Prairie Scraps

There is really nothing better than a good use for something that was headed to the trash!  Recently, we went though our boots to check for any that weren’t working or fitting.  Two pairs had holes and couldn’t be used, so I saved them from their demise!  Aren’t these floral boots adorable on the front steps?  The other pair I have are black, so I have different plans for those!   I added some extra sedums that are overtaking my flower beds to turn these trash to treasures! I’d love to hear what you think?  This was so satisfying to put together a little decoration.

This  project was a fun combination of my love of a good thrift find and gardening. I found this cute box at Goodwill for $2.99 on spring break!! I used 3 different kinds of sedum from my garden to fill this box. It’s a win win. I get rid of some of the extra sedum in my garden and this makes a cute little box for the deck. Watch the video here:  Thrift Store Repurposed Box  

The new-found front walk has been slowly but surely getting updates.  You can check out our great find HERE.  Like most of our house projects these days, we often are doing the project that seems the most urgent at the present time.  Sometimes it’s purely out of necessity - like when we found a leak in the plumbing under the house.  Other times it's because we find a great deal on a new item for the house. Mr. Right and I were able to get away for two nights for our anniversary this year, and we went shopping.  We really wanted to go rummage saling, but we couldn’t find much for sales.  We moved on to the thrift stores and then  to Walmart.  At Walmart, we had to go through all of the plants. Mr. Right found some beautiful Heather plants.  He had a vision of lining our walk with 10 of the heather plants, and the price was right at $7 a pot! When we got home, we dug out the side of the new path to line the walk with the heather plants. ...

Have you ever started a project and the entire thing turns into an even bigger project and into something you never thought it would?  Well, this last weekend, I thought I was starting just a small project, and found some hidden treasures along the way. We bought our house last fall, and right in front of our house, leading to the front door, there are small stones buried in the ground.  They seem to be evenly spaced out, but they were pretty deep in the ground.  I thought they were some stepping stones that had sunk into the ground.  We'd found a bunch of 12x12 inch blocks buried in the back yard last fall. Since the weather is so beautiful, I thought I'd just pop them out.  Here's what the lawn looked like before I started.  None of the stones are peeking out more than about 4-6 inches around.   So, I started to dig.  And dig. And dig!  I found an entire rock path from my front door to the driveway!  It had...

We finally bought a house after our move across country from the Midwest five and a half years ago.  It's taken us all month to get into the house and start to get things put away.  Moving seven people while two are headed back to college was not an easy feat.  While this house is not super fancy, one of the things we loved about the house was the very large yard.  We have seven city lots in fact.  One of the things that we loved the most about home ownership was being able to garden. I'm not a fan of those really tall arborvitae trees on the left of this picture.  We have several of them around the property, mostly right up on the foundation and causing trouble with the house.  I personally don't like them and call them funeral trees, because they are what every cemetery has.  I'd like to just reserve them for funerals for now.  This one, isn't coming down just yet.  That big, pickery evergreen bush that takes up the side of th...

I'm not sure if it's a Midwest thing, but it seems that many of my Western friends don't know about freezing zucchini or what to do with all of the zucchini from the garden, like Midwesterners do.  So lately, when I bring a dish to pass at potlucks, my friends are surprised at how good my zucchini recipes are.  You can check out how I freeze zucchini and one of my favorite muffin recipes Over Here. One of my favorite zucchini recipes is this Chocolate Zucchini Cake.  I get a ton of compliments when I bring it as a dish to pass on how moist and delicious this is.  I'm not usually a fan of cake, but this one has a crunchy chocolate chip topping, so no frosting needed!  I love that you don't have to make a separate frosting for it to taste wonderful.   My Mom used to make this when I was young.  I remember how proud she was that she found this recipe and tried to lie to us about it being a real chocolate cake, and yet she had snuck in the much dr...

I'm new to elderberries.  I don't ever remember seeing them in the Midwest.  I've heard quite a bit about them since moving to the West, but have been really intimidated by the.  The house that we moved to last year has the bushes (or shall I say trees) everywhere on the property.  Several people told me how poisonous they are and how they can cause stomach problems if you don't handle them right.  Last year, I thought about harvesting my many bushes of them all season, but chickened out!     This year, I decided that I wasn't going to use them again, but at least I would try to let people in my friends circle come pick them. So I put up a post on a local Facebook group.  I got a couple of takers.  Of course, the one evening that we could pick together, it was pouring rain and really cold!  While I was helping my friend pick a 5 gallon bucket of elderberries, I got to thinking that maybe it was tim...

This last week, I actually had to take time off of homeschooling to get my canning done.  Don't worry, the kids worked on their handwriting, math and grammar workbooks in the kitchen (if you can see all the clutter in the background - that's it!) while I canned away, but I couldn't do our history, bible and read-alouds or my tomatoes would go to waste.    You might wonder where I got so many tomatoes.  I'd love to say I grew them, but that's just not the case!  It is so dry here in the summer, that it's difficult to get tomatoes to grow nicely.  BUT, we have a guy down in Lucille, ID area who's know as Tomato Tom!!! He has tomato growing perfected, and you can pick your own tomatoes for only $.50 a pound!  Why grow your own, when it's so cheap and fresh down the road?  Each year, we run down there on a weekend and pick with the kids about 100 pounds of tomatoes for the winter months.   I like to have enough salsa and ca...

Do you have an overload of zucchini right now?  I have to say, I don't.  For whatever reason, my plants just didn't produce anything this year.  Of course, I really love baked goods with zucchini in them, so I picked up some at a local farm for $.25 each this week, to be sure that I have plenty for the winter.     I shred all of my zucchini, yellow and green with my Kitchen Aid  and my shredder attachment  into my big bowl.   I especially like to shred up those huge, overgrown zucchini's!  Those big seeds get mixed right in.  If the seeds are too big, I'll just take them out and use the flesh only. Then I measure out the shredded zucchini into freezer bags two cups at a time.  I like make all my freezer bags flat for my freezer, so I can stack them neatly and in less room.   I've found that most of my favorite recipes use two cups of shredded zucchini, so I...

As the fall harvest begins, I was finding several different bags of fruit in the freezer from last year that we hadn't used yet.  On top of that, we had an obnoxious amount of rhubarb this spring already!  What started to be a batch of Huckleberry jam, turned into an afternoon of making jam and sauces!    The jams I used from last year's berries were huckleberry, raspberry, strawberry rhubarb and cherry. My favorite recipe book is The Ball Complete Book of Canning, which if you don't have, you should get!  It has every recipe that you could possibly use and more. Only one recipe have we not likde and that was the Cherry Jam, where the optional ingredients we didn't like.  We leave them out and we love it!    I still had over 30 bags of rhubarb in my freezer (what can I say we love rhubarb coffee cake all winter long, but this was a little much!) so was checking out the recipes in my canning book.  I've made...

Fresh Rhubarb!  There's just something exciting about having rhubarb freshly cut and bagged up in the freezer.  I freeze it in 2 cup measures because that's what my rhubarb coffee cake calls for.  All winter long, my family gets fresh rhubarb coffee cake for breakfast.  I also noticed that as soon as I can get some fresh strawberries this spring, the strawberry rhubarb jam recipe calls for 2 cups of rhubarb, too.  Rhubarb is my favorite spring harvest from the garden.  What is yours? Oh, I wanted to share my Rhubarb Coffee Cake Recipe .  It is from my favorite farm Old Oak Family Farm in Wisconsin.  You can look up recipes from any of the fruits and veggies that the grow there on their farm!  I love them all!