What Did You Put In This Salad?!?

That is what I heard from DH at dinner tonight.  He was out in the woods bringing in a bunch of those blown down trees he'd cut up a few weeks ago when I was making the salad.  So he didn't see what all I found to put into it tonight.

Winter salads are fairly safe, I mean, tame, at this little place here.  They come from the store:  lettuce, spinach, carrots, celery, onions, sometimes green peppers if I find them on sale. . .

But when the growing season gets here, you never know what I'll throw in there!  Today's salad started in the usual way:  spinach and green leaf lettuce from the grocery store.  Then I got a wild hare and took my kitchen shears outside to see what I could see.

What did I see?

chives

Chives seem to be easy to grow; I got mine a few years ago as a fifty-cent size clump from a generous acquaintance.  I stuck them in the ground, and they grew.  They've come back every year.  All I have to do is cut the green shoots and eat them!  If I don't cut and eat them fast enough, once hot weather gets here they send up pretty little purple flowers, which are also edible or make a nice small bouquet in a bud vase.

They are alliums, meaning they are part of the onion family, and they taste slightly onion-y.  Being part of the allium family means they are also good at boosting your immune system.  At this little place here, we eat lots of alliums, especially if one of us is coming down with a cold.  Usually this nips things in the bud and no one else gets ill, plus the ill person heals faster.

dandelion

Yes, dandelion.  Edible, especially in the spring before they flower.  They have a slightly peppery taste, and as the leaves get larger they get more bitter.  So nice, young, tender ones are best for hiding, I mean, putting in, your salad.  They are super nutritious, especially high in Vitamins A, C and K, as well as being a good source of Calcium and Iron.  And if you cut them up small enough and toss them into the salad well, your husband and kids might not notice what you snuck into their salad. ;0)

garlic shoots

I have a small patch of garlic that got away from me years ago, when I first tried growing garlic by putting a sprouting head of garlic from the store into the ground in the spring.  Which is the wrong time to plant garlic in Michigan.  It did grow, but didn't form anything but tiny heads that were too small to do much with.  Evidently when I dug them up to harvest, I didn't get them all, because they grew back the next year, not getting any bigger.  Then the mint I'd planted nearby got crazy and took over the entire bed, making it next to impossible to find and dig up the garlic at harvest time.

Last fall, however, I tore out a bunch of the mint that was beyond it's rightful space, and now I'm seeing green clumps of garlic shoots coming up.  Knowing that garlic scapes (the curling stem of the seed head) are edible and yummy, I figured that the shoots (where the seed head stems eventually will come from as the weather warms) would be too.  Just in case my theory was wrong, I ate a piece right there outside with my kitchen shears in my hand.  Yum, garlicky!  So I cut off a fistful to add to the salad.

Garlic shoots/scapes are, like dandelion greens, high in Vitamin C, Calcium, and Iron, although apparently they have no notable amount of Vitamin A.

lemon balm

A member of the mint family, lemon balm is easy to grow.  It has a mildly lemon flavor, which is a nice addition to a green salad.  Or just to chew a few leaves raw when you're working outside and have a craving for a snack.  Nice flavor, no calories!  At least, I can't find any nutritional data anywhere for lemon balm, so I'm going to claim it has no calories.  

It was the lemon balm that DH found in the salad tonight.  Guess I left a few of those leaves a little too big to go unnoticed. . . 

So that was the greenery in tonight's salad.  Other times, especially in late June, I have had salads composed of things like 5 different lettuces, chard, beet greens, peppermint and/or spearmint leaves, dill fronds, arugula, radish leaves, young kale leaves,  as well as the ingredients I used today.  It's fun to go out and see what edibles there are around and throw them together for an interesting, tasty and nutritious mixture of greens.

This spring and summer, I challenge you to get out of the plain lettuce salad rut and throw in some less conventional goodies.  You'll be amazed at the delicious combinations you can come up with.

Giving Of Herself

This is DD2's hair.  Nearly a foot of it, that she had cut off this week.  It is all braided up and saved so that she can donate it to Locks of Love.  The donation form has been printed out, she just has to put the braid into a baggie and a padded envelope, then mail it off.

She does this of her own volition.  This is the third time she has donated.  The first time, she was just entering the fifth grade, and she'd never had short hair in her life.  It went nearly to her waist when she decided to cut and donate it (DD1 had heard of Locks of Love and wanted to donate her own hair at that time).  After the donation, DD2's hair was in a chin-length bob.

