An Adventure in Dyeing (with an "e")

I am speaking here of dyeing clothing a new color. That is why I made the distinction in the title. Otherwise it might be a little concerning.

Nothing to worry about, though! It was just my first experience with clothes dyeing!

The reason I decided to try dyeing clothing with permanent dye was because we have another wedding coming up. This time it's my niece's wedding in Vermont. Two of my children are coming with me*, including Poppy.

This is a fall wedding, which means the colors appropriate for wedding apparel are darker than Poppy typically wears. She didn't have a dress that was formal enough and of a dark enough color for this wedding.

She did, however, have quite a few formal white dresses, thanks to the several First Communion dresses that were passed down to me. Of course, she couldn't wear a white dress to a wedding that is not her own. 

This is what gave me the idea to dye one of the dresses. They were free, so I figured it wouldn't be a big deal if it didn't work.

Accordingly, I asked Poppy what color she wanted--blue--and ordered a bottle of dye.

I dicovered that one of my friends used to dye clothes from thrift stores frequently, and she had several helpful tips for me. The first was to make sure that I got dye appropriate for the dress material. In this case, that was polyester. The dye for natural materials is very different from the dye for man-made materials, so it's important to get the right one.

She also said to get the dress wet before submerging it in the dye, as that will make for a much more even absorption of the dye water. Made sense.

I did not want to be messing around with permanent dye in my kitchen, so I decided to do it outside. This meant I needed nice weather and the time to figure it out. Also, it had to be a day when Poppy would be here to help me. Of course.

I decided this past Saturday that we were going to just go ahead. 

This is when I read the directions on the bottle of dye. 

Yikes.

It's not just dunking the clothing in some colored water and voila. The water has to be kept at a steady 200 degrees for at least 30 minutes. The clothing has to be continuously agitated in that water for the entire time. It's sort of a pain.

I was not anticipating needing to keep the water at a high temperature like that. I still didn't want to have to do this in my kitchen. Luckily, A. had the idea to use the camping stove I gave him for our anniversary, so I could keep the pot of dye water hot. I wanted to set it up somewhere I could just dump the water in the ground when I was done, without having to carry an extremely heavy pot any distance. 

A. helped me set all this up, even building a little wall around the camp stove to make sure the wind didn't extinguish it.

I was a little leery of using a cooking pot to dye clothing, but I didn't see much choice, so I used my pressure cooker/canner, which is the biggest pot I have. It's also stainless steel. I figured that was more likely to scrub clean.

So! Water to 200 degrees on the stove inside (so as not to use up the small fuel canisters from the camp stove), then hauled outside to the camp stove. Per instructions, one teaspoon of dish soap added (more or less), then the dye, and finally, the dress.

We used a broom handle to stir it. Still attached to the broom, so of course the handle is now dyed blue, but it's my outside broom, so it doesn't matter.

Poppy and I took ten-minute turns stirring.

Of course I quoted Macbeth. It was irresistible. 

Poppy noted that this was quite tedious. It was. The instructions said to keep it in the dye until it's just a little darker than the intended color. We kept it in there for forty minutes. After that, there were several rounds of rinsing until the water was clear. This is important so that Poppy doesn't turn blue when she wears it.**

Then I washed it in the pot with a bit of laundry detergent and we hung it up to dry.

It looked more purple when we first hung it up, but it dried more blue.

There were some tiny pearls on the lace detail that took the dye strangely and turned brown. Poppy carefully snipped those off. 

She is very, very pleased with her "new" dress. I was surprised with how well it worked. Although I'm not too motivated to dye clothing regularly, given how much of a process it is, but it was certainly worth it for this event.

* The other two aren't, because one boy is competing at the FFA national convention that weekend in Indianapolis and another had a football game. A. is staying home to manage all of that.

**We did amuse ourselves by saying she could be Smurfette for Halloween if she dyed herself blue.

Check This Out

Remember when we talked about how Double Stuf Oreos now have as much of the cream filling as regular Oreos used to have in Ye Olden Days? And how many of you agreed with me about that?

Well! Here's an interesting new wrinkle. These are the Walmart brand Twist 'n' Shouts, with double filling. 

Well well well. Would you look at that.

That actually is double the amount of cream filling as the name-brand "Double Stuf" Oreos. 

