Our house

Here are the photos I promised several months ago of the outside of our house! I'll have to take more in the woods now that it's green. (Can you tell I downloaded all the photos of the past few months off the camera today?)

Front

Back

Backyard

Bridge across the ditch to the woods

Path through the woods

Snowy Sunrise

Here's a picture I meant to upload and share a while back.

Useful plants

The woods behind our house are fascinating to me. Watching them turn green (and purple and white and orange) and come alive over the past couple of weeks has been my favorite pasttime. I know so few of the plants I found that I decided to start researching them. Today I checked Peterson's Guides to Edible Wild Plants and Medicinal Plants and Herbs and started working on identifying what is out there.

American Brooklime. You can eat the leaves as salad greens.

Spring Beauty. You can boil the corm, or root, and eat it as a potato.

Crabapple. I think. I plan to make jam from the fruits, Lord willing.

Plantain. Ugly weed, I know, but a great healer for sores, an anti-inflammatory and antibiotic.

There is so much more out there, but these were some of the more interesting or beautiful.

Been a while

Yeah, so I've been busy! It's springtime's fault!

I've gotten my garden up and almost running in the past couple weeks. When the plants started to pop, I suddenly realized that I really did want one. So I pulled out the plans I made last December and started working. I made a raised bed, no dig garden based on a plan I found in an ebook at Sustainable-Gardening-Tips.com. Plants aren't in yet but I have some ready to go.

I've been pounding nails, shoveling compost, spreading soil additives, shaking out straw with all my available energy over the past week!

I've built three 4 by 13 foot beds. Here is one with newsprint spread on the bottom. It blocks weeds.



Here is another with the first load of compost spread in it.



I've really built muscles loading, pulling, and spreading compost. At least it was all free from the township. I need to take another couple photos now that the beds are finished and covered with straw, then again once some plants are in. I'll post more later.

Springtime

I love spring! I've been doing work in the yard for the past couple of weeks. (For about the first time in my life!) And watching the green things begin to grow. I feel a little like Mary in The Secret Garden when she finds the way in and and begins discovering all the green things growing in the rich soil.

Since we're in a new house we don't, or didn't, know what was planted in the yard. I've been enchanted finding all the new things coming up. There are all sorts of bulbs all around the perimeter of the yard, crocuses, and some blue and white bell shaped flowers, and others that look like they'll probably be daffodils and tulips.

All the new green reminded me last week that I wanted to garden this year, so I pulled out the garden plans that I made last December and started working on them. I'm making a raised bed, no-dig garden. While I'm waiting for Dad to cut the wood so that I can build the sides, I started some seeds in peat pots on Tuesday night, and already some sprouts are starting to come up: broccoli, romaine, and cucumbers! Exciting! I spent half an hour today just hovering over them, examining!

I also saw yesterday that a green mist has formed in the lower part of the woods behind our house. The leaves of the small bushes and underbrush are all starting to push out of their buds. Green is beginning it's creeping takeover!

Long live Spring!

Hello, my name is Becki and I'm a sugarholic

But I'm 10 days straight and counting! Actually, Jen told me that a treat every ten days would not be a big deal, so I indulged last night at the Ladies' Time Apart. It was good but I'm glad to be back to a normal diet.

Actually, having no refined sugar was a lot easier than I expected considering how much I had been eating. It's just a matter of a change of attitude... a change of belief, I guess. If I see chocolate, I can't look at it and think how good it would be. If it enters my consciousness I can't more than glance, and think, "I don't eat that anymore."

Kind of like sin actually. If you dwell on some temptation, it becomes almost impossible to pull away. You have to turn away immediately.

Robin Williams' plan for world peace

Check out Paul's blog on The Plan. Very amusing and satirical!