After at least 20 days off of wheat, I think I can say that giving up wheat for me personally, doesn’t make a huge difference. Well, it certainly has eliminated my spring allergy sore throat, but I think I’ve actually gained weight this month! I was hoping to get rid of a pound or two as we’ve been thrown full swing into swim suit season, but instead my shorts and tank tops are fitting a wee bit tighter! Maybe it’s from substituting corn chips & nuts instead of crackers and bread.

My son’s asthma is still active, but still seems less active than normal. My daughter’s eczema, which is the entire reason we’ve started this experiment hasn’t been eased at all. Poor thing.

Maybe we haven’t been eating wheat but we have been eating from the garden! After parenting three toddler’s we can say that shelling beans (these are favas) can hold a two-year-old’s attention a surprisingly long time!

Thanks for your diet comments, keep them coming!

It has been brought to my attention that there are other things that need addressing besides dreamily walking around the yard with your felco’s cutting flowers. I have been told there is laundry to do and bathrooms to clean and meals to prep and a wage to be earned. But who wants any part of that at this time of year?

In other news our whole family has given up wheat for the month of May. This is the third time I’ve done this. I did give up wheat for week in ’08 and then Scott and I gave it up last summer for a few weeks. We found some interesting discoveries last summer when we gave it up, like how Scott’s allergies completely went away and how we both felt lighter. This time we gave it up to see if it could clear up our daughters eternal eczema and help my son’s asthma. We are 14 days into it and while it hasn’t helped her eczema yet, it does seem to have helped with the asthma. And my usual spring time allergy induced sore throat has disappeared. It’s hard though, for us bread eaters to be off of wheat. I haven’t felt as much sacrifice as our kids, especially our 8-year-old (the one with asthma), who thinks this whole giving up wheat is a bunch of hooey. He wants pizza and pasta and bakery pastries and that’s all there is to it.

We’ll give it another couple of weeks and if this doesn’t clear up the eczema we’ll try a dairy free month (oh that somehow sounds even more tortuous than a wheat free month! Especially during hot ice cream season!). Knowing now that wheat really tends to ease our allergies and asthma during the heavy season is a great bit of knowledge going forward. Maybe every spring will become a wheat free time for our family.

Have you ever given up something? Did you see noticeable changes in your body because of it?

* l o v e *

happy mother’s day to all you mothers this sunday & every day!

]]> http://asonomagarden.wordpress.com/2013/05/10/l-o-v-e/feed/ 5 asonomagarden IMG_5297 IMG_5298 IMG_5299 IMG_5300 http://asonomagarden.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/naked-ladies-make-a-mighty-fortress-a-story-of-weed-control/ http://asonomagarden.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/naked-ladies-make-a-mighty-fortress-a-story-of-weed-control/#comments Wed, 08 May 2013 17:17:13 +0000 asonomagarden http://asonomagarden.wordpress.com/?p=1592 Continue reading →]]> Late winter & early spring in our lives is a time of eternal weed pulling. This weed pulling became compounded when we moved out to the country. Without tidy city fence lines and paved street & sidewalk borders, in the country where the garden ends and a field of grass begins is really just a matter of where you’re willing to stop pulling weeds. These weeds seem to keep encroaching on us making our garden smaller and the field larger, but armed with our hands and our weed whacker we’re always determined to fight back.

(weed free side + a soccer ball…always a soccer ball in my flower beds!)

(just to the right, were the weeds are starting to take over)
This year I found something interesting though. In the flower bed that surrounds our back lawn weeds were only moving in to certain parts of the flower bed. Beyond this flower bed is a field and those grasses were making a concerted effort to take over, but only in one spot. After a bit of head scratching and investigation I realized that the areas that were weed free had a thick border of naked lady (amaryllis) bulbs behind them. It seemed as though the invasive grasses had a much harder time getting over the ‘fence’ of thick bulbs and greenery. Upon further research I found that using a thick rooted & foliaged plant as a weed barrier is indeed a sound way of weed control. These types of plants are called fortress plants (as coined by Toby Hemenway of Gaia’s Garden). Other fortress plants are comfrey, lemongrass, red hot poker and I’m betting that the skyscraper asters I have in other parts of my garden would do the job too.

(the back side of the weed free section – naked lady greens are the wide, long leafed plants in the middle)

(divided and soon to be planted naked ladies)

(skyscraper aster blooming in October)
Just as soon as I learned this, I divided up those naked ladies and created a wall of them to surround my entire flower bed. So next spring, instead of weeding you’ll find me leisurely sipping a piña colada in the shade while my fortress plants do the work. Well….a girl can dream.

It’s been a dry year here in California. One of the driest winters on record. To us, even though we had a very wet fall, it seemed like after the holidays the faucet was shut off. There was really almost no rain whatsoever after the holidays. Such a strange winter. And this spring we are certainly seeing the signs. Sure, if you squint your eyes and turn your head a little to the left, things look pretty good. Flowers are blooming, trees are leafing out. But if you look closely you’ll notice that the lawn is almost dead already, spring flowers are getting torched by this early heat (supposed to be in the 90′s tomorrow!), and we are relying heavily on irrigation…already. This is going to be a long summer.

