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Bee Birthday and Easy Mason Jar Drink Lids (with Tutorial)

Posted on July 23, 2012 by Anisa

This weekend we celebrated Cora’s first birthday.  I ordered cupcakes from a wonderful, local, all- organic bakery that makes a to-die-for flavor called “Bee-titude.”  It’s a lavender cupcake with honey-lemon butter cream frosting, and it was the inspiration for Cora’s party theme: honey bee.  The party colors were yellow and lavender, and it turns out that this was a really fun theme to put together.

I also made a few discoveries for decorating this party that eased the green-guilt that sometimes comes along with me decorating.  I found spools of colored tulle at the craft store that I can easily roll up and reuse for another occasion instead of the crêpe paper streamers I usually use.  And I bought two yards of inexpensive broadcloth for the table-cloth that would match the party theme.

I used various glass plates and jars to decorate and filled a vase with lavender and chamomile flowers.

I have a gorgeous bee skep-shaped drink dispenser that my mom bought me for Christmas last year and I filled it with honey-lavender lemonade.  I was surprised that the lavender flowers turned the lemonade pink!

And I used my canning jars as glasses.  Pints for the adults with ribbons and tags to write names on, and half-pints with lids for the kids.  And here was my eureka moment.  Ball jelly jars are durable and their lids don’t leak.  And I used a HOLE-PUNCH to make them into drink lids.

Here’s how:

First I traced old jar lids onto patterned paper and then cut out the circles.

I used double-sided tape to stick the paper to the top of the lid.

Then I used a regular old hole-punch to punch holes in the tops of the lids.  This was surprisingly easy.  I did it with one hand and minimal effort.  The punch still worked great on about twenty paper tags after punching six lids.

I used a cheapy plastic straws with about an inch cut off the end to make the kids’ tumblers complete.

Not a single jar got broken between six, three- to seven-year-olds.  They even took them outside.  I wrote each kiddo’s name on the top of their jar, so there were no mix-ups.  It was really easy and completely free, since I had all these supplies lying around the house.  Henry even helped cut out the circles.

I plan to just swap out the paper circles and straws for the next party.

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Categories: Cora, DIY, Simple Living, Thrift | Tags: , , , , , , | 13 Comments

When to Harvest Garlic

Posted on July 20, 2012 by Anisa

If you follow me on Facebook, you know that last week I harvested our garlic.   This was our second year planting garlic and it has become on of my favorite crops to grow and harvest.   Garlic is so incredibly easy.

In the fall, you plant your garlic cloves, cover them and then just wait.  When spring hits, your hardnecks will send up scapes.  Cut those babies off; they make a delicious dish, and cutting your scapes will force the garlic plant to put its energy into making a bulb instead of a flower.  Trust me.  Cut the scape.  This year, I missed about three scapes, and here are the garlic heads to compare.

These two heads of garlic are the same variety.  The one on the left had the scape cut off, but the one on the right got overlooked during scape cutting time.  Amazing difference, isn’t it.

Last year I harvested my garlic in a fit of nesting during the pouring rain, a mere week before Cora was born.  I was insanely driven to pull all the garlic right then.  It couldn’t even wait the extra day to let the soil dry from the rain.

But if you are not nesting a week before your labor, how do you know when your garlic is ready to harvest?

By looking at the leaves.

When the leaves at the bottom of the garlic plant start to turn brown and dry, your garlic is ready.  As you can see from this picture, my leaves are almost all brown.  I probably could have harvested a week or so earlier than I did, but as you might guess from all the weeds, I was sort of neglecting the garlic beds.  Not to worry, garlic will usually keep as long as it’s not an overly soggy summer.

This year we planted three different varieties of garlic; a mystery variety that I’ve been saving from our CSA farm share (Monroe) for the last couple of years, Georgian Fire, and Erik’s German White.  Judging by size alone, you can guess which has made me happiest.  I’ve yet to do the taste test.

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Categories: Food, Garden | Tags: , , , | 9 Comments

Denver Botanic Gardens Urban Homestead Tour

Posted on July 16, 2012 by Anisa

I’m excited to announce the first (and hopefully, annual) Denver Botanic Gardens Urban Homestead Tour.  Check out the tour photo (featuring Rick in the bee suit and Emmett with one of our hens) along with the official press release below.

