Regardless of the limited availability, we still believe investing our food money locally is the best option. Actually, I stubbornly refuse to hand over our hard-earned money (whenever possible) to companies that truck in, mass-produced fruits and vegetables. You can read more about why here.

The 1st chapter of this book shares the story of an individual whose mission is to make locally produced foods a viable buying option for community members. He does this by filling an old school bus with produce and other local food items, essentially he is operating a rolling–school–bus–farmers–market in his area.

How cool is that? It actually reminds me a lot of the types of people you would find living at The Farm in Summertown Tennessee since many arrived at The Farm on a school bus caravan of sorts when the community was established.

Heck, I would even be willing to buy and operate a rolling–school-bus–farmers-market of my own here in the area.

The lost art of local food is a total shame. And I wish more people would understand why and get on board to support their local farmers.

Not only is it good business to support local food growers but it also protects the community from suffering the consequences of any unforeseen fallout or production issues or contamination that may occur at one point or another on the few large-scale farms that basically monopolize the agriculture business and provide us with all our food.

If you are curious about eating locally or if you are jaded about the state of our country’s local food affairs this book is a must read.

I’ll admit it, as a family of four I am now getting my butt kicked with the laundry.

It is not so much the cloth diaper laundry that is killer but just the shear volume of stuff to wash in a week. Sure the spit up outfits and bedding is a temporary contributing factor as is my inability to focus more than say five minutes on any one task before I am needed elsewhere… but I am honestly floundering in the piles of clothes guys.

Thankfully, piles of dirty clothes aren’t hanging around but I have a serious problem getting the clean ones put away. You see, right now there is this giant pile of stuff in the bedroom chair that I fold and mess with on occasion but basically we just rifle through the giant pile to get the wrinkled, clean but cat hair covered clothing item that we want to wear.

Dressers and folding clothes is kind of overrated when you have newborn in the house!

Luckily, this weekend my husband and I were able to knock out the laundry together because we stayed home. Actually, he knocked it all out as a treat to me.

Some ways we’ve found laundry success:

Be strategic about the laundry.
In our house, the key is folding the laundry and putting it away during Everly’s (our toddler) nap time. Folding and putting things away while she is awake means things immediately get unfolded and thrown about the house.

I wash, dry and pile the clothes in a room where Everly jumps in the clean pile and throws clothes around but when she passes out for nap time, if I have the energy and determination, I bust out folding and putting things away.

Also, USE THE BUZZER on your washer and dryer! It is a great way to remind you of when laundry cycles end and prevent the dreaded mildew smelling laundry that sat in the washer, all wet for several hours or days.

I also tend to wash clothes by laundry basket instead of mixing them all together and then separating colors out. In doing this I can avoid the sorting and carting of laundry all around the house.

On my motivated days Everly’s laundry basket down stairs gets divided by light & dark, then washed and dried separately. Then her dry clothes go right in to her room where they are folded and put away immediately, or jumped on and thrown around. Nothing wrong with letting the kid have fun right?

Our upstairs clothes get laundered together and then I know I can just cart them all back up stairs for folding and putting away.

Also, if you wash clothes predominately in warm/ cold water (like we do) and don’t have any brand new, potentially bleeding fabric colors in your load you don’t even need to divide colors. I only divide loads when I am washing new stuff, have major stains to treat or are laundering something new.

You don’t need all the fancy laundry products to get clean clothes!
We don’t use bleach in our house and I make my own laundry detergent for washing clothes, bedding, etc. I do buy special cloth diapering laundry detergent though.

Adding borax to a load of dingy whites will brighten them right up. Also, stains can be bleached out with the sun if you just hang them to dry outside. All my cloth diapers with poop stains get sun bleached as well as my cloth menstrual pads.

Any blood on clothes can be stain treated with some peroxide and then laundered in cold. Cold water rinses the stains out then you can launder with hot water to disinfect if you’d like. Don’t launder your stained stuff in hot water without doing a cold rinse first. The hot water sets the stains in.

Want soft clothes without the perfume and additives of fabric softener? We do! We use distilled white vinegar to soften and also freshen the laundry. Vinegar is great for removing stink from clothes too, like when our cat pees on a bath mat or when our cloth diapers start smelling like ammonia.

