When I was a little kid, one of my best friends had a big hedge of lilacs at her house. We played in her backyard a lot. Those were the days! I liked the lilacs so much that we tried to grow one at mom's house, but it never blossomed.

Years later, when I had my first architecture job just after high school, my boss would send me on errands around the Twin Cities. I enjoyed those trips because it got me out of the office and I got to see our project sites. Close to the office was a hedge of lilacs on a busy side street, and in the summer it was the best spot to drive through with the windows open. I took that route as often as possible.

_Everywhere I looked there were lavender scented products, but never any lilac. It was disappointing because in my mind lilac is so much better. Somewhere my longtime best friend found lilac scented essential oil for one of those candle burner things, and gave the set to me for my birthday. It's a reasonable facsimilie of lilac flowers.

We don't have lilacs at my house, so I like to smell the flowers of the currants on the side of the house and wild honeysuckle that's around some roads here. The young citrus trees I have in the family room have magnificently sweet smelling flowers once in a while. The front yard rose bush is also lovely and I hope for more roses this year.

I still wish for lilacs sometimes. The scent reminds me of being young and free, happy and having fun in the sun. No other flower or scent of any kind has matched the feeling I get from real lilacs.

This lighthearted break from the day is brought to you by LetsBlogOff, where they ask today to describe what smell takes you back. For other olfactory journeys, see below:

Our Eggzy egg stand (Holcombe Fluffs) is here, where you can see how many dozen are available, etc.

Anyway, I'm actually not a big egg-eater usually. I don't like eggs over easy. I'm not a big fan of the well-done version (which I don't know the terminology for). Lately I've been eating eggs over medium. This is a new concept for me. It's like Goldilocks and the three bears. A coworker at my temporary job (if you're on my LinkedIn you might know what this is) last fall introduced me to them.

Most egg recipes are too complicated. If I decide to have eggs, it's out of necessity and I have to get it done fast. Like if I just worked out or was crashing on a project and suddenly realized I forgot lunch. (If you're an architect you know how THAT goes...) So over-medium is great for me. I got used to scrambled and omelettes as a kid, but don't have the patience for them now.

So here's the question; do you have a recipe that rivals the ease of 'eggs over...' and if so will you please share it with me? I need a little variety, but it's gotta be simple, ya get me? Feel free to share with the world in the comments or send an email to greenrascal@gmail.com

Also, if you're within 50 miles of Conshohocken PA, and would like to buy some eggs, the fluffies would be ever so happy to provide them to you. ;)

Thanks!

My grandparents waited a long time before my mom and dad came along. Their lives were very difficult, and most of them were long gone before Mom and Dad had me. So the theme of today's blogoff, "My grandmother always said..." strikes me a different way... My only surviving genetic grandparent was very ill when I knew him, and I don't think he spoke English at the time.

So there were things that Mom did that I thought were a bit strange.

_When I was a kid most of my classmates were dressed in all the latest trends and didn't seem to have a care in the world. My mom was raising me by herself and we couldn't afford any of that. In order to make my childhood halfway decent she practiced many things that her parents had done all their lives because they had been so affected by the Great Depression.

She saved containers. You know those zip lock bags that nobody gives a second thought to? Mom washed them out and hung them upside down over the kitchen faucet over night for them  to dry out. I think each zip bag probably got used 20 times before it was decommissioned. She reused bread bags and shopping bags, also. For a long time she watered plants with emptied orange juice jugs before getting a watering can. Our charcoal grill lighting procedure involved a coffee can that she pierced several times to create the stack effect. Coffee cans held many foodstuffs in our cabinets. Those tins that you could buy Christmas cookies in? Yeah we put flour and brown sugar in those. I'm sure she still has some from 15 or 20 years ago.

I admire this about my mom. Most people throw things away at the drop of a hat. It's very wasteful and expensive. By reusing these things Mom saved herself tons of money.

