My Fall Favorites! My Best Fall Posts

It's Fall! It's finally here!

I first noticed Fall one day last week when I saw a small yellow leaf on the floor of the dining room. Since then, I've been checking for more signs every day. Sure enough, the very next day, there was a sprinkling of leaves when the wind kicked up while we were playing in the backyard with our friends. Three days ago I saw the first spots of red on the slope of trees opposite my house. And today - officially, is Fall!

To celebrate, I have compiled all of my favorite Fall Posts from the last two years. My favorite Fall recipes, crafts and activities.




Fall Recipes:
Whole Wheat Cheese Raviolis with Apricot Squash Sauce
Apricot Squash Soup with Grilled Provolone Sandwiches
Vegetarian Chili With Meat Alternative
Nonfat Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies
Nonfat Crab and Squash Chowder


Fall Festivities:
A Yard For Harvest
Seed Saving How and Why

Fall Crafts:
Harvest Wreath
Sweater Legs
Cable and Ribbed Glove Pattern
Table Centerpieces From Found Natural Materials
Embroidered Heirloom Pillows

Growing A Yard For Harvest

I love to have a manicured yard. I want my yard to look good so that when I come home, I am arriving at a beautiful and uplifting place.

Growing native flowers is one way to achieve this with minimal fuss and no watering or chemicals. It's also important that I find my plants for free, and amassing my collection of native plants is something that I am always working towards. With many of my local parks growing native flowers, and no shortage of interesting flowers growing along the roadside, collecting seeds for my yard is both simple and exciting!

One thing that is just as important to me as having a nice looking yard is to have a yard that is useful. Again, growing native flowers is a useful way to garden because it benefits the local eco system and attracts beneficial insects and feeds the birds, squirrels and wild life. But native flowers are not only nice to look at and good for the environment, they make nice dried arrangements in the fall and can be used in many ways. Some wild flowers are edible like Queen Annes Lace (wild carrot) or have medicinal uses, like Echinacea.





I grow flowers with the ultimate goal of harvest. Even my ornamental rose bushes have a purpose aside from being pretty. I can make potpourri out of the blooms after they just reach their peak, and then I can blend them up to make rose beads for jewelry making.

Growing a yard for harvest naturally means growing a yard that is abundant in food. I would love some day to have a yard in which I can walk out into and pick a wide variety food to eat. I have my vegetable patch, my herb garden and my strawberry bed. I also have a hazelnut tree that I will find a mate for soon so that in a few years I will have loads of hazelnuts to snack on and cook with.

Nature offered me a blackberry bush earlier this year, that just sprouted in my yard and 75% of my vegetable garden volunteered itself, from the compost that I created from my kitchen scraps. I planted the cucumber and the bed of lettuce, but Nature decided to give me 3 squash plants, 2 pumpkin vines, 7 garlic plants and over twenty tomato plants. Yes, Nature is very, very good to me and I know how to use my bit of Earth.

One day I plan to have a small orchard, of four to six fruit trees, and I have a large currently unused area designated to grow others types of berries, apart from the blackberries I already have. But it's important to me to have a yard that is useful in many ways - not just pleasing to look at or delicious to eat, even more than a space for the children to play.

There are plants in my yard which are only grown for some sort of functional purpose.


I have an ash tree that was cut down to the stump a year ago because it was badly placed and would soon grow into the chain link fence. The sugars built up in the roots allowed it to sprout several upright branches, turning the tree into a bush. I noticed this when the shoots were small and could be snipped easily, but I quickly realized the potential in them. I allowed to shoots to grow tall, for they are straight and pliable. We have used them to roast marshmallows and hotdogs over the fire pit, and they are also useful for building natural trellises for vining plants. Cutting them down every fall will allow new shoots each spring to be used for many things throughout the next growing season. Because they are very bendy, they can be easily shaped and I am currently considering what types of things might be created from them.

I have a slope in my back yard that is a great place to allow the grass to grow in the late fall and get nice and tall. We purposely stop mowing it in early September. There are some weeds that grow in it, that once dried make nice floral arrangement along with the native wild flowers, but what I'm really after is the grass. In the late afternoon when there is no moisture on it, I will reap the grass and form it into little bundles. These are for my fire place during the winter. We also trim the trees back when the summer begins to get hot and the rapid growth of spring dies down. The limbs will then be cut into 8 inch long sections and dried out for fall, to become kindling. In the winter when I want to start my fireplace, which I tend to do daily, I grab a nifty little bundle of dried grass from the stack, and handful of the dried twigs. Getting the fireplace going is pretty easy with them, no need for fancy store-bought starter logs or supplies.

