Benji & The 24 Pound Banana Squash Book Review and Giveaway

I received this book free to facilitate this review. Affiliate links may be in this posting. Thanks for supporting my blog.

Benji & The 24 Pound Banana Squash is a hardcover children's book that is by bestselling author Alan C. Fox with illustrations by Eefje Kuijl. This adorable book is the story of a child named Benji's experience of growing a banana squash from start to finish. Benji & the 24 Pound Banana Squash is based on a real-life event that happened when Alan Fox was eight. It teaches kids about patience, love, dedication, and perseverance and how much fun it is to grow their own foods.

My kids enjoying our harvests.

Our Thoughts:
Benji & The 24 Pound Banana Squash is a wonderful story of garden-to-table. I love how Benji is so patient even though he sees nothing come from the seed he plants at first. After a while he reaps the reward of his determination and nurturing.

We loved this cute book and its lovely illustrations. The book starts from the beginning where Benji picks the perfect spot in the ground and plants the seed to his family sitting around the table eating the cooked squash with butter and brown sugar. The pictures are fun to look at too. One picture shows Benji trying to dig the hole himself with the shovel and he fell over on his back flinging dirt and earth worms into the air. Another shows his dog bouncing a ball on a small trampoline as Benji carries the large squash inside the house. My kids will treasure this book.

Teela and Zari enjoying the Benji & the 24 Pound Banana Squash book.

I recommend this sweet and endearing story to anyone. It is perfect for those who want to teach their children about where their food comes from or even help them grasp the concepts of being more patient...because it will certainly pay off in the end. It is wonderful for those city folk that want to give a piece of country life to their kids.

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Purchase The Benji & the 24 Pound Banana Squash book for $17.95 on Amazon.




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DISCLOSURE/DISCLAIMER: I received this book for free to facilitate this review. My thoughts are mine and my family's own opinion and have not been altered by anyone else. I did not receive any other compensation for doing this review. Affiliate links can be found in this post. Thank you for your support of this blog!

Wordless Wednesday Garlic and Potato Harvest

Elephant Garlic harvest this year was awesome!

This was my first time growing and harvesting potatoes.

Creekside Farms Apple Quince Wreath with Hanger Review

Apple Quince Wreath

I received these products for free to facilitate this review.

Creekside Farms hand makes artisanal wreaths with freshly hand picked and naturally air dried herbs and flowers. They are located in California's Monterey County where the climate is warm and dry which is ideal growing and drying conditions for their herbs and flowers. They are also grown naturally without harmful pesticides and dried in small bunches upside-down on wire racks in their warehouse. Once they are ready, the ornamental and culinary herbs and flowers are used in their lovely wreath designs. Creekside Farms has wreaths for all sorts of occasions like weddings, baby showers, fall, and Christmas. They also have some wonderful smelling culinary and ornamental herb wreaths to brighten up anyone's kitchen or home.

Apple Quince Wreath fresh from the box.

The wreath arrived zip tied to the inside of the box it came in. The hanger was wrapped in a bag zip tied to one side on the inside of the box nestled beside the wreath. The zip ties were a bit annoying to get off of them, but I realize it probably was the best way to attach them so that they wouldn't move around much inside the box while being shipped. It also comes with a card that has information about Creekside Farms on one side and care instructions on the other. When I opened the box the wonderful fragrance of the wreath emanated into the room.

I am very glad they sent me a metal wreath hanger with my wreath. It is very handy to have so that I could hang the wreath from my doors. Once I freed the wreath and hanger from the box I selected one of my hallway doors to hang it from. Some of my doors won't hold it, however; because they have a tight seal and won't close while the hanger is over the top. So when purchasing a wreath with a wreath hanger make sure the door you will be hanging it from will take a wreath hanger. If you don't want to hang it from a door it can also be hung by other ways on a wall or over a mantel.