The second time she donated, was near the end of seventh grade.  Again, hair to her lower back became a donation and she walked away with a short 'do that barely brushed her shoulders.

This time, she is mostly done with her sophomore year of high school, and has gone from hair her girlfriends loved to curl, braid, straighten, or do up for her, to a sassy swingy bob.  Her girlfriends mourn, yet she cheerfully tells them she gave up her beloved locks so that some child might have them.  Some child who, through illness such as cancer or diseases like alopecia, is unable to have hair of their own to style or have their friends admire and play with.

She also tells anyone who asks about her newly shorn hair that she hopes she will be able to grow it out fast enough to donate one more time before she goes to college.  Ten more inches in two years, that's her goal.

Enjoying Every Little Bit of Dry Weather

Between rains, I've been outdoors as much as possible lately. With the warmer weather, there is much to do!  Things are waking up and growing again, but unfortunately most of those are things I would rather not have growing!  Like weeds in my flowerbeds and between the paving stones of the front walkway and the patio.  Slowly and steadily, I've been working on pulling those after each rain spell.  At least the soft, soggy ground makes weed removal a bit easier.

It hasn't, however, made it very easy to plant the additional fruit trees I ordered to expand my little orchard with this year.  Both my online nursery order, and my order from the local soil conservation district came in last week.  I've been anxiously checking the soil in the orchard daily, watching it go from saturated sponge-like, to standing water eight inches down a hole, to 'yay!  I think I can plant these trees today!!'

It has been ten years since most of the trees in my orchard went in.  I had intended to add a little more to it every few years, but, well, the economy got in the way and finances didn't allow for such trivial things as more trees.  This year, however, things are looking well (at least, not death-grip on every penny anymore), so I went ahead and ordered some trees.

What I had all ready:

• Apples

1. Granny Smith
2. Cortland
3. Red Delicious
4. Macintosh

• Peaches

1. Elberta
2. Reliance
3. Red Haven

• Pears

1. Maxine
2. Bartlett

• Cherries

1. Montmorency
2. Black Tartarian or Bing (planted both, don't remember which was which and one died)

What I added this year:

• Apples

1. Honeycrisp
2. Fameuse (aka Snow apple)

• Plums

1. Alderman
2. Superior

• Cherries

1. North Star
2. Stella

 After transplanting all my new young fruit trees, I gave the entire orchard a dose of fertilizer, aka composted horse manure, applied from the base to the drip line of each tree (the root zone).

As the wind (some really windy days this month; I'm tempted to dig out the kids' old kites and just play. . . ) has permitted, I've been laying old newspapers down as weed barrier between the rows of my strawberry patch.  This is slow going, as I keep having to dig last year's strawberry runners up from where they rooted between rows and transplant them into thin spots in the strawberry rows.  Not to mention weight the newspapers down so they don't blow away before I can get some mulch tossed on top of them.

Another non-rainy day outdoor task has been recovering the old trampoline that has been recycled into a chicken pen.  The stitching finally rotted out on the cover that came with it, and chickens don't stay penned up too well if there is a humongous gaping hole just a few feet above their heads.

This is the time of year when my chickens aren't allowed to free range because they do too darn much damage!! They love to dust bathe in the freshly mulched flowerbeds, tearing up my perennials as the shoots come up, and eating the seeds of the annuals I plant.  They also wreak havoc on the garden as it gets planted, scratching for worms and bugs--tossing my freshly planted seed potatoes and onion starts willy nilly in the process!  Not to mention also eating up all the veggie seeds I so carefully lay out in April and May.  No, those chickens are menaces to a freshly planted garden, so they get sentenced to chicken jail in the spring and get penned up during their outdoor hours.  They will get paroled once the garden is well established for the season.

Now that the chickens are corralled, I can also plant the red raspberry canes I ordered from the soil conservation district.  Raspberries, tame ones that is, will be a new crop for this little place here.  We have wild blackberries, dewberries and black raspberries galore, but no red raspberries.  So, since I'm splurging on improvements this year, I decided to order several Latham red raspberries to start my raspberry patch with.  Perhaps in a few years I can add raspberry jam to my list of offerings at the farmers market.

