We’re well into our container gardening this year and in case you were wondering how others were going about it I’ve dug up a couple of links for you…

1. My friend sent this one to me.  You’ll like it. Originally published in 2008, and loving called a patio farm, Jan has done a lot of experimenting on what can grow in pots and how.

And here’s a nice pick of her garden as of April

2. How to make your own salad bowl. With the recent (and yet again) ecoli breakout maybe it’s time.

3. And here’s a nice site all around about the ways of porch gardening. Lots to browse through so take your time

and be sure not to miss this carnival

Our Own Update:

Our gardening update is the tomatoes and peppers are in their containers and we had a hail storm…

Well we’re going strong with the garden. We’ve been getting out there every day watering, checking, tapping our fingers, waiting.

Tomorrow we’ll put out the tomato starts. I’ve been hardening them off the last 2 weeks and now they just hang out outside waiting for me to transplant them. I’m scared. I admit it. Tomato plants are so fragile and tempermental at the beginning that I get nervous any time I touch them. Last year we didn’t pluck or trim the suckers or whatever you call that so we’re going to do that this year. If I remember correctly we let them grow wild until about July and the finally my husband convinced me to leave him alone with them for a morning. When I came back he had hacked and twisted them into submission. I was afraid they were dead but they kept giving us great tomatoes all season long.

This year I also have to be a bit more careful about blossom end rot. I had that problem with some last year. I have the lime and I have to be more diligent about checking the water reservoir early on. They (I use the Garden Patch) say you only need to water once a week but I found myself needing to water every couple of days and when it got scorching sometimes daily.

The potatoes are doing well. They took a while to get going because it was still a bit chilly outside but they’re doing well now and we will probably need to top them off with more potting mix next week.

That’s all for now!

I really like cake. My whole family just loves cake…except for my husband. But that is another story. He enjoys them well enough but would rather have a pie than a cake any day.

Lately we have been into America’s Test Kitchen. You know the show where they find the best way to make a dish and test all kinds of methods, ingredients, and gadgetry. I had received their cookbook as a birthday present several years ago and true enough I turn to it for any basic recipe I’m about to embark on. I brought home some of their DVDs from season’s 3 and 6 to watch and we got hooked. We really enjoy cooking as a family and trying new things. All three of us. Peanut gets to mix spices, assemble veggies and she cracked her first solo egg a couple of weeks ago.

Anyway then we decided to take the plunge and subscribe to their annual online tv thing where you can watch all past and current shows for $20 a year.

We are having a ton of fun and my weekly menu has altered a bit as a result. I’m also finding myself spending a great deal of time in the kitchen so if you’ve noticed less updates all around blame America’s Test Kitchen.

We’ve been slowly making our way through the various cakes to see if we can improve on what we already thought was perfection (our own cake baking).

So far we have made the Classic White Cake with Almond and Raspberry filling (please note you won’t be able to see the full recipe unless you subscribe or take the plunge and sign up for the 14 day test drive WITH your credit card which they won’t charge until the 14 days are up). My husband loves this one. And I was surprised at that because as I said cake is not his thing. It’s also super easy. The key is to assemble your ingredients beforehand and weigh your flour and sugar. I have heard to weight certain ingredients but had never done it. Since I was using King Arthur’s new Organic Cake Flour which I was pretty sure is a bit denser than Queen Guinevere (sp) I thought I ought to weight it. Not possessing a regular kitchen scale… wait I think I had one before we moved. Oh well I used my old mailing scale and adjusted for the weight of the bowl.

The goal was to make cake baking a little easier. This was easy too. The egg whites were put in the milk and that easy addition to the flour/butter mix made it go very fast.

So voila!

********

Our second cake to test drive was the chocolate cake. Being allergic to soy it’s only been the last several years that I found chocolate without soy. As a result I had NEVER baked a chocolate cake. Go figure! So I figured why not my first chocolate cake be one that has been tested etc.

The goal was to make a chocolatey tasting cake but not a decadence cake with a fluffy frosting not a ganache or non-chocolate tasting frosting. There were issues with cooling the melted chocolate and not ‘cooking’ the eggs by adding the sugar too fast. And whipping cream was used in the frosting which probably added a few more pounds to me.

This cake took a little more time than the raspberry one and it took us much longer to devour because the chocolate was so intense.

The end result while good was a bit too chocolatey for me (ducking the tomatoes and eggs being thrown). Not being able to eat chocolate for so long means I eat it in small doses. The cake came out wonderful though and all was perfection as you can see.

Mother’s Day is just around the corner…I mean just! So what are you doing? Lavish gifts? Dinner out?  None of the above? Well if you’re like me and like to acknowledge all the mother’s you know, just not as lavishly as you do your own mother, then here are a few links for small crafts and cards to make for the special mother’s in your life.