A few years ago I wrote a post on drought friendly vegetable gardening, (wow, I used to write such different posts back then!) which is worth a read if you are struggling with water issues too. In regards to that post, we outfitted two more beds with in-line drip irrigation. We ordered 15 yards of mulch to heavily cover the irrigation and our tender crops. We are also focusing heavily on three beds this growing year instead of last years four beds. And I’m heavily mulching the flower gardens to help retain every last ounce of water in the soil. We need, however to get these beds on a timer, so that they can be watered in the evening or early morning hours. That is an easy step, we just need to put it higher on our priority list.

Luckily we have the option of putting our laundry on grey water. We’ve had this since we moved in, but it only drains out to one spot. Though I shouldn’t complain, the snowball hydrangea looks quite happy about the situation. However, my hope for the near future is that I can hook it up to a pipe that has multiple perforations in it, so that it can water a larger area along our foundation plantings.

How is the rain/water situation where you garden? Do you have any drought gardening tricks?

It’s that time of year where the flowers are coming inside. Our beautiful new windows (such a treat to have new windows!) are getting opened everyday to enjoy spring breezes. Slowly the line between indoors and outdoors is getting blurred.

It was a welcome side indeed to walk into a house filled with flowers on a day like today, when upon complete inspection of my two hives, I realized both are in a sad state of decline. One is queenless, has wax moths and appears to have sent out a well populated swarm. The other, also in low population, has a queen but appears to have a fair amount of dead, almost mature larvae still in their cell (chalkbrood possibly?). Neither hive looked good. It was supposed to be a good day with only my oldest son at home. We went out to brunch and then were to have a happy, learning filled hive inspection together. We learned, for sure, but having mama walk back into the house with a heavy heart and tears in her eyes was not part of the plan.

I’ve been told that this happens. Colonies die. To not give up. But it is hard not to feel incredibly guilty. What was I thinking in believing I could keep tens of thousands of bees happy when I have such little time to give them? And now I have to find time despite foreseeing a busy weekend. Do I combine them? Do I get a new queen? Do I call it all a loss? Oy!

The good news is that the garden is booming along and I’ve learned a few new tricks that I’m looking forward to sharing with you. In a rare instance, plants that I thought I had killed over the winter are making a strong comeback and the new plants I got this year are growing just great. (Usually I always kill a few new plants.) Maybe I should keep my focus on growing plants and not an apiary.

…at least there are flowers…

Today we moved the car off the side of the road to let the biggest tractors we’ve ever seen drive past us to harvest this field.

I half wished that I kept the kids home from school so we could watch those big machines move and work.

Later walked down to visit a neighbors new lambs and arrived just in time to watch triplet lambs being born. Amazing. Didn’t regret missing baseball practice in order to watch.

Laughed hard when the seven kids watching shouted, ‘here comes the polenta!’ as the placenta emerged.

Will likely never eat polenta again without a chuckle.

Realized today marks two years that we decided we wanted to live here, in this house, on this street. No regrets yet!

When we go to Sea Ranch, I often come home refreshed not only from the sea, but by how simple we can live.

The houses in this community are simply built. Not that a great amount of care isn’t put into the architecture or building, in fact the opposite is more likely true. But each house seems to be spared of such frivolities as ornate trim work, fussy paint colors, or landscape. The care seems to go into making the most of the view, the light and covering both the inside and outside of the houses in wood.

We try and take only what we really need. For me that was two pairs of pants, two tops, two pairs of shoes, pjs, cozy slippers, socks, a book and a knitting project. Well, and the camera of course. I limited the kids to one backpack full of clothes each. No computers, no internet, no toys besides two lego trucks, no excess amount of stuff. For the better part of the week we live sparingly.

It’s so refreshing to not have all the clutter around. I purge our house on a regular basis. Purging is what I do when I feel stressed out. Some people clean, some people eat, I throw things out. Yet still in a house of five people, each with their own set of interests, clutter can’t be avoided and sometimes it makes me go a little bananas. This last week though, with little to clean up and a spare amount of laundry and dishes, I could sit and read and knit and take walks with out any guilt at all. Heaven! Scott collected mussels and caught a crab for dinner and treated us to a nice bottle of local gin and fancy tonic.

The constant pain of stress knots between my shoulder blades actually faded away on day three. I had gone for a walk, sat down on the bluffs and realized that tension, by now a constant companion, was gone.

I brought my handmade beauty goodies for little spa like indulgences while the kids watched deer tv every morning.

We’re back now and in the in-between days of vacationing and getting back to the schedule of life. We came back to the treat of newly refinished wood floors but with baseboard to be put in and two rooms of furniture strewed about the house. Scott powered out the baseboard in two days and the furniture is slowly getting placed in it’s spot. Then it will be a matter of my regular post-Sea-Ranch household purge and a simplifying of our crazy schedule. And then we can get back to the business of gardening.

After a busy, hectic, too much on my tiny plate sort of week, we are headed to this place for a while.

I saw this quote the other day and I plan on making it ‘my theme’ for our time away:

“if you learn to use a perfect afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned the secret of life. -lin yutang”

Sending you peace and relaxation! -xoxo-