The Year of the Pest

OK. So you know how I haven't been very frequent in posting? Well here's the reason why, but I use the words exhausting/exhausted a lot because that is exactly what it was...

I'm going to admit something I probably shouldn't. But I'm gonna keep it real. This Spring/Summer, we have had some issues with pests. At the beginning of Spring, we had termites in our raised bed. We got rid of the wood, and all of the soil, which was beautiful soil, but I was scared that it was full of termites, so it had to go.

The next pest was ants. Do you remember the post on how to get rid of ants naturally? Well it worked to a certain extent, but they ants were plentiful, so I had to use something a bit more powerful than cinnamon and oranges. I didn't want to spray my yard because of the kids and the dog playing in the backyard, so I used Ortho Home Defense Max Ant Bait. At first it didn't seem like it was working (I only gave it two days), but then it started raining, and continued raining for a few days. When all was dry, there were no more ants. Whoo Hoo!

After the ants, the pests started coming inside. The new pests were mice! Oh my goodness, I thought I was gonna lose my mind at this point (little did I know what was to come). My cats started hanging out in the kitchen in front of us, which is unusual because they aren't allowed in the kitchen. I'm sure when we leave the house they probably hang out in there, but that's neither here nor there :) Anyway they would lay around staring at the sink cabinets. I wasn't sure why they were doing it until one day I found it...nasty, disgusting, mouse poop. Eww!! So I told hubby to lay out some traps. We had some wooden ones because when the weather starts to change we have had a mouse or two come in the house in the past. Well hubby set them up with peanut butter and the next morning the mouse had come and eaten the peanut butter off the trap! Not cheese, peanut butter! That mouse had some time to sit there for a while, so apparently those traps were a joke. Now we had to find another solution. I was talking to my sister in law who has the same problem with seasonal mice, and she said not to use glue traps. After talking to her I decided glue traps are definately not the way to go. The following story is gross so stop reading now until you see END OF STORY again...you have been warned. Anyway, she said one time she put down glue traps and when she came down the next morning she found a mouse who had chewed off his own foot. END OF STORY. So that was 'nuff said on that. After a little bit of research we found that people said to use Ortho Home Defense Max Press and Set traps. It comes with two traps. We bought three packs. We set two packs up and no kidding in about 10 minutes we heard it go off. We were happy that we caught the mouse and disposed of it quickly. About an hour later we heard another one go off. So we caught another one. Later that evening we caught another one. When all was said and done we caught six mice! Needless to say, after catching that many we bought more traps and set them up. We haven't caught anymore and there is no more mouse poop. Thank goodness!

I have saved the worst for last. The final pests we got were....wait for it......................fleas. Seriously, if you have never had this problem, pray that you never do. If you have had them, continue praying that they never return. Wow. Now, I have always associated fleas with filth, so I was not happy to have these disgusting things in my not filthy house. I don't know where they came from. We have been living in our home for eight years. The first couple of summers we put flea meds on our dog. But then we stopped because one summer we just never bought it and he never got fleas. So for the last five years our dog has not had flea meds. Early spring our cat started losing fur on her back, by her tail. We took her to the vet and the vet said fleas. She looked for them using that little flea comb, but didn't find anything. We said, "How can she have fleas? She's an indoor cat. We have another cat and a dog and they aren't having any issues". She basically said,"Just put flea meds on them". We didn't. They gave us steroids and we called it finished. A couple months later the same issue started. We took her back to the vet. Another round of steroids and this time I bought Frontline from Sam's Club and thought it was finished. When it happened a third time I told the vet we used Frontline and she asked if we purchased it from a vet or a store. I told her a store and she said that was bad. The meds at the store aren't the same as the vet. Even FRONTLINE. I was so mad. So we bought the stuff from the vet and came home. Then it happened...July 2. I saw one in my family room. Then I saw one on my shirt, then my daughter saw one on her bed. Eeeek! How is this happening? Well, obviously I know how, but what am I supposed to do? Again I didn't want to use any sprays so I got to work. I started vaccuuming everyday, twice a day and throwing the stuff from the vacuum away outside. I stripped every bed and washed everything. Then I went extreme. I took every washable cloth out of every inch of our house and washed it. I am not exaggerating when I say that was at least 100 loads. Luckily there was not a major issue with them in our upstairs. But we did have them on our main level and our basement, which is plenty!