All along my chain link fence are many types of vines. But the vines I am especially interested in are the wild grapes. They are either too old to produce, or they are a naturally barren variety.
I don't grow them for the fruit, I don't even like grapes. I want the vines. These are invasive and unruly, however, I cut them down to their trunks in the fall, pull off all of the leaves and use the vines to make natural decorations, like wreathes to be decorated with fall leaves or Christmas baubles.

There is also my water garden, where I grow bulrushes and cattails. The long slender leaves of the cattail plants are great for decorating, lashing and I keep meaning to get around to weaving them into baskets or placemats. It's on my to-do list.

I do not consider myself an urban homesteader, and I have no desire to live on a farm at this point in my life. But utilizing my space in the most useful way possible just makes sense to me. Nature is very giving when you let it do it's thing.

Turn a T-shirt into Short Workout Pants

"I really am enjoying my new job. In my first training session, they said that they call us "industrial athletes." This is no joke! My job is to load packages into the back of a truck. The boxes are often heavy and they want you to move them as quickly as you can.

It's extremely physical. Squatting, lunging, lifting, reaching and placing heavy packages at a rapid (aerobic) pace for approximately three hours solid per shift, is quite an enviable workout and had a lot to do with why I chose to apply for this job.

My first night on the dock, I wore a tank top and a pair of jeans. I quickly wished I hadn't! The denim is too hot, too constricting and every time I squatted or lunged, I mooned everyone behind me. My second night on the dock, I wore a pair of running capris and was so thankful that I did. I decided to get a whole wardrobe of workout capris and T-shirts.

The thrift store had a few workout/yoga pants that were in my size, but I had to modify the length. Otherwise, I realized I could make new running capris out of large T-shirts!

Here's what you need:
T-shirt, at least a size large
Sewing machine (hand stitching won't cut it with this project).
Elastic (you can recycle from old clothing)
Thread
Pins
Scissors

To begin with, choose the appropriate sized shirt. The size of the shirt you'll need is determined by the size of your hips and backside. Consider the length. Consider what you want to do about a waste band.
My median size is a 10, and a mens size large is enough to make a basic pant for me. The red shirt pictured was a 2XL and there was enough leftover fabric on each side too make a waste band if I wanted. I'll describe that later.

Fold your T-shirt in half down the middle, with the sleeves together.

Take a fair amount of care to smooth it out with your hand as much as possible. Working with knit can be a little tricky, as it stretches and pulls out of shape easily. When we're talking about pre-worn T-shirts, it should be expected that there will be some wonkiness right off the bat. Just go with it and gently hand press it, moving the bulky places out of the way.

You can take your measurements and draw up a pattern if you like, but I just grabbed a pair of knit work out pants that fit me the way I like.

Lay your workout pants (or similar pattern) on top of the T-shirt as this picture shows. It is really important that the portion that is the outside of the legs lines up with the folded side of the T-shirt. That is because you are going to have only one inner seam on the leg of your pants. No need to waste time and thread by adding unnecessary seams! Besides, if you have a logo or design on the front of your shirt, this will simply be placed on the side of your pant and not look too weird. You may notice also as this picture shows, that the bottom of the pant lines up with the bottom of the T-shirt. This means your pants are pre-hemmed! Cool, right? I know!

When you cut, you want to account for your seam allowance. I only wanted a quarter inch seam, so I made sure I cut that far from the outside edge of my (pattern) pants.

You're cutting through four layers of T-shirt, and therefore you are cutting both pieces you need to make your pants. Sewing goes pretty quickly.

Each piece that you have is a pant leg. Fold each one in half vertically, with right sides together. Make sure you match the sides evenly. They should be symmetrical.

Pin up the leg, stopping right when you get to the point that is the crotch.

These pants are meant to fit snuggly, and your seams will take a lot of pulling - especially if you're using them for working out.

The last thing you want is your seam to rip open while you're jogging down the street, in the middle of a yoga session or working the leg press at the gym. I know I don't want to have my co-workers laughing at me endlessly because my pants split open in front of everyone!

Each and every seam is doubled and tripled. Two straight seams, about a millimeter apart, and a zig-zag stitch that is evenly straddling the outside straight stitch. I then very carefully trimmed away the excess fabric, to within two millimeters of the seam.

