Cat curls

Step 1: Acquire a Cleo.

Step 2: Lift the Cleo.

Step 3: Make a Cleo beard.

The mythical exterior shot of the house

So this is the front of the house.

And this is Josh after he snapped the spatula handle off while helping to make scones.

The day of planting many things

Today I planted native perennials in a butterfly garden at the Oahe Downstream Recreation area. Mom and I also went to the local greenhouse and bought more plants to beautify the large, raised bed garden on the south side of the house, and the former sand pit by the back door. I really should have taken some better 'before' shots, because then you would appreciate the 'afters' even more.

The south garden. It doesn't look like much from here, but before it was full of  tall weeds and at least two year's worth of grass. Dad was digging out the clumps of turf and transplanting them to bare spots in the lawn.

One half of the garden is for the perennials that we discovered while weeding (some Sweet William and a milkweed) and I added in some herbs (parsley, basil, and dill).

This is the super spiky yucca plant. It's quite happy there and I have no intention of moving it.

A close up of the Sweet William. Apparently, every time Dad tries to grow it in PA it gets eaten by slugs. It's generally too dry for slugs in South Dakota and I am totally OK with that.

The other half of the garden has some vegetables (kale, swiss chard, and zucchini). This area gets what I think amounts to full sun over the course of the day so I'm trying out the veggies here to see what happens.

This is essentially the sidewalk before...

And this is the sidewalk after. There was a disintegrating sidewalk here and a pile of pavers by the garage. Dad used the pavers to build a new sidewalk over the old one and it looks a lot better.

We took two planters full of sand and cigarette butts and  made them planters again. This one has varieties of Coleus and lives on the front porch.

This was the sand pit. We added more soil, a flat of Portulaca, and the second planter to spruce it up.

I put this planter together with live wire grass, geraniums, and something called Persian shield.

The garden snail actually has a decent domain to watch over.

This is another planter I made that lives on the back deck.  At this point I don't remember everything that's in there but the grass is baby King Tut, there's a Medusa ornamental pepper and lots of Lobelia.

Mom made this planter with succulents. It will live behind the kitchen sink during the winter.

Thanks to my Mom and Dad for their help beautifying the outside of the house. Not many people take gardening vacations, but I'm glad they did.

New house!

I have a totally good excuse for my complete lack of blog activity over the past week.

This is the view from the front porch of our new house in Pierre.

We closed on our house at the very end of May, and my parents drove out with Cleo.

The prodigal cat returns! She is trying out every windowsill in the house until she finds the one with the best view of the birds and bunnies.

Right now, the house is full of boxes and we're still unpacking, but here are some highlights:

There are three stained glass windows like this.

This is part of the stained glass window in the living room.

There is a claw-foot tub in the downstairs bathroom. My two claw-foot end tables look really good in the house too.

This is the back porch. We're going to wash and stain it sometime in the near future.

This is the view out the back door. The white building to the right of the sidewalk is our two car garage. I've never had a garage before.

Mom and I have done a lot of re-screening. It was the first of many projects.

I got you a present...

We are packing up the apartment again because we are closing on a house this week. Picture of the new place as soon as I have the keys!

Basket #4

I haven't had this many butternut squash in my house since the last research project harvest in 2012. We were supposed to get mangoes, but there was a last minute substitution on the truck and we ended up with butternut squash in addition to the butternut squash that were already on the list.

Besides the squash, we have tomatoes (yay!), corn, carrots, lettuce, pineapple (plus a bonus for volunteering pineapple), cantaloupe, cauliflower, cucumbers, apricots, and the Mexican themed veggie add-on that included the lemons, lime, cilantro, avocados, onions, scallions, jalapenos, peppers, and more garlic. The blueberries were another add-on that I ordered and I froze most of them, ate at least 2 containers fresh, and used some to make the blueberry sauce that goes in the sweet corn ice cream.

With the corn, I wanted to do something like the corn salsa from Chipotle, and I found a recipe in our cooking bible aka the America's Test Kitchen cookbook.

We had everything we needed from the basket and the pantry: sweet corn, cherry tomatoes, scallions, jalapeno, garlic, cilantro, black beans, vinegar, olive oil, and cumin.

Basket #3

This week the baskets in Pierre were claimed in record time (and there's only one site), so we went to Hayes for our inordinate amount of produce. The Hayes pick-up is at 7 AM and it's about a 30 minute drive from Pierre, so we went on an early-for-a-Saturday morning jaunt.

Something is moving quickly here and it isn't the cows.

Our haul this week includes bananas (which better get ripe, unlike the last bunch), mangoes, a gigantic yam, lettuce, cauliflower, tomatoes, butternut squash (at least they're small), corn, fava beans, honeydew, and apricots. There was an Italian veggie add-on that contained the eggplant, mushrooms, tiny zucchini (which is the best kind of zucchini), garlic, lemon, and fresh oregano and basil.

A quick story on the bananas - they are notorious for taking forever to get ripe. Our first basket had a decent bunch, but the bananas from the second batch would not ripen up no matter how many apples I put next to them. This happens to a lot of Bountiful Basket bananas, and there were many posts on the website about making banana fries. It seems easy - cut up the bananas, coat with olive oil, roast, banana fries! We tried it, and they were terrible. Maybe our bananas weren't green enough or something, but that is one recipe I have no desire to repeat.