Kitchen / Garden / Sanctuary - Urban Homesteading to Nourish Body + Spirit

Month: May 2012 (Page 1 of 3)

Baby Squirrel Pictures!

Finally, some of the pictures of our neighbor squirrels’ litter of springtime babies! They were so cute. They’re nearly grown now, and very busy of course as all squirrels seem to be.

Apologies in advance for the underwhelming quality of the photos. F’s camera (with that requisite telephoto lens) and I still don’t get along. It thinks I don’t know what I’m doing. And while I won’t dispute that… I say, what kind of camera refuses to take a picture when I press the shutter release. If the light situation is sucky, that’s my business! (And your eyes are fine — it’s the photos that are a bit blurry, maybe because they were all taken through the window screen.)

Anyway — on to the cuteness!

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Gratitude Sunday * May 27, 2012

~ I’m once again joining Taryn over at Wooly Moss Roots in her Gratitude Sunday tradition. ~

Gratitude Sunday is a time to slow down and remember those thankful moments that graced our week. One reason I love keeping a daily gratitude journal is because it helps keep things in perspective for me. Each Sunday, I open my journal and share some of those moments with you here. If you’d like to join in, just leave a comment!

Gratitude is powerful energy. I love hearing others’ gratitudes!

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~

-Being outside on these beautiful, beautiful days. These are the days. Better than summer!!

– Turning a frustrating experience into a ‘learning moment’ — it takes some of the sting out when you can turn around an unsavory situation and learn from it.

– My sister Julie, who is a cat angel! She has rescued twelve street cats over the years, keeping six and adopting out the others to friends. She spends her hard-earned money to recuperate them, spay them, feed them, foster them — love them! She recently rescued three street kittens in very sorry shape. She took them to the vet to treat their multiple problems — eye infections, respiratory infections, ear mites, fleas. In the picture on the left, you can see how much better they look after only one week!

What beautiful creatures; they are Ingrid, Anastasia, and Vlad:

– Moving slowly, when I remember to. This month has been so busy; the remedy it seems is to move very slowly whenever I can, to offset the frantic pace.

– Curing my own ear infection with home remedies! It feels great to be self sufficient with your health and not need to visit a doctor. I had a bit of an incident, shall we say, a couple weeks ago where a garden experiment (and the subsequent attempt to dispose of it) went way south. What resulted was the most putrid, stinking, disgusting bucket of fetid sludge I’ve ever encountered — you have truly never smelled anything like this — and as I attempted to dump it, it splashed back all over me… into my eyes, ears, hair, clothes, etc. Since that time my left ear has been bugging me, and finally it sort of exploded into a case of swimmer’s ear. I doctored it with manuka, tea tree, and lavender essential oils, peroxide, and triple antibiotic ointment. And I cured it! In light of my recent pattern of reliance on doctors and drugs, this was a nice little victory.

– Tender, succulent garden lettuce and eating lots of amazing salads. The addition of fresh garden herbs like dill, oregano, cilantro, and parsley makes ’em even better.

– Tea

– Getting a really big moneymaking project completed and off my shoulders. That is such a fab feeling!

– Lots of errands completed! And then not wasting mental energy thinking about them any more!

– The few days this week where the catalpa tree was in full flower right outside our kitchen window. I was plastered to my chair right next to the window, in front of my laptop, doing work for several days this week — and every breath I took was filled with that heavenly scent!

– A cozy, rainy night.

– Taking a nap right next to my garden. I think there may be some kind of magic that happens during sleep time that occurs so near to a garden.

– Our air conditioner! It gets so hot up here in the attic apartment.

– The precious sight of a mama and papa goose and their single gosling.

***

What are your gratitudes from this past week?

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A Walk Through the Garden – May 24th

Wow, it’s been another full-on week here. I like how Trish says it — “life has been a bit real lately“!

When life gets extra real, it feels extra nice to be in my garden. My garden grounds me back to Earth!

And here’s an interesting phenomenon that I’ve noticed — if I need to take a nap in the middle of the day (usually I don’t like to), I wake up feeling mentally yucky and depressed if I’ve slept inside. But if I take my nap outside, that doesn’t happen — I wake up feeling balanced and happy and content. Nature seems to be magical that way…

So how about a walk through the magical garden? It’s growing really well! My tomato plants are exactly three months old from when I started them from seed, and some of them are blooming! That’s exciting because the past few years have not been good tomato years due to unusually long, wet, chilly springs.

Here’s the garden in the glow of the evening sun. Gardens look best in either morning or evening sunshine, don’t they.

Big turnip. (All the others are still much smaller than this!)

Parsley (L) and Caraway (R)

Broad bean flowers

Homegrown lettuce is just so awesome.

 

My baby peach is growing too!

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What’s up in your yard?

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