Take Me Home: Printable Mother’s Day cards.

Mother’s Day Tissue Paper Card

Make Handmade Sachets for Mother’s Day

Spring Bouquet for your Mother’ Day table.

Darling and Cute Eco Mother’s Day Crafts

Mother’s Day Crafts for Kids to Make

Mother’s Day Cup and Saucer Flower Holder

This is one of those things everyone runs into but nobody really knows how to deal with it. Cleaning up packing peanuts. Made worse when your small angelic looking child gets into them. I have to open packages on the sly because Peanut LOVES packing peanuts.

When her father came home today he brought in a package and happily told her it was for her (it wasn’t). Inside were some of my goodies and…(danger music here) packing peanuts. She shouted for joy grabbed up all the packing peanuts and proceeded to make soup out of them, use them for a landing pool for her dolls, rub her head in them to get them to stick to her hair and then finally take her tricycle and ride through them (yeah I let her ride her bike up and down the front hall in the house) to break them up good and tiny. So we have a mess. This is all on carpet.

Surfing the internet I found countless stories to use a balloon. That did not work for us.

We know that static is the problem so get a paper bag so they don’t bounce around on you like happened to me many moons ago when I had a huge pile to dispose of.

So what did we do? Tape. Packing tape wrapped around every member of the family’s hands and start patting. When the tape is full toss. Vacuuming would work a bit too but can clog your vacuum and fill those not so cheap bags fast. Won’t really work if you have bagless either because once you opened it…WHAM! Back they come.

I hope this helps someone.

Well it’s gardening season again and we’ve started. How about you?

For the potatoes we are hoping to repeat the success we had growing the potatoes in the Smart Pots.

We are reusing the same Smart Pots. They have been rinsed and nicely stored since last season. I did find a few petrified bagworms embedded in the fabric but (deep breath) I’ve moved past it since my husband dug them out for me.

I’m kicking myself for not saving some of our potatoes over to plant. We ate the last of them about a month ago. So I reordered seed potatoes from Seed Savers. I purchase two variets. The same from last year, German Butterball, and a new variety, Purple Viking which has a white flesh and purple skin.  Both of these came in nice and large. Last year the German Butterball were kind of small and so were the tubers from our yield.

Now I have learned from the Homestead Blessing sisters and their homemaking gardening video that if you want larger tubers don’t cut your potatoes down. That’s it in a nutshell so don’t quote me but we had larger tubers from Seed Savers so we did not cut and we planted them whole. Even though they had several eyes per tuber.

Now to plant the potatoes we used 2 15 gallon and 1 30 gallon Smart Pots. We filled each pot halfway with potting mix that had mixed with 1 shovel full of peat moss. Then we added 3 tablespoons of Oscomote granules (don’t know the article said to use this fertilizer).  Then we stuffed about 5 potatoes per pot down in the stuff. We let Peanut do this and hope they are placed far apart enough. Then we watered.

Now we wait…(when the plants are about 3 inches above the soil line we are going to fill the rest of the pots with the same concentration of planting mix).

I struggle with sending birthday, new baby, conrgratulations, happy graduation, happy anniversary, on your new home, you name it, cards.  So Tiny Prints new greeting card service is perfect for me.

Tiny Prints already had adorable baby announcements, and wedding invitations, save the date and thank you cards but they just recently opened a new line of stylish printed greeting cards (birthdays, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day holidays, etc.) you can personalize, schedule and even send online. You can pay per greeting card or sign up for a membership plan to enjoy special pricing on every card you send, starting as low as $1.99 each.

There is also a pretty nice incentive to get you AND me signed up.

By the way I’m an affililiate for this stylish company where I promoted their darling baby announcements.

So what’s the incentive?

Your first year’s membership is fee is waived AND you get three free cards to fully grasp the program when you sign up for Tiny Prints Custom Greeting Cards Membership Plan.

Thank you those who took the time to enter my teeny tiny giveaway. It has ended and Random.org has picked a winner.

Clever Colleen has been picked by Random.org to receive her free online pass to Cindy Rushton’s 2010 Homeschool Expo Giveaway. So I’ll be contacting her with details.

Thank you!

Need some help gearing up for the new school year? Wish you had a friend to take you by the hand and help you plan your year?

For homeschoolers or those thinking about homeschooling this is the time of year to review what worked, what didn’t work, and what you would like to try for the coming school year. And Cindy Rushton’s Ultimate Homeschool Expo kicking off May 3-7th 2010 is a great place to start.

One of the great things about the Ultimate Homeschool Expo is that everything is ONLINE as more than a convention–it is the ULTIMATE homeschool resource library.

Just like a convention you attend in person (and I have definitely been to my share of those) you have…

• Over 30 speakers giving you workshops on their homeschooling specialty.
• Vendor booths where you can get freebies and  sample the best of homeschooling companies
• And finally the Mommy Grab Bag which includes thousands of dollars in free ebooks, audios, lesson plans, and more.

