Friday

 

 

 

Feast of St John of Matha

 

 

 

 

We’ve decided what we want to plant, now the planning of when…where and how, has begun.  Garden Planning Guides and Seed Planting Dates from the Farmers Almanac have filled my reading time today.  Anna sat at the table this morning and drew out her own plan while I read up on companion planting.

 

We have four, 4×8 beds and a 3×8 bed and two gutter boxes.  Chris said he will add, three more 4×8 beds and two more gutter boxes.  Not counting the gutter boxes, we will have 224 square feet of planting space not counting the four, ten foot long gutter beds.  That’s alot of space.

 

 

Where’s Leo?
We want to plant: tomatoes, cucumbers, garlic, strawberries, onions, bell peppers, spinach, carrots, kale, radishes, lettuce, peas, watermelon, jalapenos, acorn squash, pumpkins.  We also want to grow blueberries, apples, pears, peaches and maybe a nut tree.  I know, pretty adventurous planning when it’s not 110° outside at 8 o’clock in the morning.

 

It seems like we got alot accomplished today…but in reality, most of the accomplishment was only in our mind.  It was just one of the days where at the end of the day I look back and go, “Really?  that’s what the laundry and dishes still look like?  C’mon, the floors and bathrooms, bedrooms and school work??”

 

 

The end of our dinning room table is a huge mess… humongous.  I have not been able to decide what exactly I wanted to do about our recipes and cookbooks.  We have maybe, 20 cookbooks and use one or two recipes from each.  There are a couple I don’t think I’ve ever used a recipe from.  That is a waste of space.  The rest of our recipes were either handwritten on recipe cards and kept in a recipe box or they were printed off the internet or torn our of magazines.  What a mess!

 

Here’s the conflict…My neighbor lost her mother when she was 5 years old.  One day she showed me a ziploc bag full of her mothers recipes, in her mothers handwriting.  That made such an impression on me I decided I wanted my recipes to be in my own hand for my children someday.

 

Great intention, but on occasion, someone has cooked something around here using a recipe card, and forgotten to put it back where it belongs.  Or it gets misfiled, or stuff spilled all over it.  Or…I get busy, or tired or lazy…and I just never get around to writing it out.

 

 

I have a solution.  I am making a recipe binder.  The recipes already written out, I am placing in these Recipe Card Recipe Pages.  The printed ones, or torn our of magazines are being slipped into protective sheet covers.  Some of our recipes I have already typed up and handwritten a note on it.  On the Chicken and Dumplings recipe I wrote, “Chris’ favorite meal!”

 

It is by no means a perfectly beautiful recipe binder.  In my mind for that to happen, all the recipes would be uniformly typed and/or uniformly hand written on cards.  But I try to keep this as my motto, “Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”  That was given to me in spiritual direction one time and I am always amazed at how many places that seems to hold true.