Starting a garden

Now that I'm getting more into cooking, I thought I'd take a leaf out of Julie'(Ed's sister) and start growing my own herbs. This weekend I went out to Lowe's to get some seeds, gloves, plant food, and a spade. All in all it cost me less than $17.00.

I bought :

Sweet Basil
Genovese Basil
Oregano
Rosemary
Thyme
Lavender
Candytuft (I decided to spend an extra $1.25 for some flowers. I like having fresh flowers in the house. It makes everything seem so much brighter.)

We have a whole bunch of flower pots and planters here from our landlords. I guess they were trying to make the place pretty before they left, but ended up leaving us will a bunch of broken down plastic pots. So yesterday even though it was rainy, I worked up the courage to put on some boots that I hadn't worn in over a year (I had to shake them to make sure no bugs were in them) and then I got rid of all of those ugly planters. Since it's still pretty cold here, there were no bugs really. Thank goodness. I had my gloves on and everything. In the wreckage I managed to salvage about four pots out of about 20. After that, I was still feeling brave and I dug some gravel out of an open bag that was left behind. There could have potentially been many many bugs in there, so it was no small feat for me.

Today I managed to wake up at a normal time so that I could take Emmy for a walk and then fill my planters with soil. I was going to plant the seeds today, but decided to read up on how to do it first. It's a good thing too since I learned that the soil should be warm and herbs need to be between 60-65 degrees all the time. It's getting a little warmer here, but it's definitely not 60 degrees. I brought the planters into the house and have them sitting on a plastic sheet on the kitchen floor. I rearranged the kitchen so now we have some extra floor space. I'll talk about that later in the post. Anyway, so I was talking to Julie about my little herb experiment and she suggested putting them in the TV room where the heater is for the first week so that they can germinate. I'm going to try that and then put them in the guest room because I think that it is the sunniest room in the house and Emmy doesn't tend to go in there much. I'll move them into the TV room tonight and get planting. I'm excited! I think I might wait a little while for my flowers though. I'm going to have to see how the herbs go first.

I'm inspired by Julie a lot when it comes to domestic ventures and experiments. In her house she used to have this little beverage cart that she kept her coffee machine, grinder, and tea on. I thought that this was pretty neat, but when I looked around our little apartment I realized that we have no room for anymore furniture. After thinking about it for a while I decided that I could convert out kitchen table that acts as a flat coat rack into an alternative workspace. It is temporary now since I'm not sure if I really like all of my appliances on the other side of the little kitchen wall, but it sure frees up a lot of space on my counters. Since our roof leaks and has ruined a good number of my cookbooks, I had to move them to the other side of the counter. But then the other day I filled our Crock Pot (a treasure by the way) a little too high and it overflowed, thus ruining another one of my cookbooks. Now with this new set up, I can have my books away from anything wet at all! It might be a pain to have them all the way on the other side of the room, but I can only use one at a time anyway. I'll live. With the cookbooks in their new spot, I was able to move my flour and sugar pots to where the cookbooks used to be. Before they sat under the broken cabinet where the roof leaked. I was always in fear that nasty rain water would ruin all of my supplies. At the beginning of the year this happened. I had just filled the sugar jar and then it was filled with gross water. I was really upset. Now the problem is solved.

The new work space also allows me to have our bread machine out again. I just found this bulk foods website that sells wheat flour by the pound. I ordered 7 3/4 lbs of wheat flour and a pound of yeast so that we can start making wheat bread again. The cost of wheat flour in the grocery store is ridiculously high, so I'm very happy. Shipping was quite expensive, but it still comes out to be much cheaper than the grocery store. I also bought 5lbs of couscous. We LOVE couscous. Note: Also introduced to me by Julie.

I think that is about it with explanations. My Sunday night food prep is still going strong. Doing all of the work on one night and then just dumping the ingredients into the Crock Pot is so much easier than doing it every night.



Edward accidentally broke off our windowsill so he's putting it back on. I'm surprised that it didn't fall of sooner. I think it's better attached now than when we moved in. I joked that when we leave the landlords are going to be like "Gee, this place looks better than before they moved in".


Notice how warped the counter is from the leaky roof. So annoying.



I really like this little jar that I got from Juni's bridal shower. It makes me think of her whenever I see it so I like to put flowers in it. Whenever I plant those flower seeds I'm going to clip them off to put in this.