Browsing Archives for Inspiration

About twenty miles (as the crow flies) from my house, there is a daylily farm.  A daylily farm that I did not even know about.  A daylily farm that was like a secret daylily farm.  So I set out with a few friends to unearth this daylily farm so that it would be a secret no longer.

We drove through some pretty country to get there.

And then we saw the daylilies.

Hundreds and hundreds of daylilies…

Thousands of them all dressed up in their prettiest dresses.

This one was called Hawaiian Party Dress.

I don’t remember what this one was called because after encountering Hawaiian Party Dress’ my mind sort of went blank.

But I do know that this is an ‘Asiatic lily’ not be confused with a daylily.  Asiatic lilies will keep their blooms for three or four days while a daylily bloom only lasts for a day.

Did you know that dayliliy blooms only last for a day?

It seems kind of obvious to me at this point, but prior to my visit to the daylily farm, I was under the impression that the name ‘daylily’ was just a name – kind of like ‘Hawaiian Party Dress’ is just a name.  I mean it is not a literal dress is it?

Horticultural is a labyrinth of puzzling factoids.

This is the lady who grows all the daylillies.

After we browsed among her blooms, she offered us pie and lemonade.

We felt it would be impolite to decline.

It was homemade apricot pie.  Made from apricots that she had picked just the day before.

And that was when I decided to move in with this woman and live with her for the rest of my life.

You can find me here. Sitting by her beautiful water garden eating a piece of pie. Watching the daylillies bloom for a single day.

Because someone needs to watch them.

I have decided that it should be me.

This was my favorite stand.

It had the prettiest design…

And also – the best costumes.

At first I didn’t know what this vegetable was.

I thought maybe they were exotic carrots.

Or petite beets.

Or tiny red rutabagas!

But then I read the sign.

“Radishes” it said.

Sometimes I have a tendency to over think things a little bit.

Hey!  I told you it was exciting!

Happy Fourth of July!

Originally posted October 2007

 

For the past year, Dennis and Jordan have shown up just about everyday to work on this house.

Aside from electric, plumbing, foundation, interior paint and some dirt work, they have done the work themselves. Framing, roofing, trimming, staining, siding, stairs, windows, doors, and the trillions of tasks in between.

 

 

 

 

Did I ever mention that Jordan is Dennis’s grandson?

 

 

 

 

 

Jordan usually calls Dennis, “Boss” or “Bossman” or sometimes “D”. Every once in a while though…

 

 

 

 

He calls him “grandpa.”

 

 

 

 

They make a great team.

This is Hal Sears.  Hal and I used to work together at the Community Mercantile which is a cooperative grocery store in Lawrence, Kansas specializing in natural foods, organic produce, and a vast selection of bulk herbs.  

Hal was the herb buyer for the store and for a few years, I was the ‘herb stocker girl’.  This means that once or twice a week, during my shift at the store, I would go through all the glass herb jars, pour them out, add new herbs into the bottom of the jars and then put the old herb stock back in to fill the jar to the top.  The store easily carried fifty different herbs and herb blends as well as whole leaf teas, powdered broth, and some bulk baking agents like baking soda and baking powder.  I enjoyed the job, especially re-stocking the peppermint and the cinnamon, but I quickly learned that powdered Valerian is the most vile smell on the face of the earth, and that I must pour the chili powder and the cayenne slowly or my eyes would sting for hours.  

 

 

 

 

Hal is extremely knowledgeable about herbs and their various medicinal uses.  At one point he created and sold his own herbal tinctures under a brand called ‘Thunder Wind Apothecary’.

 

 

Here is a bottle of Hal’s Echinacea Purpurea.  

Echinacea is an herb that can help fight off upper respiratory infections and is purported to boost the overall immune system.  The Plains Indians used it for snake bites as well as a myriad of other illnesses.  They passed their knowledge of this herb onto a travelling salesman named Joseph Meyer who began to market a concoction of the herb from a covered wagon.  To sell his echinacea tincture, he would goad a live rattlesnake into biting him, take a swig of his medicine and he would never get sick… or die… or anything.  He called his miracle drug, ‘snake oil’ and became the first in a long line of snake oil salesmen.  

Now who wants some echinacea tincture?