I received the Apple Quince Wreath with hanger to review for free. I got to pick it from an assortment of gorgeous looking wreaths from the Creekside Farms website. I wanted a harvest wreath that would go well with my farm home style. It was hard to choose just one wreath as I thought they all were very pretty. Since their Fall Wreaths are in season now I thought that the Apple Quince Wreath would be a festive decoration to deck my halls for autumn harvest and Thanksgiving. This particular wreath is made with fresh Eucalyptus, Salal, and Juniper and decorated with Quince slices, pine cones, Tallow berries, faux apples, Curly Willow, Artemisia, Sweet Annie, and cinnamon sticks. The one I recieved didn't quite look as neatly made as the pictured one from their website, but it was still very beautiful. I love the circle of green with the browns, oranges and reds peaking through. The bright orange quince slices and cheery red faux apples really stands out among the other foliage. The wreath looks very nice where I placed it and every time I go past I love taking in a big whiff of the lovely aromatic smell.

You can purchase this and other lovely wreaths from the Creekside Farms website. Get a 15% discount when you use the code ABEL.

You can also follow Creekside Farms on Facebook and Twitter.

DISCLOSURE/DISCLAIMER: I received these products for free to facilitate my review. My thoughts are mine and my family's own opinion and have not been altered by anyone else. I did not receive any other compensation for doing this review.

Preserving Everything by Leda Meredith

We received this product free to facilitate this review. Affiliate links may be in this post. Thank you for supporting this blog.

Since we now have a farm and a homestead we are in the process of up-scaling our food production. We have already planted a small orchard and garden. Next we want to build a greenhouse and put in aquaponics. We would love to grow our own plate-sized fish with herbs, vegetables, and fruit to make a whole healthy meal for our family. Combine that with chickens and quail for egg/meat production and bunnies for meat, we will soon have a sustainable and healthy way of producing food. With the Preserving Everything book by Leda Meredeth we can preserve the foods we produce as well.

Leda Meredith is an acquaintance of mine that I met through some of my herbal, foraging and foodie groups on Facebook. She is a delightful person that also owns a blog called Leda's Urban Homestead and posts regularly about foraging and preserving foods. She also teaches food preservation classes and hosts foraging tours for the NY area. Not only that, she is also a highly accomplished dancer and dance instructor.

Preserving Everything: Can, Culture, Pickle, Freeze, Ferment, Dehydrate, Salt, Smoke, and Store Fruits, Vegetables, Meat, Milk, and More (Countryman Know How) is Leda Meredith's 4th book. This book is a gem to add to your library. It covers so many food preserving methods! If you want to know how to keep your harvest throughout the year this is definitely the book for you.

Here is the online description of the book:

"The ultimate guide to putting up food. - How many ways can you preserve a strawberry? You can freeze it, dry it, pickle it, or can it. Milk gets cultured, or fermented, and is preserved as cheese or yogurt. Fish can be smoked, salted, dehydrated, and preserved in oil. Pork becomes jerky. Cucumbers become pickles. There is no end to the magic of food preservation, and in Preserving Everything, Leda Meredith leads readers—both newbies and old hands—in every sort of preservation technique imaginable."

I have canned, froze, dehydrated and stored foods so far. I really want to get more into fermenting, smoking, culturing, and pickling foods. I have a Big Chief Smoker and I am ashamed that I haven't put it to use yet. When we are set up better I am sure we are going to put it to good use smoking the fish we grow with the aquaponics. I have made milk kefir, but that is the extent of my fermentation that I have done so far. I would love to try Kombucha (although this isn't in this particular book) and my own sauerkraut and then expand upon this from there. I love Feta cheese and would also love to make it as well as my own yogurt too. There are so many more things that I would love to try from this book!

Preserving Everything is well organized and easy to follow. The book starts with a great introduction and the gear you need to gather up for the preservation processes. Then it has chapters that are specific for each method of preservation with wonderful recipes in each. Lastly it has troubleshooting, appendix: approximate pH values of various foods, useful resources, index, acknowledgments, and a page about the author. I love that on some of the pages there are boxes of white text on a dark background. These are tips, tricks, and notes that need highlighted. There are also green pages with important information to know as well. This makes it incredibly easy to find the important information that you probably shouldn't skip or skim over. The recipes also seem like they fit well into the category they are under and aren't something that are too difficult or too gourmet. I felt like I wouldn't have any problems doing any of the recipes or methods in the book and I am not a professional cook by any means. Everything is very clear, simple and understandable.

