

Smarter, Cheaper & Healthier

Kevin and I have recently decided to dedicate ourselves to improving our eating and spending habits. There are many reasons why we have decided we needed to change, but a few of the major reasons include:

• clearly seeing how much we were spending eating out each month and concluding that we were eating ourselves into debt
• continuously throwing away food from the refrigerator before we could eat it
• realizing that the pounds aren't going to melt themselves off anytime soon.
• becoming educated on the amount of preservatives, pesticides, bad fats and processed foods we were ingesting into our bodies with our previous way of eating
• realizing that we were sacrificing our health for convenience

While researching different ways to stretch our grocery dollar with healthier, natural foods, I came across this hand-dandy list that I thought I would share. We won't be purchasing everything on this list, but there are certainly some things I can substitute into our weekly menus.

"Here are healthy, nourishing foods you can always find at a good, low price. No matter what store. No matter what season. No matter if you donʼt clip coupons . . .

• eggs
• bananas
• carrots
• corn
• broccoli
• lettuce
• cabbage
• celery
• potatoes
• sweet potatoes
• onions
• canned vegetables
• canned tuna
• peanut butter
• oatmeal
• whole grain bread
• flour
• corn meal
• quinoa
• brown rice
• beans
• lentils
• pasta
• spaghetti sauce
• sunflower seeds
• popcorn (not microwaved)
• string cheese
• yogurt

- information collected from smallnotebook.org"

I am also cooking with fresh vegetables from my garden (and the Farmer's Market for things I didn't grow) and I have concluded that I will definitely be adding to my garden next year. This year's selection was drastically reduced by a few pesky deer (and probably a rabbit or two), and I figure if I double what I plant for next year I have a better likelihood of having something to harvest from each type of crop. Also, I would like a better selection of vegetables for next year. This year's garden included sugar snap peas (completely eaten by the deer/rabbits), corn, zucchini, summer squash, decorative fall gourds, green beans (which suffered greatly from the critters), wax beans (completely eaten), romaine lettuce (eaten), leaf lettuce (also eaten), cucumbers, red onions, yellow onions, better boy tomatoes (scalped by the deer), cherry tomatoes (scalped), early girl tomatoes (scalped), carrots, green bell peppers, purple bell peppers, red bell peppers, yellow bell peppers, sweet banana peppers, pumpkins, basil and chives. Now this may seem like a lot, but so far only the zucchini and squash have really been successful. Typically by this time we should be eating a ton of sugar snap peas, fresh green & wax beans, tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers in addition to the squash. Oh well, better luck next year. I am really hoping that next year's crop will significantly help the budget by providing more produce for our family to eat fresh and to use in our menu. With food prices constantly rising, every little bit I can do at home helps. I also know that all of this food was 100% organically raised, no pesticides or chemicals used here!

Delightful discovery

Last spring as I was walking through the woods behind our house, I noticed some newly sprouted plants poking through the leaf liter that looked suspiciously like daylilies. Always a sucker for free flowers, I quickly got a spade and a bucket and set forth on digging them up and replanting them in various places around our yard. I didn't have any idea what kind of dayliliy that were or if they were even truly daylilies at all (since they never bloomed in the shade of the dense trees), but I figured I'd take the risk and put them in. Lo and behold, I have been rewarded with a delightful discovery! The flowers on the daylilies are the standard orange color, but it's petals are uniquely triple layered! The blooms are delicate and beautiful to look at!




My discovery really makes me wonder what sort of history these flowers have. I am fairly certain these are not native to the woods and were indeed planted by someone at sometime. If the gardener did not just simply discard them into the woods, was there a garden there at some point that has since become swallowed up by the trees? Whose were the hands that broke the soil and tucked the bulbs into their soil beds? Was it a young mother, a elderly grandmother, a hard-working farmer, an inquisitive child? What did our property look like at the time the flowers were planted (and how long ago was it)? Was there another house here at one time that has long since disappeared?

Ahhhh . . . how I would love to know the history hidden within our own backyard. It is so amazing to have a physical reminder of the fact that although time marches on, a bit of our legacy can be left behind even when we are unaware . . .