Praline Pumpkin Pie

I hurriedly harvested all our buttercup and volunteer pie pumpkins before our first snowstorm early Thursday morning. Hubby and I also picked every tomato that showed any sign of ripening.

We love pumpkin dessert of any sort. We tried substituting butternut for pumpkin last year and thought it delicious. When I mistakenly planted buttercup instead of butternut this spring, I was relieved to find that ’cup squash is also a good pumpkin substitute.

Thursday morning, I told Marilyn that I was about to prepare squashes for pie filling. She said I had to do one additional step before freezing them: “You must first, first, first bake us a pumpkin pie for tonight!”

I made her choice, “Pumpkin Praline Pie”, with butternut squash Hubby’s parents had grown, plus a standard pumpkin pie with our buttercup squash. Both were judged delicious by the ladies at our Bible study. They couldn’t tell whether I’d used pumpkin or one of the squashes, but they decided the praline pie was the tastier pie.

Hubby devoured the pies when he got home Friday morning.

To prepare the squash for baking, I cut one in half and microwaved it on high for 22 minutes. We have a wimpy microwave. With a decent microwave, start at 15 minutes. After that, I peeled it and pureed it in our processor. Let the squash cool before peeling it; they are hot. One medium ’cup or ’nut squash is about the equivalent of one can of pumpkin.

Pumpkin Praline Pie

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Recipe is adapted from the Kitchen Klatter cookbook.

Crust ingredients:
2 T. butter
1/3 C. brown sugar
1/3 C. pecans, chopped
1 unbaked pie shell

Method:
Combine butter, brown sugar and nuts. Mix well. Spread over bottom of pie shell. Bake at 425º for 10 minutes.

Filling ingredients:
1½ C. pumpkin
1 can evaporated milk
3 egg yolks
¼ C. sugar
¼ C. Splenda
½ C. brown sugar
1½ t. cinnamon or pumpkin pie spice
½ t. salt
1 t. burnt sugar flavoring
Whipped cream


Method:
Combine and mix well. Pour over praline layer and bake at 325º until center is firm.

Top with whipped cream.

Racing Jack Frost

I canned four quarts of tomatoes yesterday, which seems a pittance. I have another big bowl of partially ripened tomatoes, which I will can once they are ready. I’ve given up — at least for this year — on making salsa and spaghetti sauce. They are too much work for too little results.

I now understand why those products are so expensive in the store. The tomatoes cook down to almost nothing, so making a jar of salsa requires lots and lots of tomatoes.

We have lots and lots of green tomatoes still on the vine. Our lows have hovered around freezing the last few days, so I’ve been covering them with blankets nightly. Supposedly, temps are supposed to stay above the 40s through Tuesday, then drop into the 20s. I’m not bothering to cover them when the temps fall into the 20s. By that time, I figure that whatever we’ve harvested is what we’re going to get.

I just hope we have enough light and warmth to ripen more tomatoes. Jack Frost, stay away!

Fill me up, buttercup

I thought I had planted butternut squash in my Three Sisters Garden. I must have misread the seed pack or the packers put the wrong seed in the package. What I have is buttercup squash.

I don’t much like the taste of winter squash and I find the texture to be extraordinarily off-putting. But I do love pumpkin pie and cake and dessert. The only reason I planted the squash was as a substitute for pumpkin filling. We found that butternut squash tastes even better than pumpkin itself in pumpkin recipes.

When I saw roundish green squash in my garden instead of elongated yellowish squash, I knew I had a case of mistaken identity. At first we thought we had acorn squash, which I absolutely detest, but instead we have buttercup.

SeasonalChef.com says that buttercup squash is “one of the most pumpkin-like of winter squashes.” So maybe The Frugal Gardener is all right after all.

So “fill me up (fill me up) Buttercup, baby
Don’t you let me down (let me down) and mess me around …
So build me up, Buttercup; don’t break my heart.”