She saved water. You know that novel idea about shutting the water off when you're brushing your teeth? Yeah I've done that my whole life. Mom never had a dishwasher. Her dish washing procedure was finely tuned to use every bit of that water to the fullest. First we washed the glasses because they were likely the cleanest things after a meal. Then we washed utensils because they need to be spotless to be appealing. Then lightly used dishes, followed by heavily used dishes. Pots and pans were absolutely last. We never drained the water until after the pots and pans were done being washed and everything was ready to be rinsed. We also rarely towel dried the last load of dishes because air drying was supposed to be cleaner and it would dirty the dish drying towel more, which would require us to wash it that much sooner. No laundry was ever washed in a small load. And no lawn-watering ever happened in the middle of the day unless it was so I could run through the sprinkler for fun to stay cool in the humid mid-continental Minnesota summer.

I'm grateful to my mom for teaching me to use water sparingly because water is one of our most endangered resources, and costly too. These days when our water could easily become contaminated with chemicals leaking from any number of sources, it's important to use what clean water we have carefully.

She lived and worked in the same town. When I was very young mom's office was less than 7 miles away. It was fairly far in my opinion. At some point in my pre-teen years her company moved from the country "into town." It still wasn't a very central location in our small town of under 2000 people back then, but it was now within a couple miles of home. She worked for the same company for upwards of 25 years, and when she retired she started working for a nature center in a park system which is the farthest I can remember her going to work. It is less than 20 miles from her home.

I wish things could be that easy now. I always wanted to work in the town where I lived. Unfortunately for me things are different now, and when I started working/going to college, I had to drive at least 40 miles one way to get there. For a short time after graduate school I was really feeling good because I both lived and worked in Conshohocken, and made a good salary. I still do, but it's here for myself and the salary is not anything to boast about. Hubby has always worked at least an hour's drive away from home.

So actually we are doing okay despite a serious funds crunch due to this recession because my grandparents were out there on their own having kids during the depression, and they adapted and never changed. Mom kept up some of their practices and taught them to me, and thank goodness! I believe when we have kids of our own that they will be able to take on similar challenges and be equally successful.


To here more uplifting stories from today's blogoff participants, check below :)

Thanks for reading, and be well!

I feel like I'm about to step into an old Cher song or Days of Our Lives or something, but today's blogoff seemed like a worthy topic despite my serious lack of said time today. The editors simply asked "What would you change if you could turn back time?"

There are lots of things I can think of that are regrettable in my past, but when I think about going back and changing them I realize that any change I made would alter myself as I am. And I like myself as I am. (Even though I have serious flaws, my mom says everybody has always been totally impressed with me, but she's my mom.) But I would like to have been less sensitive as a young person.

Being a highly sensitive person causes a lot of problems. My family has struggled with this condition as long as I can remember, or so my mom tells me. It has lead to a lot of anguish over such insignificant things that you would probably find it laughable. If I wasn't such a sensitive person I'd laugh too! But anyway, that is the one thing I wish I could go back and change.

I would go back to when I was 6 and sitting on the steps outside my house crying because I "had no friends," or "nobody likes me," and put an arm around my shoulder and say something to make me feel better. No idea what that might sound like... But I was always upset because kids were mean and I cried easily so they found it amusing to pick on me. Of course my mom tried to help, but...

Maybe I'd have to go back farther and somehow change whatever gene controls hyper-sensitivity somehow. Being not a scientist, I'm not sure how that would work. But if that would have made the difference between being timid and normal, I think I'd do it. Now, naturally, things are better. But I could do without such things as "call reluctance," "holiday depression," "post-holiday stress disorder," low self-esteem, and being easily overwhelmed...

I wonder what everybody else would change:

Thanks for reading, and you guys rock!

... to help you see the light. We have several websites to share as well as good old fashioned books. If you check these things out and decide you want help with planning a garden, I will be happy to help you. No project is too small.

We're not just doing this for the money - even though I do need some money to make the business sustainable. The goal really is to help people live better and eat better. I don't care what class you are, if you're interested in pesticide free food there is no better place to turn than your own yard. We also welcome the chance to be doing pro-bono work.

Here is the thing you super lazy people should pay attention to. The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka is a great book. I've talked about it before. In this book you will learn about the "do nothing agriculture" Mr. Fukuoka advocates. On page 15 he describes it as "farming as simply as possible within and in cooperation with the natural environment, rather than the modern approach of applying increasingly complex techniques..."

I also like this stuff because it's kinda like feng shui, which you may or may not know about. I've been a student of feng shui for many years, and it's also about working with your surroundings and keeping things simple (imho).