Let’s make some with Hal! 

 

 

First, Hal digs up a purple cone flower in his yard.  The scientific name for purple cone flower is either echinacea purpurea or echinacea augustofolian.  Either variety is suitable for an herbal tincture, but the augustofolian variety can numb your lips and mouth.

 

 

 

 

Hal keep the entire plant in tact.  He is going to use every part of the cone flower, including the heart, the lungs, the eyeballs, the bladder and the bowels.  

 

 

 

 

There will be dirt.  

 

 

 

Hal removes as much of the dirt as he can, but it is insidious.  Just when you think the plant is clean, you will find more dirt.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After a thorough cleaning, Hal hangs his echinacea up to dry for a while.  He wants it to wilt a bit.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While the cone flower was wilting, Hal and I sat on his back porch and chewed the fat.  We rifled through all of the people that we both worked with at the ‘Merc’ and where they are now.  We talked about the changes over time in the co-op from it’s humble beginnings in a tiny store on Massachusetts street to the full service grocery store that it is now.  We also covered Buddhism, Catholicism, wild-crafting herbs, his adorable two year old granddaughter named Mercury, comfrey, ducks, my four boys, living in a small town, community life, peace, peach farming, baptism, the french horn, aloe vera, theocracy and the Latin mass.  

I love talking to Hal.  

 

 

 

 

I brought Hal a few varieties of cone flowers that we sell at the Garden Center.  

The orange one is called ‘Tiki Torch’ and the yellow one is called ‘Harvest Moon’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is what the echinacea looked like when Hal took it off the clothes line.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He brought it inside to his kitchen and chopped it into four inch pieces.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hal stuffed two glass jars with pieces of the plant.  He placed the roots in the bottom, then added the stems and leaves…

 

 

 

The flowers went on the top.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He filled the jars with vodka.

 

 

 

 

One jar was finished, but to the other Hal added a few other herbs.

 

 

 

 

 

He added some goldenseal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some licorice for sweetness…

 

 

 

 

And some cayenne to clear out the sinuses.

 

 

 

 

He topped it all off with just a tad more vodka.

 

 

 

 

Hal then demonstrated how he would filter the tincture after it had set in the jars for one month.  

He simply folded a paper towel inside of  a kitchen colander and set this on top of bowl.

He would pour the contents of the tincture through the colander and then bottle the resulting amber colored liquid.

 

 

 

 

 

Hal labeled the jars for me.

 

 

 

 

He showed me a few books that had shaped his own herbal knowledge.

 

 

 

And then he made me lunch!

Who got the best deal out of this little excursion?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks Hal!

 

 

Addendum…

Several commenters have been asking about dosage recommendations for this tincture.   I hesitate to put medical advice on my blog because I don’t actually know anything.  I will say that the only way I have ever used echinacea myself is to simply  steep the dried root  in a nice hot cup of water whenever I feel the first bit of a scratchy cold coming on in the back of my throat.  You can purchase dried echinacea in most stores that have a good herb section or any health food store.  Now that I have Hal’s tincture, I will try it out and I will probably follow the dosage advice in this article (scan down towards the end of the article for the dosage info.)

 

Happy Herbing!

Rechelle

A few weeks ago, I toured the home of Mary Carol Garrity during her summer open house.

 

 

 

 

Mary Carol Garrity is the owner of the fabulous Nell Hill’s and Garrity’s stores in Atchison, Kansas as well as the newly opened Nell Hill’s at Briarcliff in Kansas City.

 

 

 

 

 

 

She has also written several books on interior decorating as well as a syndicated column called “Style at Home”

 

 

 

 

I have to admit to not being very adept at decorating my own home.

With four boys in the house, it is enough to just keep a pathway clear from the front door to the bathrooms.

 

 

 

But that does not stop me from enjoying someone else’s beautifully decorated home.

 

 

 

 

A girl can dream can’t she?

 

 

 

 

I used to love to decorate and got a huge kick out of arranging things on walls and table tops and along the mantle piece.  

I made curtains.  I collected old plates and actually hung them on the wall.  I created floral arrangements and seasonal wreaths and I made throw pillows to lay my aching head on after all that woefully wearying flower arranging. 