Volunteer veggies: a pleasant surprise

I love surprises.

Sometimes my garden produces those surprises by bringing up a volunteer vegetable or flower.

I’m not always that surprised, though. Last year, I did a very poor job of picking green beans. So I have a good crop of volunteers this year. Unfortunately for the beans and their picker, the Three Sisters garden has been moved. No cornstalk poles conveniently await beans to climb them. I’m fated to crawl on hands and knees to harvest most of these. Some of them are climbing the fence I erected for them last year, for which I am grateful.

When the fall holidays were over, we threw our pumpkins and gourds into the garden, hoping that a seed would take root. If memory serves me, we threw the pumpkin on the west side of the garden and the gourds on the east. This plant, on the very eastern edge of the pond garden, is probably a mini white pumpkin. But who knows. I look forward to finding out.

This tomato is a complete surprise. I don’t remember throwing any tomatoes in the garden, but here is a tomato plant. It isn’t very healthy, though, so we’ll see if any fruit appears.

Kenny Point at Veggie Gardening Tips
suggests that gardeners learn what baby leaves look like so we don’t pull out something good. If I hadn't known what baby squash and tomato leaves look like, I would have pulled those gifts from the garde

Let us grow lettuce

Some years ago, I read an article about growing lettuce. Article said to just let it bolt (go to seed). Plants would reseed themselves and come up in the next growing season. I liked that idea. No sowing or tilling and I get good things to eat? What’s not to like?

At its current stage, the lettuce is truly ugly. Plants look like tall many-branched dandelions. And I truly loathe dandelions. A big swath of our pond garden looks like a weed patch. But for free buttercrunch lettuce, I’ll ignore that nasty patch. The little dandelion-like seeds fly away and land wherever, coming up later as lettuce. And that’s just fine.

However, the other day Hubby did confess to helping the little white puffs in their mission. “I spread them around,” he said.

By accident, we started eating lettuce on St. Patrick’s Day this year. Hubby was trying to preserve our lettuce from fall cold snaps. He laid down a triangle of landscape timbers and put a piece of Plexiglass over them. This worked for awhile. Eventually winter got its way and killed the lettuce. We forgot about our makeshift cold frame when snow covered it.

I walked past the cold frame in early March. To my surprise, I saw little shoots of lettuce under the cold frame.

We don’t often enjoy our own fresh produce in March, so we ate it eagerly.

This fall, we’ll be intentional about our cold frame.

About the time school starts, I want to sow some other lettuce varieties, hoping for a second season. Mesclun would be welcome this fall.

Let us grow lettuce!

The pond garden

Pond Garden looking northeast. Coral bells and pepper plants are in foreground.

Pond Garden looking southwest. Blue spruce, pampas grass and volunteer green beans are in foreground.

The Frugal Gardener and her hubby have two main vegetable gardens. The narrow rectangles south of our house are the vegetable garden, currently planted with the Three Sisters on one side of the sidewalk and tomatoes and herbs on the other side of the walk. The other, an irregularly-shaped chunk of our backyard, is “The Pond Garden”.

The only water in that garden fills the bird bath. Hubby named it “The Pond Garden” because it’s shaped like a pond.

Our friend Kevin had shown us how to lay out natural-looking landscaping by using a garden hose. The hose marks sinuous curves for a relaxing, free-flowing appearance.

At that time, we had a large, ugly weed patch in our backyard. I hated it. I tried to avoid looking at it because I didn’t know what to do with it.

Then the mental light bulb turned on. I would turn that nasty patch into a garden, using the outlines of the weed patch to create natural-looking curves.

Instead of using a hose, I bought the cheapest can of orange spray paint I could find. I outlined the awful weed patch with the spray paint. Hubby tilled within the lines. I laid down salvaged red bricks for the border.

