Month: June 2012 (Page 1 of 2)

Aloha to you!

June 20, 2012 / Lindsey / 5 Comments

Just a little bit of a check-in today, as we continue to love our time here in Hawaii!! We have seen some incredible scenery here, and now that we’re settled into our house sitting ‘home-away-from-home,’ we’re really just kicking back and relaxing. It feels so good, and it’s something we’ve both been long overdue for. Mornings here for me usually consist of lying out in the sunshine on the grass and then taking a cold, invigorating swim in the stream at the bottom of the yard, and then taking an outdoor shower amidst the orchids and bromeliads that live outside year-round here. Then I’ll brew some tea, and drink it along with a bowl of local papaya with plain yogurt, lime juice (fresh from the tree in the yard!), and grated ginger. Or, a beautiful salad from their organic garden. It feels so good to be here; so healing to ones spirit. It’s a gorgeous house in an incredible location. A little piece of paradise, really. What a gift this is!

Here are a few photos of what we’ve been feasting our eyes upon:

Hanalei Valley, Kauai. Taro is grown in the fields down there.

At the north end of Kauai

Hiking on the Na Pali coast, Kauai

Our tropical fruit! All this stuff is local. Hawaii has some of the most incredible fruit you've ever tasted; I wish we got stuff like this on the Mainland. In the center there's coconut meat from a coconut I found on the beach and hacked into!

Reading about taro in "Edible Hawaiian Islands" magazine, with tea, out on the lanai (patio), with the stream in the background. This is truly the life...

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Our Airplane Food

June 9, 2012 / Lindsey / 9 Comments

Yay, we’re headed out pretty soon for Hawaii! We like taking our own food, so this is what we’ve got for the 2 hours at the airport plus the 7 1/2 hour flight:

Salads (all homegrown – lettuce, chives, oregano, dill, parsley)

Grapes

Watermelon, pears, and peaches

Raspberries

Halved lemons to squeeze onto the salads

Larabars

Homemade concord grape fruit leather

Cashews

Pepperjack cheese slices

Wasa crackers

Slices of sprouted grain bread

Whole Wheat Gingerbread muffin

Some little sweet treats

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I love eating my own food on the plane and it feels good to be taking all this good stuff. Plus we can re-use the containers while we’re travelling too — for picnics or whatever… and then fill them back up with tropical Hawaiian goodness to eat on the plane ride back. (Or with sea shells, as the case may turn out to be…)

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In My Garden – Early June

June 8, 2012 / Lindsey / 1 Comment

A new dressing of black gold (compost)

This isn’t what early June normally looks like for us — as I’ve mentioned before, we’re at least 3 weeks ahead with everything this year because of the unusual warmth. I’ve already harvested all our delicious lettuce, and everything is growing beautifully! Well, except for the things that aren’t. We have a population explosion of roly polies this year. I thought slugs were my nemesis — well they’re nothing compared to the destructive capabilities of these flippin’ bugs… and they move a helluva lot faster than a slug ever could. They’re machines. You plant – they destroy. Every year there’s always “a thing” — no matter what. Your tomatoes don’t grow, or the zucchini plants are stunted, or it’s too cold for the peppers, or the spinach isn’t happy. Or whatever. It’s just part of gardening. You expect it, but it’s a surprise each year what the failures will be, but also what the successes will be. Nature is mysterious, and I think she likes to keep folks guessing. Anyway, hopefully this year’s only “thing” will be the roly polies. They have ravaged the zucchini and cucumber seedlings; one day there’s a zucchini sprout, next day there’s a stump. Frustrating!

Zucchini stump

I don’t like buying starts from the nursery because they’re expensive, and don’t usually perform very well, but mostly because they often bring disease into my garden which ticks me off. It’s like kids at a daycare — they’re all sneezing and snotty nosed. So I picked out the least-mildewy of the cucumber starts at the nursery (below) and planted them with fingers crossed that they’ll really take off and flourish!

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But all that aside, the rest of the garden is doing beautifully!! I love just looking at it and puttering around in it. What joy it brings me!

Broad beans

Peas & garbanzo beans

What’s your garden doing?

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Go slowly & mind that knife

June 8, 2012 / Lindsey / 1 Comment

Oh goodness, the universe does have jarring ways of bringing us back down to earth sometimes, doesn’t it! I’ve been scurrying around this past week feverishly pounding out one thing after another from the bottomless bucket of to-dos, in preparation to leave for 3 weeks. And so while innocently chopping onions for salads on Wednesday morning, my attention must not have been focused enough in the here-and-now — so the knife fixed that for me by slicing the edge off my finger and part of my nail. Thoughtful, yes?

Man it hurt; fingers have a lot of nerve endings. (But it could easily have been so much worse!)

Let us all remember to go slowly and mind that knife.

But now two days later, it’s already so much better! I’m quite amazed; it’s nice to observe my body in action, regenerating and healing itself so naturally and effortlessly.

I want to post some recent garden pictures for you, so I will hopefully do that tonight. And then we’re off tomorrow on vacation! It is coming at such a perfect time. We can’t wait!! I’m not sure if I’ll be posting stuff while on our trip… maybe, maybe not, we’ll see.

I hope you all have a really wonderful couple weeks, if I don’t connect with you until we get back!

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