I am so glad I have this concise guide and recipe book. It will certainly help my family and I with our food preservation. The recipes all sound so yummy. I certainly want to try my hand at the methods I am least familiar with so that I might become more of an expert in the field of food preservation. I believe that we would all do better with learning these methods and getting back to our roots a bit.


DISCLOSURE/DISCLAIMER: I received this product for free to facilitate my review. My thoughts are mine and my family's own opinion and have not been altered by anyone else. I did not receive any other compensation for doing this review. This post contains affiliate links which means I may receive a commission if you click a link and make a purchase.

Our Farm Home

Our Farm Home.

We recently purchased a farm property with 2 houses, a barn, a chicken coop/shed, and a lean-to. These were built in the 1920's and have a cute cottage look to them. There is also a tiny building that houses the well on the side of our property. They sit on 5 and a half acres and are nestled in between a gorgeous canopy of trees.

The pasture, large barn, mailbox, chicken coop/shed, well house, and wagon wheel gate.

My favorite structure on the property is the barn. It is a large barn that was used previously for cows and loose hay. I also love the gorgeous wagon wheel gate to the larger pasture and the large mailbox.

The many flora of the farm.

Along with the shade of many trees (walnut, apple, pear, cedar, pine, mock orange, lilac, magnolia, smoke, tulip popular, etc.) there are other flora as well. There are rhododendrons, azaleas, roses, columbine, clover, dandelion, lilacs, daffodils, peonies, violets, ferns, yucca, wildflowers, etc. There is also a lovely grape vine loaded with it green grape leaves right now. We made grape juice from the harvest last year as well as dried pears and apples from the fruit we picked. My daughters planted a petunia in the front flower bed and I have since planted a fuchsia there also. We are planning on growing more fruit trees and having a large edible garden too. We want to keep the property park like.

The mini pony, horses, wild deer, bunnies, and a frog Jaedan is holding.

We would love to own chickens, quail, a goat, and maybe a llama or alpaca someday very soon. We also keep two bunnies and some bees. Right now we rent pasture to three amazing horses. They are so sweet! The large spotted Appaloosa gelding is named Blueberry and he loves me. He comes up to me and nuzzles up against me. He was in my picture for my Renaissance Fair costume review. Then there is a gorgeous Cremello filly named Skittles that looks so much like a unicorn it is otherworldly. Last but not least is a Palomino mare named Dreamer. She is a bit shy, and loves to stand out in the rain. Our mini Shetland pony, Gizmo, is there as well, but since he is a stallion he is in his own separate paddock. We occasionally see other wildlife: deer, owls, bats, cranes, osprey, hawks, eagles, squirrels, birds, skunk, raccoon, lizards, snakes, frogs, etc.

Our plan is to become more sustainable and live in harmony with our surroundings. This is the first time we've owned a farm. We are learning as we go about being farm folk. I am planning on doing a lot more posts about our critters and farm life. Stay tuned and I'll try and keep you posted.

The Harvest - September and October 2012

During the month of September and October we were very busy picking, harvesting, foraging, gathering and wildcrafting. We picked apples and pears off our trees and grapes off our vines. We picked plums from the neighbors trees that they wanted us to help ourselves to and I gathered up fallen walnuts from both our many Black Walnut and English Walnut trees. I have also been trying to educate myself about the flora and fauna in and around Portland and Rainier Oregon, where I live. I am learning a lot about canning and dehydrating too.

We made Golden Plum fruit leather in my dehydrator and it turned out a to have a gorgeous stain glass look to it. All I did was wash them, peal the skins off, pit them and mush up the plum fruit in a bowl or if they were really ripe I just mushed them with my fingers and spread the mush out on the fruit leather tray somewhat. It is fine if it has juice in the tray with it because that will get dried also. So yummy and without any additives or extras.

