I once won $50 on a scratch ticket

10 Friday Feb 2012

Posted by Alanna in chicago, cooking, friends, karma, lists, PSA, public service annoucement, readers

≈ 5 Comments

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sense of humor

For Christmas my grandma gives everyone a few of those lotto scratch tickets that you can get in liquor stores and grocery markets. Usually the most someone wins is another ticket or $1. One year, when I was still fairly young, I won $50. It was kind of a big deal. We had to mail in for the money and everything because over a certain amount you can’t just ask the guy at the local gas station to give you your winnings. My grandma even made a photocopy of the ticket and highlighted my win for me. It was up on my bulletin board in my childhood room for years and years until I went away to college.

That was the first time I really ever remember winning something big. I can probably count on one hand the things I’ve really won that weren’t just “thanks for participating” things. Like in high school when I won “Best Female Sense of Humor.” Or in college when I won a contest to model the tshirt for a writing website (that no longer exists). Most recently I won a turkey for Thanksgiving which was pretty darn exciting.

All this to say, I really appreciate the nominations/awards for being one of the Versatile Bloggers. I will even give you a little “thank you” Photoshopping:

That’s me, above. But I’m not putting that VBA logo on my blog. It’s kinda meh. I was recently reading a post about Father Trek’s take on these blog “awards” and I have to say that I mostly agree. While I really, really like and respect my fellow bloggers who have nominated me, I don’t like the chain letter-ness of the award. I will gladly link to the folks who have become the reason I am now a devout WordPress user (Blogger just didn’t have the community I’ve found on WP) in my normal posts. I’ll even thank those who have gone out of their way to nominate me:

BillPeeler of Grazing in The City, thank you for your nomination. I once gained seven pounds in Chicago in a week thanks to tons of eating (despite walking all over the city). This makes me feel closer to you somehow. I love your recipes and am just counting the days until you start sharing some Southern classics.

MonicaDockery of Words & Music by Monica Dockery, you make me want to pick up my guitars again and get playin’! Keep it up, lady!

Tara of Sugar Spice and Bacon, I’m still dying to know when we get the recipe for sugar spiced bacon. There’s such a thing as candied bacon, ya know. Tara and I actually know each other in real life and she is as cool or cooler than she seems on her blog. That’s why we don’t actually hang out in real life, cause I’m clearly not that cool.

In addition to these wonderful, thoughtful bloggers, I would recommend the following folks:

Sarah Owens from Sarah’s Place. Because she seems really nice. And if she ever invited me to dinner I would totally eat whatever she cooked.

Dear Optimists is a great blog. Thoughtful, funny and illustrated. It’s like a picture book with feelings.

The guy at Frugal Feeding writes a good blog about cheap eats at home. I like it when he uses funny British words like “jolly” in his writing. Or when he uses ingredients I’ve never heard of anywhere but in Harry Potter like “treacle.”

Did you seriously read down to this part of my post? Yeah, imagine if instead of six I had posted 15 blogs as required. Nope. There are six excellent blogs above so go check them out. And as a thank you for reading this far, something you didn’t know about me before: I recently lost my big toe nail because I walked a half-marathon in oldish running shoes (three months ago). You. Are. Welcome.

Lessons Learned in My First Garden

09 Thursday Feb 2012

Posted by Alanna in picture, food, pictures, dog, pumpkin, gardening, house, grass, landscape, vegetables, flowers, summer, farmer fridays, beets, broccoli, greens, garden, bees, nature, photos, strawberries, tomatoes, organic

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tomato plants, cherry tomato, tomato plant

Other possible titles were “Failures of a beginning gardener,” “Don’t garden like I garden,” “Gardening: Say What!?,” “Common Beginner Mistakes That Only I Would Make.” My grandma is an avid gardener whose garden I spent lots of time in (eating string beans from the plants) when I was a kid but that doesn’t mean I was ready to garden as well as she does when it came my time to cultivate my land. And by land I mean the 6-foot by 4-foot patch of dirt that we didn’t cover in grass. So here is a list of lessons I learned the hard way or never knew until I came across it reading somewhere!

