New Year

I know it's cliched to start out the new year with lofty goals about being a better, thinner, healthier, richer, person, but, well I'm going to do it anyway. Except for the thinner thing.

I had a conversation with my cousins last year in which it came out that apparently everyone thinks I'm a put together, organized adult or something. Which is kind of hilarious to me, because most of the time, I feel like my life is a runaway train, and I'm barely keeping my fingertips on the caboose. Or, something that makes sense.

What it comes down to is I'm going to focus some of my energy into getting my life together so I can be at least a little like this persona I apparently present to the world.
Let's call it project get my sh*t together.  

The house
    Our house is over a hundred years old, and while that means its got some awesome features, it also has a ton of problems. For an old house, we have a good amount of storage, yet I always feel like I'm searching for places to put stuff. Part of that problem is the amount of stuff we have, and I plan on tackling that, but I like my stuff, I'm not going to part with all of it. 
     On the heels of the stuff issue, is the mess issue. I have a 3 year old, I know my house isn't going to be up to Martha standards, but I also don't think I need to have a deep down fear that someone may stop by before I've had a chance to take a couple of days to clean. Right now, my cleaning schedule is haphazard and consists of looking at something grody, realizing that I can't remember the last time I scrubbed said area, getting disgusted, then cleaning said area. For my own sanity, this must change. 

The garden
    My mother had not just a green thumb, but a couple of greens hands. The house I grew up in had amazing gardens, and I never realized just how much went into making them that way. Now, I have almost an acre of land, and every spring I am so excited to get my hands in the dirt. That excitement lasts until about June, when the reality of weeds and heat set in and I get over the whole thing. I'm going to try to improve on that this year. Peter's already thinking about what vegetables we're going to grow, and we're going to try to solve our groundhog problem (hopefully without ammunition), but since it's currently 22 degrees outside, this one is heading to the back burner for a while.

Work
     Ugh. I don't think I can actually improve on the technical aspects of my job. I do the best I can every day I'm there, and I AM only one person. What I can try to improve on is my attitude about my job. I really do like pharmacy in general, and retail in particular. I do not love the company I work for and the non-pharmacy crap that they pile on us to no end. However, the burn out inducing stress is not the patient's fault. I need to remember that.

Hobbies
    Until recently, I was a prolific knitter. Hats, gloves, sweaters, I made them all. My guest room is filled with bins of yarn. I have a spinning wheel and literal sheep worth of fleece. And short of the sweaters I've made for 2 babies, I've done nothing with it for 2 years. This needs to change. 
     I've been doing better with sewing than knitting, at least as far as actually doing it. I would like to improve on my actual skills though. I've been sewing for a really long time, but I was only "taught" the basics of how to run a machine, read a pattern, etc. I can make stuff that looks good, and fits ok, but I'd really like to know how to do those things well and correctly. 

So, there you go. Some areas of focus for getting my sh*t together.  

In which I reveal just how impressionable I can be

I work in a retail setting, and although my current store is far to busy to allow me to keep up with celebrity gossip the way some of my former stores did, I do have a clear view of the magazine display at our checkout counter. For the last month, the cover of Martha Stewart Living has been teasing me, especially on the days that I don't get a chance to eat.

That deliciousness is marinated heirloom tomatoes with pasta, and it is damn near perfection for a summer dinner.

We threw this dinner together Tuesday night after I got home from work, so it's a good thing it's a quick and easy meal. It wasn't as garlicky as I thought it would be after reading the recipe, but it had a really great flavor, and it's just so pretty!

We used a mix of heirloom tomatoes from the CSA and our garden. Definitely going into the arsenal of recipes to use up tomatoes without making the typical pasta sauce.

CSA Week 4

This week I didn't get to go to the vegetable pickup because I'm a wonderful person who switched shifts with my partner at work so that he could start his Puerto Rican vacation a day early. I have no problem doing this, even though it meant my schedule this weekend was quite draining. I'm starting to feel normal again now though.

Anyhow, Peter and Gabriella got to do our pick-up on their own. Here's what they came home with:

Spicy salad greens, a head of lettuc, basil, summer squash, fresh garlic, kohlrabi, carrots and peas.