DENVER – Denver Botanic Gardens will host its 2012 Urban Homestead Tour of Denver and surrounding communities. The tour aims to inform, educate and inspire the community by featuring a variety of traditional and innovative efforts in the urban homesteading movement.

Local homesteaders all throughout the Denver metro area will open the doors of their homes to provide guests with an opportunity to see what urban homesteading is all about. Come prepared to be surprised because “urban homesteading is not only growing vegetables in your yard and raising chickens. It also includes activities like canning, making soap and using alternative energy sources in your home,” says Sundari Kraft, author of “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Urban Homesteading” and founder of EatWhereULive, one of the community supporters of the tour.

CALL FOR ENTRIES: Urban homesteaders who want to participate as a tour stop, share their efforts, their joys and their experiences with the public can find information and applications at www.botanicgardens.org

The tour, which counts with the support of community partners like Anisa Schell, author of the LazyHomesteader.com, and Lisa Rogers, founder and director of Feed Denver, is completely self-guided.  Participants are encouraged to drop-by whatever locations they see fit from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. Tour map sales will begin Aug. 22nd and tour participants will receive them starting on Sept. 19th.

Date and Time:
Saturday, September 22
10 a.m. – 4 p.m.

Admission:
$5 per person
Ticket sales start August 22
For more information and to register visit www.botanicgardens.org

About Denver Botanic Gardens:
Green inside and out, the Gardens is considered one of the top botanical gardens in the United States and a pioneer in water conservation. Accredited by the American Association of Museums, the Gardens’ living collections encompass specimens from the tropics to the tundra, showcasing a plant palette chosen to thrive in Colorado’s semi-arid climate. The Gardens’ dynamic, 23-acre urban oasis in the heart of the city is now in its 52nd year, offering unforgettable opportunities to flourish with unique garden experiences for the whole family – as well as world-class education and plant conservation research programs. Additional sites at Denver Botanic Gardens at Chatfield, a 750-acre wildlife and native plant refuge in Jefferson County; and Mount Goliath, a high-altitude trail and interpretive site on the Mount Evans Scenic Byway, extend this experience throughout the Front Range. For more information, visit us online at http://www.botanicgardens.org.

I’m really excited to be working with Denver Botanic Gardens to bring more awareness about urban homesteading to the community through this event.  We all hope it’s a huge success.  If you’re a local, this is your chance to see other urban homesteads up close.  Mark your calendar!

Make sure to click through to the other community supporter links:

EatWhereULive
Feed Denver

Categories: Community, Urban Homesteading | Tags: , , | 8 Comments

Dried Sour Cherries

Posted on June 21, 2012 by Anisa

Last weekend while at my in-laws’ house, I noticed that my mother in-law’s very ripe cherry trees had not been picked.  Lucky me, she told me to have at it!

Rick’s younger brother, Scott, was there and he helped us pick.  The cherries were so ripe that some were almost sweet.  As we all picked, Scott, Rick and I all remembered being kids, waiting for the cherry trees to ripen (we had cherries at the house I grew up in too), thinking that this year, this year, the cherries would be sweet.  I always expected them to taste like a maraschino cherry.  Of course, they never, ever did. They were always sour and I was always disappointed.

As a child, I assumed that these small, sour fruits were not real cherries.  That they were just for birds and to look pretty.  I didn’t know how good they really were. Rick, on the other hand, had some home-made pies and jams made from his backyard trees, but still most years the harvest went to the birds and squirrels, and his largest memory of the trees was putting the pits to use in his sling shot.

Maybe that’s why he never thought to mention to me that his parents still had the cherry trees.  Most years, my mother in-law said, they let a passing neighbor pick the trees.  (!)  I had been considering going to a pick-your-own orchard this year to buy some, when I noticed her trees.

We didn’t even pick half of the two trees, yet we came home with an incredible haul of gorgeous sour cherries.

My younger self would be so jealous of me now.  Now, I know how to turn these babies into the sweet, delicious fruit that I always hoped they’d be.  See sour cherries (sometimes called tart cherries) are also know as PIE cherries.  (Once I tried making a pie from bing cherries.  Yeah…. horrible).  Sour cherries will give you a pie to die for.  We ended up with eight pounds – PITTED.

