Composting

We have been composting with a compact unit that we got from The Gardeners Supply Company. It doesn’t take up much space and it is handy to have soil ready whenever you need it. This compost pail and the cornstarch biobags make it convenient to keep kitchen scraps under the under the kitchen sink for a bit.

The tropics right in our backyard

I planted four Hibiscus plants a few summers ago thinking that they would be enjoyable that summer and then I would never see them again. I asked the sales person and she said that they are grown as annuals around here unless you bring them in for the winter. Three are still thriving and are huge despite many cold winters. They dance around in the wind and get sad and droopy when the sun isn’t out.

Still More Jalapeños!

The Jalapeños are still rolling in and Jay found a way to use up a bunch over the weekend. He made a batch of Jalapeño Relish. Visit his site, f00die.com if you would like the recipe. Below you can see a picture of our Frigidaire Flair in action:

Tomatillos

Our Tomatillos seem a bit late this year, possibly due to the heavy rains at the beginning of the season. We are finally getting a few for Jay’s famous Salsa Verde. . . Yum! They are super easy to grow and they are inside these beautiful green husks. They get just tall enough where they need some staking. We braced them with a similar solution to our tomatoes with trellis netting and bamboo stakes. They drop a ton of seeds and will grow like weeds the following season so I highly recommend using black landscape fabric if you would like to keep some order in your tomatillo patch. I have tomatillo weeds sneaking out from underneath the fabric.

Window Boxes

I heart my window boxes this year. It is like a full time job keeping them alive, but I’m loving them. Next year I am going to consider lining the cedar window boxes that we have with some sort of self watering container/liner. Ours aren’t terribly deep and they dry out super fast. I especially like how they looks from inside the house.

While I’m on the subject of my window boxes I just want to add that I wanted to put an Amish Good Luck star over our garage (see below) and found something similar at a junk shop and got that instead. A few months back I was cruising the channels and caught a few minutes of the dreadful show Wife Swap and there was a Wiccan woman who had Stars with Circles around them all over the house. Pentagrams! I don’t know how the heck I missed this, but am I giving off an evil aura instead of Home Sweet Home?

Party Trays

Our house was built in the 40s and we are only the second owners. Occasionally we find treats in the house from the 50’s or 60’s. I was organizing in the basement and found these Chef’s Party Choice trays in a dark corner. They claim to be handy for serving after-school snacks, baked beans, salads, cottage cheese, etc. Unfortunately they were too filthy and dusty to actually use at our next party.

Fenway Park Tomatoes

Every night the Red Sox play at Fenway I scour shots of the bullpen to catch a glimpse of the Tomato plants that are in the bullpens. I did a search to see what I could find out about their origins and found this info from 2001.

Cumberland Farm sprouts in bullpen (2001)
Michael Silverman, Boston Herald
Bullpen coach John Cumberland is as sick as the next Red Sox fan over the team’s inability to win a World Series since 1918. Cumberland took matters into his own hands last Friday by planting 18 beefsteak tomato plants in the Red Sox bullpen. “I’m trying to change the karma. There’s been bad soil here. Hopefully now it’s good soil.

Now I have 2 questions
1. How many tomato plants are there now? I’m guessing 4 since that is the last time we won.
2. Who takes care of them?

Jalapeños

So, we are in Jalapeños Heaven. We have used as many as possible, and given jalapeños to all of our friends and we still have about 60 more. Don’t ask what my secret is. It is just dumb luck. My Zucchinis on the other hand are few and far between.

Frigidaire Flair

We actually have this oven in our kitchen. It is super cool and we are in love with it, but we just can’t work it into our new kitchen design. It is currently for sale – Click here for details.

It is going to be a sad day when we part with it. I found this Retro Tech website that has lots of good info and it looks like there is a bit of a Flair following out there. We saw the stove in a typical kitchen display at the JFK Library in Boston and it also was the stove that Samantha Stevens used on the show Bewitched (see below). Recently I spotted this oven on the TV show Joey.

After seeing a Image Enlargement idea on Martha Stewart’s Blueprint I decided to enlarge the image of the manual cover for framing to make up for the void that will be in our house when we say goodbye to our beloved Frigidaire Flair. A 20″ x 30″ matte image from Shutterfly was about $20. See below:

Kitchen Remodel

We are trying our best to get our kitchen redone this fall. The plans we have from our designer are above. Our kitchen hasn’t been touched since 1959 so it is long overdue. We are trying to go the simple route and not put in a kitchen that overshadows our small house thanks to the wisdom of Sarah Susanka. I have been obsessed with her Not So Big House books and have taken them all out of the library. We have a sales tax free weekend coming up in Massachusetts so we are ordering a bunch of stuff which will be a huge savings.