Nice to know that Walmart, at least, isn't trying to cheat us out of our cream filling in their Twist 'n' Shouts. 

Oreo, take note. You're being outclassed by Walmart.

A Potato Salad Tip

I have always been a big fan of potato salad. The American kind, with mayonnaise and hardboiled eggs in it. I don't use a recipe for it, but I have noticed that recipes for potato salads always recommend an all-purpose potato for potato salads.

In case you're not as interested in potatoes as I am and so don't know what an "all-purpose" potato is . . . there are waxy potatoes, like those red "new" potatoes. And there are floury potatoes, like baking potatoes (also known as russets or Idaho potatoes). All-purpose potatoes are in between the two in texture. The most recognizable kind is Yukon Gold.

The reason all-purpose potatoes are recommended is because they won't fall apart as readily when boiled. 

I don't buy all-purpose potatoes. I don't buy waxy potatoes, either. I only buy russets, because those are what come in the ten-pound bags, and I am all about quantity at this stage of my cooking life.

But! Russets, in my opinion, are actually better than all-purpose potatoes for potato salad because they will more readily absorb the dressing. Potato salad recipes also always tell you to put the dressing on the potatoes when they're warm, because then the potatoes absorb the dressing better and become more flavorful. So why wouldn't you want a potato that absorbs the dressing better?

You do, but you don't want to it to fall apart. Which leads me to my tip: Boil the potatoes whole, with the skins on. Just rinse them quickly, cover them with salted water in a big pot, and bring to a boil, simmering until the biggest potato in the pot is easily pierced with a fork.

(The fork is a better tester than a knife because it's not quite as sharp as a knife. So if a fork slides in easily, you know it's really done. And nothing is worse than an underdone potato.)

After that, drain the potatoes and let them cool down just a few minutes before peeling (a paring knife helps with this) and chopping into your desired size.

Boiling them whole does require a longer cooking time and more heat released into what is probably an already-hot summer kitchen, but it will retain the shape. No crumbling. 

Russet potato salad is the best potato salad.

I also put mustard and vinegar and diced dill pickles in my potato salad, but that's a matter of personal taste preference, so I'll leave that to you.

Just remember: Whole boiled russets and you're good to go.

Add Salt to Taste

As we look at a weather forecast that features high temperatures in the mid-90s,* I have excavated all the beer salt out of the back of the cabinet in preparation.

We even have one in a whimsical tiny beer bottle package.

We will need the beer salt to keep A. going when he's out working in the heat. He always does. He doesn't mind doing labor when it's in the 90s, but he does mind how awful he feels if he doesn't stay salted. Not just hydrated, but salted.

A couple of weeks ago when he was building a stone wall and weed-eating for a few days, he would consistently get to the afternoon feeling bad, lethargic and headache-y. He had been drinking plenty of water or lemonade, but was still dragging.

And then he realized it was because he didn't have enough salt.

He doesn't really eat when he's working like that, see, so he wasn't getting salt until dinnertime. As soon as he started adding salt to his lemonade, he was fine and could work all afternoon again.

Because he's putting it in lemonade, he prefers the lime beer salt. I don't know how much he puts in his glass, but enough that he can faintly taste it.

When eldest was working on a fencing crew--a notoriously physically-challenging job, and one he did routinely when it was around or over 100 degrees--his boss gave everyone beer salt on their breaks. They just ate it, which is also an option.

However its ingested, if you also need to work outside in high temperatures, make sure to drink enough, but also make sure to get some salt into you**. 

* I know this is not high for many of you, but it's pretty hot for us here. Even if it is a mostly dry heat. 

**This is, of course, already part of hydration drinks like Powerade, but we don't typically have those. Switchel works, too, but A. prefers the salted lemonade.

A Dangerous Discovery

When my children got home from their trip to Arizona to visit family, they presented me with a bag of kettle corn my mom had sent home for me.

I love kettle corn. Like, a lot. It checks all the salt/fat/sweet boxes that make something taste good to me.

I did send a jar of it with each of the younger two children to be their school snacks a couple of days, but then I ate the rest of the bag all by myself. Which is what I do when given access to kettle corn.

Popcorn, however, is a pretty healthy snack all in all, and I thought maybe I could make something like kettle corn that would satisfy my desire to eat something sweet without going overboard on the sugar.

