Jumping into Gardening

Moo enjoying the "fruits" of my labor. Someday, that may be a real tree.

Moo and Toots with me on my quest into vegetable gardening today.

Last week, Moo and I ventured to Lowes and picked out our very first 2011 Garden Challenge participant. A lovely mix of FIVE apples all on one cute little semi-dwarf tree. Fuji, Anna, Golden Dorsett, Ein Shimmer (however you spell that) and Beverly Hills. I will hopefully be able to harvest throughout the season...in a year or two. Oh well. Some are good for fresh eating, some are good keepers and some are baking apples, how perfect is that? And because there are multiple varieties on the same tree, it will self-pollinate without a problem! Yipee!

Today I grabbed the girls and headed out to build me a raised bed for vegetables and got to work. I actually built the 3x6 redwood box bottomed with chicken wire two days ago on the Hubs last day off, but today I spent a while leveling off the ground where the bed was to go. You can't tell in the picture, but our yard has a bit of a slope to it and I wanted the bed to be fairly flat to prevent any pooling of water in one corner or the other. Oh, did I mention that our ground is like concrete? Anyone from the Inland Empire will tell you that the dirt here is not dirt...it is grit packed tightly in between rocks and boulders. I broke two shovels trying to dig in it the past few days. Annoying and back-breaking. But I will get my garden, you just wait and see.

Anyway, I got the bed leveled pretty good and ready to fill with the good garden soil waiting in the garage in 60 lb bags. The only problem is that I am still on restriction from my C-section and can only lift 25 lbs. Ugh. So I started busting open the bags and shoveling the dirt into a bucket, then carrying the bucket out to the bed. But that didn't last long. Toots started crying and it was time to come in for her bottle. Oh well. I hope my tomato plants survive til tomorrow when I'll go out and try again!

Christmas!

Well, seeing as how it is now WAY past Christmas, I won't bore you with pictures and recollections of a holiday past (since we should be getting ready for Valentine's Day), but I thought I should put a picture up to show what Christmas means to me...it means joy on the face of my daughter Moo at coming out in Christmas morning and seeing what Santa has left under the tree...and frustration on the face of my Hubby as he tries to unpackage, unbox and build all those stupid kids toys that manufacturers think it's funny to bundle tighter than Fort Knox containing directions written in Chinese. Those Hasbro guys!

Ca-ute!

Is there anything cuter than a sleeping baby?

Pasta-mia!

So I went home for a visit in January, taking Moo and Toots, but the Hubs had to stay behind and earn a living. Bummer. But while we were there, my brother and I tried our hand at making our own pasta. Now, my brother and I are game to try to make almost anything in the kitchen and I was a bit excited to try this out. As you can clearly see, we did not have the proper pasta making equipment, but were reassured by many on-line resources that many authentic Italian 90-year-old chubby women made pasta every day without such machines as well...so off we went. Our first problem was using a Jamie Oliver recipe that everyone reviewed as being great...ours turned into a rock hard clump that I had to turn over to Bro because it was way past the point where I could knead it and it darn near broke his wrists too. Then we let it "rest" for an hour in the fridge while Bro "rested" his poor little forearms. When we took it out to roll it we had the same problem - ROCK hard and it just wouldn't roll thin enough. So we rolled it as thin as we could and cut it into strips as thin as we could, then we rolled those again. What we ended up with was a bowl draped with leathery, misshapen gobs of dough we weren't sure we wanted to actually eat. But Grammy was a trooper and told us to cook them up. Let me just say that one little scoop of that pasta FILLED YOU UP! It was so dense that a tiny bit of the stuff, well, stuffed you. It didn't taste bad, it just wasn't pasta. It was a cross between scones and pasta, covered in spaghetti sauce. We vowed to try again, following an Italians' recipe instead of a Brits'. I mean really, what were we thinking?

Challah Bread!!!

Just read an old post on my favorite blog - ColdAntlerFarm - about the yumminess of homemade pie and it made me crave something deliciously homemade. Thus, the birth of the Challah Braid! Yum! A home without something freshly baked and yummy to eat, just isn't a home. I think I'm going to commit to more bread baking from now on. It really does taste SO much better than store bought bread.

A Nice Little Snack

Does it get any better than this? I just had to take a picture of my afternoon snack today. Homemade Milk Bread, homemade Pear Butter Preserves (mentioned in a previous post) and a nice cup of milky coffee...mmmm...delicious! I feel very Laura Ingalls right now and that makes me SO happy!

Apple Picking Time

Well, I know this post comes to you pretty far after the fact, but it's been...busy....since little Toots was born and the Hubby went back to work. Hard for me to get the essentials done, in fact showering is usually far down on my to do list and I'm a woman who loves her showers, let alone try to find time to post a blog or two. But I have a few minutes right now, since the Hubby is home and has a few minutes to hold Toots before he has to get to bed and Moo is (hopefully) fast on her way to dreamland as well. So I thought I'd post a little something about our first "family trip" to Riley's Apple Orchard. The Hubby has never been "picking" and actually kind of liked it. He really enjoyed seeing Moo getting excited about the whole thing. She had a blast, by the way. I think it was nice going alone so she could really have fun doing the picking. We went last year with friends and she thought it was kind of boring since all she wanted to do was play with the other kids. But this time she was REALLY into it. She picked an entire bucket,

and tried to start on a second, but we had to stop her... we just can't eat that many apples! We already had enough for a pie and a bunch of eating apples. If you can't tell, that is Toots under the blanket attached to the Hubby's chest. I was fresh out of the Hospital and not really up to hauling around a big ol' baby for the day. So Hubby manned up and donned the Bjorn - AND carried the diaper bag...my hero. All in all we had a great day. It was a lot of fun to do something all together as a family, even if little Toots slept for almost all of it. I think spending time with my loves is such a gift. We don't get to do it often enough, so when it happens, I just treasure each moment.