Doing laundry doesn’t have to be a huge ordeal and it doesn’t have to cost you a fortune. If you just plan your strategy and arm yourself with simple laundry helping products you an dominate the piles easily and cheaply.

For more laundry tips and posts visit: http://www.blogher.com/fluff-and-fold-family or enter the $250 Sweepstakes at http://www.blogher.com/life-well-lived-moments-sweepstakes-3-share-moment-and-enter-win-250

It is not easy to up and leave in the middle of your season harvest after putting in all the hard work and anxiously awaiting the payoff.

We are fixing to abandon the garden now and turn our focus to the upcoming birth of Baby Sister. It isn’t as bad as it could be considering the garden hasn’t been all that productive. It’s been an off year for us, probably because Nathan isn’t ever home to tend the garden and with me all big and pregnant things weren’t planted to tended to as well as they should have been.

Exciting news: 

The successes are of course tomatoes, our favorite lemon cucumbers, pretty popping corn, lettuce did well, beans (soup and fresh ones), okra, swiss chard, radish, turnips, strawberries, collard greens, carrots, grapes, sunflowers and blackberries have done great.

We figured out the mystery of our Etna Bush Beans and were happy that the early ones we picked turned out okay. Apparently, the pods get white with red stripes (much like the beans inside the pod). They are best picked for drying and soup making once the pods show red and have turned white and begun to dry out.

Another Etna Bush Bean note is that once the first round of pods are removed, the plant will re-flower and set new pods… or at least our have begun to. This is a welcome surprise since our 8 plants didn’t yield as many as we had anticipated and many more will need to grow before we are making soup with them.

I was hoping to get a quart mason jar filled with soup beans this year, you know to grow a pound or two of soup beans for winter… Not sure how many rows and rows I’d need to plant for that. I’ll keep you posted though.

I did not carry this low with Everly and am kind of in awe of how stretchy and adaptable our bodies are right now.

Baby Sister is still jamming some part of herself in to my right pelvic bone and damn does it hurt! Luckily my back is holding up nicely and handling the 140.5lbs of me okay. Went to the chiropractor and only had a little hip/ tailbone slip, no major cracking back in to place or serious misalignment. Woot!

Exciting news: 

I have about 19 more days to go and my fingers are crossed that I don’t continue to gain weight this quickly to the end because 150lbs of gained weight last time = 8lbs and 12oz of baby and the goal was to have a SMALLER baby this time.

I’ve been hanging in there and walking a fine balance between rest and the need to get er’ done. Mowed the lawn a few times when Nathan didn’t want me to. Been cleaning like mad and generally just trying to get things set for our departure. 9 days until we peace out for some relaxation and the waiting game out at The Farm.

It seems to be looking like a live video stream of the birth will be the direction we plan to go, circumstances permitting. I mean if I have to labor in the car on the way to The Farm in the next 9 days obviously a live streaming birth wont happen… but it is the goal if all is drama free. The live stream will appear here by the way so bookmark it now if you are interested

Also, be sure to subscribe to the blog somehow (check out all the options on the sidebar) so you will get notification of when labor starts. The best bet would be to get mobile phone updates from my twitter stream.

Lots of people have asked about any noticeable signs of impending labor, generally speaking I’ve not had much “I must be in labor” panic. To avoid grossing you out with all the mucus details and other sensations, I’ll just say I’ve felt that she is really “down there” and ready! Some of the practice contractions are producing stronger pressure and even some pain (and nausea during one day) but as long as they aren’t stopping you in your tracks it usually means you aren’t in labor.

Everyone asks how dilated & effaced I am, I still have no idea…I haven’t seen an OB since 16 weeks so I’ve been able to avoid all that monitoring. Someone even asked if I had an estimate about how big Baby Sister is, thankfully I don’t know and really don’t want to know someone’s general estimate anyway. Those ultrasound estimations aren’t a good basis of size or weight and we aren’t crazy about frequent ultrasounds anyway. Plus the monitoring often results in unsubstantiated fear about the what-ifs that are unnecessary.

I am doing well with my water intake and haven’t been crazily swelling or experiencing any other complications. All just seems to be right on track and we are feeling ready for what lies ahead. Everly is ready too, she keeps asking when Baby Sister will “squeeze out”.