Which brings to mind a point.  Or, rather, something I often fail to think about until someone else points it out to me.  I don't have a lot of fancy landscaping.  Most of what I have invested money into has a function other than beauty.  The vast majority of my plants fall into the edible category.  Not only do my trees and shrubs look nice, they provide shade and habitat for wildlife as well as food for my table.  And, as they get larger and bear bigger crops, I can take that extra my family doesn't need for our own bellies and make money from it at the farmers market.  My flower beds contain not just pretty blooms, but things that attract pollinators and other beneficial insects and birds to this little place here.  Mint and rhubarb fill one of the terraces in our retaining wall behind the house.  Chives, oregano, basil, thyme, chamomile and dill reside in another.  I have also, some years, planted garlic beds and salad gardens in one or more of the retaining wall terraces.

Functional, not just aesthetically pleasing.  Investing money, not just spending it.

Hey, Sugar Sugar!

Sugar is the name of the pattern of the very first sweater I have knitted.  I found the pattern on Ravelry, and decided to make it for K3's birthday.  Since she has a ton of pink clothes, I didn't want to make the sweater in pink.  I was thinking a sea green, perhaps, or a blue to go with her eyes.  The yarn shop didn't have a green in the hue and type of yarn I needed, so I went with the blue.  Kind of a cornflower color.

This sweater was super easy for a beginning knitter like me.  (I'm pretty sure I'm still a beginner; it has only been a little over three months since my first knitting lesson).  It knits from the top down, all one piece, so there wasn't much to mess up, LOL.  It does require an i-cord cast on and bind off, which were totally new to me; however those were easy to learn and video tutorials of this technique are simple to find online.

It only took me a week to knit this sweater!  I told you it was easy!  In fairness, I should disclose that during that week I took a 500 mile car trip (the drive to the U.P.), so had many many hours of knitting in the car.  Still, if you sat and knit for an hour a night while watching TV, I bet you could do this sweater in two weeks or so.

I wanted to find daisy buttons to put on the sweater to make it more feminine, and so people wouldn't think my little blondie who is just starting to grow much hair is a boy when they see her in blue.

Finding daisy buttons just 1/2" in size proved to be difficult, so I ended up going with white flowers and using yellow thread to sew them on with.  Viola!  Daisies!

I loved this sweater so much, that when we were in the store looking for daisy buttons, and DH saw some camo patterned yarn and suggested that I make K3 a second sweater in camo, I decided to do just that!  Besides, I still had a couple of days of traveling left, and was out of yarn to knit with.  ;0)

The second sweater came out a hair larger than the first, even though I followed the same pattern and used the same size needles.  I contribute it to the yarn being a different brand and slightly fatter, although the labels of the two yarns said they were the same weight.  Anyway, this one, knit mostly on the return trip from the U.P., also took about a week to make.

Now I just have to get them blocked, and wrapped up for gift-giving at the end of the month.

A Couple Turkey Pictures

Guess what!  The local turkeys are no longer practicing gender segregation.  Love is in the air.  :0)

Pretending It's June

Today is very warm, for a mid-April day in Michigan.  The thermometer on my deck reads 70 degrees, and this is with overcast conditions.

I couldn't help myself.  I took off my barn clothes once morning chores were done, put on something more sun-bathing like, and pretended it was June.  Lunch was eaten laying on a blanket on the deck, mp3 player providing tunes, and a book in front of me.

Tomorrow will be back to April, though.  Severe storms to roll through this afternoon and all night long.  Tomorrow's high temperature will only be in the fifties (probably around midnight), and Saturday is looking down right chilly with a high of 44 predicted.

But for lunch, today, it's June.

A Break in the Rain

It's been raining most of the past eight days.  Maybe more.  Nine days ago I was in the U.P., so I don't know for sure what the weather was at this little place here on that date.  Nice to get a normal April rain, especially since last year was so very dry.  Yet, all the cloudy days one after another do tend to be a downer.  And there is a ton of outdoor stuff to do, ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent of which can't be done in the rain or on waterlogged ground.

Yesterday we did get a brief break between showers.  Well, okay, probably six or seven whole hours without rain!  And today, too, has been mostly dry (as I type this, thunderstorms are moving in and rumbling off to the south).

However, while the sun was out, and I was working outside on various tasks, I took some pictures.

blue sky!

leaves beginning to open on a lilac bush

daffodils in bloom on the south side of the house

bird footprints in mud puddle

raccoon and bird prints in mud puddle

crocus