But unlike a conventions you attend in person you don’t have…

• To book a flight
• spend money on hotel, car rental, and food
• Put up with workshop scheduling conflicts. While it is wonderful if you can tune into workshops as they are happening you can also access recorded workshops in your membership only area for years to come.

With every online event that Cindy plans, she builds a private, exclusive Membership Site that includes everything from the Ultimate Homeschool Expo in one place–it has audios (from all of the sessions and from the bonus gifts from her speakers), ebooks, complete unit study guides, articles, printable notebooking pages, cookbooks, on and on. I can’t believe all of the things that we receive for only $39.95. It is a lot!

(CLOSED) GIVEAWAY DETAILS: So I’m giving a giveaway for one membership to the Ultimate Homeschool Expo.

• Contest Ends Wednesday April 28th which will hopefully give us enough time to get the winner their access code in time for the conference.
• Leave me a comment about your homeschooling journey. I like one entry person please. Keeps me less confused that way.  A simple comment is nice.
• Winner usually chosen by my lovely assistant (my five year old from a bucket of numbers) but if she is otherwise engaged then Random.org will do the honors.
• Um no country origin restrictions as this is an online event.

Want to see what theUltimate Homeschool Expo is about?

Well here is a sampler of one of Cindy’s free gifts that is included on the Membership Site. It is a audio and ebook set that she actually sells on her website, but she is giving away on the Membership Site. Here are your links…

Download Part 1

Download Part 2

Download mP3 Audio : Let’s Get Ready for a New School Year

Making Your Home Sing Monday. I didn’t think I was going to join another meme. They do take up time and many times they were took me out of my regular schedule so things would get out of sync. But alas during the Ultimate Blog Party hosted by 5 Minutes for Mom I found out about Moms the Word and Making Your Home Sing Monday.

Monday is my day to get the home back in order from a busy weekend. I know a lot of people clean up house on Saturday and the vintage schedule was to clean up on Friday but for me it’s Monday. I clean the bathrooms, do oodles of laundry, straighten up and even start some deep cleaning that I’ll finish up later in the week.

So LA LA LA LA LA LA LAAAAAAAA! Today to make my home sing I’m doing the regular Monday duties of cleaning two of the three bathrooms, washing towels, kitchen linens, darks, kid’s clothes, and work clothes, and cleaning up from the birthday party we hosted yesterday. I’ll also start spring cleaning the master bedroom.

And get this. Our vacuum died a couple of weeks ago. We have a new being delivered this week but I’ve been making do with a handvac. Oh well. No biggie.

We also have been deep into perfecting our cooking and that really makes our home sing but I have write up another post for that. It is involved.

To find out more about Moms the Word and Making Your Home Sing Monday, and what other’s are doing for a singing home visit Moms the Word

Even though I have some Spring Cleaning articles on the website I haven’t talked about what is going on in my own home.

Well up until maybe a week ago I was doing precious little in the deep cleaning in the home department.

Was I waiting for Spring Cleaning? No I don’t think so. I was just…waiting.

The winter can do that to you. But I knew it was time to kick it into gear and getting some things done. So here is what I’ve doing.

I like to focus on one section of the home a week because that means if I forget something one day I can do it  the next. Or if I’m too busy I can clean any other day of the week. Or I can clean as long or as short as I like because I have a whole week to get around to it or get it done.

I also ordered some green, pretty smelling cleaners. I needed some inspiration. And I did put together a nice upbeat gospel/southern gospel cd via iTunes to sing to with my daughter while we clean. That helps too.

So I have been cleaning the kitchen the last week or so. A little every other day or so but today I wanted to start focusing on a room per week. I’ll be coming back to the kitchen because I need to  workup a nightly quick clean set up like I  had in the last home. Did I mention that cooking is our family hobby (which I don’t write about nearly enough) so our kitchen gets kind of a workout.

Today I started with the Front Entrance. I have a small pergo floor there with plant, a small table for incoming mail and a chair which we pull in for dinner parties.

1. Pulled all items off the floor which included a boot drip tray or whatever they call it and an indoor rug for catching dirt. It has been said that you should have one on each side of the door….so I do.

2. Dusted high ledge above the door.

3. Dusted blinds (3 windows) and low ledges.

4. Dusted plant stand and polished small table

5. Cleaned windows (inside)

6. Wiped down walls and front door.

7. Vacuumed corners

8. Vacuumed throw rug (I should wash it but I need it right now) and swept floor

9. Mopped the floor

How long did it take? I have no idea. Maybe an hour with breaks to do something or other. I had dusting help from my 5 year old.

What’s next? I’ll check out the hall closet tomorrow and next week I would like to tackle the Master Bedroom dresser drawers mostly.