After washing and pitting them, I immediately put six cups in the freezer for a pie.  The rest I divided between the jamming pot and the dehydrator.

Dried sour cherries are pretty expensive to buy in the store.  But they are delicious in baked goods, rice, salads, sauces, over pork, granola and trail mix, or just plain as a snack.  We hope to dip some in chocolate for Scott as a thank you for helping us pick.

Drying the cherries was incredibly simple.  Just wash and pit the cherries, and then spread them on the rack of your dehydrator.  make sure they each have a little room so they don’t end up stuck together.  I tried to pick the best, most perfect cherries to dry.  Any squashed or under ripe ones, I tossed back into the bowl to be made into jam.  Our food dehydrator puts out quite a bit of heat, and since it has been so hot here, I set it up on an old plywood table on the back porch to do its thing.  I set the dehydrator for 135° and let them dry for about 24 hours.

We dried about three pounds of pitted cherries and ended up with just about a pint after they were dry.  You have to watch them towards the end of the drying; you don’t want them to get crunchy.  They should still be soft, kind of like a raisin.  Yum.

Dried Sour Cherries on Punk DomesticsRelated articles
Categories: Canning and Food Preservation | Tags: , , , , | 17 Comments

Honey Harvest, Not Yet

Posted on June 18, 2012 by Anisa

Last week, our friend came over to mentor me with harvesting honey from our top bar hive.  I mentioned before that I suspected that it was full, and I was hoping to do this.

Chris showed me how to use the hive tool to get individual bars out of the hive.  I opened it up to check on how our bees were doing in there.

There was good news…

Lots of comb, filled with honey!

This comb is full of honey, but it is not yet capped, so it can’t be harvested.  Capped honey will stay fresh for a very long time, but uncapped honey is not ready to harvest yet and will go bad if not eaten right away.

But there was also some not so good news; quite a few (lots maybe) of the comb was built across more than one bar.  This is called cross comb and it makes it really difficult to harvest honey.  Chris suspected that it might be because our the sizing of our top bars was off.  You can see in the below picture that I’m actually holding two bars because of this.

It was a bit hot when we were checking all of this out, and some of the comb fell off because of heat made the wax soft.  Combined with that and the cross comb problem, we decided not to harvest anything just yet.

We are coming up with a solution to correcting the cross combing problem, and we wanted to give the bees another couple of weeks to get all that lovely honey capped.

Still, it was exciting to get into the hive and see everything.  We’ll try to document everything as we go along with the bees.

Categories: Beekeeping, Urban Homesteading | Tags: , , , | 7 Comments

What I Made This Week: Turnip, Pea & Kohlrabi Stir-Fry

Posted on June 12, 2012 by Anisa

I published a post today on our CSA’s blog, Monroe Organic Farms.  Just a quick one with a stir-fry recipe at the end.

If you’re here from the Monroe blog for the first time, feel free to look around and see what crazy farm-style hijinks we are up to here in the city… bees and chickens and garden, and a few other odd projects.  Plus green cleaning, clothes lines and other green-style stuff.  Welcome.

Also – there are a couple of days left to vote on this… Pick me!

Categories: Community, Food, Recipes | Tags: , , , | 5 Comments

The Buzz on Bearding

Posted on June 4, 2012 by Anisa

If you are friends with me on Facebook, you might have noticed Rick posting that our bees were swarming.  However, I am happy to report, the bees weren’t swarming after all.  They were bearding.

Honey bees regulate the temperature of their hive pretty well.  In the winter they use their wings and bodies to keep the hive warm and in the summer they keep it cool by fanning their wings.  If it is really hot, they cool the hive by fanning their wings to create air currents that evaporate water droplets.  And if it’s just burning up, the adult bees go outside to cool themselves and get the hive temp to drop so the brood (the baby bees) don’t end up honey roasted.

Bearding happens when the bee hive is either too full or too hot, or sometimes both.  It is typical bee behavior in the last summer.  But I know for a fact that our hive is full, and this weekend was pretty hot, so the bees spent a few evenings on the outside of the hive cooling down.