 

 

 

Now I look at decorative items and I just see one more thing to dust…

 

 

 

 

 

One more thing that will get broken during an indoor soccer match…

 

 

 

 

One more thing that will get mistaken for a Frisbee, a basketball goal or a receptacle from which to feed the cats…

 

 

 

So instead I visit other people’s homes and I dream…

I dream  of having a beautifully decorated home with furniture that has not been mercilessly ripped to shreds by the world’s most beautiful show cats, where no corn chips are ever scattered in a trail of crumbs from the kitchen to the garage and back again nine hundred time, and where the dirty dishes actually get placed in the dishwasher and not left to die a slow and painful death under the dresser in the back bedroom. 

 

 

 

 

A home where the only sticky spots on the floor are those left by the mottled sunlight… and they aren’t even sticky!

A home where the toilets clean themselves, the mud room is the only room with any mud in it, and my children suddenly understand why it is so important to their mother that all the bath towels be folded the same way and they ACTUALLY FOLD THEM RIGHT!

But that is not going to happen anytime soon is it?

So I will just have to hang on until Mary Carol opens her home to the masses again.  

 

 

 

 

 

If I can last that long…

 

PS – Mrs. Mama fixed the above photo for me.  Ain’t it pretty?

Our first stop will be the urban slums.

 

Today, the world’s population numbers almost seven billion souls.   Close to one billion of these souls live in urban slums.

 

 

The number of folks living in urban shanty towns is projected to triple in under fifty years.

So that will be three billion people living in cardboard shacks on the edge of major cities by the year 2050.

 

 

 

 

 

Our next stop in the Global Village is Zambia.

Zambia is in Africa.  

When materials are available, Zambians often build round homes out of bricks that they make themselves.

Round homes do not waste any space, plus you don’t have to sweep out any dark and dreary corners full of spider webs.

The Zambian kitchen is an open fire underneath the thatched ‘pergola’.  A very clever brick chicken coop is located between the home and the outdoor kitchen.

 

 

This is my friend Dave standing beside the Zambian garden.  

He’s the one in the fierce, bright yellow rain slicker in case you didn’t notice him at first.

 

 

 

 

This is Zambia without Dave in a fierce, bright yellow rain slicker.

 

 

 

Personally, I think Zambia with Dave in his fierce, bright yellow rain slicker is better than Zambia without Dave in a a fierce, bright yellow rains slicker.  

But that could just be me.

 

As we left Zambia, we passed the Refugee camp.  I have a few photos of the Refugee camp but my computer is not cooperating with me, so I will have to describe it for you.  The refugee camp consists of a low slung metal barn with a concrete floor.  No fires were allowed in the refugee camp.  It was a cold, desolate, forlorn place.  Even Dave’s fierce, bright yellow rain slicker could not lift the gloom of the refugee camp.  Currently, 35 million people in the world can be classified as refugees.  Of these 35 million refugees, 12 million of them reside in refugee camps.

Did you know that Henry Kissinger was a refugee ?

So was Albert Einstein.

Refugees can be anyone, anywhere, anytime.  All it takes is a little civil unrest that leads to bloody bedlam, and then to people just like you and me fleeing for our lives with our most precious belongings tied up in a plastic bag on our backs.

 

 

 

Now we have arrived at my house in Guatemala.  

 

 

Come on in!  

Guatemala was the most cozy of  all the Global Village homes.  There were three rooms, including a kitchen with a wood burning oven, and even electricity.  

They must have known that I suffer from occasional bouts of weakness and shakiness so they gave me the most comfortable home.

 

 

There was colorful paint and simple furnishings too.  

Our Guatemalan home was on a coffee farm.   

Did you know that coffee is the second most valuable traded commodity in today’s world?

Can you guess what the world’s most valuable commodity is?

The typical coffee farmer makes about six cents from a ten dollar bag of Starbucks coffee beans.

If you purchase your coffee from a company like ‘Fair Trade’, the coffee farmers make as much as $1.50 from a ten dollar bag of coffee beans.  This is an extremely painless way to ‘vote with your dollars’ and buy a product that you can be sure the third world farmer is getting a decent percentage from his crop… oh!  and the coffee is fabulous too.  

 

 

From Guatemala we’ll swing on over to Appalachia.