I don't get home until nearly 11pm when I work the night shift, so we rarely have an interesting meal before I collapse. Luckily I found never mentioned our dinner from my last day off

.
Grilled steak, roasted kohlrabi and carrots, peas and braised greens.
Did you know that even though they not the main attraction, you can eat the leaves from both broccoli and kohlrabi? We have massively huge broccoli plants in our garden (only 1 tiny little head so far) and they were starting to shade my brussels sprouts, so we cut some of the biggest ones off. They're pretty bitter, but cook them up like kale, and they are quite yummy. To make these, I sauted some garlic in olive oil, then threw in the stems until they started to get soft. Then I added the leaves and let them wilt. Finally, I added a cup of chicken broth (I wanted to use beef to go with the steak, but we were out of my favorite) and simmered the whole thing covered for like 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Asparagus & squash - or proof that Peter really meant his wedding vows

So we've grown zucchini and yellow squash every year that we've had a garden. It's kind of the hobby farmer's bread and butter you know? Practically a weed, you're almost guaranteed to get some food out of your plants. And did we ever. Unfortunately, we also got really honking big plants that overtook our beds and crowded out other veggies. So I got the idea in my head that we should clear out the massive brush pile that we inherited with the house, and create a bed where we could let the crazy plants go crazy and grow as big as they want.

Upon further reflection, the pile was not massive when we bought the house. But we've lived here 4 years, and there are a lot of trees that like to drop sticks during rain storms. It was massive by the time we decided to clear it.

Since we're talking about a rather large area, I also decided that we should bite the bullet and put in the asparagus patch that I've wanted for a couple of years.


Now, there's no better kick in the pants to perform physical labor that to have no choice, so back in February, we pre-ordered 25 one year old purple passion crowns from Johnny's seeds. They were scheduled to start shipping to our area in the middle of April, so that gave us almost two months to discuss how we were going to prepare the plot and get rid of the sticks. We discussed buying and/or renting a wood chipper, burning, moving, but suddenly I noticed a box on the porch when I left for work and we still had a big ol' pile of sticks. So we improvised and marked out the asparagus patch the next day, leaving the rest to be dealt with later. Then we started digging. And digging. And digging. By hand.

See, asparagus is planted in nice deep trenches. And the nice long one year old roots need plenty of space to spread out. And I like to complain about my back. Anyhow, my sister came down to visit, and thankfully took Gabriella to visit at our parent's house, so the planting process, went much faster than it would have if she had been here to "help".

See the pile of removed dirt is bigger than me! Ok, maybe I was in the trench but still - this is why Aleve was invented

And I told you it was a massive pile of sticks

Crowns

After the crowns are spread out over their little hills, you cover the roots with a couple of inches of soil, then gradually fill in the trenches when you start to see growth. Technically, a few places say the gradual fill method is unnecessary, but I found more websites saying to do it than not, so that was the approach we took.

 Also, while I fully intend to let the squash grow as wild as it wants, I did not want to risk it hurting my beautiful little asparagus, so I used some of those handy stick to build a primitive little fence to separate the two areas.

 

Anyhow, we must have done something right because exactly one week later, we had ...

 

The same pile of dirt?

No! Look closer ...

Asparagus!

And, as you can see in the first picture, an untouched pile of sticks. However, I am lucky to have incredible inlaws who apparently love physical labor with no reward but sincere thanks, and a job that requires me to work every other weekend. Now, I never thought of my work schedule as a plus, but while I was counting by fives, Peter and his parents moved that pile of crap (literally, it seems the previous homeowners preferred to bury construction debris, rather than put it out on the curb for the garbage men), and we went from

This

to

This

How did we get here

By way of introduction, let's flashback a few years to May 2007. Peter and I had spent the last four years living in a funky little house (technically two very little houses connected by a door on each floor) in downtown Baltimore city while I attended pharmacy school at the University of Maryland.
According to my mother (and one should always follow their mother's advice, right?) I simply had to live in a city at least once in my life. Well we did it, hookers on the corner, friends getting mugged, and a corpse discovered around the block and all.
Finally, graduation had come and gone, the house was sold, our stuff was packed and we (and by we, I mean I - Peter would happily live in the concrete jungle until the end of time) escaped to West Chester, Pennsylvania to search for our next home.
I knew I wanted an older home and space for a garden. Plenty of hours spent searching online later and I had found my house.

 
It would have been the only house we looked at, but we had another showing already scheduled, so we kept the appointment. But, honestly, my mind was made up the minute we pulled up the driveway. Why?

Wood-burning pizza oven, that's why!

So we got my dream house, and it has been a work in progress ever since. We've painted, and fixed, and have only scratched the surface of things we want to do here.
Our second summer, we built two raised beds, added another in the third year, and this year we put in an asparagus patch and cleared a tremendously huge pile of crap to have an area to let squash go crazy.  Thankfully, Peter has gotten bitten by the gardening bug (let's be honest, the more veggie patches we have, the less lawn he has to mow), and Gabriella loves to get her hands dirty, so the edible garden is a family affair.