Home Sweet Home

After 5 days of working out in the hotel gym.....




Living out of a tiny hotel refrigerator.....



Eating mainly sushi, salads, and peanut butter (and missing my homemade ice cream!)....





I returned home for the weekend! I arrived last night and after a romantic embrace with Nick (hehe, not really) I ran quickly to the garden to see how much my babies had grown. Nick showed me this giant pumpkin vine (below), which means we'll at least have a couple pumpkins by the time fall comes!



And we even have a winter squash coming in. Isn't she cute?



The kale has grown a ton in the past 5 days, I couldn't believe it.



My last post was about the organic pesticide that Nick and I created. A couple of you asked if it was working and the answer is that we don't really know. We still see some bugs, but I don't think any pesticide keeps 100% of the bugs away, right? In our minds it's working well.

Giveaway

Check out this great lunchbox giveaway!

Coming Up

Tonight Nick and I are meeting some friends at a food and wine festival. Monday (before I leave for Pittsburgh again) I'll post a recap, plus an almond butter review.

I hope everyone is having a nice weekend. Thanks for reading!

Homemade Organic Pesticide

Organic Pesticide & Garden Update

Before I left for Pittsburgh Nick and I created an organic pesticide for our garden. We seem to have a bug problem so we thought we'd remedy sooner rather than later. You can find the organic pesticide recipe here.

We chopped up some garlic, onion, and jalapeno peppers, and then add them to the blender with water and vinegar (grossed out yet?!).


After about 4 minutes of blending, we ended up with this creamy-colored gross mixture.



Then we covered the blender with cheese cloth and made it look like it came straight from the desert.....



Then we drained the liquid into a giant container.



After mixing it up for a while we added it to this smaller container and allowed it to sit for 24 hours.


After a day we sprayed the pesticide on our plants (near the roots). We had to make sure not to do this with rain in the forecast.


NOTE: Other than making sure there is no rain in the forecast before using this, the key is to use this pesticide right when the plants start to sprout. We waited too long....

Either way, what do you think of our garden?! I'll be honest, Nick has been doing most of the work. He was born to garden! These pictures are actually over a week old. I am so excited to see it when I get back. It's like being excited to see how big your son or daughter has gotten after a long vacation (ok, it's a little different, but kind of similar! Plants grow a lot faster than kids, so 5 days probably means major growth).




Here is our kale, which Nick tasted and then spit right out (he's not a kale lover, so it's all for me).



Have you seen our fence? We thought we'd block the animals by building a fence. I'll take credit for this one. We found the equipment at Lowe's and it took about an hour to erect this beauty. So far it's working well.

Coming Up

I'm managing to continue blogging with this busy schedule, but I'm sorry if my comment frequency has slightly decreased. I'll get back into a good schedule sooner or later. I have some great posts prepared for the coming weeks, including a post about incorporating whole grains into your diet, one about lactose intolerance, another about summer berries, and of course some updates on my training process! I want future RDs (and everyone in between) to get an idea of what I will be doing each day.

Thanks for reading everyone! Have a fabulous weekend.