Happy Thanksgiving to all my readers! Thank you for subscribing to my blog and for your visits. Thanksgiving is a very special holiday to me. I began this blog a little over a year ago and Thanksgiving was the first big set of posts I was able to upload. Thank you for allowing me to do what I enjoy to do. I love cooking and I’m very glad to be able to cook for my family, and I’m glad I can share my recipes and experiences with each one of you. Let’s make this new year a better one, and I hope you get the opportunities and/or motivations to accomplish some of the things you’ve always desired too! Have a great day and happy thanksgiving!
My Updates and Questions
Hey. I feel like it’s been forever since I’ve done a more casual and less scripted post. I guess that leads me to the questions I have. What do you think of the new format of my recipe posts? This is the second time I’ve altered the format for how I write these recipes in the last year. I’ve been moving more in the direction of how others do their recipe formatting. List the ingredients, and list each step with photos of that step. I also added the option to download the recipe as a recipe card. Is that helpful? Should I instead be formatting them as a whole page instead of 4×6 note card sized?
Lately, I’ve been trying to update some of my older posts a bit. I have so many more tags then a used to, and so I’ve begun adding newer tags to older posts. I’ve also been considering revisiting my older posts to remake them. My old phone had terrible photo quality, so many of my old posts were edited to remove the shake or grainy texture of the photos. I would really like to re-do many of them, but it will take some major time. Also, if I hear you like the format of these new posts, I will reformat older posts to fit the new style.
My plans for the blog are still moving forward. This week I got a tripod, so I’ll be trying that out on some older recipes. I will be posting the link to the YouTube once it’s up and I’ll be announcing it on every platform. I’m also thinking about holding off on Instagram for now. I don’t really know what to post, and when I do it’s not great engagement, which is understandable since it’s a completely different kind of website/app.
Projects right now are relatively slow around the house. We are preparing for hunting season and winter. The garlic was planted 3 weeks ago, and one of my garlic cloves sprouted after just a week, so it’s one of the few green things left in the yard. My peach tree has lost all it’s leaves overnight and we’ve had only two frosts so far this fall. My marigolds are still blooming in my raised beds, and though I’d like 2-3 more raised beds for next year, our priorities are elsewhere, so it’ll wait till the spring. Since we finished the master bedroom, no more flooring has come up or gone down. We are planning a yard sale for next summer though. Josh and I both have things we don’t need or use, so we plan a yard sale and a couple family picnics next summer since most family members haven’t seen the house since we moved in 15 months ago.
This virus has been pretty hard for us. We think we may have had it in May, but it’s impossible for us to know with all the testing being so limited where we are. With the second flu season coming, we are exposed to more people who are sick and it seems impossible to know who has it, and if you can even get it twice. When we were sick in May, we were mostly asymptomatic. I had a fever and a cough, and Josh didn’t even have that. However, when my mom got sick she was sick. And, this weekend I lost a Great-Great Uncle to the virus. He did have many existing issues and he’s been holding on for a while, but he got sick from a home nurse and that was it.
What a crazy time we live in. I wonder who will be looking back at our writings someday and what will they say or feel about this. It’s crazy in the U.S. right now, but at the same time, everyone is still just trying to live. For some, life has gone completely back to normal, while others are in a completely new situation and just trying to get their bearings. For some, their business is booming and has never done better, and for others their dream has been crush with lock downs and regulations they just can’t meet. Jobs, families, businesses, so many things affected. It stinks that so much bad is happening to so many people right now. However, I am very thankful for what I have. Things haven’t been easy with friends and family getting sick, being trapped inside with limited interactions with the world, and watching helplessly as we can just wait. But, we are thankful for what we do have. We are thankful for the changing seasons, for the warm days and the rain, for the food in our stomachs, and for the coming opportunity to once again fellowship with others when we are allowed to. Look forward to the future. Make goals and dream. Don’t stay in the sorrow of right now and instead look forward to the spring. This is just another season in life.
Mid-September Garden Update
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As a first year gardener, I don’t know much about gardening. As a result, I do lots of research and planning, and even still it seems with gardening you just have to learn from your mistakes. The first frost is coming this weekend and I’ve already retired most of my garden. There are a few radishes in the ground still forming, green tomatoes sitting on the vine, and the lettuce flowers beginning to open. The only color that remains in my garden is three marigolds that are still thriving despite the temperatures. My house plants will be coming inside tonight to prepare for the frost, and soon my husband and will be struggling to find enough room to keep them for another winter.
There are so many things I wanted to do in the garden still, but yet the first frost is nearly here. I was able to amend one raised bed. I added manure and peat moss. I mixed it into the top few inches, and covered it with another thin layer of mulch. I had planned to plant garlic this fall, but with the first frost among us, it is likely too late. I may still try to get it in the ground, but we will have to see if it will warm back up at night after this frost. And to protect it from the frost, we’ll likely use hay bales to protect from frost. We’ll have to see when it comes.
I have a small patch of dill growing that I planted this fall. My tomatoes and lettuce will also be adversely affected by the frost. Once they are done, we will amend that bed too with more manure and peat moss. My biggest lesson this year was to keep healthy soil. My tomatoes performed poorly in comparison to most everyone, and though I want to blame the very dry and hot summer, I am sure the poor quality soil played the largest part in that. We also learned our lesson with netting, and that chicken wire is superior to a plastic net that can still let in all sorts of critters.
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Much thought has been going into a garden for next growing season as well. I am researching when to pull crops and when to plant new, when to start seedlings inside, and what crops do well in the spot of another crop. The plans have become more finalized, and I think I found a setup I prefer. Researching, I found a new way to string up beans/peas. It includes making a wooden frame, then using 100% cotton string as the trellis. This is a huge improvement from the plastic and metal my beans grew through this year. Pulling my beans took so long because of all the tangling and growing into the plastic. So this way of trellising will be an improvement and pulling the plants will be way easier too, and the string 100% cotton can be composted, unlike plastics or other artificial materials.
