How to Naturally Kill Weeds

We have lots of weeds in our garden(s) that I weed and try to keep up with. This is enough work but we also have weeds along (and in) our rock driveway. (It's not gravel, it's rocks we've hauled out of the basement). This is more weeding than I can handle but it looks really bad and needs to get done. Plus, the weeds in the garden are tall and easy to pull, the driveway ones are short without much to hold on to. After poking around online, I have come up with several ways to kill weeds.

• Bleach in a spray bottle. This is chemicals (not what we want to use) but supposedly, they disperse and go away in 2 days or less. This is very strong and will kill anything that gets sprayed (which includes plants you may not want killed, in which case they say you can just wipe it off of those). 
• Vinegar. It's recommended to do half vinegar, half water. The stronger the vinegar, the better. You can even use the leftover pickle juice. 
• Boiling water. Rather than boil water solely for weed killing, use the leftover water after boiling pasta or whatever else you boil.
• Salt. Any salt works like table salt, pool salt, and rock salt (used for melting ice). Again, be careful where this falls as it will kill whatever it touches.
• Newspaper. This prevents the weeds from getting the sun and growing. This will kill them.
• Any combination of above. There are a lot of recipes combining vinegar, salt, and a squirt of dish soap in a spray bottle. This is the method we are going to try on our weeds. I'l let you know how it goes.

I can't wait to get rid of these weeds!


Edit: We did try that last option this weekend to get rid of weeds. It works really well, especially on the shorter weeds but you have to make sure you spray a lot on them. It also helps if you have the sun out to help dry them out as well. What we didn't realize (but should have) is that yes this kills weeds, but you still have to pull them out. At least it gives you more time to weed, especially something as big as our driveway, before they start choking out the other plants (the ones you want to keep). So, it would probably work best if you were trying to weed between sidewalk cracks to brickwork. This way, you don't have to pull them out and you can just scrape them. 

Meal Ideas With No Oven

Summer is hot and humid here, especially since we don't have air conditioning. We avoid using the oven, pretty much at all costs during these months. Sometimes even the stove top can be too warm so some of the following ideas are even sans stove, but some aren't. All are fast and easy so even if you do use the stove, it'll be over soon.

• Wraps, sandwiches, and pitas. Think egg salad, tuna salad, chicken salad, grilled cheese, scrambled eggs with beans and veggies, deli meat sandwiches, peanut butter and jelly, etc. The ideas are really endless. Anything with eggs or beans would be great. If you're trying to be healthier, you can even use lettuce wraps or sushi wraps instead of bread.
• Gazpacho and other cold soups like blueberry soup, cucumber soup, tomato summer vegetable soup or just make up your own! 
• Salads. Greek, Caesar, Waldorf. Again, endless possibilities. Use whatever vegetables you have on hand, even if that doesn't include lettuce and you'll be able to make something tasty. Even something like cowboy caviar would be good.
• Cold pasta salads. I think this is different enough from regular salads for its own category. I recommend making these ahead of time so they can chill in the fridge. 
• Grill out. Your grill is outside and not bringing heat into your house. Of course, then the food is hot which might not be what you're looking for. But here you can really grill anything.
• Appetizers or filling snacks like crackers with meat and cheese, apples and peanut butter, chips and dips (black bean, guac, salsa, spinach and artichoke), deviled eggs, cream cheese stuffed peppers, parfaits, etc.

I hope this list can help generate some ideas of your own for when  your house is too hot to bake anything.

P.S. This is my 100th post! Isn't that exciting?  

Strawberries!

We finally got around to weeding our fruits after being gone a week (boy was it a lot of work, and I'm still not even done!). This was when we noticed that our strawberry plants have strawberries on them! Some of them were rotted (because we missed them---I didn't know they came this early), I got to eat about 10 of them (the ones that were ready for picking, obviously) and we still have a whole bunch that we are just waiting to get redder! This is our first successful thing we have ever planted and had grown. Last year, we haphazardly tried to plant potatoes (we did it way too late, never watered them, never weeded them) and we got teeny tiny spuds (that we didn't even end up eating). This year is hopefully going to be different. Our blueberries aren't supposed to get fruit until next year (we've been picking off the flowers to make the roots grow better), our apple tree is a few years, and I don't know when our raspberries come.

While we were gone, our broccoli pretty much died and is beyond hope (at least for us, we really don't have any green thumbs) but our tomatoes are getting bigger by the day. They still haven't made it outside yet because every time we want to do it, the ground is too saturated from all our rain. Our other vegetable seeds also haven't made it out yet and it may be too late. Perhaps we'll just plant them next year? I'm not sure. We got kind of lazy with our garden, especially since it's really started to heat up and get extremely humid (think like 95%+). So, we'll just have to see how much stuff we can get done while the sun's on its way down because our backyard sure gets a lot of sun during the day!