You DO NOT have to till the soil. You DO NOT have to weed. You DO NOT have to spray pesticides or fertilizers. Here are a few other people who agree, and they talk about it in different ways:

Paul Wheaton is one of our go-to peeps for info on how to do stuff. His site, richsoil.com is full of interesting stuff. You can regularly find Chris on the Permaculture Forums asking questions and inserting 2 cents. The picture above is from Paul Wheaton's site where he talks about Sepp Holzer - a very knowledgeable man who I think started the permaculture movement.

The book, Sepp Holzer's Permaculture, is a great guide. It's fairly dense with information. Pages 16 and 17 have pictures of what you would call weeds that can actually help you determine what kind of soil you have and therefore what kind of plants you can plant right away. He has a big section on fruit trees which we like. It's unfortunate that we're not able to get trees the way Sepp recommends, but even a disadvantaged fruit tree is better than a non-edible tree. You can learn a lot about grafting in this book as well.

Bullock's Permaculture Homestead is a good example of all these principles at work. If you're ever in their area, go check them out!

For a more local resource if you're in PA, there is Penn's "Fruits for Home Gardeners" by Joe Volk. Here is where we found out about the Korean Giant pear tree which we have in the front yard, as well as some other plants we have. (the "giant" pear tree is actually a dwarf variety!)

perennialvegetables.org has a long list of perennials for every area of the US for those of you who are elsewhere. You have to be willing to do a little research, though, because the plants are listed by scientific name. I push that work off on Chris because I'm not that into long words I can't pronounce.

I almost forgot to mention Gaia's Garden. The pictures on pages 38 and 39 show you the kind of keyhole gardens I have been planning for our front yard, and which I believe can work for many people more elegantly than straight rows. This book also discusses the herb spiral, which I've talked about before too. The text can be dense here also, but I would suggest checking out the "Plants for Many Uses" and "Creating Communities for the Garden" chapters. If this seems scary, again, we'd be happy to help.

I'll have to talk about where to get plants from because typically people get damaged or diseased plants that they know nothing about at big box stores. Sometimes big box stores have something good, don't get me wrong. Our black raspberry is from Home Depot. But for the most part you should look for plants at higher quality nurseries. Next time!

For our first attempt it is not bad. It has a funny after-taste which can be attributed to a couple different things.

First of all, our initial airlock was pretty pathetic. Before we got the nifty cork with a hole in it, we probably got too much air into the bottle. Related to that, we didn't fill the bottle up enough. Also, we used champagne yeast. I'm not sure how much of the weirdness can be attributed to the particular kind of yeast we used, but it's there for what it's worth.

But everybody who had some of the strawberry wine said it was great and how much they liked it. Maybe they were just trying to make me happy because it was my birthday. I'll believe them anyway.

Since then we got this big ol' fermentation crock.

She kinda has a personality all her own. The first thing we put in there was ginger and daikon radish. The ginger is from Whole Foods Market, and the daikon is from the garden. (I love daikon.) The ginger is still in there, and the radish got really soft really fast and had to be removed and put in the fridge. So that 'recipe' is not so great.

The two rings of the pot which you can see form the air lock where the lid of the crock sits. Water goes in this 'moat' of sorts, and when the fermentation action creates enough gas to lift the lid out of the water, it can escape safely. This creates an odd random burping sound.

Eventually hubby hopes to start making kimchi. He's fairly obsessed I think.

Also, we're making honey mead.

This is a very simple recipe using only 3 cups of honey and 12 cups of water. We mixed it together and let it sit with a cloth over it for a few days or so, and then added the yeast and put it in a bottle to ferment. This fermentation is FAST. The airlock clicks about once a minute. (and it is driving me nuts!) This was started about a week ago and has only about a week left.

Here is a video of the action. (Our first video on this blog!)

I suppose that's all for now. There will be plenty of fermentation going on as the new year progresses, so I'm sure I'll be revisiting this topic. weeeee.

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Personally, I'm not sure we're going to get any asian pears in 2013 (which would be the third year since we planted the saplings), but they are growing pretty fast. You get the picture. Feel free to ask questions and I'll have Chris come answer them.