What We've Been Doing Since I Last Posted

A lot of time has passed since my last post.    I guess time flies by when you're having fun....or even when you're not having any fun.    In March we spent a fabulous week in Navarre Beach with family at a beach house and were so lucky to have near perfect weather, good company, more than a little bit of great food and plenty of time to make memories and strengthen our bonds as a family.    Then early in April, we spent a long weekend in Hurley, Mississippi with Larry's family.    His three sisters were there, his Mom and Jack, nephews Charles and Sam and Carlie, Charles' five year old daughter.    We played Phase 10, cooked huge vats of food and were grateful for the chance to see each other again.    Larry and Jack took off for a quick camping/fishing trip to Waynesboro, Mississippi.   They slept in Jack's van and pretended to be men of the backwoods for a while!  It was fun and even though they didn't catch a mess of fish, still thought it was worth the time and trouble.  

Larry and I had dental check ups a couple of weeks ago and I got a clean bill of oral health, but poor Larry had to go back for a filling or two and to get his new "crown" installed.    Don't you love it when those little health issues somehow snowball into an expensive and time consuming solution?   It started with a broken tooth while we were at Navarre Beach and ended with the placement of a porcelain cap pushed onto the remains of his poor broken tooth.   Thank goodness for dental insurance that reduced our obligation from $1500 to about $500!   

At some point during this time frame I came across an idea on Pinterest that I thought sounded pretty neat.    If you have not discovered Pinterest, please beware that it's pure evil and will suck you into a black vortex from which you may find it hard to emerge.   Well, maybe it's not THAT bad, but it's pretty close.   People have been known to click on Pinterest intending to search for a new way to cook chicken for supper and only escaped its clutches with the aid of several family members holding on to all four limbs pulling with all their might.     It's a powerful addiction!     But I digress......

I was looking for something to cook for dinner and, like most people who enter its domain, got quickly distracted by a pretty picture or interesting idea.  This particular thing is so simple, so stunningly easy, I guess that's why I never thought of it and never saw it anywhere else.   It is the crazy idea of taking the leftovers of a stalk of celery, placing it in a shallow bowl of water for a few days to sprout and grow roots before placing the whole thing in a pot of dirt to grow another whole celery plant.      It just so happened that I had two almost used up celery stalks and figured,
 "What the heck?   What have I got to lose?"    

So I took a knife and cut the remaining stalks off of the whole thing, making it straight across the top, leaving about an inch and a half or 2 inches of the stalk below.    I found a small, shallow dish and put the celery in it, placed the whole thing on a shelf over my kitchen sink and stood back waiting for  the action to start.    Believe it or not, within a couple of days, I saw some tiny shoots growing out of the middle of the celery.   Within 4 or 5 five days, there were whole leaves nudging their way upward and out of the center of the plant!   Imagine my surprise when the leaves appeared to grow overnight by 1/4 to 1/2 inch.   

Two celery plants with sprouts and tiny roots,
ready to be planted in a pot outside.


So that's where things are now.   Larry plans to put the plants into a flower pot today or tomorrow and I'll give an update on their progress.     I was stunned to see how much those leaves grew in one week.    And saying this is easy is an understatement for this simple way to get more plants into your garden at almost no extra cost and very little effort.    The main difference between this idea is that before I read about growing celery this way,  I would have tossed the remains of that celery into the garbage or the compost pile.   Really, all I did was find a way to give them a drink of water for a few days and stand back in amazement when they actually started growing!   

And that has been the story of our lives for the past few weeks.    I promise to do a real blog entry on our week at Navarre Beach.    We had so much fun and took a zillion and one photos to document every golden moment.    I'll post some of those, too.   Greg took amazing pictures of us at sunset that gave all of us a lovely, rosy glow.    We're so lucky to have his professional skills (and high end camera) to capture our images at the most flattering time of day.      

As we slide our way toward summer and enjoy the above average temperatures of spring, we will be planning a camping trip with the kids, painting the living room---right after I make up my mind what color to use----and I will be meandering around on Pinterest some more.    Even today I will be making three things that I found there.....Dr. Pepper Chicken, Kale with Pine Nuts and Raisins plus Tomatoes with Feta and Basil Oil.    Reports on all of these things will be forthcoming, I promise!  Comments on what you think about all of this are welcome.   :))

Happy Trails,

Marcia