One day while she was cuddling my belly she even heard a gurgle and got kicked by Baby Sister. She was amazed and remarked that her sister was “wiggling around” in there. Total cuteness.

Be sure to check out the live streaming home birth page I linked to above and feel free to share it with others that might be interested. We hope it is both educational and also a way to include those friends and family that can’t be with us during this special time.

Our well appreciated thornless blackberry bush is producing ripe fruit now. This is it’s 2nd year since we stole it from an alley way where it was forgotten and buried under weeds behind our crappy rental house.

This time last year (the first year it fruited) Miss Everly enjoyed gobbling up every single ripe berry she could get her hands on. She loves her raw fruits!

This year, after picking several unripe ones against our advice she’s not chomping at the bit to eat freshly picked ones. Big surprise huh?

She does still love the responsibility of finding and plucking off the ripe ones, even if she’s not going to eat them. She is really taking an interest in deciphering which are ready and which are not, this also applies to other garden goodies like the grapes, squash and tomatoes.

Last week when we came in with an entire bucket of fresh blackberries I knew it was time to find a recipe for them, rather than letting them spoil in the fridge.

In light of our recent heatwave I was thinking some homemade sorbet really sounded good so I did some hunting and found a recipe that looked great and also worked great for us and it is even works without an ice cream maker if you don’t have one. It was actually easier without one, and we have one.

Ingredients:

1 cup of water
1 1/4 cup white sugar
1 pound fresh blackberries
2 tablespoons lemon juice

The recipe calls for “simple syrup” or basically a sugar and water mixture of 1 cup water and 1 1/4 cups of white sugar. Then you take about 1 pound of berries and puree them up good, combine them with the sugar syrup and remove the seeds by straining them well. Then you add 2 tablespoons of lemon juice to the syrup and berry mixture, taste test and freeze.

The Joy of Baking says you can add more sugar or water to the mixture before freezing to obtain the preferred taste and sweetness if you find the above measurements leave your sorbet too sweet or too tart. I thought ours was just right though.

We froze our mixture in a plastic yogurt container and would check on it each day to give it a quick stir and to keep it mixed well as it froze. It does take about a day to freeze and isn’t a super hard freeze (at least for us) but we like our sorbet soft and keep it near the opening of the freezer door and not in the coldest part of the freezer.

Oh, I must confess I didn’t have the heart to toss out all the perfectly good blackberry seeds that we strained off so… I am drying them now and they can be planted I guess according to the internet. Not like blackberry bushes need to be sprouted from seed but I hate to waste anything.

Now that we have a second round of berries harvested I’ll make more sorbet I think. It really is the perfect yummy and healthy treat for a heatwave, summer day.

P.S. Like the well placed bucket in the photo of her picking berries? She loves running around naked these days. Ha, ha!

Google has led me astray. I’ve got my hands on the soup beans I’ve been coveting, the Etna Bush Bean but there seems to be no consistent information about the proper harvesting of these beauties. Google has failed me this time…

All you fellow gardeners, urban homesteaders and farmers please chime in: When do you know your Etna Bush Beans are ready for harvest and drying?

Back when I was seed shopping I did some reading on them and was under the impression the beans were left on the plant to mature and begin drying out, then the whole plant was yanked and brought in for drying and then bean harvesting.

Then over the weekend when I went to double check my understanding of the harvest process I found a separate site noting the beans should be picked to encourage future bean production. So we went out and picked the seemingly ripe beans this evening. As we picked them we noted that some are beginning to get reddish streaks on the green bean pod so we thought it was a promising sign.

Then I came across this blog post that has a great photo of the various stages of harvesting the Etna Bush Bean and doubted that we picked our bucket of beans at the right time.

But someone wrote a “how to” article here that says to harvest beans once pods are plump to promote future blooms and continual bean production on the plant. I understand the concept as it applies to many other vegetable varieties but does it apply to the Etna Bush Bean or any other drying bean for that matter?

I believe I am having some search overload in combination with my end of pregnancy indecisiveness. So what is the story fellow gardening readers? When do you harvest your Etna Bush Beans that you want to dry for soup making?

