First raspberries and a whole lotta peas

I think it is so funny how the first raspberries ( the first of anything really) are so precious. E just found some ripe raspberries yesterday and we enjoyed them so much. In another month they will likely be dropping on the ground and we will be trying to remember to get out there and pick them so we can make raspberry vinegar and jam.

We have also been enjoying a whole mess of peas, the only way we eat them is standing right in the garden munching away. I don't think I've ever cooked them....they never seem to make it out of the garden.

Strawberry jam.

Here is the first batch of canning this year....strawberry jam. I don't usually make canned strawberry jam, I normally just make a small batch of freezer jam with dried pineapple as the sweetener, it is easy and delicious. However, this year my boys (all three of them) convinced me that they should have canned strawberry jam too. It does make sense, as I have a good size cold room with lots of shelves for preserves and only two freezers, to do as much preserving as possible that doesn't need to be frozen. Thankfully I found Pomona's Pectin a few years ago and can enjoy making regular jam again. This batch used 12 cups of mashed strawberries and only 2 1/4 cup organic cane sugar - I could have used honey, juice concentrate, stevia or other sweeteners with this pectin too - so I feel that this is an acceptable amount of sweetener to me, most jam recipes call for almost the same amount of sugar as fruit. Using Pomona's allows the taste of the ripe, delicious fruit to shine through.

I've only made them 12 jars so they will have to make it last. I find it doesn't make sense to me to make jam out of fruit that we had to go and pick and pay for when we have so much of our own fruit here that I normally make into jam...raspberries, plums, cherries, peaches, apricots, grapes, currants, and we glean blackberries from around my folk's place....but the boys want strawberry most especially. Figures. ;-)

I won't tell them that I could have made more if I wasn't saving the rest of the strawberries for my friends and I to have at our movie/chocolate fondue night tonight. We will be watching Miss Potter and anyone who knows me knows that it just isn't movie night with some form of chocolate available - also not movie night without an Alan movie but I suppose that Ewan will do in a pinch ;-)

A full day

What a great day! I woke early (actually I was woken by my teenage son who, for some strange reason, dragged his carcass out of bed so he could get on the computer early...it just shows, give them the right motivation and they can do anything)! I made some bread dough and left it to rise while I went out to mow the grass. It was a really good idea to get that job done before the heat peaked - I think it reached 31 degrees today.

I did two loads of laundry and hung them out on my rotary clothes line. It was very peaceful out in the backyard, shaded by my huge walnut tree as I hung out the fresh-smelling clothes. I don't take a peaceful neighbourhood for granted these days. Last year, I had a problem with one of my neighbours. Their 9 year old son was using their backyard, which is right next to ours, as a dirt bike circuit and the noise was driving me crazy. A couple of calls to the appropriate authority resulted in a visit and (touch wood) that annoying habit seems to have stopped. Funny how my family tell me my hearing isn't that good but repetitive noise just gets me irritable or even angry very quickly.

Later that morning, I finished making and baking the bread and also made soup for dinner, as I was going to be out all afternoon and needed to have something prepared in advance. The soup was a recipe I invented and it's rather good - it reminds me of canned Heinz tomato soup that I had as a child - tasty and thick - but without the excess salt etc that they no doubt put in it.

Toss into a pan or pressure cooker:
one large can crushed tomatoes
6 cups vegetable stock
1 large onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic
2 chopped carrots
half a cup of red lentils

Cook until the carrots are soft and blend it up so the kids can't see the vegetables and you're done!

I almost forgot to mention that I had a visit from a member of a certain religious organisation this morning and I finally found the assertiveness I needed to say, "No thank you" to their leaflet. (Funny, we were discussing this very thing at our girls night last week.) It occurred to me that by refusing the leaflet, I am reducing the paper that will be going into my recycling bin, which is a good thing!

This afternoon, our homeschool support group met at a friend's mum's house. She lives in a beautiful area of the city and has a backyard pool, and we spent a few happy hours there enjoying the company of our friends. I wish I had photos to show you, but the batteries in my digital camera obviously had so little power that it couldn't even tell me to "Change the Batteries".

