The World Without Us: 11 Fun Facts from a Book about Earth without Humans

An interesting, thought provoking article by Mother Earth News:

The World Without Us: 11 Fun Facts from a Book about Earth without Humans

Sloppy Joe - Yum!

This past weekend we made a 4 day trip to our land. What could I pack for food that would be easy and quick? I was craving sloppy joe, so that's what I made! (Well, among other things!) It worked out great. I precooked a double batch and then we took it in our cooler, heating up the serving size for the meal on the stovetop in our camper. It was delicious and easy!

Here is the recipe to give it a try. This yields probably 6-8 sandwiches. (I double batched it from this).

1 pound ground beef
1 pound ground turkey
1 onion, diced
1 green pepper, diced
1 celery stalk, diced
1 can condensed tomato soup (you will add water to make the consistency of the Joe right).
1 tsp. cumin
1/2 teaspoon worcestershire sauce
6 whole wheat hamburger buns

Instructions: Crumble beef and turkey in skillet over the stove and cook until brown. Drain off liquid. Add onion, pepper, celery and cook until soft. Stir in condensed tomato soup, cumin, worcestershire. Add water as needed to take the thick off. I filled the tomato soup can with water and used about 1/4 to 1/2 of the can. Taste test and add cumin and worcestershire as you desire. Serve hot on top of wheat bun. Get sloppy!

Potatos in tires!!??

It's Tim again...

In the last post I mentioned "projects" so here is the other one. This one is still a bit of a work in progress.

I read somewhere that potatoes will grow in used tires, and it caught my attention. I decided to try it this year. Fortunately, Lisa needed new tires on her car late last year, and I was able to keep the old ones.

I've not planted potatoes before, so the whole thing has a bit of a learning curve. We normally buy organically grown potatoes to eat, so I just used some of those as my seed potatoes. I let them sit on our kitchen table in the sun until they had started to grow some shoots from the eyes. I only cut about three or four of them up with each piece having about two or three shoots on it. I had so many pieces that I probably planted way too many in my tire.

I filled one tire with a black dirt and peat moss mixture and just stuck the potato chunks in. It's been a few weeks now since I started and for about the first two or three weeks there was nothing happening. I started to worry that something was wrong. But then, low and behold, I happened to be walking by the tire one day and noticed just the tiniest plant starting to grow. I had to look closer now. That day I discovered about three plants growing and within a week there were ten.

As I understand it, once the plant itself gets tall enough, another tire is stacked on top and filled with dirt as well. Apparently, potatoes will grow in each tire and as the tops get taller, you just repeat the process with a new dirt filled tire.

I'm happy that I finally have some plants growing and hope to have pounds and pounds of potatoes by the end of the season. I'll try to give you and update as the plants keep growing.

Stay tuned!

Worms

Hi everyone, Tim here.

Just wanted to do a quick update on a few of the "projects" I've been working on.  Some are turning out well, others are still a bit of a work in progress.

The first project began last year a little before Christmas.  We got interested in vermicomposting and decided to start a worm bin.  After a little bit of research on the net, we were set to make some bins and buy some worms.  I made the bins from some Rubbermaid bins I had down the basement.  The one on the bottom is intact and another modified bin nests on top of it.  The upper bin just has some holes in the bottom for drainage and some holes in the top for air flow.  We put some dirt, paper, and food scraps in the bin along with the worms.

At first, the worms didn't like the bin very much.  They liked crawling out all the time.  After picking them up off the floors (and sometimes the walls)

I finally called the worm farmer we got the worms from.  He suggested a night light so I rigged up an LED night

 light to fit in the top of the bin and a little bit of tape got the light to stay on all the time.  No more problems.

It's been a few months and after the bugs were worked out (including some fruit flies) we have a whole bin full of worm castings.  The castings are great compost for the garden and we'll mix some in with the garden soil when we plant in a few weeks.  Hopefully it will help us grow some nice fruitful plants!

Getting the Garden Ready

Getting the garden ready has been slow going. We were out the other Monday and I was working on some of the flower beds while Tim cultivated the garden beds with the composting leaves we put on over the winter. The garden beds look great, but we still have a lot do with our flower beds. We have about 2,000 tiny trees growing in everything. We don't even know what kind of tree it is. We thought it was probably maples from the two bigs trees we have in front that leave whirly-gig's all over the place, but sure enough, the leaves have opened on these tiny trees and they aren't maple! I guess we have something new on our hands to figure out. Tim took a bunch from the beds and planted them in a little growing tray. They are growing well, but what are they? Huh. We still have our started seeds insides. They are doing well, but nothing like they were last year when we transplanted them in. If the weather is nice this weekend, I might bring them outside to acclimate a little bit. Usually I plant right before Memorial Day weekend, but this year Memorial Day is sooner than usual it seems. I'm going to have to play it by ear.

Rhubarb Update: It's coming in, but not even close to ready. I can't wait to harvest it and try something new! Have a good recipe, please e-mail it over! I still have some frozen strawberries from last (unbelieveable!), so something strawberry/rhubarb would be great too!

What's Up?!

No excuses, but I haven't posted since APRIL!! That's simply too long. So, what have we been up to? We went up to the property two weekends ago, we simply didn't want to wait too long to go up again so we decided that we would do another quick weekend. It was great. We rode our bikes with dogs in tow (on leashes running next to us) down to Lake Superior. The ride there was good, but the ride back was too much for me. My body said "I'm too tired - you stop now." :) I pushed the bike back the last 1/8 mile. We built a fire and enjoyed nature that night. We chilled out on Sunday morning because we were simply too exhausted. In one day we cleared a path on the front 10 acres. It was a lot of work for Tim because he had to use the machette to clear some areas. We are happy how it turned out and plan to continue making some trails. Our next trip up is a long weekend, so we have more time to do things and more time to relax!!! Ahhhh......relax. We haven't had a day off of work since 2009. It will be nice to have an extended weekend. I may want more after that :)

The next weekend we celebrated Mother's Day at our house. My Mom and Dad and Tim's Mom came over. We had a burrito bar and then showed them the video of our 20 week ultrasound. Oh yea! I forget to mention that. We had the 20 week ultrasound. We found out if baby is a boy or girl. Well, we showed the 4 minute video to our parents and they all guessed boy. Well, SURPRISE - it's a girl!! We were surprised too, Tim and I both felt boy. The ultrasound was great, but she was being a little stinker...turning away and moving all over the place. The Dr. was able to get most of the measurements he needed to be sure she was all on track, but he didn't get a good enough look at her heart. We have another Ultrasound in early July that he will take a better look at her heart.....and hopefully she cooperates! There were no worries, so we are very happy about that. Since she was moving all over the place, from what he could get a look at he felt that baby is a girl! I guess we will for sure know by next ultrasound :) Exciting times! We also showed our parents some video we've shot of the land.

My birthday came and went on Monday, 5/11. I'm 30 now - wow! Shocking, but acceptable. This weekend we have errands to run and will also be going to the Green Bay Botanical Gardens. I recently started working with a gal that works there, she was in my media class. Since Tim and I love gardens, we thought it would be nice to support this local group. This will be our first visit with membership. We haven't been there for about 3 years, I'm looking forward to it!

Hope all is well with our family and friends!