I was so upset about this. I did intense cleaning every single day for about two weeks. Now that may not sound so awful but think about what this entails. Imagine moving every bit of furniture in your house every single day twice a day and sometimes three times a day. It was exhausting. I lost 10 pounds. As much as I was happy about losing that weight, I was not happy by the way the weight was lost. Add to this that my kids don't like to sleep, which means I get no sleep and a meltdown is coming soon. Finally one day I called my husband at work sobbing and said "I can't take this anymore, I don't know what to do! Can you please come home? I need to take a nap!!!"

When I finally got some sleep I could think a little more clearly and started researching the best way to get rid of fleas...naturally. Again I didn't want to use any sort of chemicals. Every thing I read said use baking soda or salt. So I sprinkled baking soda all over the carpet and left it there over night, I also put down aluminum pie pans filled with soapy water by night lights. The next morning I looked in the pans and found a couple of fleas, and I vacuumed up the baking soda and didn't see anything for about four hours. Then I saw one again. When this happened I lost it. I couldn't take it anymore. So I decided, if we're going to do this, we're going to do it once and get it over with. The solution? Salt. Seriously. Salt. I went to Sam's Club and bought probably about 30 lbs of salt. I put it in my food processor and turned it into powder and started sprinkling all of my carpet. With this process you have to leave it on your carpet for 2 weeks. At this point my kids ages were 4 and 18 months. What was I supposed to do about keeping little kids off the carpet? I had to leave every single day and stay out ALL day, which is not typical in this household. It was exhausting. Every morning I loaded everyone up and immediately drove to my mom's house to give the kids breakfast. My mom works, so she gave us a key and we would hang out there for a while. But my kids turned into different people when we were there. They would not listen to me at all. So then we started doing things outside of her house. I had to be sort of creative to keep them busy for two weeks. This also meant no naps. Which worked well for me at bedtime because I could get them to bed earlier and easier.

Anyway, long story short, that got rid of most of them. After vacuuming up everything we didn't see anything for about a week, but I guess they must have been in the pupae stage and hatched. So we did round two of salt. This time we also purchased Bayer Advanced to spray the yard and took our pets to the vet to get put on Comfortis. The vet wasn't very happy about this, but we needed to take some drastic actions to rid ourselves of these things. So here is what we did to FINALLY get rid of them...Sprayed the front yard with Bayer Advanced bug killer, gave our pets Advantix (dog) and Advantage (cat), two weeks later gave them Comfortis, two weeks later Advantix and Advantage again, and two weeks later Comfortis again. Cut our grass as short as our lawn mower could go, salted the carpet for four weeks, and washed every bit of fabric in our house. The Bayer Advanced was used in the front yard because it is shaded, but the backyard is full sun, so cutting the grass short is all we needed to do there. Oh my goodness, it was awful and exhausting.

After all of this was said and done, I found myself disgusted with carpet. To know that those horrible creatures could live in carpet so easily made me hate carpet so this is what happened next...

This was our next project of the summer. Uggh...I'm getting exhausted just looking at these pictures. This was a big under taking. But more on that later...

Strawberry Jam

In June we went to pick our own strawberries. Let me tell you, if you've never eaten a strawberry straight from the field warmed by the sun, you've never eaten! Yum!!! Anyway, what to do with all those strawberries? Strawberry jam of course. We also froze a lot for smoothies and homemade ice cream, but made jam straight away. I've never made homemade jam before, but it was really easy, and I learned a lot about jam, well, strawberry jam anyway.