After arriving home from that outing and eating our tomato soup and fresh bread and salad, K and I had to go out once again for our Taekwondo class. It was a challenging class, partly because two teens were there who are ready to move up to black belt and the instructor was making us do all our patterns so that he could assess the two boys, followed by some hot and heavy sparring at the end of which we were all dripping!

At the end of the class, the two boys stayed on to complete the requirements for junior black belt, first Dan. They had to answer a number of questions related to the history of Taekwondo, the meanings of patterns, the student/instructor relationship, etc. They had to demonstrate all their kicks and other techniques that they've learned since white belt. And the part we were all looking forward to - the board-breaking.

Only teens and adults, green belt and above, break boards. I have broken one at a time myself with a palm strike, knifehand and various kicks. It gives you an amazing sense of power! These two guys were faced with stacks of two and three boards this evening. One of the kicks was a flying side kick over a line of pads. Whilst I felt some sympathy for the boys doing the kicking, especially when they failed to break the boards and the pain and frustration was obvious, I also felt for the guys who had to hold the boards! More than once, someone's fingers were smushed! I don't know whether those boys passed their test - they won't find out until later - but watching them really motivated me to work hard in the next year so that when I face the same test I will be ready, all of the information in my head and the physical ability to do everything that I need to do.

In the meantime, K and I test next Thursday for our black stripe so it's back to the manual for some studying.

And finally (because it's getting late and this is a really long post) my latest Ecoholic action plan is to make myself some cloth menstrual pads. I have been using a Keeper for years but continued using those thin little pads for heavy days...well, I intend to stop buying them...another little action to cut down on the pollution of the planet!

More Nature

My hubby and I decided to go mtn. biking last evening. We are fortunate to live close enough to be able to bike from our home up into the hills and some lovely bike trails. One of the best things about this time of the year is the abundance of wild flowers that are in bloom. My personal favourites are shown in the following photo. The scent of the wild roses is absolutely intoxicating sweetness. Ahhhhh...

Here is a shot I just managed to catch of a doe. Can you see her hiding? My husband was further ahead on the trail which clings to the side of a steep grade and while he cruised along he startled this creature down the in the valley to run towards the direction we had biked from. She came bounding along and I barely managed to extract my camera from the pack in time. Thankfully, she finally stopped to take a look back at me and I got this photo.
Here's my man as we pause for the homeward descent after a great ride. I never tire of looking out onto Okanagan Lake from the vantage point of the hills. It's just so beautiful.
I'm always so happy when we take the time to get outdoors for a bit of exercise. The beauty of where we live in the world often just takes my breath away.

Enough about the ladybugs, already...

I know I already posted about this but Katherine had mentioned she had never seen ladybugs in their "wrinkly" stage before and I had never seen them right when they have come out of that pupal stage before, so I thought it was interesting enough to show more. ;-) Here is the pic I posted last week when we found them at this stage.
And here is the same pupal case yesterday, but empty now, with a new ladybug underneath the leaf.

When they come out of their pupal case they are light yellow and they look wet and soft. It really is incredible to see. E was so excited as he found each one.

This one has been out for awhile because you can see its shell is orange now, getting more red.

Last night we were looking at the shell-like remainder of the pupal case in E's magnifying kit and he said to me, "It's way more cool to actually see them in real instead of just in a book." I had to agree.

After reading more about the ladybug's metamorphosis we will be watching to see if we can find one going from larvae to pupa stage.

This one is newly emerged and you can see the colour of it well. E found this one and wanted to take a pic of it. Now, let's hope that they get to work again and start eating all the aphids on my roses.

Inspired=Frustrated+Challenged

I've recently been after myself about finishing up my works in progress. You see, sometimes when making things, I find myself challenged to the point of not going on until I've had time to think my way out of the difficulty. Such is the case with the two projects I decided to show you here.

First up is a pair of socks I've knitted. I really wanted to post a picture of beautifully finished socks. But. No. It seems that's not the case. So here they are - shown as my recent frustration.


