Home Interior Renovation

We were all new gardeners once upon a time. Oh, the mistakes we made. The plants we killed! The dumb choices we made. Mistakes and dumb choices will be a part of your gardening life until the day you set aside your shovel and pruners (or until they day they pry them from your cold, dead hands, in my case) and that’s a good thing. Mistakes help us learn. I can’t imagine gardening without them.

But beginner’s mistakes can be especially disheartening. There’s nothing worse than just getting started in a new hobby and watching everything you’re trying to grow just sit there pathetically when you dreamed of ripe juicy tomatoes and a garden full of flowers.

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There comes a point where you can’t eat another steamed, sauteed, or fried bite of zucchini. The thought of making another loaf of zucchini bread or batch of zucchini muffins makes you almost nauseous.

But come February, the fresh flavor of steamed crookneck squash can often help brighten even the most dreary winter day. If you take the time now to freeze some of that glut of summer squash you’re getting from your garden or CSA, you’ll be sure to have some on hand when you want it this winter, without resorting to rubbery, flavorless supermarket zucchini.

How to Freeze Summer Squash

There are two basic ways to successfully freeze summer squash:

Blanch and Freeze You want to retain the flavor and texture, so how you freeze the squash matters.

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Since Planet Green started, we have been stressing the point that when it comes to energy efficiency, there is an order to things, and some things give a bigger bang for the buck than others. After all, our goal is to reduce our carbon footprint as much as possible, not redecorate our roofs with solar panels. Yet that is what gets all the exposure and investment.

We used the Rocky Mountain Institute’s Cool Citizens Guide as our guide, but it is old now (1992) and the numbers are seriously out of date. But it was and is a great guide to the low hanging fruit.

Then we recently discovered the Minnesota Power Pyramid of Conservation. A good guide of what to do first, but not particularly interactive.

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eclectic home design by chicago kitchen and bath Rebekah Zaveloff, KitchenLab & Design in a Bag.com I think I owe a bit of an apology — I prefer to not take off days at a time of blogging without at least saying something in advance.  But sometimes, life goes crazy and at 11:00 pm when I finally sit down and have a moment to write, I end up falling asleep with exhaustion (my days generally start at 5:30 — though I have insanely committed to a weekly 5:00am butt kicking exercise class — that is, well, kicking my butt).  The late last week mini blogging break wasn’t really planned, it just happened as the consequence of back to school,  fall planting, broken truck, farmers market starting, pre-sisters wedding last minute frenzy, simply too many irons in the fire, chaos.  Do you ever have that? Read more…