Previous owners had planted cedar trees and I had received a blue spruce from my brother and sister-in-love for my 40th birthday. We planted pampas grass in the gap between spruce and cedars for privacy, then scattered flowers in various parts of that garden. Flowers include coral bells and irises from my mother's garden. We have purple bee balm and lilies from Hubby's aunt's garden and coral hollyhocks from his parents' garden.

In the spaces that are left, we plant various vegetables each year. Volunteer buttercrunch lettuce returns every year.

An eyesore became something beautiful and productive for almost no money.

Three Sisters Garden

We planted a Three Sisters Garden this year: corn, beans and squash. Corn consumes a very high quantity of nitrogen and wears out soil quickly. Without corn’s sisters, corn must be rotated every year to give soil a rest. With the sisters, corn supposedly can be planted in the same plot year after year.

We only have one place where we can plant corn. Last year we tried another plot with poor results. The only way we’ll have sweet corn yearly is if the Three Sisters do their job.

Beans pull nitrogen from the air into their roots, providing nutrition for the next year’s crop. Beans climb the cornstalks and stabilize them against wind. This is a big plus in our windy climate.

I wanted to plant purple beans this year because I find green beans on green plants somewhat hard to see. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find purple pole beans. When I typed “purple pole beans” into Google just now, several links appeared. I’ll be buying online next year!

Once my plants came up, I heavily mulched them with newspaper and grass to suppress weeds and fertilize the ground. Grass is very rich with nitrogen.

Once the corn canopies, little further tending is necessary.

Squash runs underneath the corn, providing living mulch. Shade from both corn and squash squelches weeds and preserves soil moisture. Squash vines are covered with spines, discouraging hungry creatures from eating their fruit and their sisters’ fruit. We planted butternut squash this year. I hope to make pie filling from it because I can’t stomach winter squash on its own. But butternut pie tastes better than pumpkin and I adore pumpkin pie.

Three Sisters combination produces lots of leftover plant material at end of season. Just as I do with all garden “trash”, I leave it on the ground until spring. Cornstalks and vines make wonderful snow traps.

Unfortunately, they don’t get along with our tiller. Cornstalks are too thick for it to chop and the vines get entangled in the tines. I burn them in our fire pit come spring.

When our fire pit is filled with ashes, we spread them on our garden, adding potash to the soil. Have I told you that the Frugal Gardener hates waste?

I can hardly wait for that sweet corn. Yum, yum!

Gift from the birds

Every winter, I put trash cans underneath my bird feeders to catch the waste. I’m amazed how many sunflower hulls are in those trash cans and how many little sunflowers come up each spring.

I thin them ruthlessly, but always leave a few of those beautiful yellow flowers to brighten my garden. Yellow is one of my favorite colors. It’s so cheerful and warm. Sunflowers’ shape makes them look like faces. I often feel that my sunflowers are smiling at me and the thought warms my heart.

Raspberries and the city

One day several years ago our city inspector called. He told Hubby that we had to remove the tall weeds in our yard.

The Frugal Gardener and her hubby carefully tend our yard. We knew we had no tall weeds. We were perplexed. What was he talking about?

Then we realized that he had to be thinking of our raspberry bushes.

At this time we were editor and publisher of a weekly newspaper.

Hubby called the inspector.

“My wife loves her raspberry bushes,” he said. “And she doesn't want to cut them down. Do you really want my wife, the editor, to have to cut down her raspberry bushes? You know that you’ll hear about it in print forever.”

We never heard a word more.

Talk about the power of the press!

Growing raspberries

Our raspberries were here when we moved in. I kept thinking those bushes were raspberries. They had raspberry leaves, but they didn’t produce any berries. So I didn’t bother with them. I didn’t have time to do much gardening then, so I just left them alone.

We’d been here one or two years when we had a wet spring. Berries appeared. Oh, so they are raspberries! We were delighted.

I’ve been tending them carefully ever since.

