garden

Harvest sign

Running Behind: Happy {Belated} Fall!

What with our trip to London {it was so great, and I’ll be blogging more about it sometime soon…} at the beginning of the month, and then trying to play catch up in all areas of life upon our return, we basically skipped the first half of fall. Which is a little bit sad, because…

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Guinea Coop

This Year’s Garden Experiment: A Headless Chicken & The Great Guinea Massacre

Warning: The following tale is not for the faint of heart. As you might have guessed from the title, it involves murdered birds and decapitated chickens.  Blood and guts.  Feathers and more feathers.

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Green Beans

The Canning Bragging Club

I did it!  I finally learned how to can.  (Maybe there’s hope for my sewing skills…) Thanks to my friend Diana, who was so very generous with her time and with her canning equipment, I can now proudly inform folks that I am indeed from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.  And mean it. Even without the sewing…

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Using Herbs in Flower Arrangements

Using Herbs in Flower Arrangements

  This is the time of year when herbs are growing like crazy in our garden.  Yours, too? Here’s an idea for putting herbs to good use, aside from the obvious culinary uses… Include them in floral arrangements! We recently hosted a large cookout and I had a fantastic time putting together a zillion small…

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This Year’s Garden Experiments: Organic Bug Control

  If you’ve been following along with our Garden Experiments, you may know that we’ve experienced a few mishaps along the way.  Recently, I showed our abundant green bean harvest, so you may also know that we’ve experienced some success as well. The first major Garden Experiment was the implementation of a new method: Square Foot Gardening.  You can…

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Tomatoes & Green Beans for Canning

Learning to Can (Can)

Somehow, I spent an entire childhood in the beautiful farm country of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and emerged without any knowledge or skills in the culinary art of canning. A family friend pointed out that the this likely had to do with the fact that my mother was born and raised in east L.A.  Canning was not…

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Green Beans Galore

Green Beans Galore

  Holy green bean harvest!   I might need to serve some with breakfast this morning, and at every meal thereafter, to ensure they’re all eaten up. And to think…we almost didn’t plan beans this year.  They’ve turned out to be our most successful, low maintenance crop! Green beans do make for somewhat tedious harvesting,…

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green beans from the garden

This Year’s First Harvest

The other night, we enjoyed our first garden harvest with dinner: green beans!   Funny story: In between bites of green beans, I said to Mr. Native Texan: These green beans taste much better than last year”s.  (Pause for thinking) Probably because I cooked them in sausage drippings this time, huh?

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Gardener's Hand Scrub

Easy Gardener’s Hand Scrub {great gift idea}

I love to garden.  [Check out This Year’s Garden Experiments.]  Wish I had more time to devote to digging in the dirt and trying to make things grow, but here’s one thing I don’t have to spend extra time on: cleaning up my grubby hands, post-gardening.

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4 More Delightful Children’s Books About Gardening

Guess what: we’ve discovered four new favorite children’s books about gardening!  Anyone else get all excited to read about gardens with their kids?

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