• Gardening

    Taking Time to Putter

    These days I’m finding myself in a state of go-go-go in the gardens. Rarely am I stopping to just see what I see, to sample a bit of what is going on—there are so many weeds to pull, plants to trim back, and who-knows-what-else to do in this frenzy of summer. On Tuesday I got called to pick Forest up early because his low grade fever from the morning had morphed into something a little higher and he was crankier than usual. He’s finally cutting a few more teeth and paired with allergies that keep trying to turn into another cold, he wasn’t feeling very well. We settled in for…

  • Gardening

    Soaking It In

    Do I dare say that it’s hot? I mean, it is summer. That’s what summer is about. But it’s slowly turning into the phase of summer where anything after 11am until after 5pm you don’t want to venture out unless you are swimming in water. It’s almost like winter where we hibernate for awhile inside. For most of the garden plants this is their thriving point of the year, such as the daturas. They’ve grown by leaps and bounds and are flowering away, already producing seed pods to spring forth new progeny next year. In the compost bin an unknown cucurbit sprouted and has since climbed about 12′ up the…

  • Memes

    Life Lately: Late June 2016

    +In My Head Not a lot, actually. Well, I take that back. A lot, actually, it just switches often. Let’s see if I can bullet point it… Privatized prisons: This is thanks to OITNB, more commentary below. Brexit: For once it was nice to see my social media feed filled with another country’s/dominion’s politics. I wish I’d known a little bit more about the implications before it happened—that’s my fault for trying to keep my head in the ground with the news these days. Eating/Conversing while a toddler is present: I remember watching my SIL (and this still happens, actually) as she got up and down, up and down, while…

  • Food,  Gardening,  Vegetable and Fruit Portraits

    Blackberry Kombucha Shrub

    I started making kombucha in August of 2013 (and side note to that post: A 10pm run to Walgreens for sugar? Oh man, I miss those days of randomly running out to the store at weird hours. That *does not* happen now with a toddler. Making kombucha at 10pm also does not happen!) and I’ve kept it up on and off in the years since. Brewing and drinking kombucha is definitely cyclical, with months of being very interested in having the drink around and other months where the batch sits in the closet just hanging out until I’m in the mood for a new batch. For those months that the…

  • Gardening,  Thoughts

    On Podcasting

    When I started The Garden Path Podcast late last year I knew that it would be hard work but that I would enjoy it. Podcasting takes oogles more time than writing a blog, at least for me. I thought I’d break down some thoughts here about these first six months. Overall Goals It was originally the Cultivate Simple podcast that really got me into listening to podcasts. I’d dabbled in them before that but they really weren’t terribly popular yet. Podcasting has been around since the mid-2000s so it wasn’t even a new format at that point in time when I started listening to Cultivate Simple, but it wasn’t as…

  • Gardening,  Thoughts

    These Days in the Vegetable Garden

    Today we’re wrapping up 11 days of Forest and I flying solo around here. Chris has been in northeast Texas doing field work. I’m trying to determine, I think it might be the longest stretch of time he’s been away since Forest has been here. When I found out a few months ago that Chris was going to be gone for this long amount of time I asked my parents if they would want to spend a long weekend with me, because, well, have you solo parented a toddler? It’s kind of hard, especially when there’s things to do around here! Thankfully they were up for coming down and helping…

  • Hiking,  Outdoors,  Texas,  Travel & Places

    Hiking Adventure on the Nature Trail at Fairfield Lake State Park

    Everyone but my dad set out for a hike Sunday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend. Dad stayed back to hang out with their dog Daisy. We weren’t sure exactly how long this trail was because unlike many other Texas state parks there wasn’t an individual trail map for the state park. The trail was on the campground map but there weren’t really any distinguishing marks to estimate the distance of the trail. And to make matters more complicated, wires were crossed between my brother and sister-in-law in regards to what the end-goal was for the hike: my brother was going for a hike and my sister-in-law thought the trail ended…

  • Thoughts

    Flood Video

    I put together a short video of the second flood last week. For some reason I didn’t take a video of the front yard with the good camera, just my phone apparently, but I put some photos of the front yard in there at the end. Chris and I walked the neighborhood yesterday morning. Pretty much every house north of us along the creek had flood damage of some sort, mild to horrific. We are very lucky.