Last night Nathan and I celebrated our 9 year anniversary with a dinner out. Nothing real over the top since date nights and getting super keyed up is something I lack the energy for these days being that I am 34 weeks pregnant now.

Everly was along for the dinner and we all had a great time, baby sister enjoyed the steak dinner too! I am loading up on the red meat these days thanks to mild anemia remember?

Everly grows up before sister arrives: Miss Everly is quite ready to meet her baby sister. Have I mentioned that she’s in the process of potty training herself in these last pre-big-sister days… Well she is!

We had no desire to force her to grow up any faster now that a new baby is on the way. I didn’t want to rush her to wean but she did so herself, I didn’t want to force a toddler bed but she really let us know it was indeed time and now she is adding potty training to the mix. It really blows my mind.

When looking back, I guess her pattern has always been to dive right in to the next stage when she was ready. Like when she stole noodles right off my fork one day and started her solid food journey at 7 months old.

We’ve been explaining that Baby Sister in in my belly all along and have been talking about what will happen when she gets here. While it doesn’t seem like she gives it much thought I guess she really does comprehend more than we think. And her instincts and development are pretty right on.

With all her self led transitions we’ve been a little slow to realize and have had some rough patches as a result. In the instance of potty training it’s been this constant battle of her wanting to be naked and stripping herself and then having small accidents.

The thing about her (and I guess myself also) is that when an idea is planted there is no stopping the forward motion or going back. So letting her run naked is all we could do. We are working on the big girl undies and keeping them on, she still struggles with pulling them up and down a bit but that will come with time.

Everly has had all sorts of potty success all on her own this week. One day she just asked me to help her open up the potty chair lid, I did so and walked away to finish the dishes. She sat there for a bit, peed and then came to get me so I could see it.

Yesterday she asked me to bring the potty seat out to the deck for her and she peed and pooped, several times. Today has been more potty success so it seems we are on the right path. Fingers are crossed that she doesn’t revert to non-potty-chair-use when baby arrives, but if she does that will be fine too.

Pregnancy news & updates: I am 34 weeks pregnant. Baby Sister was “sunny-side-up” (or posterior) and head down over the weekend and I am NOT dilating or effaced which is good.

We aren’t stressing over her orientation in the uterus because babies turn themselves all around even during labor for best positioning. Besides my midwife is confident even if baby stays in the same position labor wont be an issue for me. They would even attend my home birth if she was breech, so position is not an issue.

Also, with the lack if dilation and no thinning of the cervix my fleeting thoughts about labor beginning before I get to The Farm are history, for now. I was advised to lay more, to chase Everly around less and to chill with the homestead tending… but I am stubborn about these things.

My energy levels just don’t permit me to lay idle and someone has to care for Everly but I am taking it easy on the outdoor work and am tuned in to my body for signals to call it quits.

Been trying to get life to a good stopping point. That is laughable huh? There is blogging and website work for clients I want to get all squared away. The house, pets & garden all need loose ends tied up before we leave and come back with baby. My home birth kit and newborn supplies/ gear aren’t all gathered up or even purchased. I am dreaming about someone doing a meal train for us when we come home. I’d love to have some readers register here and be guest bloggers while I am on hiatus too!

I am revamping the “Updates from The Farm” page to create a hub for those of you looking for labor/ birth updates when my hiatus begins in a month. I think that is all I have to report. Now what is shaking with you this week?

Our three hens have gone out to the backyard where they permanently live in our garden space. The reasoning behind this is so that they can help control the garden pest population naturally thus keeping our growing food happier and also providing us with some super nutritious organic eggs.

Did you know chickens that forage the majority of their food lay healthier more nutritious eggs?

My mother has been raising backyard chickens for several years, hers are in a fully enclosed run because in the boonies of Arizona the hawks, mountain lions and various other predators will pick your chickens off before you can blink.

Here in Indiana, in a subdivision, the list of daytime predators is slightly smaller. Actually our biggest predatory concern was our own dog and we worried about annoying the neighbors dog (a bird dog) on the other side of our shared fence.

Our dog, Dixie, did manage to grab the bird Everly calls “blue-red” when we attempted to let them both become acquainted. Luckily, Dixie only had feathers in her teeth, no chicken meat in that instance.

