Friday, May 16, 2025

Working in the Garden-Lots of Photos

    Good afternoon, we are humid and hot here in Missouri. Mid 80's with high humidity and this area of Missouri being closer to the sun (than I am used to living on upper Illinois-Wisconsin border) Is very hot for me-I think more so being a senior now.

   So I am out early, usually 7:30 -8 am after most of the dew is off and Larry is set up for his day. I have most of the grass cut now-the tallest for sure, so I think one more large battery will finish it up-before I have to start again. If I keep at it-takes me a week to get it all done.

  I bought  bags of soil last week, the guys when they were here brought it all down for me-so I worked on that the last couple of days-trying to get the gardens sorted out and looking better. It was a lost cause last year.

  I am going to need more garden soil so I called and Wal mart's generic is sold out in the large bags but they ordered 100 more bags coming in tomorrow-that will go fast. I will call tomorrow afternoon to see if it came in. I always have loved Miracle Grow but their prices have been outrageous the last couple of years, so I have been using Wal marts generic brand It is on sale now too for around $5.00 Hoping I can get some more this weekend.

  I needed to get some of the flowers out of the growing bottles since we are hot now-the stems are pretty thin-sadly and those chipmunks dug up a bunch after I worked yesterday-ugh. Hoping they will make it. I grew snapdragons, salvia, and dwarf petunias that needed planting.

    This first photo-iris's we brought from the woods house, and the lilies were from my Mom's garden-they are settling in this year at the lake


One of the pots the chipmunks dug out


The three pots  below and an old rusty sewing machine head. At the woods house many years ago a friend knew I sewed a lot so he brought me two of these and thought I would like them in the garden-I dragged them here to the lake  These three stone pots were here when we bought the property




Garage sale fine, that I brought along. Once the butterflies start coming I like to have shallow water spots for them I love the wild violets so I never dig them out


This pot has ornamental grasses we grew from little plants-I have a spot for them near the lake. The tall ones we grew last year-I bought a couple varigated this year, but they are growing very slowly so far. Hope to get this set up over the weekend.


Another look at my Mom's lilies





  We bought two of these large leaf pans years ago at a garage sale The plants are milkweed I grew from seed last year







Next is the photo of the pad the guys set up for the lift-they are booked up now, so hoping a lot of time does not go by before they can work on this more


I will close with this pretty color-just have one of these  I will be keeping at this project to get things sorted out and looking nicer. Plus it gets me outdoors for a bit too.





Happy Friday and weekend dear Friends

Wednesday, May 14, 2025

New Recipe-Almond Flour Cookies

After cutting a lot more grass,  I decided  to bake up a batch of almond flour cookies. I have not baked with almond flour as the only flour in the recipe. Almond flour is a very safe food for acid reflux. I changed the chocolate chips to white chocolate chips which is also a safe food.  Butter is not on my list, but I bake with coconut oil mostly for me anyways.

  Here is the recipe I followed but I doubled the recipe. The author made huge cookies and only got 10 cookies from her recipe-I doubled the recipe, made smaller cookies and got 36 cookies-not a lot of cookies for 3 cups of almond flour though. I also lowered the bake time to 9 minutes which was perfect.

    These turned out really good  so I will make them again. I have enough that I can freeze most of them too.

      This first photo are balls of dough that I pressed down. The recipe also says they don't rise much or spread out-they did rise a bit for me


You can see that when they bake they don't change as much as regular cookies when they bake


 
   I am exploring new recipes for this acid reflux condition I am dealing with, which is finally getting better,
 

    We have humidity and warmer temperatures-in the 80's this week. I needed to break down and turn the a/c on for us-set at 79