2016 Spring Garden

Square foot garden

We are hobby gardeners. By hobby, I mean, we really enjoy gardening but don't produce enough to feed our family throughout the year and spend more on gardening than it would cost to purchase organic food from the store. However, it's a great learning experience and we're learning as a family how to grow things organically. As part of our homeschooling, I decided that this year, we will weigh what we harvest. This way we can keep track of how much food we're producing and get an idea of how our garden is growing and feeding our family. I'm not including the cost of seeds since most of them we either saved or bought in the past. Not to mention, seeds are pretty cheap. I also didn't include the cost of soil or any gardening supplies. My goal is to grow 25 lbs this year. At the end of the year, we'll compare the cost of organic food from the store with the cost of organic food we've grown in our garden. In the future I hope to add more details about our garden such as how long each crop took to grow, the total cost involved, and how much time daily we spent watering the garden and taking care of it. But to start, weighing the crops is enough. I was excited to finally justify the cost of a kitchen scale.

We harvested our first crops a few weeks ago and some more earlier this week. So far, we have harvested carrots and onions and are just over 4.5 lbs. If our pumpkins, cantaloupes, and watermelon grow, we might make our goal before the Fall harvest. We have harvested some kale but I didn't weigh it. We should be getting some tomatoes as well. Our tomato plant is a great example of how my husband planted an organic tomato that we got from the store, in a pot of soil. The seeds have grown and produced lovely tomato plants that have been very fruitful the past few years. 

This year, we added a two barrel compost. That along with the compost tube from our Garden Tower should really help our soil naturally. Here are some pictures of our garden. I'll start with some pictures of my family, since I know that's what my family enjoys seeing the most. Scroll down and you'll see pictures of our garden and gardening supplies. We're growing a lot of things. The Garden Tower mostly has herbs, strawberries, and greens. The square foot has pumpkins, onions, cantaloupes, peas, and potatoes. Our tomato plant is in the pot in front of our square foot. Depending on how this year goes, we may expand our garden next year. We'd love eventually become more self sufficient. On a side note, we have not had to run our sprinklers this Spring yet. Thankfully we've gotten some good rain and we've been able to use the rain from our rain barrels to water our garden, which is the best kind of water to use. Plants love rain water.  

My four loves!

This cute baby loves helping in the garden!

Three carrots we harvested.

Her first carrot to harvest.

Yum!

Harvested onions

Our cute wild bunny that lives in our yard.

Pitcher plant, to hopefully help catch all the fruit flies in our kitchen.

One of several really long onions

Such great helpers!

Compost barrels

Rain barrels

Garden Tower, filled with herbs, strawberries, and greens.

Mosquito repelling plants

Several herbs

Where we just pulled some carrots and onions.  Don't worry, new seeds have been planted.

We had to pull the kale from our Garden Tower but don't worry, there's more growing here.

MFW Preschool Unit 2: Obedience

Princess just finished Unit 2: Obedience in My Father's World, All Aboard the Animal Train. It was such a fun unit. The animal was the black bear and the character trait was obedience. We played, "Mommy says," hunted for bears, read lots of books about bears, and spent lots of time playing and singing. She memorized the "Black Bear" poem quickly and still remembers the bunny one from unit 1.  Princess loves doing her school work and picks up on things very quickly. 

We acted out the story of "The Three Bears."

We made a black table and black beds for them.

The sandbox is always fun

Trampoline Park

Backyard trampoline

A fun match the ball in the right hole game I made

We played zoo where the kids could purchase animals from me

She loved playing "hide the bear"

Coloring

Playing with her younger brother

First time to visit the dentist

Her teeth looked great!

Egg sensory bin around Easter

 

The closest thing we saw to a black bear, she was unsure of it.

Nothing beats fun in a box!

Freshly Review

Facebook advertisements occasionally actually entice me. Not all ads do. Thankfully, I own some Facebook stock so I'm okay clicking on the occasional ad if it interests me. That's how I found out about Freshly and actually Blue Apron and Green Chef as well, although that was through friends on FB.

What is Freshly? It's a meal delivery service that delivers cooked meals ready to be heated. They are not frozen and you keep them in your fridge until it's time to eat. 

Here's how Freshly comes packaged.

So convenient, right? It also says it only takes 2 minutes to heat up. I found that the meat and sometimes the veggies were not cooked enough at only 2 minutes. 3-4 minutes turned out better and we have an amazing microwave that is only 4 years old, so it is on the normal range of cooking. I compare Freshly somewhat to getting freshly prepared foods at places like Central Market or Whole Foods.  The first week I ordered 12 meals, 6 different ones, so we'd have six dinners ready for the week. Each comes with 1.5 serving. I only got pictures of 5 and I'll explain why below. Here's what I got.