Raspberries want lots of water, especially during blossoming and fruiting seasons. However, I can water all I want and only have fair results. For a good crop, we must have rain, especially during blossoming. This year, we received no rain during blossoming. I watered, but the blossoms were sparse. Last year, we did have rain during blossoming and blossoms were everywhere. Blossoms produce berries, so the more blossoms, the more fruit.

Rains during fruiting time make the berries larger and juicier than they are with only watering.

Raspberries do require some work.

Pruning

If you don’t prune, your raspberry patch will soon be overgrown. After years of neglect, our raspberry thicket was nearly impenetrable. Once I began to prune, we received better yields — and I could get through the canes to reach their fruit.

Pruning is very important for raspberries. Otherwise, they become a tangle and have too much competition for sunlight and nutrients. I leave my canes intact until late February or early March in order to trap as much snow as possible. I then cut off all canes about 18 inches from the ground. I remove all the old, dead canes.

Red raspberry canes should be pruned to the ground.

Make sure to wear plenty of protection when pruning, including safety glasses. My face has been badly scratched when I hauled off the prunings.

Propagation

Black and red raspberries propagate themselves differently. Red raspberries send out suckers. To propagate red raspberries, sever the sucker from the mother plant and plant it in its new location.

Black raspberries start new plants from the canes of the old ones. Canes grow long enough to bend over and touch ground. The tip grows roots and up comes a new raspberry plant. If you wish to propagate the berries, cover the tips with 2-4 inches of soil to encourage rooting. Next spring, sever the new plant from the mother cane and transplant it.

Do not propagate any plants from diseased canes. The new plant will be infected with whatever infected the parent.

Black raspberries

Our black raspberries are one of summer’s greatest joys. All year, we look forward to eating them. We devour them during their short season, mostly in raspberry ice cream.

Last year we had a good crop. Rains fell at the right time to produce lots of plump, juicy berries. I thought I might be able to make preserves. That didn’t happen. We ate every last berry I picked!

The berry thicket is a hot, stuffy place. No air moves. I pick the berries early in the morning. That’s the only time picking is bearable. I object to being scratched, so I wear pants and a jacket. My hands are the only part of me left uncovered below the neck. Unfortunately, I can’t pick while wearing gloves. I tend to crush the berries because my sense of touch is off. Once I did try picking while wearing thin plastic gloves. That didn’t work. The gloves were shredded within minutes.

So I get a few scratches. Big deal. The price of scratches is well worth paying in order to eat delectable berries.

Tara's gone to the kitchen

I've been asked what to do with tarragon. Since I love to find answers for people's questions, I searched Google, that fount of all information. (What did we ever do without search engines?)

Tarragon is most commonly used in bearnaise sauce and in the herb mixes herbes de provence and fines herbes.

About.com's Home Cooking site gives tarragon history, storage information and, most importantly, recipes.

In My Kitchen Garden talks about tarragon, too. Make sure to read the comments.

TheBigOven.com has a recipe for chateaubriand with bearnaise sauce. Reading their recipe brought back good memories. Last year, we won a trip to Vail, Colo. On our trip's first night, we ate at The Ore House. We chose to split chateaubriand. Was it ever delicious. We were stuffed at the end and our stomachs were very happy!

Hubby at The Ore House the morning after we gorged ourselves there.

How to be a frugal gardener

This is Marilyn’s reworking of Hubby’s idea. We replaced our grill, so planted a garden in the old one. She saw what we’d done and did it herself. Hers looks better.

I owe this list to Nature Moms Blog.

1. Grow Your Own Plants from Seed — Seeds are cheaper than nursery-grown seedlings so growing your own will save you some green. Local seed exchange programs and community gardens might also provide you with free seeds.

We overdid on seed starting last year and were overwhelmed with eggplants, something I don’t even like that well! We didn’t get around to starting any tomatoes and peppers this year, but I intend to try again next year, just with a more reasonable amount.