 

 

In the year 2000, 13.6 percent of Appalachia was living in poverty and 5.8 percent of those people were living in what is termed ‘deep poverty’ which is having an income that is half the poverty level.  The national US average for poverty is 12 percent.  There are pockets of poverty throughout the United States including Hispanic migrant farm labor out West and poor black communities in the South.  All of these groups tend to share a common link of being involved in an industry that has historically wreaked havoc on the environment, the community and the health of it’s work force. Industries like coal mining and some types of farming which rely on a desperate work force willing to work under terrible conditions for little pay.  These industries all too often lead to workers getting sick from exposure to pesticides or diseases like black lung from working in the coal mines.  Once a workers health is gone, he can no longer support his family and they sink further and further into poverty.  

 

 

 

 

Our last stop will be my favorite place in the Global Village…

 

This is Thailand.

I loved the houses in Thailand.  

 

 

 

 

These simple structures are raised to survive the yearly flooding and also to get the people away from the mosquito breeding grounds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The walls are constructed of bamboo and they are not fitted closely together to allow for air to move through the home.

 

 

 

 

 

These Thai homes are built with a thatched roof and a metal roof, but in Thailand the roofs would more typically be constructed of bamboo also.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is in places like Thailand that families can easily get malnourished due to lack of iron and/or Vitamin A in their diets.  This causes loss of peripheral vision, an inability to coordinate your movements, slowness in processing new information, general weakness and eventual blindness.  

 

 

 

 

 

A family that is struggling to see and to move and to think has less and less ability to properly work their land.

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes it is easier to believe that poor people are lazy and just don’t want to work hard isn’t it?

In truth, there is all too often a vicious cycle of illness, malnourishment, and tyrannical forces such as a controlling industry that wants to keep it’s work force cheap as well as governments that simply don’t care for their people.  Heifer International is a charity that has been able to squeeze in behind this corruption and help people in ways that truly makes sense for the areas that they are working in.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you are interested in donating to Heifer or of learning more about their work, you can find out more here.  

Heifer International makes a difference by helping people to help themselves.  

Here ends the tour of the Heifer Ranch Global Village with locations throughout the United States…

Heifer Learning Centers
Heifer Ranch in Perryville, Arkansas
Hidden Villa in Los Altos Hills, California (Scheduled to open in Spring 2010)
Overlook Farm in Rutland, Massachusetts

Heifer Global Village Site Sponsors
Howell Nature Center in Howell, Michigan

Shepherd’s Spring in Sharpsburg, Maryland 

It has been a pleasure traveling with you today!

Please exit to your left and watch that first step, it’s a doozy!  

And thank you for choosing MSFH for your tour of the Heifer Ranch Global Village.

On our recent trip to visit my sister-in-law and her family, I took my camera and walked around their sweet old neighborhood.  Their home is the stately mission style house pictured above.

I love older styles of homes and if I ever get the chance, I would love to build another house inspired by a different style of architecture.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

For instance, I would love to build the world’s sweetest brick bungalow.  

The coziness of any bungalow never fails to make my heart go pitter-pat.

Plus, the big bad wolf can huff and puff all he wants but he would never be able to blow my house down.

 

 

 

 

 

 

But what about an English Tudor with a vine covered chimney?

I am afraid that I really must build an English Tudor with a vine covered chimney.

What exactly is the point of slogging through the next fifty odd years without an English Tudor with a vine covered chimney?

I will however, need a curl of smoke rising from my vine covered chimney.

…and a butler who lays a fire for me every morning.

 

 

 

 

 

Oh dear!

Perhaps the chimney should be vine-less?

Is a vine-covered chimney so necessary if there is a long shed roof dormer, a curving brick sidewalk, and a storybook slate roof?

I think I have found it.

Yes!

This will be the next house I build…

 

 

 

 

HOLD THE PHONE!

Can I really NOT CHOOSE a formidable four square replete with a prominent overhang and precisely perfectly striped awnings?

This is the one.

This is the next house of my dreams…

End of discussion…

 

 

 

 

 

Oh dear!

But what about a sweet cottage with four dormers and an entrance so welcoming that I almost walked in?

Hello?

Anyone home?

Can I have your house please?

