Matter of Trust contribution

Well since I spouted on and on about how awesome Matter of Trust is, I figured I'd better walk the walk. Maybe I should just give it to you in pictures......

Um... before

Hee Hee.... during

3/4 of a pound of hair... that is how thick this mop is!

The new do, for now... I plan to grow it back out. It's only hair after all.

Buzz cut's for hair booms! It does more good in the oil clean up than it does being on my head. LOL.

A Matter of Trust

This oil spill will have such a huge impact on our world, I don't think many people realize how devastating it could be. I feel really helpless with this whole situation but then I remember I'm not. Here's what you can do to help out:

1. Use less plastic, plastic is an oil product so if you demand less plastic you also demand less oil. (driving less isn't the only way to withhold money from BP.)

2. Eat local and preferably organic: many 'fertilizers' for lawns and crops are also made from oil and the closer your food is less it drove to get to you.

3. Smile more, Earth needs a hug.

4. Save your hair, yep.... save your hair. Do you get your hair cut at a salon? Ask them to get with the program of sending hair to Matter of Trust.  Since I don't get my hair cut at a salon, I do it myself, I will be saving all my hair. Also Matter of Trust or MOT takes pet hair too! What do they do with it? They make 'booms' of hair, essentially long tubes of hair that collect oil (picture). These booms are laid out in the oil spills and your hair, your dogs hair, or even wool soak it up. All the information and how to's can be found on there website at the link above. Please help, it's such a little thing.

photo from here.

A big update about everything...

So sorry for the delay in postings, but it is May after all.  On Tuesday I got 28 tomato plants in the ground. We've decided to try the twine method for supporting the tomatoes as they grow. I discovered supporting the tomatoes this way in The Vegetable Gardeners Bible which is my go to book for just about everything. We are still having cold nights here, but only into the the high 30's low 40's which is doable for tomatoes if they are covered. I have 5 tomato plants left over that will end up in the front yard spiral garden supported by cages.

The spiral garden is coming along nicely. We got all the plants divided and put into the ground and sweet peas started for the teepee. I plan to plant beans on the A frame trellis and possibly a squash or two. It needs to be mulched badly and that will happen sometime this weekend... in between rain storms. Memorial day weekend in the PNW is ALWAYS rainy.

All the plants look so small right now. It's rather cute! I don't have the walk way done yet because I am going to need a ton of woolly thyme, I bought two plants but that's a lot of walk way to cover.

We have a chicken who isn't laying, she hasn't been for about a month now. I am going to spend some time outside checking for an outdoor nest, some chickens will just decide to lay outside. So I've gotta check that out, oh and maybe deworm them and get some DE into the coop shavings. I don't think our bee's are enjoying the wet weather considering all flights are grounded. I want to get in and do another hive check but that must wait until it is warmer which will be likely sometime early next week.

Mom and I are prepping for a garage sale too! That should take place the weekend of the 11th. Provided we actually get nice weather? I am going to sell off some major furniture and all the chemical cleaners in the household. It truly is amazing what I found under the cupboards. Jake and I need to spend some time organizing the garage for the sale, moving stuff that we don't want out there to the basement or out back. I need to get his triathlon gear up for sale too! Man the list just goes on and on....

Why I am reducing my plastic waste

This video makes me slightly heartbroken with all the damage we've done. Plastic's don't disappear even if you recycle, recycling isn't enough. The first 'R' is Reduce, then Reuse and Recycle.... I think most people have just latched onto the "it's ok because I recycle" mentality, and that isn't good enough anymore.


With hope.... we can stop this:

Bee Hive Check 5-9

We did a hive check on Sunday, mostly to see how many frames they had drawn out, and wether or not to put on the second hive body box. They still have a little way to go, they've drawn out comb on frames 1-7 once 8 is fully loaded we should get that second box on. We don't want to think they don't have enough room to grow and start thinking of swarming.

The hive was very calm which was surprising, I think I only sprayed them with peppermint 5-6 times and that was that.

This is frame 7, you can see where they've attached there own comb to the starter strip of wax. This was really warm wax and not attached to the sides yet so it was really wobbly.