We canned pear sauce and dehydrated pears too. I don't have a proper water bath canner or a good canning rack, but we used what we had and got the job done. The dried pears turned out really chewy, but still really good.

I have a handy dandy Pampered Chef apple peeler that gets the job done quickly if I want apples peeled and cored. My Nesco American Harvest Food Dehydrator is perfect for making yummy apple chips! The kids helped load them onto the trays and then they were dried. We like to bag them up and freeze them. They stay crispier this way.

We have different varieties of grapes that grow on our grape arbor. The grapes are really good straight off the vine too. We made both white and red grape juice. After we plucked a bucketful of each variety off of our grape vines we washed, sorted and de-stemmed them. I used my Vitamix to blend it a little in batches then we placed it all in a big pot on the stove to boil while stirring. Then we strained it all through our strainer (we don't yet have a food mill) and bottled it.

We gathered and foraged loads of walnuts from our trees that had fallen to the ground too. I don't have pictures of the walnuts yet, but I will get some.

We also love to visit local orchards, farms and "u-pick your own" places to get things we haven't yet grown at our place. Since I am still learning I love to take photographs of plants and identify them to see if they are edible or medicinal or useful in another way. This is a fun hobby of mine that I want to soon get really good at.

What have you picked, harvested, foraged, gathered and/or wildcrafted this year? Have you made anything special out of the things you got? How have you preserved your harvest?

Rainier's 3rd Annual Harvest Festival

In my town of Rainier, Oregon the 3rd Annual Harvest Festival (previous years it was called the Pumpkin Festival) is happening at the City Park on Saturday, October 27th from noon until dark (around 6:30 pm). This is put on by the Rainier Chamber of Commerce and admission is FREE!

This event is family and kid friendly. Activities include: hay rides, carnival games (25 cents per game), crafts, food, venders, costume contest, pumpkin carving contest, Trunk or Treat and Willow Grove (a band from Longview, Washington) will be playing.

Bring a carved pumpkin for the contest. Really great prizes will be given away for the best pumpkin, costume and trunk or treat-er. There will also be a raffle for some neat stuff to win. At dark there will be a pumpkin lighting ceremony. Costume contest is for all ages including pets. If you are interested in being in the trunk or treat please stop by city hall to pick up an application. Game tickets are 5/$1.00 and raffle tickets will be 5/$1.00.

Like Rainier's Harvest Festival on Facebook for updates and more information.

Wordless Wednesday The Great Pumpkin October 2008

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My Favorites of Fall

This autumn has been great so far and I would love to share with you some pictures of past falls that I have enjoyed and tell you some of my favorite things of the season. Autumn is one of my favorite seasons for many reasons. Here are some of them.

I love when the leaves on the trees change their many colors.




I love going to the many fairs, festivals, harvest parties, farmers' markets, orchards, and pumpkin patches. Having hay rides and going through corn/hay mazes.



I love the flavors of fall: mulled hot apple cider with cinnamon sticks, spiced chai, sparkling cider, toasted pumpkin seeds, pumpkin pie, apple pie, pecan pie, turkey, sausage stuffing, acorn squash, sweet potatoes, yams, mashed rutabaga/potatoes, Thanksgiving feast, etc.



I love the scents of fall: autumn scented candles, my neighbor's scentsy, apples, caramel apples, mulling spices, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cloves allspice, star anise, pumpkin pie spice, clove orange/fruit pomanders, cinnamon pine cones, chai mulch, grape vines loaded with grapes, wood stoves, etc.



I love fall fashions. Especially sweaters, shawls, scarves, dupatta (long scarf), and ponchos (esp. ones with fringe, metallic threads, eyelash yarn, etc.), capes, caplets (esp. hooded ones).


What do you love about autumn? What are your favorites? Do you have a favorite recipe? Please share with me! Thanks!

Wordless Wednesday Neighbor's Harvest Gifts

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Nature's Bounty

I have planted a large garden in my backyard and had the boys help with planting, weeding, and watering. My boys love helping me out in the garden. I looked out there today and two of the yellow crookneck squash were ready to harvest. We picked them and a whole bunch of Oregon Giant peas. Take a look...