Home Quotes

Fallen LeavesOctober 28, 2010 A sure sign of winter approaching is the falling leaves.  We get a lot of leaves because we have 3 large maple trees in our back yard and the neighbours on both sides of us each have a large maple tree.  Across the road in front of our house there are more trees that drop leaves, neighbouring properties with lots of trees and our huge, old willow tree.  Most of our ...

Hi there! I hope that you had a great week. Like I said in my last post, we have been extremely busy around here.  I can’t believe that my last post was on Monday night!  I have not been a good blogger lately…opps! I am ready for trick-or-treating this weekend, how about you? I have told you all before that I receive a lot emails from my Shaklee customers telling me how satisfied they are with their new ...

When frost threatens the garden, bringing in potted plants and tender plants is an ideal way to keep plants for the next spring.  There are a couple of problems with bring in plants with the main one introducing insects indoors.  I kid you not, I brought in an asparagus fern that hid a spider almost the size of a quarter!  Other common insects in potted plants are ants, earwings and pill bugs.  ...

I've been following a discussion about the 5 crops (foods) that should be grown for sustainable living in uncertain times.  They are: potatoes, corn, beans, squash and eggs.  My gosh I have to say I disagree with the potatoes and corn.  I will be discussing this in greater detail on my cooking blog but from a gardening perspective you really do need a fair amount of space to grow enough potatoes ...

Palm TreeOctober 7, 2010Palm trees are very popular where our vacation home is.  They are rather problem free, tolerating the heat and humidity well.  Pictured is one of the palm trees near our vacation home.  Now palms actually come with one itsy, bitsy problem.  They attract palmetto bugs aka American cockroach.  I am not impressed with palmetto bugs at all even though I know they don't bite ...

CaladiumOctober 6, 2010 I love doing a bit of garden surfing so to speak in our vacation home community. Our vacation home is is Zone 9B so considerably warmer than our home Zone 6 B.  That means I get to discover a lot of rather interesting tropical plants.  This is a showy bulbaceous bulb that does not do well at temperatures below 60ºF.  While I won't be able to grow this gorgeous plant ...

I hope that you all had a great weekend! I wanted to show you how the hubs and I have a date night in.  It is hard for us to get out sometimes but that doesn’t mean we can’t have a date in. We were supposed to go out and plans changed so I went to my favorite store…the good old Trader Joes and picked up our date food.    I was really in the mood for a wine and cheese kinda thing.   So I ...

Corking in Jalapeno PeppersOctober 22, 2010I picked a fair amount of various peppers over the last few days in anticipation of frost soon to come.  Pictured are some of the jalapeno peppers.  See the thin white striations on the lower three jalapeno peppers?  These striations are known as corking.  Some believe that corking is an indication of that jalapeno pepper being hotter than those with ...

Do you Know Amaretto Vineyard? Jessica is a wife and mother to a beautiful girl.  She is a crafter, cook, bargain-hunter and loves anything thrifty! Recently she purchased some Get Clean products from me and she wanted to share her experience with us and she included her before and after pictures! I hate to clean. I do it every now and then because if I did not, well, my house would soon look like this: ...

Potted OnionsOctober 22, 2010The milder weather has given me extra time to get plants indoors.  Yesterday I brought in a pot of onions.  I planted the onions in early June but by mid-July they were pretty much done.  I intended to dump the pot and replant but forgot.  When we returned home from our September vacation I was pleasantly greeted with some rather healthy looking growth.  It looks ...

The sky was a gorgeous blue yesterday morning.  It had rained the night before so I was waiting for the gardens to dry a bit before raiding them again.  I figured I would get the last of any of the green tomatoes since if a frost hits them they won't ripen off the vine and gathering a few herbs.  I didn't get the chance.  By afternoon the skies turned ominous looking then let out a blast of ha ...

Last Large Vegetable Harvest of 2010October 20, 2010  My gosh, by any stretch of the imagination home gardeners and commercial growers in our area have not had a good growing season.  Despite that the fall has been rather on the mild side meaning the garden has been producing longer than normal.   It is beyond our ADFF and we have yet to have a frost.  The weather is turning and based on the ...

Halloween is here ! I see people decorating their homes and I am so inspired. Every year its fun to try new decoration ideas and get creative. For some like me, internet comes to rescue. Halloween decoration is specially fun because of the wackiness and crazy ideas.I have put together a few decoration ideas for Halloween to inspire you to create your own. Most of these are past year's inspiration from Pottery barn, and ...

Halloween is here ! I see people decorating their homes and I am so inspired. Every year its fun to try new decoration ideas and get creative. For some like me, internet comes to rescue. Halloween decoration is specially fun because of the wackiness and crazy ideas.I have put together a few decoration ideas for Halloween to inspire you to create your own. Most of these are past year's inspiration from Pottery barn, and ...