Homestyle Meatloaf

 

Grilled Flat Iron Steak

 

Coconut Lime Salmon

Beef Provencal

 

Moroccan Chicken

I also ordered Chicken Rustica with Roasted Cauliflower. We just ended up not eating it and throwing it out. The reason being was, it would expire before we had time to eat it. Hopefully it was just because they try to use as few preservatives as possible. I just would have liked to have known that the food would not last a week before going bad.

I was hoping to get the meals delivered early enough last Friday to serve our first meal on Friday. However, they did not arrive until after 7pm, which is no fault of Freshly. Since we have little kids, we eat around 5-5:30. The meals were overall, okay tasting. Some better than others. We liked the steak probably the best. We didn't fully enjoy the others because my husband and I got sick, we think food poisoning. We're trying to decide where it came from and hope it wasn't from Freshly. We think it might have been the tea from a Mexican food restaurant since our kids eat everything we eat, except for a few meals from Freshly they just refused. Which honestly, that saves me no time if my kids won't eat it and they are actually really good eaters. Some have some interesting spices and some were a little unusual in taste.

Before we got sick and were unable to keep anything down for over a day, I had already ordered food for next week. Although my husband said he'd rather me just cook from now on. He does like food we make from Blue Apron and Green Chef. A few of the meals had a hospital-like taste to them. If you've ever eaten hospital food, you know what I'm talking about and I haven't eaten hospital food often. I'll come back and write another review after next week. I'm trying a few breakfast items as well. I LOVE this idea but the food has to taste good. I also am not saying Freshly made us sick, we really don't know, but when you try something new and end up sick, you always wonder if it was because of that. If you do want to try Freshly, let me know and I'll give you a coupon code to get some free meals. 

Camping at Fort Griffin

Truth be told, I am really not a camper. I might be a glamper but even that may be pushing it. Frankly, I'm more of a B&B girl. I like clean bathrooms, nice beds, and climate control. However, I LOVE the outdoors! I just don't like bugs or trying to use the restroom outside! However, I married a man who loves to camp and so on occasion, we will camp or glamp as a family.

Last Fall we went camping for the first time as a family. My husband and I went camping around 11 years ago when we were first married and got rained on. Blue Rock is in Trail Life which is kind of like boy scouts but a Christian scouting group. They had a family camp out last Fall at Fort Griffin. It was fun. We more or less glamped and stayed in the climate controlled shelter rather than in a tent in the 40 degree weather. A good friend of mine glamps there every year and she gave me the heads up and I felt it was fine to try with the two little kids. Blue Rock would love to stay in a tent next time and probably will have lots of fun tent camping experiences with his dad in the future. 

The stars were pretty at night. The night sky brings a lot of people to this area. There is also a nice museum and lots of rich history. We had a great time.

I stayed in the shelter most of the time with Blue Knight and some with Princess while Blue Knight napped. That's the one hard thing about traveling with little kids and babies is how much they need to nap and rest. The car ride was not the most enjoyable experience as Blue Knight does not like the car but we made it and he didn't cry too, too bad. We just stopped more than if he loved the car. 

Blue Rock's favorite part of the camping trip was the campfire and smores. He also enjoyed hiking with the guys. My husband and Princess went hiking with them while I stayed with the baby. Friday night we had smores and let Blue Rock hang out with his troop while we tried to put the little kids to bed. We only stayed one night, instead of two. When we were almost done packing up it started raining. I was really glad we decided to go ahead and head home. We had a packed day on Sunday. 

Blue Rock had an encounter with a barbed wire fence. He's okay, thankfully! His troop also did some community service while they were there. They picked up the trash all around the camp ground. 

I recommend Fort Griffin. It's a smaller campground, you could probably walk around the tent/rv/covered shelter area in about 30 minutes. There are two bathroom facilities with showers and they are clean. There is only one covered shelter. There's a big playground in the middle of the campground. There is also lots of nice hiking around the campground and outside the camping area. That's where most of the hiking took place. We saw some Indian ruins and they have golf carts you can borrow for free to drive around if you have a little kid or are unable to walk it.

It was really nice to get away from the city and unplug from cell service and the internet. I see more camping or family glamping trips in our future. I recommend Fort Griffin and thought it was a nice place to camp in Texas.

His poor nose!

He loved exploring

Our climber!

 

The shelter

We set up two queen air mattresses

 

There was even a picnic table inside

At night

Car ride home. The first and probably only time all three kids will nap at the same time!

Sweet baby!