Regreening The Desert

I found this video fascinating and inspiring.

Sewing a Modest Uniform Skirt & Crocheted Rug

Finding Tera modest uniform skirts has become a problem since she started high school. None of the local uniform stores carry long enough skirts. Our local store doesn't even carry skirts except for primary. What?!!! All of the middle and high school girls wear skin tight unflattering horrible capri thingys. After surfing the net the only skirts I could find were unattractive or too expensive in my opinion.

I decided the time had come to attempt to make something my daughter would be proud to wear to school. Like anything else you never learn unless you dive in....so I did.

I found a cute pattern, then pinned and cut, and cut, and cut...then read, read, and read, looked, looked, and read, read, ...then...

sewed, and sewed, and of course....ripped and ripped.....and sewed and sewed again....mastered the invisible zipper....then there appeared...
...a not exactly perfect...but, beautiful skirt my daughter loves to wear. Tera has since received many compliments on her new skirt. It's not always easy to be the only one....but, I bet some more girls may get brave enough to buck the status quo and step out with modest and fashionable uniforms all their own!

I used gabardine fabric. It wears really well and is stretchier than cotton. This skirt also sits low on the hips. Tera finds it is more comfortable at school that way.

A picture of my daughter's room. The rug is crocheted from old sheets, curtains, and clothes. You can get an idea of how to make them from the following video.

Five Minutes A Day Bread

With organic bread costing between $3.00 to $5.00 a loaf you can realize a huge savings by learning to bake your own bread. Baking bread once was a skill most housewives knew. My Father-In-Law was one of 19 kids, and he recalls his mother making nine loaves of bread every night before she went to bed. Evidently having that many kids wasn't bad for the health, she lived to be 93.

Anyway, still with all the frivolous important things we fill our lives with, we have very little time to spend making nourishing whole foods for our families. So I am constantly on the look out for bread I can make when I don't have that much time.

This is it. I mentioned it before in a previous post, and I have finally found time to give this time saving bread a try. I give it an A+. I love it. It's easy, has a nice texture and tastes yummy.

There's no kneading involved, you make a big bunch of dough at once, store it in the fridge and pinch off enough to make a loaf as you need it. One batch makes six loaves of bread. In the book, Artisan Bread In Five Minutes A Day, there are recipes for using this dough to make many other baked items: pizza dough, rolls, cinnamon rolls, etc...

I read about it first in my magazine Mother Earth News. You can read about it on their website here.

Here is my refrigerated dough.
Here is my dough ready to rise. After rising, slash and bake!

And you get this.....A perfect family sized boule.
This is a video from the Author on how to make this bread. I skip a couple of the last steps. I sprinkle the pan with flour and let it rise and bake on the same pan. (I don't have a baking stone)

On the side, I've found a recipe to get my girls to love Brussels sprouts. Cook a few bacon pieces in a black iron pan. Wash and cut in half the sprouts. Throw sprouts in pan with bacon and drippings. Add a little coarse salt and black pepper and stir fry in bacon until sprout edges are crispy. This was from our dinner last night. There were no left overs!

Knitting a Hat

Here it is! The finished hat. This isn't the gargantuan hat I started out making. Some where I miscalculated something and the hat looked large enough to fit King Kong. Then, being the impatient person I am, I just deducted how many stitches I thought was necessary and started a new hat unraveling the old. The new hat looked quite small. It turned out to be too tiny even for my youngest daughter. We all decided we should give it to my Sister's Munchkin. So I crocheted up a pretty blue flower and sewed it on with some bright pink yarn forming the eye of the flower. I must say, I'm pretty pleased.
This is my third attempt at making a sufficiently sized hat for my over sized yet not huge noggin . The pretty green, blue, and brown yarn on the side is wool and I am going to attempt to make a cute hat out of it once I get better at this!

I'm terrible at following directions, and tend to get impatient with tedious directions. I found this video very helpful and easy to follow.

Geoff Lawton

This is an interesting video on Permaculture. Geoff Lawton is a permaculture consultant and designer. He has taken over and continued the permaculture work after Bill Mollison retired. His website is Permaculture Research Institute of Australia .

I find Permaculture so intriguing.


The definition of Permaculture by Permaculture Solutions.

What is Permaculture?

Permaculture is a method for designing sustainable, human-supporting landscapes that mimic the operation of natural ecosystems. By linking the different parts of each system in ecologically sensible ways, permaculture achieves high yields for low energy inputs while actually building fertility over successive seasons. For some, permaculture means a backyard garden that for relatively little work supplies an abundance of organically produced food all year round. For others, permaculture means a drought and flood-proof rural property ensuring food, water and energy security into the coming decades.

Drainage Issues and Compost Corral

This is a closeup of the make shift trellis I made to keep the melons out of the water.

It's just part of living here. Unbelievable rain amounts. It doesn't just drizzle, it dumps buckets and buckets of rain for days and days. Unless the pumps (those are the huge pumps they use to keep our area from becoming a lake) are running, the rain quickly fills the ditches covers the road and creeps up the hill our home is built on.

The water drains off fairly quickly once it stops raining or they turn the pumps on. Yet parts of my yard and garden keep very deep puddles until there is enough let up in the rain for the sun to either evaporate it or the water table to go down. The hot sun evaporating the water from underneath the veggies is murder on the vegetables. They get steamed right in the garden. At times the ground is completely saturated and the only place for it to drain is through the drainage ditch and into the swamp.

So...I believe it is time for some drainage issues to be addressed. I am thinking of putting in drainage pipes in my potager (they are the red lines.). This is a drawing of what it will look like eventually. The paths will either be mulched or covered with gravel. We are implementing each stage as time and money allows. I'm glad we had these rains recently to reveal the drainage flaws in our garden before we have to tear anything apart to fix the problem.
The following is a video of the compost bin we are going to build. His "compost corral" will be a much better fit for our land size. It's such a simple idea yet brilliant!