FIMBY

Ugh... the first week of August, the pinnacle of summer, has been a wash out, literally. It's rained, rained and rained some more. Those beautiful beet juice pictures were taken on the one sunny day this week. Crops are rotting in the fields at the farm, my bean plants were floating this morning in my yard and my beautiful tomato plants that I've mulched, staked and lovingly pruned are all ravaged by blight - AH!! It's been a frustrating gardening week.

The artistic prompt today at Shutter Sisters is abundance. Specifically, "where is the too much, too little, never enough showing up in your camera lens". That's easy to answer today.

Too much green (or should I say purple) beans. I don't like canning but I had no choice when we got our 5 lb bag of beans yesterday from the farm. With last week's 5 lb bag I blanched and froze, gave away and of course ate. With yesterday's bag I made 7 jars of dilly beans this morning, and I still have beans left over!

Canning beans takes forever. All that rinsing, washing, boiling, and stuffing each individual bean by hand into the jars. So not my thing... but neither is wasting food I've paid for and I know on a snowy January day the kids and I will appreciate those dilly beans with our lunch.

We also have too much rain. Way to much rain. This morning we tramped through the swamp, also known as our back yard, rescuing drowning slugs and arthropods of various sorts. So I guess you could say we have too little sun.

Too much rain, too much beans (a blessing I suppose), too little sun and never enough fresh tomatoes. That about sums up the first week of August.

I steamed farm beets for supper last week (a vegetable I'm learning to love) and saved the "juice" left in the bottom of the pan. I stored the juice, about 2/3 cup, in a glass jar in the fridge and pulled it out yesterday for the kids to paint with.

The kids also mixed up a yellow paint with 1/2 cup hot water and 1 tbsp tumeric mixed together.

The resulting artwork is beautiful and my own art (photography) is inspired by my children's creativity. For more natural painting inspirations check out one of our favorites, Berry Smudges and Leaf Prints by Ellen B. Senisi.

Farmer's Market Flowers

Not too many years ago in the past I almost exclusively shopped at Wal-Mart (shh... don't tell anyone), it was cheapest after all. The only thing local there was the poorly paid and under-insured "associates". To be fair our family budget was tighter. We were still paying down consumer debt (a folly we won't ever repeat) and saving for a house down payment. I wonder if my miserly shopping helped us save money? Probably, but now we're choosing to save money other ways so we can purchase food according to our values.

Our biggest money saver is owning a small home (we rent out the basement), on a small lot in the community my husband works in, walking distance from his job. A huge blessing and a choice I realize not everyone can make. But even if it weren't "easy" walking distance away he'd hoof it on foot, longboard or bike, that's the kind of guy he is. Living close to employment, and sacrificing a larger lot in the "country", enables us to live very comfortably with only one car. In fact, it goes days not being used and during those times we sometimes lend it to friends so they don't need to own a car.

But wait, don't we have children? Yep, 3. And don't we camp? Yep, every month. How can we manage with just a car, not even any roof rack, trailers or other "carry more stuff" storage? Light living is the name of the game.

Owning one, small, old car and not driving it a lot, having no debt and a smaller urban footprint (fancy speak for living on a small city lot and renting part of our house) are three biggies that enable us to buy more local food.

I heard the other day on NPR the "average US family" is now spending $100/week for gas (I nearly croaked). I'd rather pay $30/week and use the "savings" to buy more I-know-the-farmer grown food. To be sure, we're not driving in luxury. Our car is 15 years old, there's little squirmies living under the booster seats , and the AC stopped working years ago. But who cares we're eating well.

But what about those who aren't so blessed? Those who are on very limited incomes and can't even afford to own a car, never mind limiting their car usage.

Stay tuned for next week's (and the last - I'll get off the soapbox, promise) local food post on making sustainable, local food affordable for everyone.

One last question. Where would you rather spend your money and time?

Local Farmer's Market

Yay, finally a "preserves on a sunny window sill" shot

I don't can, except dilly beans (pickled green beans, so delicious) when we get inundated mid-summer from the farm. Should be any week now I guess.

But I do make refrigerator pickles. No bubbling, boiling water and finicky sterilizing needed. Well, the jar should be clean of course...

I dare you NOT to make these. They're my kiddos favorite cucumber treat, trust me that's a lot of white sugar in this house!

Refrigerator Pickles

8 c thickly sliced cucumbers
2 small onions, sliced
2 tbs pickling salt (I use less)
2 c white vinegar
1 c sugar (more or less depending on taste for sweet pickles)
1 tsp mustard seed
1 tsp celery seed

Combine cukes, onions, and salt in large bowl. Mix well. Combine vinegar, sugar, celery seed and mustard seed in saucepan. Cook over medium heat, stirring frequently until sugar is dissolved.

Pack cukes & onion mixture fairly tightly into jars (to minimize floating in liquid as much as possible). While still hot, pour vinegar mixture over vegetables.

Let cool to room temperature. Screw on lid and put in fridge. Let pickles age 7-10 days in fridge for best flavor.

Will keep for several months under refrigeration. Ha, like that ever happens!

Picture shown is a half batch, fits in a quart Mason jar.

There's been a lot of potty talk these days and not from the usual under-four-foot tall crowd.

It started over a month ago when Samantha at Our Green House wrote about hating waste and hum... could she somehow reduce that daily, down the toilet, paper waste??

Right around the same time I was feeling pretty good about our family making the switch to recycled, save-the-trees, toilet paper. That didn't last too long though as my friend Cori upped the anti with her Uber-Eco recycled, for real save-the-trees, cloth toilet wipes.

I'm not the only one noticing all this potty talk. Even my friend Rich (not so much of a tree hugger but great guy who plays a mean uilleann pipes), just posted this week about the growing cloth trend.

