Our Green Life – Page 2 – The Creative Salad

Grow It, Cook It

Our daughter has been pouring over a fantastic gardening cookbook for kids: Grow It, Cook It: Simple Gardening Projects and Delicious Recipes. Yes, a book about gardening and cooking — two of our family’s most favorite things! This cookbook aims to get children involved in growing and preparing their own food. What better way to get kids excited about the food they eat than to grow and prepare it themselves!

Let’s head out to the garden and harvest some strawberries!

Grow It, Cook It presents how to grow a particular plant, and then incorporate it into a delicious recipe (with stunning photographs!). Here are some examples from the book:

The book also includes a section on seed saving:

Now to make something with our harvest of strawberries!

I think a batch of strawberry fruit spread is in order. That is if I can convince our daughter to stop gorging herself on the delicious berries. Who can blame her?! Homegrown produce tastes the best.

My (Lack of a) Summer Garden Plan

Our spring perennials are beginning to burst into bloom:

While we’re certainly enjoying the flowers in our front yard, I’ve made a radical decision regarding our vegetable garden this summer: we’re not going to plant one. I feel as though I only have so much time right now and I’d rather use that to dehydrate and can crops from friends’ trees and the farmer’s market than grow a meager supply of vegetables in our tiny front garden.

(I found making this decision–even typing it here!–to be so liberating, such a weight off my shoulders. Clearly this is what I need to do this year.)

I imagine that this is a temporary move and that we’ll plant a vegetable garden again next year, but this year we have other stuff going on. I can only do so much right now. My plate is full.

Not that I’m complaining! On the contrary, life is good!

Mud Pies

At least someone is happy about the gopher that has moved into the neighborhood. She now has fresh piles of dirt to play with every day thanks to its tunneling.

Tips: Landscaping for Privacy

I’ve been reading all sorts of wonderful gardening books from the library recently: Free-Range Chicken Gardens: How to Create a Beautiful, Chicken-Friendly Yard; Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living and The Essential Urban Farmer (never-mind that we live way out in the country!); Landscaping for Privacy: Innovative Ways to Turn Your Outdoor Space into a Peaceful Retreat; Grow Great Grub: Organic Food from Small Spaces; and Plants and Landscapes for Summer-Dry Climates of the San Francisco Bay Region.

I particularly enjoyed Landscaping for Privacy, which focuses on using natural elements to block out visual and auditory clutter. I loved their use of water to reduce ambient noise, round-up of fence materials (some familiar, others creative and new), methods to keep pests from vegetable gardens, ways to incorporate play spaces for kids, and delineate spots for dogs. Here’s a sneak peak inside the book, featuring some of my favorite pages to savor and enjoy:

Someday we’ll own our own place and then I’m buying a copy for sure. This book’s a keeper.

The Ladybug Release

Our tree kale unfortunately appears to have developed an aphid problem.

I secretly felt a little giddy over this scenario though because suddenly we had a great reason to buy 1,500 ladybugs to release in the garden!

We’re all about educational, non-toxic pest management in our house.

Unfortuantely the ladybugs weren’t the cure-all we were hoping for. We placed numerous ladybugs right on top of delicious aphids and, much to our horror, the ladybugs walked right by and completely ignored them:

Not the scenario I was anticipating. HOW DARE THOSE LADYBUGS IGNORE OUR APHIDS?! We bought them for a purpose, darn it. How could they not be hungry?!

I couldn’t help but vent my frustrations on twitter:

First the ladybugs skipped out on a tasty snack and then they flew the coop. Two days later, they were nowhere to be seen.

Yet here we are, a few weeks later, and our aphids seem to be disappearing. Perhaps a few ladybugs have lingered in our garden or I’ve simply been more diligent at removing infected leaves.

Regardless, the whole ladybug release experience was so much fun that we want to do the whole thing over again. I may have to take a trip down to our neighborhood hardware store and pick up a few more ladybugs.

Who can resist a practical, fascinating, eco-groovy, AND super fun home-school activity?!