After I made it, I was reading online about home canning and botulism. I started to second guess my canning, and was scared to eat the jam. Which was stupid because I grew up eating home canned goods my entire life.  But, in situations like this, I did what I always do, which is research the heck out of it. I also talked to my father in law who makes jellies and jams all the time. He said he never worries about anything like that because of the sugar content. I didn't think sugar acted as a preservative, but apparently it does. I am not a scientist, but from what I could gather, large amounts of sugar acts similarly to salt in the fact that it sucks the water out of bacteria. If bacteria doesn't have water, it can't grow. So essentially, it kills the bacteria. Also, strawberries are acidic. According to this site for safe canning (as in a water bath) foods are considered acidic if they have a pH lower than 4.6, the lower the pH, the more acidic it is. Strawberries have a pH of 3.0-3.9. So, if you've ever been concerned about that, now you know it's ok to eat your jam!

Anyway, I used the recipe from The Pioneer Woman. It is delicious, however I think next time I will cut the added lemon down to 2 tablespoons, or eliminate it altogether. I also want to try to use apples as the pectin next time. The powdered stuff claims it is derived from apples anyway, so why not just use apples? I'll try it some day and see how it goes. If I ever do, I'll be sure to let you know!

Cook up some biscuits and load it up with jam and butter. Yum! You're welcome :)

Straw Bale Gardening Continued

I am horrible at posting new things. This has been a crazy summer. So much has been going on. The last time I posted I mentioned about straw bale gardening. Then things got crazy...more on that later. But first, I'll continue with the straw bale experience. It was awesome!

When doing research about straw bales, I couldn't find any information about if chemicals are in the straw bales. We wanted to do organic gardening and I didn't know if the wheat had been treated with anything, or if it had would the chemicals leach into our vegetables. Since I never found the answer to that question, I was in search of organic straw bales. Now, if you ever decide to search for that, give it up now. What you need to search for is organic wheat farmers. That is when I found what I was looking for. I called the farm and sure enough they had straw bales that they use for their animals, and sell them to other farmers for their animal bedding. Anyway, if you ever need that bit of information, you're welcome :)

So, when you get the bales home, you have to condition them. This process takes about two weeks. The point of this is to start the decomposition proccess. In order to accomplish this, you have to use high amounts of nitrogen. You can use conventional nitrogen, but we used fish emulsion. For normal fertilizing, you need something like 1-2 tablespoons, for the amount of nitrogen we needed, I think we used 5-6 tablespoons. It worked well. The bales reached the desired temperature on schedule. Now, just to let you know, the bales went crazy with mushrooms. Mushrooms are a good sign because it lets you know the bale is decomposing, however, with three curious little kiddos, any mushroom growing in my garden makes me nervous. From some of the research that I did, I'm pretty sure they were Inky mushrooms, and are edible. Now, I didn't try them out so don't hold me to that. I am not a mushroomologist :) I still made sure my kids didn't go near the bales when there was any sign of mushrooms or slime mold. Once the bales reached the desired temperature, it was time to plant.

When  you plant, you need to split the bale a little bit and drop some clean soil into the bale. Then just stick your plant in. If you're planting from seed, you just place a layer of soil on top of the bale and place the seeds into the soil. We covered ours with some netting to keep hungry birds from taking our little seeds. When our seeds started sprouting, we removed the netting. After that, things took off. We had plenty to get us through the season, and canned a few jars of tomatoes, but next year we plan to make the garden significantly larger. I love it because you don't have to worry about the pests like you have with a traditional garden, so you really have no need for chemicals. We didn't use anything for our garden. However, our garden was full of beneficial bugs. We had some pretty massive spiders and spider webs, and they took care of plenty of bugs. There were ladybugs, ants, and we put some worms in there too when the bales started decomposing.

All in all, it was a great crop. We are very happy with our results. So next year hopefully we can get enough food to get us through most of the winter. I want to try to start growing enough food so that we won't have to buy anything like that from the grocery store. For example my father in law plants more than 100 bean seeds, we planted 36. He gets enough to get them to the next summer, we had enough to get us through the summer.  I also talked to a farmer at our local farmer's market and asked them if they would sell us their "grade b" tomatoes for canning. They said "can you pick?" We said yes, but unfortunately never got to go get them. So that is still an idea for next year. I would like to do something like that for corn since we don't have enough room to grow corn. Hopefully we can find a farmer that will let us pick our own.