2. Don’t buy peat pots when you can use your leftover toilet paper rolls, eggshells, or newspapers for free.

I don’t use peat pots. We throw our eggshells in the garden for fertilizer. As I’ve written before, newspaper makes wonderful mulch. We generally burn our toilet paper rolls in our fire pit. Toilet paper isn’t romantic, but the fire is.

Marilyn remodeled her kitchen last summer and used the old sink as another container. In her yard, container gardening even includes the kitchen sink!

3. Instead of buying containers for container gardening, why not recycle household stuff like old boots, buckets, baskets, metal tins, old toys, apple barrels, wheelbarrows, broken plastic tubs, etc. A few years back, I took two old wheelbarrows and stacked them on top of each other in my front yard and planted in them. The result was so gorgeous that a picture of it ended up in a small local newspaper.

I’ve never gotten my planter’s picture in the newspaper, but I have used all sorts of objects as planters. Someone in town has put a bike in their garden, lined its basket with moss and planted annuals in it. I love that. However, the work of continually watering containers in our semiarid climate wore me out last year. I’m taking a break from most container gardening this year.

4. Make your own pinwheels. I use pinwheels in my garden to deter critters and while they are not that expensive (usually only $1 a piece at the store) I can save $10 or so and have a nice time crafting with my kids by making my own — and they aren’t plastic, which is a plus. I just love the look of pinwheels blowing around in the garden; it is lovely. Ribbon attached to a stake works well too.

The link above shows how to make paper pinwheels. I wonder how well these would hold up in our lovely High Plains winds. They do look fun.

5. Look for open bags of soil at your local gardening center and seedlings that are past their prime. You can usually get some steep discounts on those items. Ask the cashier if they can cut you a deal.

We recycle our potting soil, dumping it into a metal trash can we salvaged. And we shop end-of-season garden sales.

6. Re-purpose broken watering cans by using them as planters or by cutting off the spout and using them as refill containers for bird feeders.

I never thought of using a watering can to refill bird feeders.

7. Do you or any of your neighbors have fish tanks? When it comes time to clean the tanks use the water to give your plants a tonic they will love.

No fish tanks here, but it’s a great idea for those who have access to one.

8. Use a plastic garbage can to collect rain water by putting it under a drainage pipe. Then just scoop out water as needed instead of reaching for the hose to water plants.

Rain water? What rain water? I keep a dish under the spigot to catch the water that inevitably drips from it. Mr. Kitty loves to drink that water.

9. Use kitchen scraps to make your own compost and put banana peels under your roses to give them a potassium boost.

We also throw our coffee grounds in our rose bushes. Vegetable kitchen scraps go straight into our garden.

10. Cut down on fanciful flowers and plant some drought-tolerant plants instead, like one of my personal favorites, hens-and-chicks.

I could definitely do a better job of this.

11. Grow food and you won’t have to buy as much at the grocery store! You can even grow your beauty products.

Last year we made our own salsa and spaghetti sauce. This year I want to make both of those again, plus our own pesto. I did a poor job of bean picking last year and intend to remedy that this year. I feel virtuous when I look at jars full of our own produce.

12. Put old saucer or plates under your pots to collect water run-off.

Unfortunately, these old saucers catch just enough water to breed mosquitoes. Nasty things.

13. Line your pots or containers with 6-8 sheets of newspaper to help them retain moisture so they won’t need to be watered as much.

I had never thought of this. I do lay down a heavy mulch blanket over my containers. When I started doing that last year, I was amazed how much watering I saved.

14. When it rains, scoop up your indoor plants and set them outside for a little while to get a drink.

Rain has wonderful nutrients that tap water doesn’t have. Definitely give those poor indoor plants a drink.

15. Shop for gardening tools, containers, and lawn and patio furniture at yard sales, garage sales, and barn sales.

Or fish them out of the trash!

