Posts

Love the Butterfly? Embrace the Weeds!

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As a former professional bean walker, I’m almost ashamed to admit that I have milkweed growing in my flower garden. On purpose. {GASP!}  Yes, I’m allowing that slippery, slimy weed that stinks and makes your hands sticky and a putrid color of green, is almost impossible to pull out by the root, and reproduces faster than rabbits, prime space in my garden. Why? I like butterflies more that I hate milkweed. And lately, butterflies have been getting the short end of the stick. Within my lifetime (I know that’s a long time, but still…) butterfly habitats and food sources, such as the sticky, stinky milkweed, essential to monarch caterpillar survival, have been disappearing at an alarming rate. This decline in resources is putting a big dent in the number of kaleidoscopes (the fancy word for a group of butterflies) flitting around our yards, pollinating flowers and food, eating aphids, and generally adding beauty and delight to our lives. So last summer, when a volunteer milkwe
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A Time to Swear

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Kyra's Garden: No Swearing Required My first job, and one of my first memories, was “walking beans”. From the middle of June, until the soybeans grew into a matted mass, my mom and my sisters and my brother, along with most other Midwestern farm kids, began each morning by 6am walking up and down miles of rows of soybean fields, pulling each and every weed. By the root. (It didn’t count if you didn’t get the root.) We ended by noon or so, before it got too hot. Back at home, the five of us kids would jostle for a bit of cool from the window air conditioner in the dining room, waiting for our turn in the bathroom, while mom cooked us all lunch, refilled our milk jugs with water to freeze for the next day’s work, washed our stinking clothes, and helped Dad into his El Camino to inspect our work.  (My dad had mobility issues due to MS. But that’s another story.) I could go on and on about walking beans, the ankle-spraining cement-hard clods of mud, and the bugs, and the s
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Too Much Time on Our Hands

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Oh! My! Goodness! Real food for g-tubes in a ready-to-eat package? My mind started reeling as soon as my daughter Celia, a nurse who works full-time at a traumatic brain injury rehabilitation facility, and part-time at a pediatric health care agency, told me the news. Since I’m more than a little skeptical about health information that sounds too good to be true, it took me a few weeks to research these “Real Food Blends” people. Just what were they up to? What was their angle? What is in it for them? What, exactly, is in these g-tube meal pouches? I don’t trust my Kyra’s health to just anyone. Finally, after determining that these packaged g-tube meals were indeed (almost) as nutritious as the meals I‘ve been cooking and blending and straining for Kyra for over 15 years, I decided to try them. Real Food Blends currently has 5 meal varieties available, so we ordered a box of each, and gave it a try. When the meals arrived, I zipped off the top of a pouch, mixed in a couple ou
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