This Little Lassie....

This little lassie went to market (that's me!)

This little lassie stayed home (that's Sarah)

This little lassie had roast beef (to sell- that's Morgan Wilson)

This little lassie had none. (that could be Leah)

And this little lassie went wee-wee-wee all the way home.

Okay. So that last line was a bit scary, and didn't make any sense. Anywho! Today I'll be going to the Wilson's farm pick-up day to sell our crazy surplus of produce all by my lonesome. *yikes!*
The rest of our family is going to help the Tate family (in one way or another) to prepare for Grace T.'s graduation next Sat. Sarah is going over there to watch the little boys. (Thus the rhyme for her. But I guess that means she isn't staying home. Whatever!) Well, see you guys later! (Some of you on Mon.! :)

The Tale Of The Turnip (that sounds scary)

I was sent on a mission today: figure out how to make something with turnips. Something that actually tastes good. Something that we can type out on recipe cards and hand to customers who buy them at the Wilson's on Saturday. They have very generously allowed us to sell our loose-leaf lettuce, turnips, and spinach at their farm pick-up day on Sat. So what is a girl to do who only has a vague idea of what a turnip is used for? I recollected (somewhere in the files of my brain) that you cooked the leafy tops and ate them like regular greens. So far so good. But everyone knows that. The only other inkling I had was that in some AmericanGirl book, the heroine refused to eat her "orange mashed turnips". I am wondering why her's were orange: ours are purple on the outside and white inside! :) So I did a Google search, and I came up with some interesting facts: you can use turnips in any recipe in which potatoes are called for, you can use it instead of cabbage in coleslaw, and it has cancer-fighting nutriets! Yay for that strange vegetable! So I set out to make two recipes, for better or for worse....."Turnip Oven-Fries", and "Mashed Turnips". Sound good? Here's what I did:

Washed, peeled, and cut up the turnips: some I chunked, (to boil) the others I sliced thinly like potatoes. I tossed the thin ones in olive oil, and laid them out on a tray. The others went into a pot of boiling water. Here's a picture of the chunked ones:

The oven-turnips baked at 425 F. for 20 minutes or so, and the stove ones just got the dickens boiled out of them. I like to boil my potatoes to mash until they are nearly falling apart, so I did the turnips the same way.
Back to the oven-turnips: When they were done, I salted them, and had everyone try the finished product: it tasted sort of like sweet potato fry, if you have ever had those. Sort of sweet and mild at the same time. Here is a picture!

Here they are. Aunt Christy added the spinach to the side in lieu of curly kale. :)

Then for the mashed turnips---I strained the water away from them, smushed them up with a pastry-cutter, (I did NOT feel like taking out our whole Bosch thing and doing it the right way! :) and added salt, pepper, butter, and our goat-milk. Yum! They tasted pretty good, if not exactly like real mashed potatoes. I found that they were a bit more wet than potatoes, and a tad bit stringy-ish and lumpy. But that could have been because I didn't use a mixer! Here are a couple pictures of those! :)

Here is a far-away-ish picture. I am dealing once again with our addle-pated camera, so bear with me. We'll call the darkness of the picture "Art" and leave it at that!

And once again, my hand stars in the post. I believe that is all ya'll have seen of me! :) hee-hee. Well, hope this turnip-y post is not too dull! If I were anything like Winnie-the-Pooh, I would have made up a "hum" by now, because "turnip' is a promising sort of word that deserves a rhyme or something! ;) -Rachel

CEO, Chickens, and an Essay

I am now a CEO. Of sorts. By this afternoon, I, Rachel, will be the...mother of quite a nest of baby chicks. I bought them. Leah will take care of them. Come October we will sell the eggs to our landscape customers, and we will split the difference. Sound good? I hope so! Leah had the enthusiasm and likes chickens, and I had the money and a nice picture of some earnings in my head, so between the two of us, we will have a little business. I wonder how it will work out? My part sounds almost too easy, but she is out there with Sarah who already takes care of our family chickens so it'll be fine. There has been an awful lot of talk around and what the measure of a good book or movie is. Funny enough, I had to write a paper on the book side of it for our literature-based unit study a couple of weeks ago. Here it is as I wrote it:
In 1868 John Ruskin said, "Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books." I believe that one of the main questions you should ask yourself when reading a book, is whether or not there is anything to be taken from it, and applied in your own life. Some books are, for obvious reasons, wrong to erad, containing things that are contrary to God's principles. Stay far from such books, for, though they may be entertaining now, it is not worth the poisoning of your mind to gain a few hours of selfish enjoyment. There are others books, not harmful in any way, but presenting life in very unrealistic scenarios. When evaluating this sort of book, it is more of a question of "better" or "best". The best sort of book one can read, is a work that inspires us to higher thoughts, to purer ideals, and ever points our imaginations to Christ's standards. C.S. Lewis sums up well the measure of a worthwhile book, (fiction particularly) when he said, "No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally, (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty...the only imaginative works we ought to grow out of are those which it would have been better not to have read at all." But the ultimate measure of our standards as Christians can be found in Philippians 4- "Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue, and if there is anything praiseworthy, meditate on these things."

