slow living 2012 – August

Now that August has finished, it seems like summer is over even though we officially have until September 22. We are into our last long weekend of the summer and it started off with a blue moon and a peaceful Friday night. I sat outside after everyone else was asleep last night watching the moon, listening to the crickets, frogs and coyotes and even attempted (though not entirely successfully) to take some pictures.

School starts again after this weekend, along with getting up early to pack lunches, brush hair and find matching clothes – all things that we let slide a little over the summer. Hockey will even be starting up soon. I just had to register both girls last night before the deadline. The dad will probably be coaching again this year. I think he likes it more than he lets on.

I’m following the example at Slow Living Essentials again this month, and using her categories to summarize my month and list some things I’d like to accomplish.

{Nourish}:

We’ve been eating fresh fruits and vegetables with our meals all month and a few treats thrown in here and there. I wrote about spiced chocolate cookies, breakfast bacon and cheddar popovers, sun-dried tomato pesto and chocolate coconut butter.

I have noticed that when I add a post about food to this space, it is usually either a baked treat or something to do with preserving the excess from the garden. I don’t post dinner recipes because our dinners tend to be simple meals of meat, starch and vegetables. We occasionally make a special dish or pasta, but the main meals are simple and usually quick to come together. The dad is the main cook while I am the bottle washer. He does it so much better than I do.

{Prepare}:

Here is where things started to get serious around here this month. So far we have frozen peaches, green peppers and jalapeno peppers (chopped or cut in strips), marinara sauce and oven roasted tomato sauce. I’ve made oven-dried tomatoes, 2 more gallons of pickles and started to ferment some jalapeno peppers to make my own hot sauce. This weekend we’ll be making more tomato sauce, some stewed tomatoes and passata and we’ll pick, blanch and freeze green beans if there are enough ready. The freezer is getting quite full already, and we’re not done yet. Good thing there are two of them.

{Reduce}:

I fail in this category. I used the air conditioner quite a bit this month in an attempt to make life comfortable. I also used my dryer for the same reasons. It was just too hot to do otherwise.

{Green}:

I’m still loving the homemade laundry soap and dishwasher soap. Once you have the various parts needed to make them up, it’s easy to keep making it. The citric acid seems to work great in my dishwasher – we have no issues with residue on our dishes.

As far as other homemade products go, I made a lavender bath soak to help me sleep earlier this week. It makes a nice bath, and I’ll be trying it out some more in the cooler months.

{Grow}:

The garden survived the drought of the early summer and produced like crazy. We’ve nearly been drowned in tomatoes. Our cucumber vines have finished now, and the melons are soon going to be finished as well. We also missed the boat on the broccoli this year – we didn’t pay attention for a few days and they all bolted. I’m ok with that – I have always been squeamish about the little green worms in brocolli. Ick.

We’ve also pulled the onions, which are drying nicely on the garage floor. I might try to braid them up this weekend if we left enough of a tail on them.

And just to quickly list the rest of the garden, we have still to finish with the zucchini, potatoes, beans, canteloupe, watermelon, squash, pumpkin, beets, kohlrabi, cabbage and brussels sprouts. There is probably more, but I can’t think what else we planted at the moment. The biggest disappointment this year was our carrots. We harvested 6. Yep, 6. I put them all in the tomato sauce.

My flower beds are about to spring into action again as the sedum are huge and about ready to turn colour. The dry summer has even started to turn some of the trees yellow and reddish a little early this year.

{Create}:

I started a sweater for the tall hormonal kid this month (she chose the cotton for it). I’m using a pattern for a sweater worn in the movie We Bought A Zoo, but changing it quite a bit. Hopefully it works out the way I see it in my head. If not, it will be unravelled and made into a lot of cotton dishcloths.

{Discover}:

I read a few books this month, but not as many as I normally would have. I’m part way through two Barbara Kingsolver books and enjoying them both. I don’t usually read more than one book at a time, but this month I have a bit of a short attention span and wandering focus. The Michael Connelly was a quick read and good. The Grocery Gardening book was an impulse purchase at the grocery store and had a few interesting bits and pieces, but overall not worth the price of purchase. And Emeril’s cookbook is great. We share an interest in bacon fat.

{Enhance – community}:

As far as community goes, we continue to buy local fruits as they are available, the kids have been part of summer community camps and we had a bbq to bring together some friends that we don’t get a chance to see very often.

{Enjoy}:

We enjoyed our bbq weekend with friends – they stayed over in guest rooms and tents, we sat up late, rose early, went swimming and enjoyed breakfast together.

What else did we do – there were summer camps – the tall hormonal kid learned how to cook at a leadership camp and treated myself and my co-workers to a quiche, soup, salad and pie luncheon. Both girls enrolled in a riding camp and the small squeaky kid managed to master two jumps in a row with her pony, and the tall kid once again got comfortable at a canter.

We went out for dinner, entertained at home, swam whenever we had the chance, visited with friends and relatives, celebrated a neighbour’s new retirement, celebrated my birthday and went to a housewarming bbq at my mom’s new home.

And our standout customer of the month was a polite young tattoo artist who phoned and asked if he could store his newly purchased (used) hearse in our storage barns. He’d been turned away from other storage places because the owners were too squeamish. The dad’s answer was that yes, we had the space, but we’d prefer the hearse came empty.

Another busy, occasionally strange, but interesting month.

Linking to Frugally Sustainable, White Wolf Summit Farmgirl, Mind Body and Sole, Simple Lives Thursday