Bells will be ringing

When I [Marilyn] was little, my mother’s father rang the bell in our old country church every Sunday morning. How I loved hearing that big old bell ring, beckoning all within hearing distance to come and worship! Back in those days, a rope was attached to the bell, as it hung way up high in the belfry. The reverberation caused by pulling that rope would make a slight vibration in the building. I always shivered pleasantly when I felt it. As a small child, the ringing of the huge bell made a lasting impression on me. I was always amazed at how loud the bell sounded!

Listening to the church bell ring gave me a lifelong appreciation for bells and chimes. I love them. I have wind chimes hanging all around my yard in the summer time. As the High Plains winds blow, as they so often do, I can stand in almost any spot in my yard and hear wind chimes in the background.

Some churches still ring their stately bells, announcing the start of their services. As I work in my yard on a Saturday evening, I can hear the bell ringing in the middle of town at our local Catholic church. That sound can wing me away instantly to a time long ago as I stood watching my beloved grandpa pull that bell’s rope.

My yard without wind chimes would be like a church’s bell tower without a bell. Empty. Soundless. Lost. Sad.

As my wind chimes gently jingle and sway in the breeze, peace enters my heart. Precious memories from days gone by and loved ones passed on surround my soul in love and peace.

Cinnamon Sweet Pickles

No pickles taste better than this recipe Mother got from her neighbor. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time or really the space to do this recipe. I sure hope someone who reads this does.

When we went through our mother’s possessions after she passed away, my sister-in-love said, "We'd better enjoy these pickles while we can because I doubt that either of us has the time to make them again."

Start recipe on Thursday for scheduling.

Day 1 – 2 gal. cucumbers, peeled, seeded, cut into strips. Dissolve 2 C. dehydrated lime in enough water to cover pickles. Put in roasting pan. Let stand 24 hours with tight cover.

Day 2 – Drain and wash with cool water. Soak in cool water 3 hours. Drain. Mix 1 C. vinegar, 1 T. alum, 1 1 oz. bottle red food coloring, enough water to cover pickles. Pour over pickles. Heat and simmer 2 hours. Drain. Mix 3 C. vinegar, 3 C. water, 10 C. sugar, 8 sticks cinnamon, 1 lb. cinnamon red hots. Boil. Pour over pickles and reheat. Let stand overnight.

Day 3 – Drain, saving juice. For three mornings, reheat juice and pour back over pickles.

Day 6 – The fourth morning, reheat pickles in juice. Pack and seal in hot wide mouth jars. Water bath 5 minutes. Do not use aluminum or stainless steel pans. Makes 11-12 pts.

Mother’s notes: For Day 1 lime and Day 2 cold water, I found the big square Tupperware [cake taker] worked well. Day 2 on, I used the rectangle roaster when it was time to cook. I prepared the red hots solution in the Dutch oven and poured over cucumbers. For Days 3-5, I drained the juice from roaster into Dutch oven, reheated it and poured it back over cukes. Day 6 I just heated in the roaster, put in juice, water bathed after treating lids in aluminum pan.

Now I feel nostalgic. I can just see those red slices in one of her relish trays. I can taste them, too, a kind of sweet, hot, crunchy sensation in my mouth. Sigh.

Spectacular Frozen Corn

This is my mother's recipe for the best frozen corn ever.

17-18 C. corn cut from cob
1 lb. butter (do not substitute margarine)
1 pt. half-and-half
Bake at 325 degrees for 1 hour. Stir occasionally. Requires LARGE roasting pans to make. Spread out on cookie sheets and freeze until solid, usually 2-3 days. Then put into freezer containers and freeze until ready to eat.

I am hungry already. Bring on the sweet corn!

Don't Fence Me In!

Marilyn's post yesterday reminded me of the truck farm my brother and I worked when we were at home. (This picture was taken in 1994, after we were both married. Truck farm was much smaller by then.) We didn't live on a farm, but my mother had grown up on the farm. She was still a farm girl at heart. She could not and would not abide laziness. She had the world's longest to-do list and she intended for it to be completed.