Mosquitoes

Mosquitoes are my worst enemy. They LOVE me. They eat me right up. For instance, last night I sat in front of a citronella candle (supposedly mosquito repellent) for about 20 minutes and I got 12 new bites. I've had bites through my clothes, even in jeans! I don't know how they do it. I did read that they can smell their "prey" up to 50 meters away though. There is still a lot of research needed about who they like the most but they know it has to do with natural things like lactic acid, uric acid, and carbon dioxide (what you breathe out. The more you breathe, the more they find you).

From what I can tell, repellents with 30% DEET are the best (but being pregnant, I can't use anything higher than 10%). Also, those new products that clip on you are supposed to work really well and then you don't have to slather the spray on because it's all contained. I had heard decent things about those candles too but apparently that didn't work so well.

There are many products available and sometimes, the best thing you can do is just try different ones and see what works best for you. All I know is they really really like me and I haven't found a product that works well enough yet. I'll keep you posted if I find something amazing.

The Last Week Updates

So as I mentioned, I was cat sitting (and apartment sitting) for my sister and then going to my parent's house for a wedding this past weekend. Boy, was that a busy week! Cat sitting went just fine but they live in the city and it's nice for a little bit of a vacation but I don't think I could ever live there. It's just not my lifestyle. Then, the wedding was lots of fun but I felt like I hardly got to spend any time with my family because the weekend was so rushed (we got there Friday night, slept most of Saturday, then left Sunday afternoon) so we might go back soon. On the way home, due to lots of construction, our exit was closed and we had to go the long way home. I was so angry because we'd been in the car forever since we had missed the last rest stop (also due to construction). It seems like our whole route was under construction!

Our bunny, Cocoa, seems fine. We had David's brother check on her once or twice while we were gone (she can go about five days with a full food bowl and a full water bottle). She is looking at me now though like, "are you here to stay this time? Or are you just leaving again?". It's kind of cute but I think we're all trying to get back to our regular schedules.

One other thing we did last week was go to my doctor appointment to listen to our baby's heartbeat! I hadn't mentioned I was pregnant before (I'm almost 11 weeks now) because we were waiting due to the high risk of miscarriage in the beginning but after hearing the heartbeat and knowing how much teeny (that's what we call the baby) moves, it seems like we have a very healthy baby. I'm due January 15th and so far, have experienced pretty much every symptom they said I would, the worst being the nausea and vomiting. They do say that should pass in these next couple weeks though so I'll keep you posted.

I think that's everything new with us. Just getting back to regular life and I'll try to keep up with blog posts this week.

Just Wait

I am sorry I have not been posting lately. I was busy getting ready to cat sit for my sister. David and I go and live in their apartment while we do that (don't worry, we have a bunny sitter). We are staying here til Thursday then during the weekend, we are going to my parent's house (six hours away) for a wedding. I will try to post again next Monday so please stay tuned.

Birds in the Morning

The last couple days have been nice enough that we have our bedroom window open at night. Right outside this window is a huge pine tree. I can't guarantee all the obnoxious birds live in it but it does seem like some do. These birds wake us up between 3 and 4am. We already get up at 5:30am so David can get off to work on time so waking up a few hours earlier is not exactly pleasant. Most of the birds are tolerable. We wake up when they do but then we fall back asleep. Sometimes it's actually nice to hear because it means it's no longer winter (and boy did that drag on this past year!). However, there's one bird (I'm not good at bird identification so don't ask me what it is) that sounds like an alarm clock going off. It's louder than all the other birds, it's chirping is screechier and longer, and if this bird is making noise outside the window, it is IMPOSSIBLE to go back to sleep. He's just so obnoxious! He better do his part in the animal kingdom and eat mosquitoes or something because otherwise, I'm not going to be able to put up with him much longer. The other thing we could do is close the window but the fresh air is always nice and it could be too hot and muggy any day now to have it open so we should enjoy it while we can. I just wish the birds would stop waking us up.

Front Porch

Our front porch used to be rotting wood that was also painted blue (it matched the trim color of the house at the time but that has since been repainted a cream). This would be a time I would show you a picture but my pictures haven't been working lately. Anyway, it was really ugly and needed to be replaced so David and I went to Menard's a couple weeks ago and got the boards and screws for the new stuff. We had started prying up a few boards (12 I believe) before we realized that we didn't have the equipment to jack up the roof so we could put boards under the pillars (again, easier to describe with a picture but hopefully you know what I mean). We also had to put sand under the porch, sloping away from the house to keep water from going in the basement. (You can use dirt but we have lots of sand from digging out our basement). This kind of slowed our project down because we need hundreds of buckets of sand that we would have to carry out of the basement, around the house, and into this porch hole. So it sat unfinished for a few weeks. David's parents weren't originally going to redo the porch so it was sort of our project.