I make popcorn on the stove in a big saucepan. Typically, I pop the popcorn in the pan, dump it into a bowl, and then put the butter right in the very hot pan to melt before drizzling that over the popcorn and then salting it. 

To make something like kettle corn, I figured I could just add my very dark maple syrup to the pan before the butter, and the maple syrup would quickly release most of its water content on contact with the hot pan. Then I could add the butter, etc.

That is what I did, and it did indeed work quite well.

But then, of course, I had kettle corn. A lightly buttered and sweetened kettle corn, to be sure, but still the salt/fat/sweet popcorn that is so hard for me to stop eating.

I fear I did not. I managed to put a few cups in a jar for one child's snack. But I, um, ate the rest of the batch. It was like five cups of kettle corn. 

The only survivors.

So I will not be making it again unless all of my children are home to eat it before I do, but now you know: Homemade kettle corn is easy. And addictive.

Homemade Brown Sugar

Did you know you can make your own brown sugar? Brown sugar is literally just white sugar and molasses. I knew I could make it. I even knew how to make it. And yet, I have not been making it.

Logically, I knew I should. I use a lot of it, given how much I bake. It's much cheaper to make than to buy, especially since I prefer dark brown sugar, which is always more expensive than light brown sugar. And I already have a gallon of molasses.

I kept telling myself I should start making it next time I ran out. But then my laziness would overcome me and I would buy more brown sugar when I was at the store.

However.

Here we go.

I finally did it. I used two tablespoons of molasses per cup of white sugar, which makes very dark brown sugar.

I mixed it in my food processor. It wasn't hard, of course, although I did overfill the food processor and have to split the sugar in half to get it all combined evenly.

The most annoying part of making it is getting sugar all over the counters and floor, which seems inevitable with this quantity of sugar. But now I have a lot of brown sugar on hand, and I can always make more when I need it.

When Money Can Buy Happiness

At least, when a little money can buy a little happiness. Like this . . .

One of the extremely irritating places to me in my house is the pass-through. This is a spot where there were windows in the original trailer that became, well, glassless windows that lead into the added-on living room. 

There is a shelf there, and that is where our landline phone lives. Also the pencil sharpener, pens and pencils, tape, stapler, calculators, etc. It's basically like an office desk, which I do not have. 

That stuff was always all over the place on that shelf. Calculators spread out all around the phone, random pads of paper, pencils that had fallen out of the repurposed honey jars . . . It was a mess. All the time. And it drove me crazy.

Finally, and why this took me so long I do not know, I bought an organizer for this spot. I knew what I wanted to put in it already, so I looked for one that had the appropriate number and size of compartments. 

It cost me $25 and fifteen minutes to go from this:

Yuck.

To this:

Yay!

Of course, keeping it that way will require constant vigilance to put things away as they get taken out, but at least now I have somewhere to put them that is not just the general location of the shelf. And that is $25 very well spent.

A Day for Candles

I have talked a lot about my candles this winter. They have also featured quite frequently in photos here. I've gotten a lot of enjoyment out of those candles I've made from the stubs of blessed candles collected at church.

So imagine my delight when I discovered that yesterday was a day all about candles!

Specifically, it was Candlemas. I had no idea about this until A. and I showed up for daily Mass* in the village and we were handed candles for a procession before Mass started and told it was the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord.

Okay . . .

I had to look this up. Turns out, this feast is always forty days after Christmas and it commemorates, as the name says, when Jesus was presented at the temple by Mary and Joseph, as was the custom for Jewish boys at the time. When that happened, Simeon, a man also at the temple that day, called Jesus "a revealing light to the Gentiles."

And that is where Candlemas comes from. It's all about light. In some countries, it's the end of the entire Christmas season. It's also a day when priests would bless candles. 

I didn't bring any candles to be blessed, since I didn't even know what day it was. But I already have blessed candles in my house, thanks to the ones I made. So I decided it would be fun to have a candlelit dinner to celebrate Candlemas.

The children were very enthused about this. They thought we should turn off every single light in the house so it really would just be the candles illuminating the table.

A., however, really dislikes dim light at the table. The idea of eating by just candlelight was not really to his taste. I compromised by leaving lights on in the living room and kitchen and just having candlelight in the dining room.

And then I had double the candles for the bookcase in the living room.

I'm not sure I'm going to remember this every February 2, but it was fun this year, anyway.

