HJ Waxing Moon

What We're Eating: Made a nice yogurt parfait for breakfast yesterday. 2 big dollops of plain, full-fat* Greek yogurt homemade granola another dollop of yogurt homemade granola diced peaches  * I haven't found any low-fat/non-fat yogurt or sour cream that's not filled with extra starches. At least the fat is naturally-occurring! I ate this sitting in the backyard on the patio, on a nice warm summer morning right before we attacked the garden. It was nice to take a moment to appreciate the work we've done already, that I could just wake up, head out there and eat my breakfast. Also, fresh and yummy!  Monday was so warm, we just wanted something refreshing for dinner. Enter: Cucumber-Watermelon soup! Cucumber Watermelon Greek yogurt Fresh mint Fresh rosemary Salt & Pepper This is really supposed to be a "savory" soup despite the sweet ingredients, so the pepper is essential. We used the immersion blender, but a regular blender would...

The last few weeks have been a chore. This was the beginning of the aphid infestation, around the beginning of July. It only got worse from here, as you will see. My one, lonely garlic scape. It was delicious! Mr. Moon would like you to know that the mint garden got as tall as his hip! It's started to die back in the heat since then, though.  Isn't it strange how our plum tree has purple sections and red sections? That's because of these new starts. All the new parts are green. I asked at the nursery and it was recommended that we cut all the new starts out--they will overgrow the older, likely hybridized tree that is actually giving us plums.  Sucker bugs! Why?! Took this picture for identification by the folks at the nursery, and they said it was likely the teenager stage of some sucker bugs. Best to get rid of them, suggested just using the garden spray I had tried for the aphids. Speaking of aphids... This is the garden as of August 3....

I previously discussed, without pictures, the food storage situation at our house. I didn't have pictures then for a lot of reasons, one of which being that I've never been much of a shutter bug, as evidenced by the fact that I forget a lot of the "Before" pictures for some of these projects. Also, it's one thing to show the before pictures of a shed in disarray, most people with a shed are probably in the same boat. But I don't want to shame people publicly for being behind on major household projects, especially when there's no real "fault" to be thrown around. This is why we're here. But! That won't stop me from bragging on all the awesomeness we've accomplished! These shelves were just full, stacks had toppled over, things were stacked in front of other things so we had no idea what we had, and I'll just skate right on past the details of the mouse infestation issue which has been taken care of, thank goodness. Of cours...

Mr. Moon realized the other day that we never got After pictures up about the landscaping he did in the side yard. When we moved in, the butterfly bushes were 5 feet into the neighbor's yard, who was being understanding and ever-so polite about asking when we might get to that project now that we've moved in? Did you need a nice little reminder of what that looked like before? This is from April 16: Yeah, we took those back quite a ways... These are from only a week later, April 23. Including, as you can see (left), taking out an entire BUSH. It had been growing at an odd angle away from the house, and didn't seem very happy there in general. So, out it came. My favorite part is that we saved all the strong branches for using as stakes for other plants. Already they are holding up rose bushes and being used as the bottom rung of the trellis for my nasturtiums. Mr. Moon is especially proud of the back-breaking work he did taking out the stump of the butterfly ...