B: 8 months and counting

Round about September 2008 we walked down to the Whole Foods and picked up some pints of ice-cream and ate them outside. It was a pleasant evening and cheaper than Baskin Robbins. We ate our ice cream with some nifty spoons that claimed to be bio-degradable....I thought neat! Let's see how fast they degrade, so I tossed one in the compost bin. 

It persisted through the last hot days, and there it stayed through the winter. I had forgotten about it until I was turning over the pile the other day and harvesting some nice compost for the garden.....Not only has it not degraded, but if you cleaned it up it would be indistinguishable from what it looked like when it was brand new.

I don't know how it would in a saturated environment, and it would probably prove to be digestible by animals, which plastic isn't, but it sure as hell won't break down in a landfill if it can survive my compost pile. I am a huge fan of plastic alternatives, but I guess I have some alternative expectations for what Biodegradable ought to mean. 

yard

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Another reason to like Sacramento… Free trees! All you have to do is call up the county and a tree guy will come out to your house and tell you where you have room for more trees. Then you choose from a list and they bring the trees to your house! (Well supposedly they bring the trees. We’re still waiting for them.) Way cool. We’re expecting two lavender crepe myrtles. (I didn't know what crepe myrtles either until we moved here and saw them everywhere, and realized that we totally had to have one.) Here's a picture of one:

Pretty, no?

We’ve also been working doing a bunch of cleanup from the summer season. B got up on the roof last weekend and hacked down a whole bunch of tree while I stayed down on the ground and cleaned up our tomatoes and weeds. I also got to pull out a bunch of little miniature trees that have been sprouting up, which while exhausting, was satisfying too.

i fought the ivy...

(not quite sure who won.)

Back when we lived in the northwest, we spent a couple Earth Day weekends pulling ivy from the local state park - it was an invasive species and it was killing the trees and all that other hippie crap. This year, we inadvertently spent the weekend before Earth Day pulling ivy, this time from our backyard. And this was some serious ivy. Serious. Root balls the size of four pregnant watermelons. Bugs and spiders and snails and mold. And the occasional pool toy from the next door neighbors. Needless to say, it was A LOT of work. Above is the before picture - this was actually taken before we even bought the house, and it's kinda hard to tell, but the ivy had pretty much taken over the whole yard. We now have most of the ivy out, but I'm still sore. We'll see how much comes back next year...

After. It's hard to get a perspective, but that pile is less than half of what we got out.

But we did manage to get in a few tomato and basil plants! And we also found the solution to our yard waste problem - after two months of diligently cramming our yard waste bin full every two weeks, we found out that we can just call up the county and they'll come out and pick up our giant pile free! Why didn't any of our neighbors that gave us crap for the giant pile in our driveway mention that? Did they really think we wanted that there? Whatever. At least it'll ALL be gone next week.

B: Happenings

It's been a while so I thought I might post some news and happenings.

Mandy and I were both down in S. California last week. I was there for work, but Mandy ended up coming down at the same time to be with her mother who was sick. It was great that we could both be down there with Lily to help her parents out. Her Mom is doing a lot better, and it definitely seemed like having Lily around helped distract her and brighten her up during her recovery.

Lily is now 10 months give or take a few days. She is trying to stand independently and falling a lot. She shuffles along the furniture, and manges to get into her fair share of trouble already. Crazy stuff! We make it a rule not to post pics of ourselves or Lily. Instead here are some actual lillies. These are in my front yard. They look the best that they ever have. I guess 3 years of neglect is really paying off.

We cook even more than we used to and I feel like we are both getting to be pretty decent though we still have a lot to learn. Mandy made a lemon blueberry tart while Lily napped today which I think looks super awesome. We are both stoked to cut into this sucker tonight. We just finished some homemade icecream last night. I made mexican chocolate cherry almond. It was pretty good and a bit spicy. Unfortunately I failed to grab a pic.

If we are lucky maybe Mandy will have a few free minutes some day soon and she will post about her socks....They are pretty sweet.

B: wilted greens

We recently made a pasta dish from the JOC using spicy italian pork sausage, and rapini (broccoli rabe) from the farmers market and it was so amazing that we had to make it again, but we decided to try it with mustard greens instead. Wow! Was that ever a difference. The greens were tougher and so mustardy spicy that it clashed with the sausage. I haven't used mustard greens in the past and we weren't expecting it to be that strong!

This got me wondering, how does one do mustard greens properly?



On other fronts, the tomatos are rocking this year. I have some greens on the vine and hope to have ripe fruit by late july at the latest. We largely boycott those awful red orbs one buys at the supermarket because they are so bad. Waiting for the awesome home grown tomatoes makes this time of year paticularly enjoyable. Dreaming of the bruschetta to come...