Runaway October

Some­times when you aim to hand make all of your gifts, the final goal can get away from you. Sure, that super cute scarf would be fun to make, but in Ari­zona who’s going to use it?

So the boys (with lots of help from Mama) are mak­ing soap to give as gifts this year. Who can’t use soap, right?

Don’t worry, the stove was not on yet.

My fancy dou­ble boiler.

Adding flax meal for exfo­liants and kelp pow­der which is a great detox­i­cant. (Is that a word?)

Soap on a Rope, poured and set­ting up.

In the molds, with a fin­ger­print… for authenticity.

We did two dif­fer­ent batches so far–one for the gals, one for the guys.

The Guy Recipe

• 1 lb sus­pen­sion Shea But­ter soap base
• 2 table­spoons Kelp Powder
• 2 table­spoons Flax Seed Meal
• 15–20 drops Tea Tree Essen­tial Oil

The Gal Recipe

• 1 lb Honey melt & pour soap
• 4 Tb Beeswax
• 4 Tb Honey
• 15 — 20 Sweet Orange Essen­tial Oil
• 1 tsp shim­mery Mica for sparkle

(P.S. — If the boys give you a gift of soap, pre­tend to be sur­prised! They are very proud of their efforts! )

Hey guys. Remem­ber me? No? Dan­git. I don’t blame you.

I have lots of excuses, but no real rea­sons. Maybe it’s my short atten­tion span?

Sum­mer is on full blast here in Ari­zona. When I say full blast I mean you walk out the front door and are lit­er­ally blasted with Sum­mer Heat. My poor gar­den has seen bet­ter days.

Today

Con­sid­er­ing we get to plant some­times as much as a whole sea­son ear­lier than other parts of the coun­try, I can’t com­plain. We ended up with more toma­toes then we knew what to do with. We made many batches of salsa and lots and lots of fresh tomato slices. I even exper­i­mented with ketchup, but it turned out way way too sweet and pretty much ined­i­ble. Boo.

The boys wanted in on these pic­tures.

This is one of a few big har­vests. We basi­cally ended up with a lot of squash, jalapeños and tomatoes.

Does this look like a zom­bie ver­sion of that guy from Veg­gi­eTales to you? Me too!

We also planted ONE “hon­ey­dew” plant and ended up with a few good sized mel­ons off of it. It’s still going strong though. It LOVES the heat appar­ently. It takes up a huge amount of space still. It’s not a hon­ey­dew by the way, I’m think­ing maybe a Cren­shaw or Casaba melon.

Those leaves are about hand sized, for ref­er­ence. In the bot­tom right, is my Span­ish laven­der bush. It seems happy to have a lit­tle bit of shade.

The heat is caus­ing the jalapenos to be red and small from the start.

Some strag­gler toma­toes. About 70% of the cherry toma­toes ripen okay, the oth­ers suc­cumb to the sun and shrivel up.

I’d say all in all, the gar­den was totally worth it. There’s noth­ing quite like find­ing your boys nes­tled in your gar­den fill­ing up on tomatoes.

Some things I’ll do dif­fer­ently next spring:

• Space out the toma­toes a smidgen more.
• Cage them imme­di­ately, and con­tinue to sup­port them as they grow.
• Read up on cucum­bers. I think that by the time my pick­ling cucum­bers came up, it was too hot. You can find itty-bitty inch long cum­bers one day and the next they’re shriv­eled and gone.
• Plan for sprawl more. The toma­toes over­took the green beans, dill and car­rots. The one squash plant took out the lemon thyme, cilantro and most of the spearmint.
• Pos­si­bly plant a week or two ear­lier. I don’t have to worry about frost much, but I do have to worry about the sun killing things right as the fruit matures.
• Pos­si­bly some kind of shade cloth over the whole thing too.

So, that was our gar­den this year. Still debat­ing on when to rip things out to pre­pare for the win­ter garden.

How did yours come along?

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Okay, so after a 7 month hia­tus, I am back. If you ever want to get com­ments on your blog, just stop blog­ging for a really long time. I hope to be back blog­ging reg­u­larly now. I over­hauled the whole blog, got rid of unnec­es­sary “fea­tures” and setup a new gallery tool. Be sure to check out the pic­tures, by click­ing on the links either above or to the right. I update with pic­tures of the boys reg­u­larly.

New Year by *Sally M*

On another note, 2009 has come to a close. It was a year of ups and downs for us, like I’m sure it was for most other fam­i­lies. We were taken to court by one of my day­care clients, and nice guys always fin­ish last. My hus­band bought me a won­der­ful new home! He also plowed through mas­sive lay­offs at his work and even ended up with a pro­mo­tion. We were sur­prised with an unex­pected preg­nancy and sub­se­quent mis­car­riage. We made new friends, lost fam­ily mem­bers, and all in all I think we weath­ered the storm nicely. We can only hope 2010 is as good… Well, maybe with a lit­tle less of the downs, of course.

As is typ­i­cal for me, I hope that I can use my blog to stick to my New Years res­o­lu­tions, which are pretty typ­i­cal for me, just look at the one’s from years past. But this time I have a whole house to dec­o­rate and make homey. On a bud­get. I also con­vinced Matt to buy this lit­tle pretty for my Christ­mas present…in pink of course.

Cav­allini 2010 Daily Planner

My hope is that I’ll have plenty of space to sched­ule things ahead of time, so that I don’t end up scram­bling the day before a birth­day or 4 weeks before Christ­mas again. My plan is to make Christ­mas presents through­out the year, and maybe setup a cou­ple craft­ing get-togethers. So if any of you are inter­ested in meet­ing to have some good food, a few drinks and make batches of Christ­mas presents with friends, let me know.

I have lots of new recipes to try, crafts to make, sewing to do and I hope to do a bit of can­ning. And by a bit, I mean I think I’ve been bit­ten by a can­ning bug. I found a new source for cheap, fresh pro­duce and home­made jam and jel­lies has never sounded bet­ter. I still need to set up and dec­o­rate my “craft room”. I’m kinda ignor­ing the fact that half of it is sup­posed to be for Matt’s com­puter stuff. We debate over the name of it con­stantly. Matt orig­i­nally named it the S.O.R. — Server Oper­a­tions Room. I’ve decided it’s the Sewing Machine Oper­a­tions Room — S.M.O.R. That’s a  much nicer name, don’t you think?

So those are a few of the things I’ll be work­ing on this year. Wont you join me?

And remem­ber, a blog­ger lives for com­ments. Please don’t be shy. If you drop by, lemme know you were here! To do so, just click on the link below that says “Leave a comment/# of com­ments” and type in what­ever your heart desires.

Thanks for read­ing!