How to Season and Wash a Baking Stone

Scene: A lazy Saturday morning. Lisa is snoozing her life away snuggled under 7 blankets on her bed. Husband enters the room.

Husband: Lisa, wake up. I already took Blitzkrieg out side for a potty.

Me: “…….”

Husband: I made scones for breakfast.

Me: “!!!!!!!”

Yes, my wonderful Husband whipped up a batch of cherry scones and served them with teeny jars of clotted cream and lemon curd for breakfast. The cherry scones were a wonderful surprise because weekend morning breakfasts are usually a fend for yourself type of deal. The only exception is that one of us makes a gallon of coffee which we sip throughout the morning at our leisure.

Even better was that Husband used our baking stone to make the scones. A seasoned baking stone is a wonderful alternative to using a Teflon baking pan which can leach questionable substances into your food while you cook it. It also saves me a little bit of money because I don’t have to use cooking oils, butter, spray with a seasoned baking stone.

How Do You Plan Landscaping When You Suck At Gardening?

After watching our “easy to care for landscaping” die a little less than two years after buying The Condo I replanted those seven little solders all standing in a row…

…with my first attempt at grub resistant gardening. This is what my front flower beds looked like early last summer.

Mother Nature pulled a nice big April Fools Day prank on me (clever how I worked April Fool’s Day into today's post, huh?) Japanese Beetles took out my replanted bushes and white leaf mold took out the rest of the plants in the beds. Now I’m stuck with this:

Last fall I took all of the plants out of the flower bed, treated it with Milky Spore, and let the whole thing go dormant. Oh yeah, I put in a garden border with reclaimed bricks while I was at it, but that’s another post.

Apparently Blitzkrieg has a little rule that I can’t take photos for the blog unless he’s in them. What can I say? My dog loves the camera.

Now it’s time for planning the landscaping for those flower beds. The problem is I suck at landscaping. I have no idea what plant or how to decide.

I know that The Condo is in Zone 5, the front yard gets partial morning sun. The soil is clay and we are going to spend a bucket load of our budget on soil amendments. I know I don’t want to plant plants that attract Japanese Beetles (I know I'll never fully rid my yard of Japanese Beetles. I just want to encourage them to fly by my yard and eat at the neighbors) but other than that I don’t know what I want to plant other than some more lavender (it grows well in my crappy soil), perennials that that look pretty and are food/pest deterrent, and possibly a tea bush (Camellia Sinensis) but I don’t know if that will grow in my area. Will it?

How do you decide what to plant and where to put it in your landscaping? What resources do you use? Once you decide what you want to plant where do you get your plants? At the nursery or mail order? Any help or resources where you can point me to would be greatly appreciated.


This post is part of Works for Me Wednesday.

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In other Blog Business:

Are you going to BlogHer this year? If so, could you please login to BlogHer and vote for two Rooms of Our Own that I’m involved in and that aren’t getting a lot of votes? The Rooms of Our Own are causal meet up/networking opportunities held during lunch and are different than the panel discussions.

You don’t have to attend the sessions if you vote for them, but you’re welcome to!

Green Bloggers Room of Our Own (this is separate from the Green Blogger panel.)

When Your Family is Your Blogstalker/Troll Room of Our Own (fortunately I don’t have this issue, I’m promoting it for a blogger who obviously can’t mention it on her own blog.)

Thanks!

A Shopping Cart Made Into a CHAIR?

Now this is a creative reuse project that I love and totally want – a chair made out of an old discarded shopping cart!

I think one of the reasons I like reestore’s Annie chair is that it reminds me of a Bertoia chair. Again, which is something I want but don’t know where to put in my small living room so it stays at the store where I visit it often.

I wouldn’t mind having this once-was-a-washing-machine-drum-now-is-a-coffee- table either. Why didn’t I think of this before we had our old broken washing machine hauled off to be sold for scrap metal?

What I love about both of these reestore projects is that you don’t automatically realize what they are made out of just by looking at them. Especially the washing machine drum table. When I first looked at it I though it was a nice arty modern side table, something like the Bowhaus dog crate/coffee table combo.

It’s only until I read the description that says the Silvana is remade from a washing machine drum that I looked at it and said, “OH yeah, it does look like a washing machine drum.” Genuis!

Makes me want to check out a junkyard just to see what’s out there to remake.

What do you think? Would you consider buying either of these and putting them in your house? Yes? No? Maybe so?

What are Your Favorite Essential Oils?

I first got into essential oils back when I started performing at the Ohio Renaissance Festival. Many of the booths there sold (and still sell) essential oils straight up and in blends for any and all uses you can think of depending upon the vendor or the type of essential oil.

One of my favorite oils is lavender because it smells pretty and is very calming when I'm in Type A Stress Puppy mode. It's antibacterial, and it's also a natural pest deterrent, which is another reason I planted it in my garden. That makes it very easy to dry lavender and bring it into The Condo for all of my lavender needs.

But I'm getting a little tired of the lavender because I have a lot of stuff that's scented with it. My reed diffuser is out of essential oil and I need a change from the lavender. Give me some suggestions. What are your favorite essential oil scents?

Yes I realise that the lavender bucket photo is recycled from an earlier post. I could explain it away by saying that I'm all about recycling because well, I am. In reality, I built a new computer and I'm still working on loading software and files from the old build to my new build. Using photos I already have on my blog's server makes doing today's post a little bit easier while I'm in computer limbo. Thanks for understanding!