Since then the birds have been in the garden so there is a good solid fence between Dixie and chickens. Every few days we put Dixie on a leash and we let the chickens have run of the yard while supervised. The garden pathways quickly become picked clean of bugs, weeds and other chicken food. This is why lawn and yard time is also a must for them. The curse and blessing is chickens eat what they have access to, even my flowers and berry bushes when they get board with the lawn.

I mentioned a while back that we had many of our garden beds lined with salvaged window panes thought the winter, to protect plants and extend out growing season. A makeshift coldframe basically. Nathan did a similar vlog about the garden here.

This spring we haven’t gotten around to taking the window panes down and in the meantime they served as a great barrier between the chickens and the feverishly growing plants, until the chickens flew over them this week.

Holy crap, chickens can fly?

Yes, I know they have wings and that using them shouldn’t be that shocking but in all the years of my mother’s chicken keeping none of them ever flew higher than a foot or so…

In my pregnancy haze I became much more upset by this setback than needed and felt at my wits end about adding chickens to our homestead. Then we clipped their wings after sourcing this website.

So far they haven’t flown over the even lower fencing Nathan installed in place of the window panes. Yay the old window panes are out of the garden! But now they are stacked on the lawn, must find a place in the garage for storing them ASAP.

What a relieving fix to the chicken flying issue! Now if we could just keep the flies and gnats away… I bet if people didn’t let their lawns grow 4 feet tall we would have less bug issues, that and the meat dumping out by the pond’s edge… Well, I am off to search for some homemade fly and gnat remedies now. I’ll leave you with a glimpse of the garden this year:

Early May brings us the first tastes of our garden handiwork. This year was not exception.

Last night I found myself with several radish, some turnips we got at the store a while back, salad greens and a desire to make something wholesome for Nathan’s overlooked birthday. Well, it wasn’t really overlooked… Just had to be rescheduled since our schedule is basically jam-packed right now.

After pawing through the available locally raised meat in the freezer I choose two packages of chicken breasts for grilling. Meat is the easy part, it is being creative with the side dishes and garden vegetables that take real brain power. Especially when you are faced with a radish or turnip.

I raked my brain for the distinction between a radish and a turnip (what? I blame pregnancy brain). Last season a blogger friend turned us on to a dish of mashed root crop called “Neeps and Tatties” (a similar recipe variation can be found here) that will now be a regular sidedish offering in our home.

The problem was… did it use radish or turnips…

After some intense google searching and a quick note to said blogger friend I arrived at the conclusion that it used turnips and potatos.

Virgin Neeps & Tatties (Talina’s way)

• 2 large turnips, peeled and cut in chunks
• 3 large potatoes, cut in chunks skin on
• Generous helping of butter (2-4 tbs)
• Garlic, salt and pepper to taste

You just boil the turnips until soft and mashable, in a separate pot boil the potatoes. I boil the turnips for longer than the potatoes by and hour or so (on low). When both items are soft to the touch drain them and transfer to a food processor, bowl or blender. Mash to desired consistency adding seasonings and butter as you go. I usually transfer my mash back to a pot to keep warm on the stove before serving.

With the turnips taken care of I turn my focus to the pinkish/ red radish that also need to be consumed. I don’t like radish very much, like many people. I seem to recall giving Nathan a hard time for once again planting these foods that would be such a challenge to consume… but I was seriously doubting why that was (remember the pregnancy brain?).

I resolved to wash and taste a slice of one to decide if they would go in the salad or if they needed to be cooked somehow, I needed my memory jogged about this dislike of radish. Let the torturous experimentation begin. You know kind of like sticking your tongue on a battery just to check.

Bleah! The spicy bite of a radish after the hard, crunchy texture just wasn’t my idea of a good time. In my mind crunchy should be followed by a crisp, fresh and even sweet aftertaste. Not a spicy one.

It was decided, I would cook the radish as a side dish. Rumor has it cooked radish lose the bite they are so well known for. I’d put this to the test.

Grilled Radish and Garlic

• about 12-15 radishes, thinly sliced
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 tablespoons butter, cut into small pieces
• 1 cube ice
• salt and pepper to taste

Preheat the grill for high heat. Place all ingredients on a double layer of aluminum foil large enough to wrap contents. Season with salt and pepper. Tightly seal foil around contents. Place foil packet on the grill, and cook 20 minutes or until radishes are tender.