We had plenty of chores, including lots of garden ones. After baking in the hot sun while doing tasks I hated, I decided I would NEVER have a garden when I grew up. No way. Not going to do it.

Never say never.

My mother was very frugal, partly from necessity and partly from preference. She hated waste and unnecessary spending. So she had a huge garden full of all kinds of vegetables. Being hyper organized, she kept a meticulous garden book, noting where she had planted each crop and what varieties she used. I prize that book now, but I don't keep one.

Her garden rows seemed infinite when we were pulling weeds or other boring tasks under the beating sun. And she could always find weeds that we never saw. I learned to love mulching because it suppressed those horrible weeds.

Late summer and early fall was canning/freezing time. She ran a regular factory in the basement, but putting up our produce was the reward for nasty tasks like weeding. I entered into food preservation whole-heartedly. Looking at neat rows of produce-filled jars was always a pleasurable experience. Eating them was even better!

How I miss eating her frozen corn recipe, which will appear tomorrow, and her very labor-intensive red hot pickle recipe, which will appear the next day.

When I lived in Virginia, a friend from upstate New York invited me to her house for Thanksgiving. I continually longed for farm country and she said we would pass through lots of farm country.

Our ideas of what farm country meant were diametrically opposed. We drove roads that were lined with houses. Their lots were long and narrow. Their houses sat next to the road with large gardens behind them. She said those were farms. What farms?

My idea of a farm is acres of corn, wheat, milo and/or sunflowers. Anything else is a just a repeat of my mother's garden. In my idea of farm country, the neighbors can't look into each other's windows just as they could in suburbia!

I thought of the Roy Rogers song "Don't Fence Me In".

"... Let me ride through the wide open country that I love,
Don't fence me in.
Let me be by myself in the evenin' breeze
And listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees
Send me off forever but I ask you please,
Don't fence me in..."

My little farm

Marilyn is on a roll and adds her second contribution.

As a youngster growing up on the farm 22 miles from any “civilization,” I could hardly wait to leave that all behind me. I had dreams of being a city girl, of living a pampered life, quite opposite of the life I’d been raised in on the farm.

For some reason, those childhood and childish dreams never did come true. And for some reason, I never met a “city guy” whom I could relate to! Believe me; I tried! I made it a rule never to date any farm kids! Nope, I made sure the guys I dated were sophisticated, and knew nothing about hard work and farm life!

Ha! How silly that was! Sophisticated? Hardly! Hard work? Most of them had no clue what hard work meant!

I’d come home from working long, hard hours as a nurse’s aide, only to find my boyfriend still asleep, lounging around the house at 2:30 in the afternoon! He gave the excuse for not showing up for work that day, as “I just didn’t feel like it.” For some reason, that didn’t sit well with me! I found it to be quite disgusting, in fact, and the relationship would soon end. I would end up kicking these deadbeat men out of my home!

Yet I still searched for that dream I had as a child. Did I miss the farm? Oh, some. But my family lived close enough to town that on weekends I still visited them on the farm. But my heart still told me to stay away from dating farm boys.

As I matured, both in wisdom and in years, I discovered what made me so disgusted by boyfriends who had a poor work ethic. Why wouldn’t laziness disgust me? I was raised on a farm by parents who taught me to rise early and work hard all day! I was taught that nothing gets done by sitting around lazily watching the day go past. I was taught that at the end of the day, it was time to rest and play. But not before the work was done!

As I near my 50th year, there are days I long for those long-lost farm days. My heart aches for those times, for those memories to be relived once again! Just because my parents taught me to work long and hard, they also showed me how to enjoy the simple pleasures in life and to sit back and relax.

I have loved working hard forever. Well, at least ever since I was an adult, having to go out and make my own living in this world! I look back on my life as a young adult, setting out on my own in the big old world. Even as young as I was, as immature as I was then, I knew that I must show up for work unless I was truly sick. I knew that even though I may have stayed out too late with my friends partying up a storm, that when the alarm went off, it was time to drag myself out of bed and get to work. I never was one to call in sick for any reason other than if I was truly sick.