 

 

 

 

But what if I need more color?

Maybe a mission inspired two story with fabulous windows, and massive porch columns?

This is the one.

I must go for some color next time…

 

 

 

 

UNLESS!!!

I can find the fixer upper of my dreams!

Wouldn’t this be a fun one to tackle?

Look at that wrought iron fence!  That side porch!  That beautiful second story bay window!

 

 

 

 

 

I lingered long over this one…

Imagining it in my mind…

Painting it, sanding the floors, caulking the joints, repointing the bricks, stretching new screens, repairing the plaster, stripping off mirrored wallpaper, ripping out the overgrown garden, replacing the insulation… the plumbing… the wiring… the windows…

Wrenching the house off of it’s foundation to repair the cracks…

Discovering a ghastly infestation of termites…

The roof caves in…

The house sinks into the ground…

My marriage breaks up…

My kids go to jail…

I am placed in a mental asylum where I wander the halls in a backless gown…

My hair is matted to my skull in greasy blobs.

Food is dried on my lips…

A handsome man visits me with a pretty woman and a baby and I don’t know who they are…

I escape the asylum and am found living with ferel kittens in the old house I once tried to rescue.

There is a strange old man who wears yellowing t-shirts and paint stained shorts who spends all of his time taping old game boxes back together and planting trees…

He never remembers to put half and half in my coffee…

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fearing for my life, I fled the fixer-upper and found a different house…

 

 

 

 

 

 

A house with white clapboards, a green roof, a curving brick sidewalk….

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sweet gingerbready siding on the gabled exterior….

 

 

 

 

An inviting front porch.

An absurdity of windows…

Strangley comforted I thought, This is the house of my dreams…

This is what I will build…

 

 

 

 

It’s the only way to keep my sons out of prison.

Wait!

Not Tipsy in the Garden!

I meant Garden TIPS!

A few Garden TIPS from my father-in-law Joe!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the way to Joe’s garden.

Inside there is a bountiful harvest of garden wisdom.  

 

 

 

 

A few years ago Joe started planting his tomatoes and cucumbers inside of these sunken buckets which were placed inside of his raised beds, which were placed inside of a circle of wire mesh. 

You might need to be a little tipsy to go to all this trouble for the sake of a garden fresh tomato, but there is a method to Joe’s madness.

Joe cut the bottoms off of those buckets (which are laundry soap buckets that he collects from the nearby nursing home).  He fills the inside of the buckets with new potting soil every year, thereby eliminating all sorts of soil diseases that could infect his plants.  This method also saves on watering, as Joe can train his hose on the inside of each bucket and not waste water on the surrounding dirt.

Joe also stuck several Tums tablets in the soil around his tomatoes.  The Tums tablets add calcium to the soil which prevents ‘blossom end rot’ on his tomatoes, and also keeps his tomatoes from getting indigestion.

 

 

 

 

Besides gardening and farming to support his large family, Joe also maintained oil wells for a living. Because of this, he is a skilled welder and he often puts these skills to use in his garden. Here is a garden implement to which he added some length and reinforced with a second support.

 

 

 

 

 

Here is a support he made for his pepper plants. When the plants get tall and heavy with peppers, they can rest upon the metal grid.

All of these welded tools in Joe’s garden caused me to ask him…

“What if you want to grow a garden and don’t know how to weld things?” 

“You can’t grow a garden if your can’t weld.” Joe replied.

 

 

I think I may be in trouble with this whole gardening thing.

 

 

 

 

As many folks do, Joe uses a raised bed system to garden.

No welding required.

 

 

 

 

To keep the weeds down on his paths between his raised beds, Joe stapled fabric weed barrier from the edge of one bed, across the walk way and onto the edge of the other bed. He then covered the fabric with mulch.

 

 

 

Joe keeps his green onion patch going longer, by keeping a small store of extra onion sets and replacing every onion that he picks with a fresh set.

 

 

 

Joe always washes his hands before he harvests his lettuce so that there is less dirt to wash off later.

I hope to visit Joe’s garden later in the season to show you his shocking asparagus beans.

…and to see if the Tums worked on his tomato’s indigestion.  

 

Dreaming of my own garden fresh produce someday soon,

Rechelle