* It's not actually daily, because we only have one priest to cover a lot of churches. So the "daily" Mass is only Monday and Wednesday mornings.

A Thing I Learned

I discovered something interesting during this latest period of cold weather: I have touchscreen gloves.

I have to admit that I didn't even know these were a thing. I knew my usual gloves don't work on my cell phone to take photos of whatever, but I had no idea why. And I also have no idea where I got these gloves that do work with a touchscreen.

Gloves of mysterious origin. With hay on them, because I was feeding animals.

Poppy saw these gloves and asked me why some of the fingertips were white. I had no idea. But then, when I went out to walk the dogs* and wanted to to take a picture of the rime, I found that the white fingertips of these work on my cell phone screen.

Photo taken with gloves on.

As was this one.

This got me wondering why these gloves work with a touchscreen. What is it about a bare fingertip that registers with a touchscreen, but a typical gloved fingertip does not? And these gloves did?

A. theorized that it was the light color on the gloves' fingertips that the phone was picking up on. Eldest, however, looked it up, and it turns out that touchscreens pick up on our skin's natural electrical conductivity. So there's actually a charge going from fingertip to phone screen, which is blocked by normal gloves.

Touchscreen gloves, however, have conductive material in the fingertip to continue that charge from fingertip to phone. You can even make your own touchscreen gloves by sewing conductive thread into the fingertips of whatever glove you want.

I just thought that was cool. Always nice to solve a mystery, however small.

* When we have very cold periods like this, we move the dogs' crates from the sheltered but unheated shop into A.'s minimally heated office. They're not in there all the time, but enough that they have to be walked out of the property for potty breaks occasionally. This means that the only time we have to walk dogs is in the very worst weather. It's very dramatic.

An Unusual Benefit of Online Shopping

Several months ago I stumbled upon a YouTube series of videos that followed a family living in the mountains of somewhere in Eastern Europe. It was a remote place, and the way of life there was markedly unlike our modern American life. This family heated their house and cooked on a wood-fueled stove, which the mother of the family started every morning.

I also start our woodstove every morning, so I was interested to see how she did it. She used a small stick that she shaved into a firestarter by splitting it very finely with a big knife all on one end.

It looked like a serious drag to have to do that every morning. 

I start our woodstove using the kids' old math books (thin paper that catches easily), torn-up Amazon delivery boxes, and kindling my boys split for me.

The nascent fire.

Five minutes later. 

What that mother wouldn't give for paper and cardboard to easily start her fire, and here I am drowning in it.

As always, a little perspective is an excellent thing.

A Quick Cookie Tip

I make a lot of cookies. They are my younger children's primary snack at school, which means I make cookies once a week. I have the recipe for chocolate chip cookies memorized because that one uses melted butter and thus requires no creaming with a hand mixer. And THAT means I don't have to have soft butter to start with. Handy. 

I've made those cookies so often that I play pretty fast and loose with the ingredients, usually adding peanut butter in addition to the butter and some oats instead of all flour. I also don't actually measure the salt, baking soda, and chocolate chips, instead just eyeballing those ingredients.

When I make other recipes--peanut butter, gingersnaps, oatmeal--I do more or less follow a recipe, but with one exception: I never, ever mix the wet and dry ingredients in separate bowls. Instead I mix the wet ingredients first--fats, sugars, eggs, vanilla--and then right on top I put the flour and other dry ingredients. 

I'll sort of shallowly mix the dry ingredients right there before incorporating them into the wet ingredients, but I really do not see the point in two bowls. Cookie dough is always thoroughly mixed anyway. It's fine to just stir it all up vigorously in the same bowl.

Wet on the bottom, dry on top.

This saves time and another dish to wash. So feel free to also be a rebel and disregard the "in a separate bowl" instruction if you, like me, are always trying to find more efficient ways to get through kitchen tasks.

Tumbling Tumbleweeds

Tumbleweeds are so iconic of the American West: blowing about on the wide-open spaces, a fixture of western movies, almost as recognizable as the cowboy.

They are also awful.

We live in the land of the tumbleweed, which is actually an invasive plant called a Russian thistle. They grow big, plentiful, and prickly, drying in the ground and then getting uprooted by the wind to blow about and disperse their seeds.

Still firmly rooted and biding their time.