Some vegetables don’t produce their first year. Or the year after that. When my husband and I bought asparagus root stock from the local big box store I was all set with my hollandaise recipe to smother my stalks in. What was this fern doing in place of little asparaguses (asparagii?) poking up from the dirt!? As it turns out, asparagus takes a year or two to start producing stalks. Rhubarb shouldn’t be eaten in the first two years after planting. The good news is that they’re both perennials that produce for 15-20 years so no reseeding each season.

Celery and leeks need blanching. In this case, blanching does not mean dropping in boiling water and then throwing it in an ice bath, either. It means you cover the plant with dirt or something to block out light for a little while to make it sweeter. Yeah. Seriously. Weird, right?!

Tomato plants can (and should) but cut back. As I mentioned over the summer I had a cherry tomato plant (the small, yellow pear-shaped kind) grow to be over 8-feet tall. The picture below shows the plant when it was still growing up and not out in front of our 7-foot fence. It made it taller than the fence and then over it. It was all but too late when I heard that trimming it to keep it about this size would have been a good idea and produced larger, better tasting tomatoes.

Tomatoes will replant themselves which means if you pull one out of the ground to build a deck and then try and transplant it to a shady spot and it dies, it will suddenly reappear the next year. Tomatoes do not grow well in pots even if the guy at the nursery tells you they do. They have pretty long tap roots and you will get a significantly better bounty if your tomato is in the ground. In full sun.

Know what the plant looks like before nurturing a weed. Oh, do you think that sounds crazy? I’m just telling you from experience. The picture below is what I thought was a giant bell pepper plant because it sprouted where I planted my seeds. I thought the leaves looked about like a pepper plant‘s leaves, too. I bug sprayed this thing, watered it, and loved it. Until another one of these popped up where I hadn’t planted seeds in another part of the yard, and another, and another. And it never grew peppers. In fact, the only reason I have a picture of it is because I legitimately thought it was a pepper plant.

Flowers on herb plants are bad and are bad on some vegetables. When herbs flower it’s called “bolting” and it basically means that they’re trying to produce seeds. Because we want their leaves, flowers should be pinched off. The same applies for some vegetables (like broccoli, below) except we eat the flowers before they bloom. When they eventually bloom, they will expand plant energy on seed making and not on broccoli making. Then these weird grayish broccoli colored aphid-type bugs show up and it’s no good. The moral: eat your broccoli.

Thinning is good. I have a thing with thinning or trimming vegetables, I don’t want to pull out the baby sprouts! I don’t want to cut those tender new shoots! I’ve realized I just need to plant less seeds if I don’t want to thin. Otherwise you get a wall of broccoli and beets that are too close to grow very big (both below). I want to nurture all baby sprouts. Don’t be like me.

Make sure you know what kind of soil you are getting. My first garden at my house was a “raised garden” made using leftover cinder blocks that were left by the previous owner. We bought the cheapest “soil” we could find which ended up being mostly bark and super acidic to fill it. It was really good at growing mold. Which brings me to: Potting soil and garden soil are different. Which kind of makes sense since they have different names, right? Turns out it also means they have different soil composition (potting soil allows more air in for plant roots) and different nutrients (potting soil has nutrients a plant would get from regular ground soil).

Squirrels love sunflowers. Squirrels will leap from a fence to a sunflower to trample it down and then gnaw off the head of a sunflower even before the sunflower seeds are something they want to eat leaving you with beheaded sunflowers. I would punch every squirrel in the face if I could.

When it says full sun it doesn’t mean mostly sun. And if you ignore the seed packet/ common sense of planting vegetables in full sun, they will only start producing late in the season and never fully ripen. While I’ve now learned what to do with green tomatoes (besides frying them) I would have preferred them and my pumpkin to have ripened.

