Orange Mold?

Apparently my skills at starting seeds need a little fine tuning. Not that this surprises me at all, I tend to kill indoor plants. I either over water them or forget about them all together. Either way they are goners.



With this said, I have never in my life seen bright orange mold on any of my plants before now. To be honest, I was a bit worried that the infestation of lady bugs in the house had been laying eggs in my plants. Little man and I had transplanted a lady bug in one of the marigold containers as a way of attempting to get over his insane fear of the relatively harmless bugs all over the house.



My wonderful research driven husband immediately pulled up the orange mold on the Internet, determined that it was caused by over watering, and scraped it off the plants that it had formed on and instructed me not to water my plants for the next week. Actually, I believe he threatened bodily harm if I went anywhere near the plants over the next week. And you know what? The mold went away!

Like It Or Not, Here We Go

Today Andy went to drop off our diapers and found out that as of today, we will be washing our own dipers. The person who does our diaper service is moving to Boston and was nice enough to give us 60 of teh pre-folds that we have been using. Saturday will kick off our first diaper washing adventure. Any tips are welcome.

Village University

Throughout the next few weeks our local community center is doing a series of Sustainability workshops. A lot of information in a short amount of time and not enough time and information all in one. I skipped the first one because quite honestly I really could not care less about preservation of vegetables through fermentation (Kim chi for starters). But this week's was great and I hated that I had to leave early because I promised Andy I would come home at 4:30 to assume parenting duties.

This week I learned about fruit trees (we actually have an apple tree in front of our house I would love to see edible apples on), growing grapes (a hobby I would love to take up), beekeeping (the more I hear about this one, the more I am contemplating it) and planting and starting your own garden. To start off, I have to say every time I go to one of these I feel like I am already behind. For example, last summer we started a modest garden that did not fare well due to clay soil and our little rabbit friends that thought my garden was a salad bar. So, of course, this year we already have plans for a fence and are planning on adding peat moss, top soil and compost from the bin we have been working on since last summer. Today, three of the four speakers talked about needing to do soil testing before planting to balance out the soil and on top of that I found out that my peas, carrots and lettuce need to be planted in April (did I mention April begins next week?!). Also, while I have found a great place to buy fruit tress and bushes inexpensively, I may end up waiting until next summer to start my grapes because I came away feeling like there is a lot more too it then I had thought and may need to do some more research.

On the bright side of life, I got a lot of great information, came away recharged and ready to re-design my whole yard. Oh and did I mention some wonderful friends of ours are letting us use their brooder for our chickens! I am very excited about that one. Six weeks and counting.

Is Spring Here Yet?

Teach Them Young

Since I had some frozen pumpkin in the freezer, had just read an article about not inhibiting your toddler from doing "big things" (like cracking eggs into a bowl), and some spare time, we made pumpkin bread the other day. Believe it or not, it turned out pretty good!

We have been blessed to have some pretty amazing people in our lives, and the other day little man had a wonderful time hanging out with some of those friends (and is still telling people about the experience). Between two households, our friends have two cats, two guinea pigs, two dogs, two horses, one cow, and a bunch of chickens. Even though the picture below shows little man feeding the cow, the chickens really stole the show for the day (I just forgot to take pictures). Not only did little man bottle-feed the calf, he went into the coop with my friend and collected eggs. Thankfully they had an over abundance of eggs that day, because little man was not going to part with the container of eggs. I did manage to get them away from him for the drive home.

I had already decided that we needed to do something special with the eggs, and during nap time I was reading one of my parenting books as it was talking about building confidence. So, I thought, why not bake pumpkin bread? I have pumpkin in the freezer that I saved this fall, and I have the eggs, the local flour, and all of the other baking supplies. It is time to teach little man how to crack an egg.

He did pretty good with it. The only shell that landed in the bowl was the one that came from the egg mommy cracked. Little man did a great job mixing and adding stuff to the bowl and the results were excellent. Although, I have to admit, we required some clean up....