They are wretched plants. They are stiff and sharp, embed their prickers into the sheep's wool, and this year, they are EVERYWHERE.

We must have gotten rain at just the right time for them, because I've never seen so many. Even the one year when they formed a solid four-foot-high bank of tumbleweeds against the garden fence, I don't remember seeing so many in the ground. They're currently still rooted, but in the next month, they'll start blowing free, and then we're really in for it. 

All the dark patches in this field are Russian thistle.

There's really nothing to be done about them at this stage except wait for them to build up against fencing and then pitch-fork them into piles to burn. And hope that next year isn't such a banner year for them.

The Sharp-dressed Cowboy

One of the many things I have learned since coming here to cattle country is that cowboys are very particular about their clothing. Not, of course, when they're working. When they're out branding or fencing or rounding up cattle, they wear their old, worn-out jeans and shirts*. But if they're dressing up for church or a school event or even a rodeo?

Then it's Starch Time.

Starch is a very important part of the cowboy's dress clothing. They still wear the same kind of jeans or shirts, they're just in good condition and, most importantly, they are heavily starched and ironed. And I do mean heavily. The laundering happens preferably at an actual laundry, because they don't use the spray starch. They actually dip jeans in a vat of starch before pressing them. This results in a starch so heavy that the jeans will literally stand up on their own and the owners have to "break" the legs of them before they can put them on.

I have listened to half-hour conversations among ranch wives about which laundries use enough starch and get jeans starched enough that they will stay creased properly through four wearings. It's a big thing.

I have never visited any of these laundries, and don't usually worry about starching and ironing our clothes, but my sons do occasionally have to make an effort to meet the proper cowboy standards for their clothing. Most notably for FFA contests.

One son went to a livestock judging competition this past weekend for which his FFA advisor specifically said his clothes should be ironed. He could wear (new) jeans and just a button-down, but they must be ironed.

I knew that meant starched, as well. Said son was busy helping a neighbor round up her cattle the morning he was supposed to leave, so I did his ironing for him. I do not like to iron, at all, but I know how to do it if necessary. Just like a businessman's dress clothes, the sleeves of the shirts and the legs of the jeans should have a visible crease that runs in the center of the seams, which requires folding the clothing carefully before ironing.

We have heavy duty spray starch, which is what I used. I sprayed more starch than I thought I would need and very carefully lined up the creases properly before ironing them in.

This would probably be easier if I had a full-sized ironing board, but I don't want to store one.

Those jeans certainly won't stand up on their own, but at least they had the proper creasing. Even if it only lasted for one wearing.

* ALWAYS long-sleeved button-downs or snap shirts, though. This is entirely a matter of practicality, to keep the sun from absolutely frying their arms and necks when they're out working all day. 

Kitchen Alchemy

I have been the recipient of so much food recently. So much food. It started when Rafael asked us to come pick the apples off his tree. From those apples, I made several crisps and pies, and also canned five quarts of apple slices in cinnamon syrup.

Next was the lady who runs the coffee shop in the village asking A. and me to pick the apples and pears from her trees.

These were Granny Smith apples.

Those became a crisp and six quarts of canned apple slices. The pears are still ripening, but I'm guessing I'll can at least five quarts of those. And there were great quantities more of both fruits on her trees, should we decide to get more.

Our elderly neighbor that A. helps brought me a box of sand plums the next day.

These are a small, local variety of plum, the only use for which is jelly.

Those became two and a half pints of jelly.

Such a pretty color. Delicious, too.

Next, another mom from school texted me to ask if we would like the extra roosters they weren't going to get around to butchering. A. picked those up that day and we spent the next day butchering them.

And of course, we had one for dinner that night.

When I stopped by that mom's house to give her back two of the six prepared roosters, she asked if we needed any pears or apples. I didn't really, but I took some pears anyway, just because they had just harvested the ones from their tree and she said she didn't have time to deal with them.

She also said she had saucing apples, and I couldn't say yes fast enough to those. Most of the apples here are definitely NOT saucing apples; they don't break down enough in cooking to make sauce. My family can eat astonishing quantities of applesauce, and they're always sad in the fall if I don't find good apples for it.

Small, but tasty.

I came home with enough apples to make 12 quarts of applesauce. 

I only canned seven quarts, though, because that's how much my canner holds. We ate the rest just from the refrigerator.