That sticks with me even to this day. As I grow ever closer to being half a century old/young, I find myself imitating my parents’ lifestyle. I am up before the alarm goes off, starting my day. In the summer months, there is always something in the garden or yard that needs attention. I like to be out there just as the sun rises, tending to my little piece of farm life, right here in town. Right here in my back yard.

I tell my 80-year-old father that he farmed in the country and I farm in town. He laughs at that and agrees with me! I show him my corn rows, which are skimpy compared to the hundreds of acres he once grew! He and I mow my lawn. I tell him that my farm is puny compared to what he used to farm, but this is the closest thing to a real farm I can get!

Dad agrees with me, smiles, and off we go, each doing our “farm work” as the sun sets lower and lower in the western sky.

Friends are like butterflies

My friend Marilyn will be contributing guest posts from time to time. This is her first contribution.

Forrest Gump says, “Life is like a box of chocolates.” I like to think of my friendships as a "garden of butterflies.”

Butterflies thrive on a nice, warm stone. They warm their wings before flying off to hover over some waiting flower petal for refreshment and sustenance. They also need little sips of clean, fresh water in order to refresh their little bodies after they have flown hither and yon all day long.

And each butterfly is its own unique creation. Each one has a spot that is different from the others. Butterflies come in 28,000 different species and each butterfly has slightly different markings, the mark of our loving Creator’s hands.

Friends are like butterflies. As a friend, you flutter from this friend to that one, doing fun activities with this one, then sitting and drinking from your friends’ refreshing, encouraging words at the end of a long day. Or maybe you just sit on the deck and watch the sun set together, basking in the last glows of the warm sunshine and in the joy of each other’s presence.

When the weather has beaten you down, the chill in the air has spread to your heart, what better place to get warmed up than in front of a friend’s fireplace with a warm cup of hot cocoa?

Or how about those times when life has hit you behind the knees and knocked you down? Maybe one of your butterfly friends drops by and takes you out for a yummy piece of homemade apple pie a la mode! When you get home after spending time with a good friend, you feel refreshed and much safer.

So, Forrest, I love your chocolate saying, but I also like my butterfly saying! When I look at each of my four closest friends in the entire world, I see a lovely butterfly in each one of them. I see them each ministering to others who are in need of love and comfort at just the right moment. I see them spreading beauty in the world. I see each of them in need of such things in their own lives at times, and I watch as each butterfly in the group stops and ministers to one another.

Dear Lord, I love the way You made butterflies for our enjoyment and for us to learn from. We can learn a lot from the life of the beautiful butterfly. Thank You!

De-mint-ed

I should have listened to my mother.

Hubby and I planted mint in our vegetable garden. After we'd done the work, she warned us that mint was very invasive. We didn't want to undo what we'd done and we left that plant in our garden. How foolish was that!

Mint sends out wicked runners. All those runners must be removed from the garden or the plants will grow back. If we had listened and ripped it out, we would have saved ourselves much grief and work. Instead, every spring I "de-mint" the garden. When it's done, I say I am "de-mint-ed." I was demented to plant it in the first place!

The first year we de-mint-ed, we had to get fill dirt from a construction site because our garden had a crater in it. That evil plant had even sent runners under our sidewalk to infiltrate another garden. The crater's contents went into our driveway. The Frugal Gardener hates waste. We're still dumping our precious garden soil into the drive because of mint contamination, although the loads get smaller each year.

Unfortunately for us, we planted the mint right on our property line. It spread into the neighbor's lawn. The neighbor thinks the stuff is great and tends it. Therefore, it spreads right back into our garden. See the mint poking through the fence? I can't dig up the mint that's right on the line because my shovel hits concrete. So I'm stuck with it.

Yes, I definitely should have listened to my mother. Don't plant mint!