Anyway, at the end of the season, the bales really start to shrink down due to decomposing, great for the compost bin!

 

 

If you're interested in your own straw bale garden, there is plenty of information out there. We actually purchased the book, but there is information online about it. This is a great thing to do if you are limited on space, have poor soil, or don't feel like dealing with raised beds. So next Spring, get some straw bales and try it out. I don't see how you can really fail with this system.

 

Straw Bale Garden

My husband and I both grew up eating vegetables grown in our home gardens. Neither of us had ever eaten any veggies from the grocery store. It has been important to both of us to start our own garden, for our family. We have tried container gardening, and a raised bed garden. The container garden didn't do well for us because we used Terra Cotta pots, and it was too hard to keep the soil watered without over watering, and then the soil got too hot, and on and on it goes. The raised bed was better, but we were very limited with space. With our raised bed, it was also very expensive because we needed to buy the soil and the wood to build it. We just removed the bed, and found termites, which was disgusting, and a little scary. After all of those problems, I tried to find something else, and found straw bale gardening.

For us, straw bale gardening seems like the perfect solution. It doesn't cost much to start up, and seems to be a great way to have home grown vegetables. My only dilemma was trying to find out if the bales that you see at garden centers are treated with anything. I called two of my local garden centers and asked them where they get the bales, and they both told me the same farm. I decided to call the farm to ask them about the bales, and they told me that they get the straw from a variety of farmers, so they would have to call me back with an answer. Unfortunately, I never got a call back from them, so I was back to square one. My next step was to find organic straw bales. This is an impossible thing to do. I did a Google search, and was coming up with absolutely nothing in my area. Apparently there isn't a market for organic straw bales? I was getting frustrated, and was venting my frustrations to my husband when I said, "I'm gonna call some of the vendors from the local farmer's market, someone has to know an organic wheat farmer." Then it dawned on me...Google organic wheat farmers. When I did, I finally found what I was looking for. I found a certified organic farm about 45 minutes away. I was so happy! I called them, and he said they had some bales in their barn from about two years ago. He said they don't really do the small bales anymore because the people they usually sell their straw to are fellow farmers that are looking for bedding for their animals. The size that they sell now are too big for a little straw bale garden. He gave me his son's number and told me to give him a call because he's the one in charge of all of the straw stuff. So I called him and scheduled a time to go to the farm to pick up the bales. When we got there, I told him about my search, and suggested they get online and advertise that they have organic straw bales. He said he'd look into it, and might start doing small bales for just such a thing. He said it's more work to make the small bales, but I hope they will continue to do them, I told him I would give him some information on where to advertise, so hopefully he will do it.

Anyway, that's where we are now. I will be doing a lot of updates on this, as well as explaining, as we go along. In the meantime, here is a picture of what it looks like now:

Hu-Man and Robin

I have a funny story to tell about a Robin building its nest. Our swingset has a rock wall attached, and over several days we started noticing little bits of straw and grass and any sort of nesting material building up on the rocks. My husband would go out and take all the stuff off and get rid of it thinking the bird would stop because of the human scent. Finally one morning we noticed that there was a nest actually built up on a beam under the canopy of the swing set. The bird had the whole nest built except for the floor. I told my husband to go out and get rid of it before the bird came back. As my husband was up on the climber, I saw a Robin land in the tree not too far from the set, with his beak full of straw, and his head cocked to the side eyeballing my husband. I was standing safely inside the house looking out of the window and yelling to my husband that I think I see the bird responsible for building the nest. My husband looks over at the tree and tries to hurry taking down the nest. All the while I was teasing him from the window saying the bird was probably thinking "I just spent the better part of this morning building this nest and all I have to do is lay down my floor. Now this human is messing up my work. My wife is nagging me about being big and pregnant and needing to lay these eggs somewhere..." and as I was saying this I looked over and the bird started to nose dive towards my husband on the swing set. Now this platform is 5 feet tall so my husband could only escape by climbing down the rock wall, climbing down the ladder, or going down the slide. So, realizing this, I'm screaming "Oh my goodness! It's coming after you! Get down he's going to try to bite you!" My husband started to get a little concerned because his hysterical wife is screaming at him and he sees a bird coming to attack him. For whatever reason the birds just flew after him but didn't actually try to do anything to him. He just landed on the fence behind the swing set. My husband got down unscathed. Once I realized he was okay I could not stop laughing. I have not laughed that hard in a very long time. For sometime after that the bird just hopped around looking for the nest and after a while a friend of his joined him. So I started ad-libbing for them "What were you doing last night Rob? You don't remember where you left your nest?" "No seriously man, I know it was right here but this big human came and took it away, I even tried to get him but he was pretty fast for human." (Because even birds embellish stories).