I also came home with eggs, because she said she was overrun with eggs from all the new pullets they got this year.

Four and half dozen eggs, and she wanted me to take more.

People here give us food a lot partially because they know I have a lot of kids to feed. But also they give it to me because they know I know what to do with it. If they ask us to, we will harvest fruit from trees. If they give me fruit, I will can it. If they give us animals, we will butcher them. No preparation is necessary on the part of the givers.

Also, and crucially, I always give them something back. Rafael got a small apple crisp. The lady at the coffee shop will get a jar of canned pears. Our elderly neighbor got a pint of jelly. And my fellow mom got two chickens ready for the oven, a quart of applesauce, and a loaf of bread.

No one asked me for anything in exchange for all these things, but it seems only logical--and polite--that they should get some small part of this food back, but in a usable form. I don't have to pay for these things, except with my labor.

Make no mistake, it is a LOT of labor, but it's also a lot of food. Seems like a good trade to me.

How Good We Have It

Every so often, I will re-read a book called Women's Diaries of the Westword Journey, by Lillian Schlissel. As you might gather from the title, it is a collection of diary entries written by women who migrated west with the wagon trains and so on in the 1800s.

There are many reasons I like to re-read this book, but one of the main reasons is that it reminds me how comparitively easy my life is now. 

Those women were cooking over open fires, when it wasn't raining, blowing wind, or otherwise unsuitable for fires. 

They were hauling water from streams, when they could get water. 

They were walking miles a day, or riding on uncomfortably jouncy and hard wagon seats. 

They were sewing all the clothing for themselves and their large families. 

They were scrubbing that clothing in streams, if they were lucky. 

And they were doing all of this while almost constantly pregnant or nursing a very small baby.

I was contemplating this the other day as I was making Mexican Wedding Cookies. I don't make these cookies often, because they take much more time and effort than most cookies. I have to chop walnuts, grind walnuts (I use my immersion blender), cream butter with my hand mixer, roll the balls individually to bake, and then roll them again individually in powdered sugar. 

However, a woman in 1890 making these cookies would have started by cracking and shelling all the walnuts. She would have had to grind the nuts in a molcajete. She would have had to cream the butter by hand with a spoon. She would have had to pulverize the sugar for rolling in a mortar and pestle. She would have had to build a fire in her cookstove and keep it at just the right temperature for baking.

This is a truly unimaginable amount of work to the modern cook. It occurred to me that this is most probably why they were considered wedding cookies, too, because no one would go to so much effort for anything but a very special occasion.

Truly a labor of love.

It's good to keep things in perspective sometimes. Mexican Wedding Cookies do that for me.

What are you most thankful for in our modern age?

I Learned Something

I have discovered that the store version of Fritos are pretty much always good. The chips with more kinds of flavorings--like Doritos or Cheetos--are generally not as good in the generic version. Fritos are very basic, though. They only have three ingredients. How can you screw up corn, corn oil, and salt?

Well, you can do it if you pretty much leave out the salt.

I did not even know this was a thing, although I had noted that the corn chips I bought awhile ago said "salted" on the bag. I thought that was weird, because of COURSE they're salted. When are they not?

I found out last time I bought some. These were labeled "original," and they had so little salt it was almost impossible to taste it.

Can you imagine Fritos without salt? It was very strange. And not really appreciated.

 

Original=pretty much not salted.

Luckily, they're greasy enough that I could just shake salt into the bag and it would stick to the chips, so they were salvageable. But now I know to look for salted corn chips, not original, if I want them to taste like actual Fritos.

And now you do, too, I guess. 

Taming the Wildflowers

When we first moved here seven years ago, I was surprised at the variety of wildflowers I was seeing every year. 

I am still surprised. That's because the varieties are actually different every year.  

We have highly variable rainfall here. About the only constant is that we don't get very much of it. Our average is only around 18 inches a year. When we get it is the question. We don't really have a very reliable wet season, but we can get a heavy storm at any time. And when that rain comes determines which flowers bloom.

This year, we've had huge amounts of some wildflowers I've seen only rarely in other years. As soon as I am able, I always want to put wildflowers on my table. The flowers that have been available to me thus far are small, kind of weedy looking ones. I haven't had any larger ones yet to serve as the anchor flowers in the arrangements I like to make.