This is frame number 8, they get bigger as we get toward number 1. Watching the bees draw there own comb is so fascinating.

I spotted our queen, see what a big butt she has!

A good picture of the girls hard at work making comb.

I took a video while Jacob was pulling out frames, It's long but pretty cool. I can never fully focus on the queen because our little camera can't refocus after the video has started, so every time I try to zoom in I lose focus. Sucks. But you still get the idea and size of the queen versus the workers.

Oh and Jenne, no bee's fly at the camera in this video so you're safe to watch.  ;o)

Spiral Garden phase two: The Layout

After rototilling in all that compost and smoothing down the dirt as best we can with a rake it started to look like this.

Jacob took a video from our bathroom window and the arial shots of it are much better than the pictures I can take on the ground. Keep in mind the layout isn't complete yet, my goal is to get that done by the end of the week.




I've been working on designing the flowers and general layout of this garden. I'm getting really excited to start planting!!!!

Spiral Garden phase one: Demolition

I apologize for the fuzziness of these pictures, I was unable to take the picture though the window because of the glare so I had to take it through the screen. This is our front yard, weed infested, half dead grass with a small flower bed in the middle. It has to go! We hardly water our grass at all and have become the ghetto grass owners of the neighborhood. Not that I care but I know they do, since I don't eat grass or take any pleasure in mowing it, we decided to remove it.

All I have for you at this point is the demolition stage, the before pictures and a video that Jacob shot of the grass removal part. We did rent a sod cutter which makes life so much easier. Then we loaded our trailer and the neighbors truck and took it down to the yard waste facility. The plan is to create a spiral/labyrinth like garden with a small 'thyme' pathway and big perennial flower beds. Should be fun!

Snow in May

See this is why springtime makes people crazy. About 2 weeks ago we had abnormal highs in the low 70's. On Thursday we got a small cold snap that came through from the north and brought with it, snow. Big 1" or bigger, wet snowflakes that made general travel a slushy nightmare. It was all gone in about 3 hours though because our high for the day was mid 50's.  I shot a video of it, enjoy snow in May.....

Plastic Reduction Challenge April

Well I went up in my plastic for this month but there are several things in here that I won't buy again now that I know what I know about plastic. Some of the stuff like the bottled water isn't mine or I should say wasn't generated by us. We had guests over, they are both #1's so they can be recycled in my area.

Here's the rub:

Weight 465g or 1 lb. 3/8 oz. (ouch, nearly doubled from March)

The list:

Food
1. 10 lb. bag of organic/fairtrade sugar ( I will continue to buy this since our bulk bin doesn't offer this)
2. 8 pack plastic wrap for olives from Costco. (won't buy again)
3. Ketchup bottle (I won't be buying this again it's a #7)
4. 3 water bottles (one's not pictured, don't buy ever)
5. plastic wine cork (we don't drink much wine and the wines we choose have a real cork stopper)
6. individually wrapped boca burgers (again, from costco and we won't be buying them anymore)
7. 2 cheese wraps, I've yet to find a good 'cheddar' not wrapped in plastic
8. Milk bottle caps and sealing rings (cheese, and yogurt making)
9. Foodsaver bags (lots of them, most aren't from me they contained blanched corn and I fed it to the chickens, so I adopted this plastic waste.)
10. A few ziplocks

Misc.
1. Envelope windows of course (still working on the junk mail reduction no thanks to USPS here.)
2. Wasp attractant bottle, came with the new wasp trap. (Yes the trap was needed, the bait isn't)
3. Broken hair clip
4. shipping tape and packing slip cover
5. baggie from hardware store for screws bought a long time ago.
6. Light bulb case for outside light, couldn't find one not wrapped in bomb proof plastic
7. Garden bulbs, came in a plastic sac.
8. Small baggie full of shrink wrap style plastic, a small story about that. I purchased reusable canning lids/rings from a company called Tattler  each of the sets came individually wrapped, which I was sad about but this should be a one time purchase. I'll post more about this later.

Some of this stuff I won't purchase again because of how it is packaged like the olives and the boca burgers. I am going to greatly reduce my use of the foodsaver bags and rely on my canning this year. Still lots of room for improvement.