I think this is the bird. It keeps coming back to this tree and looking at us while we're outside.  Look at the first picture. Doesn't he look like he's looking at me?

Ahh...Spring :)

How to Get Rid of Ants Naturally

Sometime in the past I know I wrote something about our ridiculous ant issues. I hate ants because they are wrecking havoc on my yard. When we were going to lay down mulch for our swing set, we noticed a little ant hill by the leg of the set. We were trying to figure out how to get rid of it without the use of chemicals. We took the handle of a shovel and poked deep holes in the mound. Then we filled it half way with baking soda, and the rest with vinegar. I think it killed some of the ants, but not all. In the past I have used boiling water on the hills, and that has worked really well, but you need a lot of water and you need to make it outside without sloshing water on yourself. My other trick has been cinnamon. Cinnamon doesn't kill the ants, but the don't like it, so they should leave the yard. I did this in my front yard, and they left, but my neighbor treats his yard with something, so they didn't go there. Guess where the went? That's right, my backyard. Now I have been trying to get rid of these annoying creatures ever since.

They haven't bothered me too much in the last couple of years because I wasn't spending a lot of time in the backyard, but now we are going outside every day and I refuse to have these pesky things crawling all over my family. I remembered reading something about ants not liking citrus, so I had a new plan of action.

I bought some oranges the other day and since they are no longer in season, the inside tasted just about as delicious as the peel. So I thought I'd go ahead and give this citrus thing a try. Instead of just using orange peel, I decided to add some cinnamon too...why not?

After I grated two oranges, I sprinkled it over the area that saw all of those nasty buggers. It actually covered a pretty large area for just two oranges. I wish that I had gotten a video of the ants trying to get away. There were so many ants, the mulch looked like it was moving. Within about 10 minutes, there wasn't an ant to be seen. AMAZING!

 

After realizing I missed the opportunity to capture the power of citrus and cinnamon on camera, I was on the lookout for ants. I finally found one on the slide. I didn't have enough oranges to spread over the entire area of mulch, but I did have enough cinnamon, so it got sprinkled everywhere. I think this ant was trying to escape the cinnamon, so he decided to use the slide as his escape route.

Here he is...happy as a clam. 

So I did the first thing that came to mind...I sprinkled him with cinnamon. He didn't know what to do!

In this picture he thought he had it figured out. When I originally sprinkled the slide with cinnamon, he just went up the side to try to climb over. That's when I did a mega sprinkle which created this awesome border of cinnamon. Look at how he's looking at it. This ant went back and forth, around and around. He never figured out how to escape. Finally a strong gust of wind came along and blew him off, only for him to land in more cinnamon on the ground.

I have to say I was pretty happy to see these horrible critters running away because that is what I have been doing with these stupid ant hills that I keep finding.

Now I'm going to go to the store and buy up all of their oranges and take turns with my mom and my husband grating up the biggest batch of ant repellant ever. I'm also going to buy more cinnamon, and sprinkle that stuff everywhere, and let the ants know they are no longer welcome.  As an added bonus, my yard will smell awesome!

I am going to have to put down ant traps too, because there are just too many ants. They take the stuff back to the queen and it kills them. But after that, I'm hoping my homemade concotion keeps them away. We'll see...

Rainbow Swing Set

In January we decided it was time to get a bigger play-set for our kids. The one that we had was a Step 2 set that we bought for our first child when she was 18 months. It had two swings and was great for her at the time, but when our new babies were born we decided we needed to get a new one because the Step 2 was now too small for our family.