These smaller flowers are very pretty, but arranging them into something that doesn't look like literally a bunch of weeds has required some different techniques. And I'm going to show you how I do it. Whee!

The first thing to note is that I always gather way more plant material than I think I'll need. One reason I do that is because when working with smaller flowers, many of them must be grouped together to make a larger grouping of color in the arrangements. I need a dozen of the small flowers rather than one or two large flowers.

Also, these plants have a high ratio of greenery to flowers. It's this greenery that makes these plants look weedy, so much of it is going to be discarded.

This whole big pile will turn into just two smaller arrangements.

After I gather a large pile of plants, I start stripping and trimming them. I'm trying to keep the stems as long as possible, but get rid of all the excess leaves, spent flower stalks, etc. This will leave me with only the flower at the top of the stem. I'll use my fingers to strip the stem if it won't break as I do it, but sometimes I have to snip with scissors.

I do this outside, because there's a lot of plant material to be thrown out. It's easier when I can just throw it on the ground as I work.

Then I bring the stripped and sorted flowers inside to my sink, where I cut them shorter as needed and arrange them in my vase or jar. I still use something as a background screen--in this case, the yellow clover--and then I bunch the smaller flowers together to serve as my anchors.

All those flowers I gathered ended up making two small arrangements.

Yesterday I had one rose on my Mother's Day rose bush that was open. I have learned that there's no point in leaving these on the bush. They get whipped by the wind, dried out and beaten up so quickly that it's better to bring them inside so I can enjoy them for a few days. Knowing I had one big flower to serve as my anchor flower, I kept an eye out on my morning run for plants with complementary colors.

What I started with.

I stripped all the lower leaves and then snipped off the undeveloped flower buds at the top.

What I brought inside.

The final arrangement.

Dealing with these weedier flowers takes more time and care than just putting a few sunflowers in a vase, but the end result is very satisfying. And I love having unlimited flowers to decorate my home with. I currently have five arrangements of flowers in various places around the house. Too many? No such thing.

An Annoying Truth

Remember that little throwaway line I had a couple of weeks or so ago when I mentioned my hands and feet were slightly swollen and painful, so that's why I wasn't running? This caused some concern among the parents--as in, mine and A.'s--because that can be a symptom of some more-serious problems.

What was actually happening was that mostly my hands were tingly and going numb overnight, which was annoying because then I would wake up and have to massage one or the other of my hands back to life. They sort of hurt, too, as did my feet a bit. 

I otherwise felt okay, though, so I did what I typically do with random symptoms like that: I monitored myself--paying attention to my heart rate, energy level, mobility, etc.--and waited to see what would happen, meanwhile mulling over possible causes and ways I could make it better.

One of the things I did was ask A. to massage my hands and feet. You should know that this was a great act of bravery on my part, because A. has incredibly strong hands, and his sort of massage is more like deep-tissue massage than a gentle rub. It is undeniably effective, however, so I gritted my teeth and presented myself for treatment.

Although he did massage my hands and feet, he also moved on from there to my arms, calves, etc. And that is when he found something very interesting: I had bands of muscle reaching from my pectoral muscles--in my chest--to my fingers, and also from my lower back to my toes, that were so tight, he could barely touch them without extreme pain on my part. 

The diagnosis from A. was that stress was causing me to constantly hunch in on myself, curving my shoulders down and shortening the muscles so much that those muscles were pulling painfully all the way to my hands. 

Bad posture also had a bad effect on my lower back, which was tightening the muscles all the way down to my feet, but I think that tightness was more caused by the fact that I hadn't been running. And when I am not running, I am sitting more, which is very bad for my hips, legs, etc.

It had been at least a month since I had been running--or even walking--regularly, thanks to a cold that then turned into a persistent cough. After about two weeks of that, I was definitely out of the habit of running. And once I get out of the habit, it's very easy to make excuses to not go. 

I am not someone who exercises because I love it. But I am, clearly, someone who exercises because I need to do it to be mobile and functional.

And so, knowing that it would be Not Fun to get back into the running groove, I put on my purple shoes and started again last week.

Although they look less purple and more gray here.

That first run was . . . slow. I think the best word to use for it would be "ponderous." The second run wasn't much better. But my body? It is much, much better. About a week of A.'s authoritative massage, consciously straightening myself up and stretching out, and starting to move again has completely fixed the tingly hands and feet.

