I've been a bit lethargic about posting the last few days. The words just weren't forming any sort of decent sentences is my brain. Everything seemed boring. It didn't help that I've been running around here like a maniac the past few days, trying to cram as much into each available second as I could. Thankfully I did get a lot of things done - unfortunately you had nothing to read for a few days. But I'm back now and hopefully can manage to keep my inspiration going too. I certainly have plenty … [Read more...]
An update on what’s growing
July 29, 2008 by Leave a Comment
On Saturday morning, I passed by the thyme plant growing in my herb container garden and saw this! ICK!!!! I don't know where they came from or how they got to be over an inch so quickly but these little suckers were munching down on my thyme plant. I quickly picked them off and disposed of them and thankfully have not found any more...but why we have so many caterpillars around this year eating all our plants, I just don't understand. Speaking of which, the evil little caterpillars that were … [Read more...]
What we’re growing right now…
July 22, 2008 by 2 Comments
If you read this blog often, you know that we tend to grow some things that some might consider strange. Even for us they can be a bit abnormal, but as we try to become more self-sufficient and look towards a future where food costs just continue to rise, we find ourselves focusing on growing more and more interesting things. For example, we're now trying to grow ginger root. We were in an Asia store the other day and saw a few pieces there which were already starting to sprout a bit. So we … [Read more...]
Another hour in the garden…
July 17, 2008 by Leave a Comment
Just spent another bit of time pulling weeds, trimming trees and just trying to get a grip on things in the garden. Overwhelming is certainly one way of describing it! I took some more photos but I barely notice the progress myself...well, actually, I can see the progress in the photos! Woohoo :) I primarily focused on the right side of the garden today, trying to trim down the grass and cut back the trees and roses so we can at least see what is what. There is a whole lot of grass back there … [Read more...]
A bit of progress in the garden
July 16, 2008 by Leave a Comment
Well, we finally did something about the garden. I feel guilty for not going back there the last two days but Monday I was still recovering from working back there 3 hours on Sunday...and today it was just too hot in the morning to get out there. I may squeeze in a bit tomorrow morning but I have errands to run all day so I think Thursday will be my first day back out there...it should be a nice view of just how quickly things sprout up and may convince me to get committed to the 1 hour a day … [Read more...]
That time of the year again
March 14, 2008 by Leave a Comment
The gardening fever is striking us again (thankfully since we have a nice big space to utilize back there) and we've just starting a ton of seeds....of course we are only writing about it on our self-sufficient / garden blog, Self-Reliant Yuppies, so if you want to see what we're up to, please go drop by! I've also posted a bunch of recipes I recently tried out on there if you're a foodie like myself ;-)Recent posts:What we got from Burpee seedsStarting seeds in newspaper pots … [Read more...]
What we got from Burpee
March 14, 2008 by 2 Comments
So I've mentioned that we got seeds from Burpee a few times now...and you may be wondering what we ordered...so here goes - it's a LONG list, I know. But the seeds there cost a fraction of the price here, especially for chili seeds so even with shipping them over here, it's totally worth it. Plus you can't find okra seeds here....We mostly stuck to heirloom varieties. It's a farm garden, after all, and after we had a bunch of hybrids last year, we realized that the taste of them really wasn't … [Read more...]
Cayenne harvesting
October 6, 2007 by Leave a Comment
We got quite a few nice peppers from our cayenne plants despite not really giving much love or attention to them. We decided to harvest a few of the peppers before we went away last week and hung them up in our kitchen to dry. We tried a little piece of one of them in our chicken penne arrabiata dish the other night but probably could have used a tiny bit more. Stefan tried them once before and they were very hot so we were trying to be a bit cautious so we wouldn't end up with our pasta being … [Read more...]
An excess of tomatoes leads to…Southern Spaghetti Sauce
September 4, 2007 by 6 Comments
...me in the kitchen making pasta sauce from fresh crushed tomatoes, a task which sounds more daunting than it is. When I was at the grocery story last week, I picked up some ground beef to make spaghetti sauce. I have been using a Southern-style meat sauce recipe for over a year now that I picked up on allrecipes.com. I started out just following the recipe but now I've totally changed it up to suit our tastes. That all started because I needed to clean out the fridge today... The … [Read more...]
Eggplants, chilies and tomatoes – oh my!
August 16, 2007 by Leave a Comment
Once again it's been a while since our last garden update so here goes...I mentioned once or twice that we are giving our lettuce a try in window boxes along our courtyard and at the front of the house. These are the plants by the courtyard which are really thriving. They apparently get just enough sun during the day and I water them all the time too. We're looking forward to starting to harvest a few leaves at a time from each plant so we can hopefully keep them growing but still enjoy our own … [Read more...]
Hi! I'm Tiffany and I'm so glad you're here!! I'm an American living in Germany for the last 11 years. My family just uprooted from Frankfurt to Berlin and we LOVE it!
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