I faced several setbacks with these babies. The biggest, as always, is my lack of knitting experience. Which leads to many beginner mistakes made continually. I want to say here, that I think I should receive some credit for even continuing to attempt any knitting projects due to this handicap ;o) Anyways. I did finally get the socks knitted - after unravelling them to correct the infamous pointy toe mistake, oh and ah, to add to the foot length (yes, there was lots of unravelling, let me tell you). Now after sticking with it to make it through those mistakes I have to face the final step. Grafting the toe. Arrrrgh. I'm gonna say right up front - I like knitting, but I HATE grafting. This hate is directly in proportion to how ugly my finished project looks. All due to the crappy kitchener stitches I seem to make (see above photo). sigh. Now I've read how to make these stitches in the knitting books. I have seen them done online. I have even had kind, dear, sweet Nicola show me how to make these stitches. And yet. Well... Mine still don't turn out worth a hoot. I am not sure why this simple stitch evades my mastery. I am this close to just sticking those socks under the needle of my sewing machine or better yet, serging the suckers! Ha! Let's see them unravel from that!

Seriously, I know I won't be satisfied until I master this stitch. It's challenging me, and frustrating me. So, I'm setting those socks aside once again while I regroup.

Hey, I don't need those wool socks for another few months anyways, right?

Next project to share with you is faring somewhat better at the moment. This is a quilt I designed and am making for my youngest son (blame his taste for the super bright fabrics). I'm turning my efforts back into finishing this project after figuring out how to deal with the challenge I faced with it.

Everything went along fairly smoothly initially in assembling this - right up to the point where I was machine quilting it. I thought I was just kicking butt with my freehand machine quilting ( note the danger when you get too self assured with any kind of handiwork) and it wasn't until I had used a full bobbin of thread that I took the time to fip the quilt over to check thoroughly for problems. *Now unless you think I never check to see how my stitiches are on the underside, well, I actually do - but I missed seeing the tiny wrinkles with this project - the stitches were fine though*.

Okay, you know what I'm going to tell you, right. Uh-huh. There were problems. Lots. The wrinkles I'd quilted into the back were tiny and if there had been only a couple of them, I would've carried on. There wasn't just a couple though. The next course of action involved the seam ripper. Now here's the part I HATE about sewing. Picking my stitches out. I believe this is because I see myself as more of a going forward kind of stitcher. So, I really don't enjoy going backwards, so to speak, which is what you're doing when you have to remove all your stitches. I spent a lot more time picking those stitches out than it took for me to put them there to begin with. That done, I set this project aside until I figured out how to prevent this situation from happening again.

I think I've got the challenge dealt with and now I'm back to being inspired to carry on and finish this quilt. The above photo shows the quilt awaiting my machine quilting. (This made possible only after all that stitch removal, re-ironing the backing and the quilt top separately, and then going through the whole centering and pinning process all for a second time...)

Funny, but it seems like whenever a project frustrates me and then I figure it out - well, that project just inspires me to tackle more projects and um, er, while frustrated on at least one project, I always have something else to work away on. Hmmmm... sounds like I have a project formula here: Inspired=Frustrated+Challenged

Sew easy!

When I was tidying the garage last week I came across this old pillow case (in our rag bag) and loved the colours. I thought it might be just the thing to try out sewing a pillow case skirt.

Here it is, takes about ten minutes to make. This is my first try, I am thinking that next time I will add some big front pockets for holding assorted gardening odds and ends and I will also use the pillow seam as the back of the skirt so that it can have a slit for more leg room. This is my kind of sewing, all I had to do was to sew a casing for the elastic waist. That's it. The hem of the pillow case became the hem of the skirt.(you getting a good laugh here, K?) Now I will be on the lookout for pillow cases whenever I go thrifting. Hey Katherine and Samantha, did you know we are getting our own Sally Ann on this side of the bridge?

O.K - I went ahead and put the slit in the back by just unpicking the seam a bit and finishing it, it is much more comfy for gardening this way.