Once you have your pant legs sewn and threads trimmed, you'll want to turn them right side out. This photo is an error, I started pinning with the pant legs inside out and realized that If I had sewn them that way, the seam that joins them would have been on the outside.

Once the pant legs are inside out, match up the seams at what will become the crotch (I hate that word!)

Pin the two pieces together and just as you did when you sewed the pant legs closed, sew a quarter inch seam using a straight stitch. Sew a second parallel stitch a millimeter apart and then zig-zag down the middle of the outer stitch. Trim off the excess fabric.

After you have the two halves of your pants joined, you want to try them on. If they are too loose, you can take them in. If they don't come up high enough, you can add an extra long waste band.

I recycled elastic from old clothing. On the gray pants that have the logo, I chose to do a waste band because they seemed to be to short and would pull down in the back during squatting. I could have used the scraps leftover from the red shirt, and this would have looked quite nice. However there was an ugly old gray sweatshirt that has been sitting in the recycle pile for a while and I chose to take the waste band off of it because it matched so well. I cut the elastic to the length that I needed, enfolded it into the waste band and sewed it together. I then pinned this band, with right sides together, to my pants and sewed it with a double straight stitch and a zig-zag. Trimming off the excess thread, these pants were done!

The red pants were plenty high in the waste, and I decided that I wouldn't bother with a waste band. I didn't care to have a hem, either. I know that having the elastic showing makes them look like ridiculously long underwear, but I don't mind. My shirt will cover the elastic.

I did want to make the point, however, that they may well function as long underwear! You can have them as leggings in the colder months, wear them under skirts, whatever you like.



These pants were so easy to make, I can see making many of them in the future! Whenever I find myself running short on work-out pants, I can just grab a few big T-shirts from the thrift store or my husbands dresser and whip a few up!

Strawberry Fields 4ever

I'm so happy it's spring! I'm not even irritated that we keep getting bouts of freezing temps and snow. I've lived in the Midwest plenty long and I know to expect snow clear into May. I enjoy the bouts of warm temps when they come and allow a bit of leeway when it comes to my spring planting.


Each spring I usually put in a bit of landscaping. Whether it's putting in flower beds, building trellises or building a new walkway or fire pit. Last year I moved my little water garden from the back corner of the yard to sit beside the porch. We had goldfish in it, but they never seem to make it more than a season and so I've determined that we will have a froggy pond, not a gold fish pond. I even made a sign, see?

There are poppies, daisies and coneflowers planted around the pond.
When they come in, it will be quite a pretty natural look.

This year, we wanted to grow strawberries but because the large oak tree planted in the corner of our yard is shading the back half of our garden, we needed to find a new site. The old pond site was looking pretty atrocious. I thought about it and thought about it, and came up with a design using materials we already had to make a raised strawberry bed on that slope.




My determination faltered for about a minute when I first came back to this site and became overwhelmed
by the amount of digging and excavating it was going to take. But one thing I've learned digging a lot
of holes (I have built 4 in ground water gardens) is that a large amount of dirt is easily moved, one
shovel at a time.

 

Adam was fascinated by what we found when we turned over these rocks!



The fill spot from where the pond used to sit was sunken in a bit and we were looking to make a raised bed. It took quite a lot of digging on the slope to bring all of the soil down.

I used to live in a house which butted up next to a creek. There was a long steep slope from my back door down to this creek, and this slope was positively littered with limestone rocks. It took many days outside to dig up these rocks and climb up the slope with them to the back yard, but I had a lot of them and my first pond was gorgeous! When we moved, we decided to bring the pond (and the rocks) with us. But because the pond now sits partially beneath our porch and we have far fewer rocks around it, we have a surplus of them sitting in the corner of the yard. The kids helped me move the rocks back over to our site where I dry stacked a sixteen inch tall wall.

Karlie was a big help breaking up the soil and raking it towards the front of our wall.

 

One thing I've gotten pretty good at over the years is dry stacking limestone rocks so that it's good looking and won't fall over, even when little feet run across them.

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There is plenty of room on the back end of this slope to build a second tier, for an herb garden. On the very top, I plan on growing some berry vines, such as blackberry, raspberry and blueberry.

I love that my kid dressed up like Bumblebee to help me in the yard.

We got some old weathered pallets from my next door neighbor and broke them up, cut them down, and made a little wooded "fence on the back end of the new bed. Adam had a lot of fun breaking them apart.