Running can be painful, yes, but not as painful as not running. So annoying. But true.

Green Beans to Soup Beans

Despite the very spotty germination on my Kentucky Wonder green bean plants that resulted in exactly nine plants growing to maturity this year, I have actually been harvesting green beans. I have two gallon-sized bags of green beans in the freezer right now, thus ensuring my favorite green beans+bacon+onions for Thanksgiving dinner.

Of course, given the fact that I never did put up fencing for the plants to climb, I also have a lot of beans that get lost in the jungle and grow too much before I harvest them. This makes them tough and starchy. Not what I want to a green bean to be.

But it IS what I want a soup bean to be.

Green bean on the right, soup bean on the left.

"Soup beans" are what I call those green beans that over-mature on the plant before I find them. Some of those over-mature ones I leave to dry out, and then I save them to plant for next year. But most of them, I freeze as soup beans. 

It takes me a few days to harvest enough beans to bother with, but when I do have enough, I go through them and separate them into green beans and soup beans based on their size. All of them get the stem ends snapped off. The green beans are frozen whole. The soup beans are chopped into short lengths before being frozen.

Like so.

And then I have a bag of bean pieces ready to just throw right into soup when I make it.

Soup beans in soup.

I have about a quart of soup beans in the freezer right now, and I'll just keep adding to it as long as the plants are still producing beans and I keep missing them until they're too big.

Real Tradwives of the Country

Happy Fourth to all my fellow Americans! Have a totally random post, with no photo, in celebration of our great nation.

Although I am definitely an Internet dinosaur--having a personal blog just for fun is pretty much obsolete these days--I do still see a lot of what goes around online these days. And one of the things I see a lot is discussion of "tradwives." 

If you are not familiar with this, it stands for "traditional wives," and so far as I can see, is supposed to be something like June Cleaver crossed with Ma Ingalls. 

A tradwife makes sourdough bread, grows a big garden, keeps an immaculate house, cares for animals, has many children, and does all of this in a white cotton dress and cute boots.

This seems to be tied to the rise in "homesteading" as a lifestyle choice, and has quite justifiably created a backlash of mockery.

As anyone who has ever lived a "homesteading" life can tell you (and most people are living a very light version of that life, myself included), a woman cannot do all of that. She cannot care for everything perfectly, keeping everything and everyone in her orbit perfectly manicured and photo-ready. It's just not possible.

It's a dirty life, and it's often not pretty. It's muddy, or bloody, or smelly, or full of maggots. Because that's what life is like if you live anywhere close to the natural world.

I was thinking about this yesterday when the children and I were cleaning out the truck bed.

I had not planned on cleaning out the truck bed yesterday. I was actually on my way to go gather apricots from my neighbor's tree in the pasture across the road. Picking apricots and making jam from them is a perfectly acceptable tradwife activity. It's even possible, I suppose, to do those things while wearing a sundress.

I, however, was still wearing my running shorts and t-shirt from my early-morning run, because I had been so busy in the garden and kitchen that I hadn't showered and changed yet.

I was going to take the truck so I could bring the ladder and rake to reach the high ones. But when we got to the truck, we saw that the truck bed was covered in a layer of hay and sand that I had meant to rake out to mulch my tomatoes.

Okay, I thought. I'll just do that real quick.

Ha ha.

Forty-five minutes later, I had filled the wheelbarrow with noxious hay; removed the incredibly heavy rubber truck bed mat that had been harboring a truly disgusting layer of soaked and fermenting hay underneath; raked, swept, and hosed out the muck from the truck; and flipped that giant, heavy mat twice to scrape and wash it off.

I did all of this wearing my running clothes, plus A.'s muck boots. I got liberally splattered with foul muck, and was drenched in sweat by the time I finished*.

This is when I went into A.'s office with the rake in my hand and told him, "I'm ready for my tradwife photo shoot."

Because that's what it really looks like to be a traditional wife: Sweaty, dirty, and tired.

A. asked me if I actually wanted him to take my picture. I did not, because I wasn't feeling very photogenic, so there's no record of this particular moment in our "homestead" life. 

It's just one of many through the years, however, and I'm sure it won't be the last. 

* It was a very dirty and tiring task, but also quite satisfying, which sums up our life in a nutshell.