So, what do you think? I know this is a subject that many people disagree on, and I do think that various people have varying convictions about it, but these are my thoughts! -Rachel

I've Done Been Promoted! ;)

Hey guys! For those of you who don't know us personally, you may not have known that we have a family landscaping business: Solid Rock Lawn and Landscape LLC. We are all very active in the business, and for a long time Sarah and I have gone out weekly to maintain our contracts with Dad and Daniel, along with helping out on the bigger, higher-end jobs. You might say that our "specialty" is high-end work. We have the landscape contracts on several very nice homes, and Daniel has gotten to be quite an expert on a 15 foot ladder with a hedge-trimmer, trimming pyramidal holly bushes and making them come out nicely without a second look! :) Here are some pictures of jobs we have done:

This is a Starbucks we did some simple landscaping for

This is a job in the "Rah-ther" fashionable district of East Beach. This is the same home that we prepared for a city-wide garden tour! (That sounded so uppity! :) Doesn't Daniel look mysterious, slinking around on the side?

Here is a sod-job we did. Last one to race onto the emerald grass and flop down is a rotten egg!

This picture and the next are of a home that we landscaped toward the beginning of our business. It had nothing. Literally bare ground, and the big trees you see. It was total blank canvass basically. We put in the steel edging, all the landscaping, the rocks, etc. We are quite proud of this one! Here, we learned that planting 500 little pachysandra plants in the freezing rain and mud is no fun! (Were you there Matthew?) :)

So, as you can see, we do some good work as a family! I don't mean to sound stuck-up, but I don't think there is anything wrong in admiring a job well done! Okay. So last night Dad sat us down and presented a new business plan. From now on we are keeping hours: 9-5.

I am being taken off of regular "outdoor" work, and am appointed Office Manager. That means the office is my domain entirely. I am in charge of the billing each month, of keeping files in order and filing new items, of typing up proposals for Dad, entering new addresses of customers into the computer, keeping an eye on when we must renew contracts, stocking office supplies, printing off any number of things, balancing the business (and home) checking account, etc. Dad gave me the grand run-through this morning, and I am going to be working in here 1-2 hours a day.

Sarah is now our "Media Director" of sorts. She will be designing a website for our business, and will be in charge of doing things of a media sort.

Leah will take my place on the maintenance crew. Wow! So we are getting a bit more official here! I am excited about being able to take the administrative side off of Dad's shoulders. He was cute. This morning he was discussing how it can be confusing to keep track of when contracts need to be renewed, and I suggested, thinking he had thought of this and didn't want to do it this way, "We could write the date they expire on the calendar."

The look on his face was so cute, because the idea had never occurred to him! I think this will be a great practice for me in future life! Who knows! Whoever marries me may get a bonus expert bookkeeper! ;) Well, enjoy the pictures and I"ll see you later! -Rachel

Entreprenuerial Ideas From Us Two

Sarah and I are full of ideas. We have never started a business of our own, but we have had so many ideas! Our first idea when we were little was a lemonade stand. (Our marketing campaign manager [a neighborhood kid] suggested we raise the price to 100 dollars a cup. We almost agreed) That didn't work out so well! :) Recently, we have come up with some more ideas. Mr. Don and Mrs. Mickey Solomon have a vision to build a bed-and-breakfast called Solomon's Porch on their land. We have grand plans for stocking the gift-shop there. Sarah loves goats. So we have decided that she can have goats, raise them, and make soap out of their milk. I will paint the goats and other animals and make notecards to sell, also illustrate them in children's books. (That is also why I desperately want a donkey. I have plans for a Christmas book :) Then, I can grow herbs in a garden and make bags of loose leaf tea to sell. I can also sell my other books (maybe?) and things of that sort. Yes, we've had ideas. None of them except the lemonade one has been put to good use. I had a thought earlier this year of planting a garden full of heirloom flowers and selling them at a roadside stand. Ummm... that was good and well till my poor garden was washed away, shrivelled up, and neglected in lieu of our vegetable garden. The fault of those pickles. :(
We have thought of making a dog-biscuit business, a few years back, and had even made up a name (which I don't like now) for it. But we never did get very far (we bought cookie cutters shaped dog-like, and we made some treats for our customers that had dogs.)
I've thought of selling cordial cherries to the local tea parlor, and places like that, and just last month figured out the price of such a thing, but it was too late in the season to approach anyone.
There is something really funny about our ideas. No sooner have we had the idea and laid it aside for a bit, then someone else starts a wave of businesses like our idea! The dog treat thing has become huge, and we'd never really heard anything about it till we got the idea ourselves. And the flowers? The newspaper has been filled with articles about flower-farming people! And the herbal thing? I have been interested in that for years, but suddenly everyone and their brothers are taking herbal classes and selling herbal products. But that doesn't stop us from thinking up ideas! Now all we must do is begin! (something- we don't know what!) Well, anyway! That's all for now! -Rachel