This little fence is to keep the bunnies out. They are jaggety on purpose.

We have a lot of bunnies in our neighborhood. Every spring the cute little shits eat up half of my produce as it's coming out of the ground. They're really fond of strawberry plants, so I built a barrier. The front and sides are raised and rocky, the rabbits will have a hard time getting in that way. On the back side, we dug a deep trench and then placed these posts to form a fence. They are purposely staggered in height for simplicity and for looks. Plus, it'll make it that much harder for the rabbits to find away over it.

We couldn't find our spade, so we used a kitchen spoon.

We planted around 28 June bearing straweberry plants. These are perennial, and will come back year after year if we take good care of them. That's why it was important for me to have a good place to keep them. I am expecting a pretty good crop to bake in pies, make strawberry shortcake, eat fresh and can into jams. Notice I did not say that I expect to have any for sharing.

Karlies favorite part is to water them in.

I expect this weekend to build the second tier and plant my herb garden.

I realized after I took this picture that I misspelled the sign.

So... Do You Want to Make Your Own Coconut Oil?

Welcome to the Festival of Food Carnival. In celebration of Spring, we're sharing real raw recipe ideas.  Hosted by Diary of a First Child and Hybrid Rasta Mama, you're welcome to join us next time, or if you have a previously published recipe you'd like to share, add it to the linky below.

A couple of weeks ago, I bought a coconut. I love coconut meat, they taste similar to Brazil nuts, which are my favorites.

After a friend of mine shared an article on homemade coconut milk, I began playing around with my coconut. And then I bought another one, and another one. I started experimenting and researching.

I decided I wanted to make three things with coconuts: Coconut Milk, Coconut Flour, and Coconut oil. All of which can be very expensive and as my regular readers know, expensive ain't my thing!

One thing I discovered however, was that no website, blog article or Youtube video (that I was able to find) showed how to process coconuts in all three ways, simultaneously. So here you go! I will post the links to the pages and videos that I saw at the end of this article. I am not an expert on coconuts, but I am something of an expert on cheap!

Real quick, I'm going to bore you with some math.
Here, I bought five coconuts. They were 1.38$ each, and I picked up the largest ones out of the bin.
My yields from these 5 coconuts are thus:
1.5 cups of coconut oil
220 oz. of coconut milk
8 cups of coconut flour

All for less than 7$.
It's important here to note that had I chosen either the coconut milk OR the coconut oil, I would have gotten quite a lot more of each. But because I wanted both, the totals for each were less.

So let's get started!
Shopping for coconuts, you want to pick heavy ones. Shake them to see if they have plenty of liquid inside. Low liquid content likely means there is a hole or a crack and the coconut inside has been compromised.
Hold the coconut over a bowl and whack it hard with the back edge of a heavy knife. It splits in half magically! Sometimes the first blow does it, sometimes you need to hit it a few times.

I had all five coconuts split in just a couple of minutes.

You can save the liquid and strain it as it likely has bits of the hull floating around in it.

Some people add a bit of sugar to this and drink it up. I just processed it back into the coconut milk.

Another trick I read online. Put the coconut halves into a 350F oven for 15 minutes. This won't hurt them a bit!

When you take them out, you will find that they are a lot easier to remove from their shells, as heating them causes them to pull away a little from the outer hulls.

Turning the halves upside down on the counter and giving them another good whack with the back of a heavy knife will now cause them to pop out of their shells, most of the time. Otherwise, use a butter knife to pop it out.

I had a bowlful of large chunks of meat.

I chopped them up into pieces that my blender could handle.

Don't throw away the shells, they can be very useful!

Coconut shells make excellent mulch, they can be composted or burned. Because they are highly flammable, they are terrific fire starters for your summertime bar-b-q or weenie roast. You can also crunch them up and use them in your fish tank filter, water filter or other application instead of activated charcoal. Ground to dust, they are very absorbent and a great way to handle those pesky oil stains in your driveway. You can even use the dust as a facial exfoliant. So keep them!

Next step, into the blender.

Before adding liquid, use the crush setting and get the pieces as small as you can.

Obviously, this is not five coconuts. Only blend about a half a coconut at a time, unless your blender is a mean machine and can handle more.

I was using a cheap Sunbeam blender that I bought at a thrift store without a lid.

 Now add the liquid that you extracted from the coconuts. You will run out, so just use fresh water afterward.