Well, today we had David's parents, little sister, two cousins, and grandparents come out to help us on the house and they made it their personal mission to help us with the porch. There was an assembly line for sand, someone spreading it out underneath the porch, and two people prying up the rest of the boards, jacking up the porch roof, and putting new boards in place (not screwed in, just in place). After about 6 hours of work, the porch is still not finished. The sand is still not finished either. We have to exchange some of our boards because of bad knots, chunks seemingly cut out, etc that don't make them pretty. The sand is more than halfway done but I would estimate will stay take at least 50 more buckets (by the way, when I say buckets, I mean 5 gallon pails. The kids were carrying ice cream buckets or the pails only half full since the sand gets heavy but we still need a lot.) Also, our boards are 8 feet long (because that's how they're sold) and we only need 7 feet so we'll also have to cut them off when we screw them in.

After our front porch is done, we'll have to redo the stairs. But we can't redo the stairs until we raise the sidewalk leading to them. We are going to do that when we have the cement here to do the apron at the end of our driveway. So really lots of projects depend on other projects and it kind of seems like you have a lot to get done in one day.

I'm thankful for all the work we had today and that our porch is getting somewhere. I do admit I'm a little sad that David and I's project got taken over but otherwise who knows when we would've finished.

Movie Theater Popcorn

I think one of my favorite foods in the entire world is popcorn from the theater. I know it's not exactly healthy for you, especially because I always get the extra butter flavoring. We don't go to movies very often (I think we have seen one movie in the past year) so I figure a treat like this once in a while isn't going to kill me. However, I recently found out it's possible to make it at home. I like the bagged popcorn okay and even popcorn from the air popper is good but nothing compares to the popcorn from the movie theater.

It turns out the secret ingredient is coconut oil. I cannot STAND coconut so I found this really surprising. I've also heard that it's hard to find in stores but it's easier to find online.

It also matters what popping device you use. People recommend a hand-turned crank kettle as the cheap way to do it and the expensive way to do it is a home version of the commercial popcorn machines.

The type of corn you use doesn't really matter but make sure it's fresh. It's also best if it comes in plastic instead of a bag but I'm not sure how big of a difference that makes.

The salt and butter are also very important. Most people add salt to the oil so it distributes evenly. Some places recommend getting the powdered salt so it's like a cloud of salt that helps spread evenly also. The butter is supposed to be clarified (which is a whole process that I'll let you look up on your own) but I kind of think that you could use regular melted butter and not have a problem. I think it depends on how picky you're going to be. If you want it to taste EXACTLY like the theater, it's going to be more costly and time consuming than making a few tweaks. However you make it, it will end up cheaper than the theater popcorn because they definitely jack up the price.

Let me know if any of you try to make your own. I want to try but I'm not sure it's worth all the work. I think I might just save it as a treat for the theater.

Food Poisoning

Lots of people think they have food poisoning if anything goes wrong after eating food (that they didn't cook themselves). However, real food poisoning is actually kind of rare (not unheard of, just not as common as everyone makes it). It seems rather easy to get food poisoning; something touches something else it shouldn't, cook didn't wash their hands, food isn't cooked all the way, etc. However, most of the time, it's just indigestion. It happens.

This weekend, I was at a party for my husband's grandparent's 50th wedding anniversary and we had a picnic style of food where everyone brought something to share. It was all great food and lots of fun but near the end of it all, David started not feeling well. We assumed he ate too much and once we got home, he could sleep it off and everything would be fine. Well, apparently we were wrong. Once we got home, I started throwing up too (is this post too gross? I'm not trying to be graphic).

When more than one person gets sick from eating basically the same thing, it could lead to a conclusion of food poisoning. Now of course, it doesn't really matter what it was because we're okay today but I do hope that people are more careful at their own family parties. To be honest, if it was something at the party that got us sick, I believe it was what we brought since that was just about the only thing that both David and I ate (there was so much food that you could easily pick and choose without having some of everything). We had run out of time to make something (there was a more formal party for the grandparents the night before and we got home late) so we had to buy something from the grocery store deli. Kind of ironic.