Stop being a slave to mass produced foods that come from all over the country!

Why does it matter? Well, here is my thought process:

Those out of season bananas, they come from outside the country. The oranges, the strawberries, potatoes, corn… Your store bought meat that was inhumanely raised on feed lots or worse… Chances are they all traveled more than 100 miles to get to your dinner table.

Just think of where they were raised, then they needed to be taken somewhere for packaging or processing, then they are shipped off to your grocery store where you buy and then drive them home. How much oil/ fuel was used just in the process of transporting those food times?

Don’t you think the fuel to transport groceries comes from the same “pool” we consumers tap to gas up our cars? And in buying foods that come from so far aren’t we encouraging more and more usage of fuel that in turn drives up the fuel prices?

If we stopped buying this stuff from afar they would eventually stop shipping and trucking it in, they would lose money without us fronting the expense. Then our local farmers would have their communities to feed and the bigger corporations wouldn’t be squeezing them out and so on…

Each choice we consumers make is like a vote for those companies and their business practices. Money speaks and I am afraid we are sending the wrong messages… and we are suffering the consequences. Those companies aren’t suffering, we are!

If you do some research and really commit you can either produce or support local farmers that are producing what you need without relying on fossil fuels to get food to your table.

Furthermore, eating locally tastes better and it helps your community by keeping those grocery dollars reinvested in the area and not in the large, faraway corporations that could care less about your community and your neighbors.

It only takes one step at a time to influence a huge change. Just commit to swapping one non-locally produced item a week or month for one that is local. Think of the local farmer’s family you’ll be helping to support, the amount of gas your food wont be guzzling to get to your table, the amazing taste of fresh food…

What one item can you obtain locally that you aren’t already?

That is right I said it! As avid couponers and deal seakers even we are disgusted by the new show that has been airing as of lately.

In general any show that rewards for the negative is a show we avoid. We don’t watch Intervention or Hoarders or Jersey Shore. All those shows just focus on and draw attention to those people we’d rather not be like or even associate ourselves with. Plus we like to make a habit of really controlling the influences we allow into our home and TV is a big offender, even when it comes to adult TV show viewing.

I have to admit, at first I was interested in watching a few episodes of Extreme Couponing just to see if there were any unknown tricks I could learn. Specifically I like to see different couponers and their coupon organization systems but after a few episodes of the show our conclusions have been drawn and I wont be shy about sharing them here.

First, there are a few situations where this kind of extreme behavior is allowable. I do like to hear about those that extreme coupon for the benefit of organizations or needy families. Donating the stuff you score is a noble idea and it can make a difference to many.

The hang up I have is the abundance of coupons and deals for crap food and the quantity in which some of these Extreme Couponing people consume said crap.

I know this is a generalization and slightly rude but so many of these couponers (and even their families) are overweight on this show… presumably because they like to buy (and live off of) cases of Cheez-its, Hamburger Helper, soda and other overly processed and generally junk filled foods.

I cringe watching the amount of candy, soda and other non-perishable crap people buy in abundance and then stockpile. Sure, we are not perfect eaters & shoppers. You will find some of these same processed junk food items in our house but we do not live off them, they are occasional unhealthy splurges and they are not what we live off of. We certainly don’t brag about our stock of them and we wouldn’t dream of encouraging others to stock up on them.

Just because it is free or cheap DOES NOT mean you need to get it and live off it!

I guess I get so hot under the collar about the topic because as a nation we are having a very real food/ health crisis and it all really does go back to the fact that we put cost and convenience over wholesome nutrition when we make our food choices.

I’ve been reading Barbara Kingsolver’s book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and it also draws correlation between our nation becoming removed from our food and how that has impacted our health and our buying trends.

The good thing about the Extreme Couponing show is the dialogue it allows us to have about our food choices and why we make them. Every time we buy we are making trade-offs whether we realize it or not.

What do you think: Do you think it is crazy to skip something that is free or cheap on the basis of nutritional principal? Is good food just a luxury people with money can afford? Does convenience or nutrition rule your shopping cart, how so?