Blend, blend, blend.

Because I was making flour with the solids, I took care to get my pieces as miniscule as possible. If I had a Blendtec, this would have been an easy thing. But my cheap little Sunbeam just went and went.

This is maybe one coconut. By the time I was finished blending, the bowl was filled to the brim. Looks like oatmeal and it smelled delicious!

It confuses me when people talk about keeping things on hand like cheesecloth.
Bandanas can be used for so many things! I always have plenty lying around.

Dampen the bandana and place it (or strainer, or cheesecloths over the mouth of a pitcher and scoop one or two cupfuls of the pulp into it.

Squeeze, and squeeze and wring and wring. You can be as forceful as you need to be with the bandana, you won't tear it, wear as cheesecloth would after a bit.

I was able to squeeze out enough super concentrated coconut milk to fill up six 24 oz. jars.

If you're only making coconut milk, good job, you all done! This is, as I said, very concentrated so you would want to dilute it quite a bit.

If you want to make the coconut oil and flour, read on.

After getting as much liquid out of the pulp as possible, dump the coconut grounds out onto a cookie sheet.

I had to use two of them.

Spread it out as evenly as you can, then place it in a 200F oven for a few hours to dry out.

Once the coconut flour has fully dried, run it back through the blender or a food processor to break it up further.

I placed my jars into the refrigerator and let them rest for several hours. The fat separated to the top.

If I was only making coconut oil, I would have wanted to put my milk into a bowl or some container that would allow me to scoop the cream out easily. But making the milk as well, I didn't want to remove all of the cream.

I ladled approximately
1/2 to 2/3's of the cream into a heavy bottomed pot.

I placed the pot on medium heat and went on with my day. There is nothing you need to do here, just check on it every so often.

After a while, you will see the oil begin to come to the top.

Continue to cook until you are unable to get any more oil out of the sludge. I would estimate that this took me about an hour.

You can see that I got about a cup and a half of pure virgin coconut oil. If I had taken all of the cream from the milk, I would easily have gotten over two cups.













I can't say that it was a blast to make all of this, as you can see it was a ton of work! Was it worth it? Oh yes! Especially the coconut milk. And as I said in the beginning of this post, all of these products are fair bit pricey, and making your own makes them affordable for just about anyone. In fact, going to a regular grocery store and purchasing cooking oil (corn, canola, vegetable) plus a sack of wheat flour, plus two gallons of cow milk would cost you at least double what I spent here for much, MUCH healthier products.

Stay tuned to this blog for recipes using coconut milk, coconut oil and coconut flour, as I can see this being something that I do on a regular basis!

Research Links:
Hybrid Rasta Mama; 333 Uses for Coconut Oil
WikiHow; 8 Ways to Open a Coconut
Homemade Desert Recipes; How to Open a Coconut
Wellness Mama; Homemade Coconut Milk
Whole New Mom; Easiest Coconut Milk Recipe - Improved!
Youtube: Raw Pleasure Australia; How to make coconut milk. (obnoxious music, but good video).
Ehow; How To Make Homemade Coconut Oil
Youtube: Christopher Silverton-Thong; Coconut Oil - Homemade
Trini Style; Homemade Coconut Oil

*********** Please take a moment to visit the blogs of our other Festival of Food participants. The links in this list will be live by the end of the day, as participants are all in different time zones.

• Gone are the days where dairy-free, gluten-free deserts mean a fruit platter! This "raw" cheesecake from Luschka at Diary of a First Child is a wonderful introduction to raw food, and is pretty simple to make too! You can also find Luschka on Facebook.
• Jennifer at Hybrid Rasta Mama shares Tropical Twist Kale Chips, a recipe guaranteed to take your taste buds to the tropics! Kid love these tangy treats too!  You can also find Jennifer on Facebook.
• Sarah at Why Food Works discusses the importance of fat and enzymes - and offers up a recipe for a raw, 5-minute blender gazpacho that's perfect for warmer weather. You can also find Sarah on Facebook.
• Abbie at Farmer's Daughter shares tips for introducing Raw First Foods based on her experiences following baby-led weaning with her older son. You can also find Farmer's Daughter on Facebook.
• Destany at They Are All of Me shows to how she made coconut oil, coconut milk and coconut flour in her own kitchen, using whole coconuts. You can also fine They Are All of Me on Facebook.

Stay connected! Be sure to "Like" the Festival of Food Carnival Facebook page.

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