We decided to go check out the Rainbow swing sets. Apparently they have closeout sales, so we got a great deal. We wanted it installed before Easter but we had to wait until temperatures were above 40°  for them to come out and install it. We also had a lot of other things that needed to be done before this new swing set arrived. We had to call someone out to cut down two trees from our backyard, as well as remove a limb from our neighbors huge cottonwood tree. We had two days of warm weather, so the first day we had our trees cut down, and the next day the swing set was installed. The kids were so excited to play on it so we let them play for a few minutes before it got dark and told them that they would probably be able to go out and play on it again the next day. Unfortunately, we couldn't seem to shake winter and it was a while before they were able to actually enjoy it.

While I was waiting for the weather to warm up, I spent hours online researching what was the proper type of material to use under a swing set for safety. I looked at pea gravel, rubber mulch, wood mulch, and wood chips. In the end we decided to go with wood mulch. There were pros and cons to each of the different materials, for example, the rubber mulch seemed great because it was a very nice landing pad from any sort of high place,  but I was concerned about any odor that it would emit over time, I was concerned about chemicals leaching  into the soil, and I was concerned about how hot it would get on a typical summer day, not to mention it was the most expensive choice.  My next choice was pea gravel. I thought this was a great idea because not only was it a safe landing zone, but my kids could  play in it sort of like sand without being a giant litter box for any neighborhood cats. I nixed this idea when I realized I needed about 9 inches of pea gravel which worked out to be something like 20 tons. I don't remember exactly how many tons, so 20 may be a bit much but it was definitely more than 10. My husband and I would have to lay all of it down wheelbarrow load  by wheelbarrow load, which didn't sound fun for anyone.  Also, if we ever move from this house we probably would have to remove it for the next owner which is not something we want to deal with. Our last two choices were woodchips or wood mulch. We decided to go with mulch because it seems to be a little more pleasant to land on if someone falls.

So now the weather is nice, the swing set is up, the mulch is laid down, and the edging is finally finished. But now we have a new problem...ants!

Where have I been?

Okay so where have I been since October?  Honestly I haven't been doing anything particularly interesting. I contemplated starting another blog because unfortunately my sister in law is no longer able to post due to the fact that she is busy with four out of five kids in school :) I'm not going to start a new blog because honestly I don't feel like starting over. I'm pretty sure I could just copy everything over, but I'd like to just keep going with this one. So from now on its just me, a home made sister I suppose :)

When I originally came up with the idea of starting a blog, I wanted to talk about things related to motherhood and all of the funny and interesting things that go along with raising kids, specifically as a stay at home mom. However, that never really happened, it turned into me posting about food and my sewing endeavors. I have decided that now I'm going to write about all of my endeavors, just in case there is someone out there like me who is wondering about something, or is thinking about trying something new and wants to find out if someone else has tried it too. I also plan to include stories of everyday life that might bring a smile to your face if you are having a bad day.

This year I plan on getting back on track with things because over the past two years I was either pregnant, or trying to get newborns to sleep through the night. I was also feeling a sense of accomplishment because I got through the "terrible twos" with an absolutely angelic child. But when my little one turned three, things changed! Whew, it was exhausting and trying, but now she's back to her normal sweet self, YAY! My "newborns" are now a year and half, and life is getting a little calmer. So here I am ready to share some of our experiences and hopefully keep up with this blog a little better!

On another note, a lot of my free time has been spent on Pinterest dreaming of Spring. Now that Spring is here things are starting to get busy again. I have gotten so many ideas from Pinterest it's hard to keep up with them, but that's why there is Pinterest so you can pin everything to remind yourself :) I have a huge list of things to do. My sofa and loveseat are over 10 years old and are starting to show their age, which means I can either replace them (not going to happen), or I can cover them. I want everything to look fresh and clean and I can't find anything that will fit my couches exactly so I have decided to make my own slipcovers.  I have never taken on such a daunting sewing project, so it will be an interesting undertaking. But that is a project for a later date because right now I have yard work to do!