The other night, I harvested some homegrown celery that was loaded with beautiful leaves. I could bear to let these go straight to the compost so I made a concerted effort to find multiple uses for them. 1 – Drying in my dehydrator for use as a dry spice later. Dry. Grind. Bottle. 2 – Vegetable Stock – added leaves and stalks to other homegrown vegetables to make a hearty stock. Yielded 6 cups! 3 – Wild Rice, Celery, Carrot, Turnip, Radish, Baby Green Bean [...]

It’s a pleasure when a Tweet can motivate you to do something. Today’s question posted by @AlecBaldwin prompted me to take a walk. What a beautiful fall day here in central Ohio! Cloudless blue skies, temperatures in the high 70′s, and trees almost vibrating in golds and reds.

(RECIPE BELOW) One tedious gardening task is thinning. Not only is it tedious, but also a little heart wrenching to pull healthy little plants out of the ground that you worked so hard to grow. When planting very tiny seeds, it is hard to space them out properly, so the method of planting way too many and then thinning them out is standard practice. When dealing with root vegetables like carrots, beets, turnips, you need to give them the underground space to develop. Refer to [...]

Muddle half a mini cucumber and shake with ice and 2 shots of your finest chilled vodka. Strain into cocktail glass. The new taste of summer!

I had the chance enjoy a forest full of wildflowers just steps from my office… I took a lovely walk through our Scotts Miracle-Gro Campus Arboretum yesterday and found hundreds of Red Trillium getting ready to bloom. There are also an abundance of Virginia Bluebells, Troutlilly, and very interesting looking flowers on ones called Dutchman’s Breeches. There are many other’s I photographed I can not identify, especially the fungi. It’s a great time to see those early spring wildflowers. Our trail is marked, and there [...]

Absolutely thrilled to record 62 MPG in the old Honda Insight on my trip to Cincinnati today. Now enjoying a stroll through the Farmer’s Fair in Covington. We listened to the inspiring Ed Begley Jr. speak; Live Simply So Others Can Simply Live. Stacy and I are having a great time. UPDATE: The 62 MPG was achieved while averaging speeds in excess of 70 MPH (don’t tell my Mom) going to Cincinnati, which, I’ve learned, is mostly downhill. Driving uphill the 120 miles home my [...]

Originally, this video was going to have a voice over, but it was just too funny with the geese and ducks fighting in the background, and we felt it only needed a little music, and a long, detailed description. I did not want to spend any more money on brand name seed starter discs, and I had seen an overpriced “kit” to make seed starter cups from newspaper, so I decided to find a way to create my own on the cheap. A little googling [...]

I forgot to turn off the center burner, and turned my back for 10 minutes. I turned off the center burner, used my water spritzer bottle to put out the skin fire, and the chicken continued to cook. By the way, it WAS tasty! (Originally posted to YouTube August 15, 2009)

I finally made zucchini bread today! I love to cook, but am not much of a baker. I chose a good recipe from FoodTV.com (thank you Paula Deen), took my time, and now have 1 beautiful large loaf, 2 cute small loaves, and 2 not so pretty tiny loaves. The “tiny” loaves were baked in very old toy pans, so I think that was the problem. I can’t wait to take them to the office tomorrow. As delicious as they are, I cannot possibly eat [...]