Dogs like vegetable fertilizer. The pooch below is not dead from fertilizer (she’s actually just sleeping on newly laid sod in this picture). But she would have eaten all the plant fertilizer I laid down if I hadn’t prevented her. Chicken manure was also pretty great for her to smell as well. Just keep your animals away from any kind of fertilizer even if you’re using the organic stuff. They don’t know why it smells good but they will try eating it. Lots of learning experiences in my first attempts at a vegetable garden but I can’t wait to make more mistakes and learn from them this year. What have you learned in gardening that was unexpected?

Is it easier to shoot macrophotography?

08 Wednesday Feb 2012

Posted by Alanna in environment, nature, Photography, photos, picture, pictures

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

canon rebel, canon rebel eos, close ups, eos 350d, landscape shots

My husband and I took advantage of a beautiful, warm Saturday this past weekend and went on a hike at a nearby county park. Once up high enough you can overlook a small town on the coast and out to the Pacific Ocean. While on our hike we were able to practice some of the things we have been learning in our Canon camera photography class. Up until lately I’ve been of the “take a million pictures and hope one turns out” mindset. Lately I can get away with two or three.

I shoot with a (now rather banged up) Canon Rebel EOS 350D which has seen better days (I used to do concert photography). In taking the hike, I was able to practice some landscape shots, some of my husband in front of a landscape and some portrait-type shots. No matter what, my favorite thing to do is still to get in nice and close for some macrophotography.
It’s probably just a stylistic thing that I prefer the close ups. It’s probably why I also enjoy taking (and looking at) beautiful pictures of food. But look at that picture above, you can see the spider webs between the tiny thorn covered branch. The sunlight is highlighting all the fine little hairs on those leaves. This is good stuff. Not that the landscape wasn’t good stuff, maybe I just have a harder time getting a good picture of it?

Even with some Pioneer Woman Action Set help this picture still doesn’t get me. The haze combined with the sun was really picked up in this picture and the sky is totally blown out. It could have been overcast for all the viewer can tell. What happened to my blue sky?

I’m just drawn to the fine textures in nature and think they make a much more interesting subject. How about you? Could you also look at pictures of food all day but only when they’re beautifully lit and colorful? Do you prefer to see a nice landscape and the bigger picture? Can you tell me where I’m going wrong with my landscape shots?

Seedlings for Spring

07 Tuesday Feb 2012

Posted by Alanna in california, environment, flowers, garden, gardening, grass, house, husband, landscape, nature, picture, pictures, pumpkin, vegetables

≈ 14 Comments

The first day of Spring is March 20th. I’m getting a jump of plantings this year because remember when this happened to my pumpkin who was planted too late in the season? I’m trying out this egg carton method of starting seedlings and I just wrote what they are on the carton as well so I don’t forget. The little guys on the left are one French pumpkin, two baby bam pumpkins and then on the right are two little cucumber sprouts. The watermelons and peppers haven’t sprouted yet. Those pumpkins look like they might be a little overly ambitious.

As for where I’ll be planting my squash this year, I asked my husband if I could give them a nice sunny home in an area with no plants currently. It just happens to be a prime location that I’m not even convinced I like. Here’s a shot from this post about our house on Google Maps: See that mulch on the right side of our grass? See how barren it is? This was before I tried two gardenias, some hostas and a few other plants in there that didn’t get enough water and died. I want to plant my squash plants in that area because it gets plenty of sun and it’s pretty barren, but would it be ugly to have squash plants over there? Or do the benefits outweigh having vegetables in my front yard?

In other news, in Northern California we are seriously short on rain this winter. Any one else doing a rain dance? If no rain during winter means lots of rain in spring (“In like a lamb out like a lion?”) then that’s good for the plants! Any one else out there starting seedlings already?

thismodernwife

I once won $50 on a scratch ticket

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Lessons Learned in My First Garden

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Is it easier to shoot macrophotography?

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Seedlings for Spring

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