What's going on here? Until just a couple months ago I was blissfully ignorant of any toilet "alternatives", excepting of course composting toilets which are very cool but kind of impractical in our current bathroom directly off of kitchen house arrangement.

I'd of been content, for now, to stop the discussion here. However, my research-happy husband, whose RSS reader keeps him up to date with all the techie-eco trends, has one-upped ya' all.

I should of started to worry when he innocently asked "how much do we spend on toilet paper each month?". Next thing I know, "because for a year's worth of [kind of expensive recycled] toilet paper we could get a bidet. And it would fit right on our current toilet." (like this is a good thing)

Oh brother! We are weird enough already. This would shoot us right up into the eco-wacky stratosphere.

I thought I was green in using recycled toilet paper. That didn't come out right. I mean toilet paper made from recycled paper. My friend Cori is taking to the next level though with cloth toilet wipes. I am nowhere near there yet and not sure if I even think it's more green what with the soap, hot water and electricity required to wash the load of butt wipes (sounds crude but that's what they are folks!).

But (bad pun) I thought this would be a great post to add to the earth friendly tutorials at Natural Family, the newest FIMBY addition. Check it out.

Today's Raspberries: A photo that is somewhat but not necessarily related to the following post.
This morning during my sporadic (some days I'm disciplined, most days I'm not) quiet time I wrote. Mostly prayers of the "please guide me" variety. My last scribbles of the morning were:

The words flowed from my pen, without thought. After I wrote them I was pleasantly surprised with what seemed like a divine answer to my morning's soul searching. It became my updated Tuesday's to-do list.

Lest you think my life is airy fairy and I'm running around arms in air with a free spirit "going with the flow" I should set the record straight. I don't know much about tested personality types, I hate labels, but I'm probably a type A personality. Very task orientated and driven to accomplish. I'm not a work outside the home career woman so this "energy" is channeled into my homemaking. Somedays it seems like homemaking with a vengeance. Hum... maybe that's a better title for this blog.

I'm fairly thick-headed but I'm getting the message of where my heart and home needs to be (contented), how I'm going to achieve my goals (simplify & self-discipline), how to travel this journey (enjoy & embrace) and what needs to over-arch it all (love).

scrubbing the bathroom and kitchen floor, having clean kitchen counters (hoping to avoid the dreaded after supper build-up that makes me a cranky best-friend and mama) and de-cluttering my son's room. It's difficult to embrace these homemaking tasks in the midst of summer. The garden calls my name...

The kids also call my name. As much as I involve them in home maintenance (trust me my 5, 7 & 9 year old are active participants in laundry, cooking and cleaning) there's only so much you can make your kids do before they declare mutiny or call child protective services.

So, today as I tackle projects they sit around pestering each other, start crafts they can't finish without my help and occasionally complain "I'm b***d" (kind of a swear word around here). Before bad mommy guilt kicks in I remind them that on a weekly basis we go to the library, the beach, the farm, have picnics in the park, read lots of stories, tackle craft projects with mommy's help - yada, yada, yada. A kindly spoken "figure it out" is my response of the day. Oh, and an afternoon video (sheepish admission).

I used to enjoy cleaning. Back in the days before children, oh so long ago, when you'd wash the floor and it would stay clean for weeks or tidy the book pile in the living room once a week whether it needed it or not. I also used to dust in those days. Looking back I have no idea what I actually dusted as I don't remember those early apartments ever being as dusty, dirty or finger-printy as my house now.

What non-glamorous homemaking tasks are you choosing to embrace this Monday, this week, this month? Know that in doing so you make your house a home. And at the very least it is a momentarily tidy, clean refuge from the outside world. Oh, and if you can, pick a bouquet from outdoors to brighten those indoor work days.

My experimentation with making my own moisturizing cream is included in this week's Make It From Scratch Blog Carnival over at the funky Home Ec 101 What You Wish Your Mama Taught You.

Other entries that were of particular interest to me are:

• A lemon-lime body scrub that sounds good enough to eat in this summer heat.
• Kohlrabi Salad recipe. I'll have to remember this for next time we get this funny looking Brassica in our weekly share of farm vegetables. I'm so encouraged to see people buying and talking about their CSA farm shares. Yay, Yay, CSA!

I'm not sure exactly when the summer steam roll train started this year. Probably sometime in February when I began to fantasize about raised beds, weekly pick-ups at the farm, fresh picked berries, wearing sundresses and going to the beach.

I'm officially five days into summer and pretty dog tired from living out my winter fantasies. (No, not that kind silly!) Maybe feeling tired is just a Wednesday thing.

"oh, what a lovely flower", as my kids wait in the car to go to yet another farm

Or maybe it's the-week-is-crammed-with-so-many-good-summer-things-but-you-just-can't-stop-because-the-summer-train's-a-rollin'. Whew, I got tired just typing that.

I'm thinking crossing my fingers a lazy week or even a day will come along in the next couple weeks, realistically sometime after our camping trip. But this week's list of dentist appointment, library visit, berry picking(s) and freezing, cooking a meal for 20 folks, trip to the beach, unsuccessful trip to farm to get manure for building raised bed, last horse riding lesson, farm pick up, and usual weekly errands, grocery shopping, cooking and general home management doesn't allow for a lot of lazing around.*

Frozen strawberries ready to be put into freezer bags

Sometimes that's the way summer is. The "must-dos" all happen NOW because the same weather that ripens the berries for picking (the window of time for picking organic strawberries in Maine is brief) makes for great beach days and for growing weeds in the garden and for picnics and for nightly skateboarding and hiking and camping.....

Tonight is a happy life-is-full tired but I'll be glad for some happy feeling-lazy tired too.

*footnote: Did you know that at week's end the kids & I will have been to 6 different farms this week, cool.