Here they are at 8:00 pm last night.  See them all around the entrance:

And here is the hive at 8:00ish this morning.

Last night I took a video.  Video is not my forte, but I thought it was really cool.  Bear with the shakiness of the camera.  I just got back from a three day road trip to help my sister move and Cora didn’t sleep the entire trip, so neither did I.  In other words, look past the crappy film job.  ;)

Again, we are bee amateurs…  very much beginners.  But I wanted to share as we learn too.  I’m excited that on Wednesday, a friend is coming to help me harvest honey.  It will be our first time; I hope to get lots of pictures of that process!  And I actually think the bees will be happy to have a little more wiggle room in the hive.

In the mean time, here is some good info about bee bearding and bee swarming.

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Categories: Beekeeping | Tags: , , , , | 9 Comments

Garlic Scapes Two Ways

Posted on May 31, 2012 by Anisa

Last spring we harvested our first crop of garlic.  At that time I knew that we should cut the scapes, the flowering shoots that hard-neck garlic sends up in the spring, off of the plants so that my bulbs would reach a good size.  Once I cut them though, I didn’t quite know what to do with them.  I had heard that they were edible, but I was really uncertain on how to use them, so I ended up putting them in a vase to let them keep curling and eventually open up.  They were striking, my sister even asked to take some home.  But this year, none will be in vases.  My pallet is no longer a garlic scape virgin, and there is no going back.

I did a quick search and decided t try a couple of simple garlic scape recipes.  They are, honestly, amazing.  Checking in my cupboard, I realized that I had all the making of pesto.  I was inspired by this recipe, but used 12 scapes and added a bit of lemon juice and ground black pepper to mine.

It is honestly the best pesto I’ve ever tasted in my life.  I used my food processor, and chopped it pretty fine.  Henry helped me add ingredients to the food processor.  I also have to add that the olive oil we recently bought (3 gallons of it) is very fruity and I think it made a big difference in the quality of our pesto.

We used some of the pesto last night to make pasta.  I ran to the store to buy these curly-cue noodles in honor of the scapes, specifically for this.  For the sauce, I whisked together a good, large dollop of the pesto with about 1/3 cup crumbled feta and half a cup of the hot pasta water until it was fairly smooth.  Then I just tossed it over the pasta.

It had an initial garlicky bite that quickly mellowed and was quite delicious.  Even Cora loved it.  Tonight, I plan to use the pesto as a base for some homemade pizza.

Since I already had the food processor out, I decided to whip together a quick hummus.  I didn’t even clean it out, I just added more scapes, a can of rinsed chick peas, salt, juice from the other half of the lemon, and a bit more olive oil.

It is insanely good.  I don’t know if it really qualifies as hummus, it doesn’t have tahini (which I don’t care for much), but it is so good.  I hope I can make some for a party or, crossing my finger here that I still have scapes, our next potluck.

The garlic flavor is such a highlight.  It is much more mellow than using a garlic clove, but still strong, and the color is so beautiful.

I really think garlic scapes would make an awesome addition to guacamole.  Today, I think I’ll try making a batch of garlic scape pickles.  Just the thought has me salivating.

Garlic Scapes Two Ways on Punk DomesticsGarlic Scape Hummus:

In a food processor blend:

12 garlic scapes, roughly chopped
1 can garbanzo beans, drained and rinsed
juice from 1/2 a lemon
salt to taste

When everything is well combined, add 1/3 – 1/2 cup olive oil in a thin stream while the food processor is running.

Pasta with Feta-Garlic Scape Pesto Sauce:

1 lb of pasta
1/3 to 1/2 cup crumbled feta cheese
1/4 – 1/3 cup garlic scape pesto (link above, made with lemon juice)
salt

Cook pasta in salted water according to package directions.  Reserve 1/2 cup of the pasta water before draining.  In a bowl, whisk together the hot pasta water with the feta and pesto until smooth.  Toss over drained pasta and serve.

*Any leftover pesto or hummus (yeah, right) can be frozen.  Simply put pesto in ice cube trays or a freezer bag (flat).  Defrost hummus in fridge overnight and stir in a little olive oil to bring back the creamy consistency.

Categories: Canning and Food Preservation, Food, Garden, Recipes | Tags: , , , | 20 Comments

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