Few things are more gratifying than growing pumpkins.
Plant a few tiny seeds indoors in May, transfer them outdoors in early June, and in four months you will have gorgeous bright orange orbs that scream "Fall is Here!".
We dug out separate pumpkin patch a couple of years ago, when our pumpkin plants began taking over the garden. Pumpkins love space; their tendrils will wander everywhere, and it got so that they spilled out of the raised beds and cluttered the pathways. Luckily, a pumpkin patc…
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Added by SAB on September 22, 2009 at 11:39am —
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This summer, our family went to our cottage in Canada for seven weeks. Being there is blissful, but leaving our Bainbridge generated some stress. Where will the dogs go? Who will take care of the chickens? Who will water and weed the garden?
This summer I got really lucky - my friends Nina and Ruth agreed to take care of the chickens and garden in return for fresh vegetables and eggs. On alternate days, they came to the house to feed and water the chickens, collect the eggs, and pick whatever w…
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Added by SAB on September 14, 2009 at 4:08pm —
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Swiss chard is one of those overlooked vegetables. You have to search for it in the grocery store, usually in the corner of the produce section sharing a bin with bok choy and kale. Go find it, because once you eat it you will be hooked.
As a side vegetable, we enjoy it cooked two ways. Swiss Chard is delicious at its most simple: steamed, tossed with a pat of butter, a splash of balsamic vinegar, and some ground sea salt. For a variation, sometimes I saute it in butter over high heat with a cl…
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Added by SAB on September 4, 2009 at 7:04pm —
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Ah - Summer in the Northeast....beautiful sunny days, tank tops and fireflies at night, evenings sleeping with all the windows open and only a sheet on top of you...
Not this year! We've been on the East Coast since June 17 and have barely seen the sun poke through the clouds. Every day brings a new set of showers, or out and out rain, and the fireflies are still hibernating. What's a person to do? Beckon the summer gods with an offering of Southsides!
My husband can make a killer Southside.…
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Added by SAB on August 5, 2009 at 7:44am —
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I grew up on the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House series of books. Starting with
Little House in the Big Woods, I read them cover to cover when I was in 4th grade, and then read them cover to cover again each summer in Quebec up through high school. The pluck and optimism that Laura and her family had, confronted with daily hardships ranging from a plague of grasshoppers to being resettled off Indian lands, inspired me and made me long to live back in the pioneer days.
Reading the books…
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Added by SAB on June 2, 2009 at 12:00pm —
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Some friends and I went to Vancouver last weekend to run the Vancouver Half Marathon. It is a wonderful race, very scenic and friendly, and the organizers and participants were so fun and friendly, we have made it an annual event to trek up there for a girls' weekend.
On the way home, famished, we stopped at this incredible store in Vancouver on Granville Street called
Meindharts Fine Foods . This store is amazing! Yes, we w…
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Added by SAB on May 11, 2009 at 4:30pm —
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Though we have had a cold and rainy spring here in the northwest, one plant in our garden is absolutely thriving: my rhubarb.
Rhubarb is a perennial vegetable that is incredibly easy to grow. When we moved to our house, we found a rhubarb plant growing in a corner of the yard. We moved it to a corner of the garden in the mid summer, thinking it may or may not survive being uprooted, and in August, it withered and seemingly died.
The following March, however, new sprouts came up and by mid April…
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Added by SAB on April 29, 2009 at 3:44pm —
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I’ll throw out a quiz I remember my father giving me when I was a kid: Can you name the three vegetables that are perennials?
His answer: Artichokes, Asparagus and Rhubarb. I’m not convinced that Rhubarb is a vegetable – some sources classify it as a fruit, some as a vegetable, but asparagus and artichokes are perennials that will come up in your garden every year.
Our first stalk of asparagus appeared late last week, poking its head through the soil toward the sun. For the next four weeks or…
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Added by SAB on April 16, 2009 at 6:48pm —
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I am a sucker for birthdays. I see them as a celebration of the years past and the years to come. I also look at birthdays as an annual way to connect and say hello or I love you. I may be old fashioned and out of the tech revolution, but I think email birthday greetings are cheap. For my friends and family, I try to send a birthday card in the mail and give the birthday boy or girl a phone call. (This doesn’t mean my birthday greetings are perfectly timed -- ask my brother about his 40th birthd…
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Added by SAB on April 13, 2009 at 5:15pm —
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The greenest way to bolster your food budget is also the most enjoyable way: grow a home garden. The National Garden Association, a non-profit organization for gardening education, projects that the number of homes growing vegetables and fruits will increase 40% in 2009 from 2007. In total, over 23 million Americans will buy vegetable seeds for harvest this summer and fall!
We couldn’t wait to start a garden when we moved to Bainbridge in 1999. In Seattle, our small and shaded lot could support…
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Added by SAB on March 19, 2009 at 8:25pm —
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Spring in the Northwest is a wonderful thing. Daffodils start poking through in late February. The grass greens and starts growing in mid-March. The frogs start to sing in the evening, and mornings are happily announced by birdsong.
On Bainbridge Island, there is another harbinger of spring: Little League. Teams were announced last week, and coaches have already started scheduling practices (Jem is on the A's, Jack is on the Red Sox, and Charlie's team is to be determined). With three sons play…
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Added by SAB on March 10, 2009 at 12:53pm —
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Who doesn’t love granola? Crunchy and sweet, loaded with nutritional ingredients like nuts, oats and fruits, I love snacking on it and putting it in the kids’ lunchboxes. After sampling a lot of store-bought brands, I’ve developed a yummy homemade recipe that my family loves.
My…
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Added by SAB on February 25, 2009 at 6:41pm —
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Do your kids love waffles as much as mine do? No longer just a weekend treat, I often make homemade waffles for breakfast before school.
Rather than buying a packaged pancake/waffle mix, I have developed my own
Waffle Mix…
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Added by SAB on February 24, 2009 at 12:00pm —
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One of my New Year’s Resolutions was to lower our family grocery bills. I read in the Wall Street Journal that the average five-person American family in our income bracket spends $580 per month on groceries. Now, I knew that $580 would be a stretch. For one, I live on an island in the Puget Sound area, an area known for its high cost of living. Secondly, whenever I can I try to buy organic food, because I think organic food is healthier for my kids and for the environment. With that in mind, th…
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Added by SAB on February 6, 2009 at 4:30pm —
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When we moved from Seattle to Bainbridge in 1999, our yard went from a postage stamp sized lot to four acres of pasture and woods with the added bonus of a dilapidated, though usable, chicken coop. My husband and I, ridiculously excited to be living in the country again, leaped in…
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Added by SAB on January 27, 2009 at 10:30am —
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I started baking bread at home about a year ago. My three boys love bread. They are big time sandwich eaters and toast lovers, and as a family we consume between two and three loaves a week. But then we spent a little too much money on a house remodel, and our family wallet got tighter. I choked a little each time I went to the store and saw the price of whole grain bread, a family staple, rise from $2.00 to $4.00 a loaf, seemingly in a couple of months. Should I really pay $4.00 per loaf for br…
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Added by SAB on January 23, 2009 at 11:30am —
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