If I do get my garlic soon, I will do a post about that, but otherwise, my garden is just about done for the year. Thank you to everyone who has been seeing and checking up on my progress. Gardening has been a lot of fun and I am very excited to see what next year holds!
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August 2020 Garden Update
August was an eventful month in the garden. In the beginning of the month, I pulled a tomato plant because of fungus. On the 27th, I pulled my cucumbers from the fabric pots. They began forming very misshapen fruits, and the leaves were dying off rather fast. I also planted radish seeds that day in the two open fabric pots and in the free rows of the raised beds. They already have decent sized sprouts, and the rainy weather helps too. I noticed several of my tomatoes had blossom end rot, but I added some crushed egg shells and with lots of rain in the forecast, it had only happened to 3 tomatoes. Finally, I also ordered garlic to be planted beginning to mid-October. I tried to grow garlic last winter, but I really had no idea what I was doing, so they didn’t make it through the freeze. Finally, I’ve also begun trying to root a pineapple top. And, I found a volunteer pumpkin vine by the house.
I’ve also been thinking extensively about the garden for next Spring, Summer, and Fall. Josh and I plan to build 2 more 8X3 or 4 beds. We plan on placing them by our baby peach tree and we plan to place lower maintenance plants there, though I check on my garden at least once a day. Beans grew really well for us this year, so we plan to grow more green beans. We bought heirloom garlic from MI Gardener, so we plan to grow 3 varieties. We didn’t have much luck at all with tomatoes this summer, so though I’ll be more careful next year to water more often and soak them, I plan to up our quantity to 10 tomato plants with 2 heirloom varieties. I’d like to grow bell and banana peppers next year, potatoes and sweet potatoes, cabbage, broccoli, and more onions, but this time from seed. And, once garlic in harvested in July, we’ll wait about a month or so, and plant some peas. We are ambitious, but this summer has been such a blessing to us that we’d love to have even more fresh veggies next year! We would plant zucchini, yellow squash, or eggplant, but my in-laws always grow lots, so we help absorb some of their excess. Finally, we contemplated more carrots, growing celery, and beets, but we’d like to grow the garden in increments that won’t overwhelm me, and hopefully doubling in size won’t be too much.
This summer we also got quite a bit of seed from our garden. The radish seed pods below is about 1/2 the quantity I got from about 4-5 plants I let go to seed. It took me about 3 hours to break and filter out the seed, and I easily have 100-200 seeds. I also got 3 onion flowers from my sets this year. They formed seeds, but I want at least one other variety, so I will also be buying a packet of seeds. Finally, as I mentioned, my green beans have been doing great. We were harvesting once a week, but just Monday when I was harvesting, I found about 3 pods that were drying. So, I also got 12 new seeds from that, and I will now be harvesting beans twice a week until they slow down. I also am letting my lettuce go to seed, though we’ll see how far they get before I turn my beds.
August 18
August 27
September 1
Plants Outside the Garden
One Year Update
Listing Photos
It all started with my Starting Point post. There I wrote my initial thoughts and ideas for this house as recorded last November. We bought this house and found many things wrong with it. We starting putting work into the house starting last October/November, and below is what we were able to accomplish so far.
Current Progress
As you can see just between the first set of photos and the second, we’ve made some big changes. We removes trees and bushes, put in raised beds, added an exterior door on the garage, and changed the accent color on the house from red to teal. Inside, we removed a lot of the latex paint off the utility room walls, we built and removed our builtin pantry, and installed a storage shelf instead. We removed the broken dishwasher and sealed the space to be used for my canning stuff. We also upgraded the light in the kitchen, painted cabinets, remove the old range microwave and added a new range-hood, as well as replaced the old leaking kitchen faucet. In the dining room, we refinished the wall after removing about 1/3 of the wallpaper in the house, and we also created a lampshade for our single handing bulb from a lantern we used at our wedding reception. We haven’t done too much to the living room yet; we added a projector screen and are mainly using it for storing some of our extra stuff until we finish the master bedroom. We replaced the light fixture in the hall, and upgraded all the light switches in the house to the rocker style. We repainted the bathroom, removed the medicine cabinet, changed the light fixture, and painted the vanity and changed the hardware. We also added a new shower curtain to match. In the original green room, due to it’s carpet color, we originally replaced the floor in the closet with vinyl planking. After seeing how easy it was, we took on the task of redoing the entire rooms floor, which was not an easy task. we remove the wood from the closet to be replaced with matching floor eventually, I also painted the bedroom the two shades of orange, we moved in, and that is the state of our orange room. Finally, our current project is the master bedroom, or our new green room. We just finished laying the flooring on Saturday. There is still a lot of work we want to do in that room before the new unveiling, but I hope this helps build some excitement for the next unveiling, which will be coming in the next two weeks or so.
A Year’s Worth of Projects
A year is so long, yet so short. We were able to accomplish so much because of the blessing we’ve received this year and from taking things in stride. We are happy for our new experiences and are content with this house even as we continue to find more problems. We aren’t sure if we’ll keep this house forever, but we are happy for all the good things this house is providing for us. This Lustron gives my husband and I something to do together, to bond over, and to dream for. We hope for nothing but the best for this house in the future, and we hope our fingerprint on this house improves the beauty of this old Lustron, rather than hinders it’s potential.
For more on our home improvement posts from this year, feel free to check out any of this posts below. If not, I’ll see you again soon!
Our Lustron Home 