Living Large In Our Little House

Today is World Turtle Day, so I think it’s fit­ting that we were able to save a box tur­tle yesterday.

Dale called me yes­ter­day morn­ing and said, “I have a box tur­tle in a box.”

Ok, I’ll bite. “Why would you have a box tur­tle in a box?”

“He was in our bath­room, and I’m going to bring him home and let him go.”

“In your bath­room at work? That’s weird,” I said.

“Better than the skunk they found in there a few years ago,” he replied.

It was a fine idea to bring the tur­tle here, con­sid­er­ing that there are busy roads all around his job and not only that, he works with some really imma­ture and evi­dently cruel people.

Some of the other men at his work tossed a huge snap­ping tur­tle around a cou­ple of years ago until it died.

When I told a friend about this, she said, “Grown men?” Yes. Sadly.

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Our cove as look­ing from the lake's main channel

 

You know the old song, “Working for the Weekend”? Operative word is for, not through.

I have never been the one to answer the call of house­work when there is some­thing else I could be doing, and this past week­end was no exception.

On Saturday, we did have to go and do gro­cery and bank errands early in the morn­ing, but we got side­tracked as well vis­it­ing a cou­ple of antique stores and pawn shops. We rarely buy any­thing, as we didn't on Saturday, but I still like to go “junking.”

On Sunday, we had a zil­lion things we could have been doing around the house – spring clean­ing, fin­ish­ing the clothes rota­tion, laun­dry, yard work, installing the win­dow air unit…the list goes on.

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Sade with Dale and Kerri /Photograph by Kevin Pieper for Mother Earth News

 

I have a new the­ory: All I have to do to ensure one of our Six Pack gets hurt is start a big project.

Tuesday, I was rotat­ing the closet from win­ter to sum­mer clothes. It was unbear­ably hot that day; we hit record highs in the 90s, just two days after hit­ting record lows.

I heard Dale pull into the drive and Sade run off of the deck to greet him. She loves lying in the sun on the deck. About 5 min­utes later, he called for me to come outside.

I climbed over the moun­tain of clothes ready to be packed away and found him stand­ing with a shovel over a snake.

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Container Garden 2013

I finally got my con­tainer gar­den in this past week! It did get down into the high 30s on Sunday morn­ing, but I’m hop­ing we’re done with the threat of frost.

This will be the biggest gar­den I’ve ever tried with 4 dif­fer­ent types of toma­toes, 4 vari­eties of pep­pers, cucum­bers and cilantro (which was a huge fail last year).

I con­tainer gar­den due to the very rocky ter­rain and the dif­fi­culty in keep­ing gar­dens out of the paws of crit­ters.

We might just have to rename The Party Deck to The Plant Deck.

I’ll be glad to not have to buy some of these things when my plants start pro­duc­ing. I’m grow­ing every­thing organic, which can get expen­sive at the store.

When I paid a visit to the doc­tor last week, we talked about our new health­ier lifestyle and how it was going. We got on the sub­ject of soda and diet soda and how bad they are for us. I told him we try to drink green tea, and he asked me if it was organic. I told him Dale had shopped for the tea and brought home conventional.

Tea, evi­dently, is one of the big no-nos to buy con­ven­tional (who knew?) as it has tested high in pes­ti­cide residue. Tea is not listed among the Dirty Dozen, but I trust my doc­tor, so we pur­chased organic green tea this week. It did get me to won­der­ing again about the “Dirty Dozen,” so called by the Environmental Working Group for the foods that have tested the high­est in pes­ti­cide residue.

Because of the cost of organic, if I can get away with not buy­ing organic avo­ca­dos and bananas, I will (they rank #48 and #35 respec­tively on the list of hav­ing lesser pes­ti­cide residue).

I read this list a while back, but had also read some­where that if you can peel it, the food should be ok. Generally true, but not for pota­toes, which I’ve been buy­ing con­ven­tion­ally grown (#10 on the list, oops).

Here is the Dirty Dozen. For a list of all 48 tested foods, go to the link for EWG above:

1. Apples
2. Strawberries
3. Grapes
4. Celery
5. Peaches
6. Spinach
7. Sweet Bell Peppers
8. Nectarines
9. Cucumbers
10. Potatoes
11. Cherry Tomatoes
12. Hot Peppers

Keep in mind that this list tested for pes­ti­cide residue only and didn't take into con­sid­er­a­tion genet­i­cally mod­i­fied foods (GMOs). While corn is not on this list, we always buy organic to avoid buy­ing a GMO, as up to 80 per­cent of all corn pro­duced now is genet­i­cally modified.

Other foods they rec­om­mend you pur­chase organic are meat and dairy prod­ucts. If meat and dairy are not marked organic, the ani­mals could have been fed GMOs or been given hor­mones and antibiotics.

I bought 9 of the items on this list this past week and all but the pota­toes were organic.

What’s your score?