Orange Juice

I am one of those people that if I see people on TV eating or drinking something, I immediately want it. Most of the time, I'm not even hungry when this happens and sometimes, it's foods I don't even like! It seems kind of crazy to me but I am sure there are other people like me out there. The one thing that I notice most commonly is orange juice. I think there's something about the color and the fact that every character seems to have it with breakfast that makes it so appealing. In reality, I don't like orange juice that much and I despise the pulp kind. But if I watch enough TV with orange  juice in it, suddenly that's what I have to have. Then the next time I'm at the store, I pick up a carton (pulp free of course) and I get so excited and pour a big glass of it when I get home. That's when I remember that I don't really like orange juice. Maybe a couple sips are good and refreshing but after that, it's a struggle to finish the carton. I would also like to point out that the color of orange juice happens to be my favorite color (this probably isn't important to the fact that I want it so much).

I've actually had freshly squeezed orange juice before (boy, is that a lot of work!) and even with straining out the pulp, it still doesn't taste that delicious. I'd rather have apple juice (which I know isn't as healthy for you). The strange thing is, I really like oranges. There was a time when I was having one nearly every day. How can someone like oranges but not orange juice? They're basically the same thing except one is slightly more solid!

Okay I know this was an odd post but I just had to get this off my chest. I so desperately wished I liked orange juice more.

Mowing the Lawn and Making Muffins

I know I'm kind of old to not know how to mow the lawn but in my family, it was mostly a guy's job. I thought it was something I should learn though so I asked David to show me. We have a big yard and I would like to help out. We have an electric lawn mower. It plugs in and has a cord. The cord especially makes it feel like vacuuming, except your vacuum is kind of heavy to push. You just have to make sure you don't run over the cord. It turns out, minus the grass I got in my sandals (apparently you're supposed to wear tennis shoes when you do it), it's actually quite fun! I'm so excited that I know how to do it now. I assume David will still do it most of the time but just knowing I COULD do it if I wanted to, makes me feel better.

Also, I am going to make raspberry lemon muffins tonight! Last time I made muffins, I accidentally left our oven on preheat (super easy to do since you have to manually change it to bake) and the tops were all burned. I'm happy to finally have a recipe that will help me use up my lemon extract (I had bought some for David's birthday cake back in December and haven't touched the stuff since).

• 6 oz container of lemon yogurt (you could also use raspberry, blueberry, vanilla, or plain but I chose lemon because I'm leaving out some of the other lemon ingredients that seem important for flavor)
• 3 T vegetable oil
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp lemon extract
• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 3/4 cup sugar plus 2 T (for topping)
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 cup fresh or frozen raspberries

Mix wet ingredients and dry ingredients in two different bowls. Then combine. Add the raspberries. Spoon into muffin tin and top with the extra 2 T of sugar. Bake for 15-17 minutes at 400 degrees. They're done when you push on the tops lightly and they spring back. 

I haven't made them yet but I'm excited. If you want more lemon-y flavor, you can add lemon zest or a couple tablespoons of lemon juice.


Edit: I have made them. The batter was a little thick so we added 2 T of milk before we added the raspberries. They also took closer to 20 minutes but they turned out great! David would've cut up the raspberries (we used them whole) and probably would add more lemon flavor. I don't really like lemons though so I tried to keep it subtle. I think there's plenty of lemon flavor but like I said, you could add the zest or juice to amp it up. These make a GREAT summer treat! It's like raspberry lemonade!

Edit 2: I made them again and this time instead of adding the milk, we just added the raspberries. They were juicy enough it worked out. The first time we made them we used frozen raspberries. This time we used fresh. They still took longer though. 

Would You Sell Your Dream Car?

We are a family of Jeeps. Our typical vehicle is a Jeep Grand Cherokee that gets around 20 miles per gallon. My husband drives this car to work but if I need the car, he drives his Jeep Wrangler (which gets around 15 miles to the gallon). Obviously ,we need a better gas efficient car. The car that makes most sense to get rid of would be the wrangler. David's cousin is even interested in it and would pay us good money for it. However, this is David's dream car. This particular one is beat up (but that's half the fun of it for him. He loves working on cars.) but has a great engine (Wranglers can come with more than one kind of engine and from what I understand, this is the better one) and to my knowledge, has never needed a jump in winter (a huge plus for the area we live in). Jeeps also have some of the most comfortable car seats I've ever sat in. This car is also rusty, old (I think it's a 92), really bumpy to ride in, a manual (so I am able to drive it but not comfortably), etc.

It makes total sense to sell it and use the money for a better gas efficient car but I think David is going to have a hard time giving it up. He knows that eventually he can get another Jeep Wrangler but who knows if that is actually going to happen. He has his dream car now and wants to keep it. It just doesn't make any sense for our current situation.

I think we're going to end up selling it and David will just have to say goodbye to another car but what do you guys think? Would you give up your dream (in progress) car?