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A blog about daily life in the Clement house
3 oz. frozen orange juice concentrate
1/2 c. milk
1/2 c. water
2 T sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla
honey
7 ice cubes
blended in the blender
I've been promising a video of Ruthie crawling for a while now and finally here it is! She's gotten quite good by now, since those first uncoordinated attempts a month and a half ago. She's our earliest crawler by far, neither of her sisters crawled until 8 months. I guess she had the motivations of trying to get where her sisters were and get what they were playing with. It's so amazing to watch a little person learn to move around like this, to watch her brain develop and her muscles develop and the coordination between the two develop. It's fun to see as she gets better everyday and learns something new.
She is also pulling up on things and standing there to play with whatever she can grab now. Nothing on the coffee table is safe any more:) It's a whole new ballgame with two older sisters who have small toys, like to build towers, use scissors and crayons and leave a paper trail on the floor behind them. Anna and Josie are getting better at picking up after themselves and are also good at spotting every time Ruthie gets something in her mouth that she shouldn't have. They are a cause and a solution. They are good big sisters and are good at including Ruthie in their play as little as she is and love to play little games with her and get her to laugh as well.
Now to the garden. It may just look like a crazy mass of random plants, but there actually is an intentional order to it (and some intentional wildness). The large plants in the background are kale that we are hoping to get seed from. We planted these plants last year. The seed came from Katie's grandmother, Ginya, in 2002. We are almost out of the seed, and it is nearing the end of its viability, so we wanted to get some more seed. We are not sure what the variety is, but we have never found it anywhere else. The seed pods are just about mature, so we will probably pick them this week. We are anxious to see if the seed is relatively pure. In the foreground is some of the same kale planted this spring. It has already yielded copious amounts (just look further down the page). There are also orange calendula flowers, a sage plant on the front corner, and bunching onions around the border.
This is the same corner of the garden. Toward the top of the picture, tucked in under the kale are beets and swiss chard. The chard will be happy to see the big kale plants go soon.
This is a picture from the other side. In the front corner is some dill. Calendula, beets and cayenne pepper are behind that. The green and purple patch in the middle is our salad mix. There are about five or six different varieties of lettuce growing together. One benefit of having a cool early summer is that we have had an abundance of salad greens. We cut from this patch at least once a week and have more than enough salad. Now that the weather has warmed up, I expect each cutting to be the last and that the lettuce will bolt or turn bitter with the heat, but we harvested yet again today, and it was still just as tasty. When the lettuce does bolt, I plan to leave it so that we can gather seed from it to have our own seed for salad mix next year.
The green mass in the middle of this picture is carrots (more on those later). The plants with white flowers sort of growing over the top of them are arugula. This is arugula grown from our own seed that we grew last year. Now it has gone to seed, and we are almost ready to collect the seed from it for next year. To the right, it is hard to tell, but there are six varieties of peppers, some of which are setting on pretty well, though the plants are a bit scraggly. We need to get some more compost on this area. The peppers are planted amongst another variety of bunching onions. In the front right corner is the mint that we try to keep contained to this small corner.