a gifted watermelon and some lanky tales.

a knock at the door is often something you dread, or something you really look forward to. and sometimes there's a medium feel to it. but the positives burst air-wise when your neighbor is standing on your porch holding a whopping melon to gift you.

i especially admired the thinly white stretch of a star tracing out from the middle of the watermelon once i cut it quasi-crookedly down the middle. and it was not huge, but still monumental in its own way.

when i was little, my one older brother told me my other brother swallowed a watermelon seed, and it started to grow in his stomach, so they had to take him to the hospital to have it surgically removed.

you can guess that my family loved telling me tall tales in my more gullible days. of course they found it amusing when i believed the stories.

that same brother also once told me that while playing hide and go seek, he found my sister first and threatened to beat her up if she didn't tell him where our remaining brother was. this was all before i was born, mind you. so since our remaining brother was hiding quaintly in the dryer, they turned it on, with him rumbling around inside. they said he shrunk, and that's why today, he's the shorter brother.

i don't think i could tell a tale like that if i tried. i'm stuck to the truth like  it's some kind of gloppy glue. but tales have their place, and so do melons.

abandoning shampoo ?

foodie blogger extraordinaire amy strauss of apples and cheese, please showed me this blog post about abandoning the act of shampooing our hair.

with the goal in mind to always question everything, while appreciating life all the while, i stopped to consider this idea. i knew that hundreds of years ago, or even a century ago, people washed their hair less. but i hadn't thought about the commercialization of shampoo leading to our more american, everyday shampooing routine.

most people i know shampoo their hair everyday. i usually do too, but sometimes i skip a day.

and i don't handle greasy hair well. but overproduction of oils to keep up with the stripping of them by shampoo's efforts makes some sense. i'd thought about that in the past, but again, i never imagined that hair could do its own work if i just let it.

plus, the harsh, unnatural chemicals leaking into your scalp before rinsing, well-- sadly, i hadn't pondered much on that front either.

this article had some additional eye-opening tidbits to absorb beyond what was mentioned in the links in the blog post referenced above.

last night, i skipped washing my hair. that's no big change of pace, as i do it once a week or maybe every two weeks. although i'm always grateful to wash my hair again the next time then, like ahh, how refreshing it is to be clean-clean-clean.

i figured i might test this out eventually. but for once, i had all the needed ingredients already in my house, so i'm doing it up. 

i used just 1 tablespoon baking soda with 16 ounces of water, scrubbed finger-wise at my scalp and throughout my tresses that reach just a few inches shy of my elbows. afterward, i mixed 1 tablespoon of apple cider vinegar with 16 ounces of water and applied it to my hair. i did soak the ends of my hair into the golden-hued liquid of the measuring cup, as i have devastatingly knotty habits per strand sometimes. i read to let the vinegar sit for a minute or two, so i rinsed it out as well as i could afterward.

most people note that the stench of vinegar won't stay in your hair if you rinse it out well. i really tried to rinse it out thoroughly, but i still detect a hint of it at my shoulders every now and then. it's noted to use apple cider vinegar, as white vinegar is a bit too harsh for this purpose.

i was surprised to discover that my hair didn't feel clumpy, knotty, and dirty after i used the baking soda. and in fact, i was a bit caught off guard by it almost feeling smooth post-apple cider vinegar.

the ultimate test came when i brushed my hair. if i don't use intensive conditioner (leaving it on for 5 minutes) after using shampoo, the bristles of my brush fight very hard with my proverbial locks. but a pleasant shock resulted instead; the brush ran smoothly through almost all of my hair except for a few wads of knotty layers. that is not bad at all compared to when i don't condition at all post-shampooing, which is rare.

and now i'm noticing that my hair doesn't feel heavy but instead refreshingly light and clean. and an hour or two following the regiment, i stepped into the bathroom and realized that my hair looked more dry at the roots, but the good way (as in, not greasy or oily) but also fluffier, of more air, like volume ?

but the scalp and hair's time needed to adjust healthily to non-shampooing can range from several weeks to months. so the actual differences to be seen haven't had a chance to happen yet. 

the word balance, in the natural sense, which seems to be the only sense i can imagine or picture, is something i'm appreciating more lately. maybe my scalp will as well.

we'll see if i can keep this up, and hopefully i won't run back to shampoo and conditioner. no promises, but i will try my best at this one !

lilly jay meets the newer sheron faye & other escapades.

this weekend, my niece lilly jay and i visited the sweet young cow named sheron faye at wholesome dairy farms. when not spying on the young crew of cows, lilly was attempting to pick yellow wildflowers growing tall and lanky out in the meadow.

 

after leaving the cows behind for the day, we ventured to fisher's farm fresh produce and scooped up three oversized vanilla sugar, sprinkled-happily cookies care of the black buggy baking company. 

almost looking like a cookie thief running off with her supply of disc-shaped desserts, one was for her, one was for her cousin lillee grace, and the final sweet was for me.

back at my house, lilly managed to eat all my sweet, miniature tomatoes that were ripe on the vine in my garden. it was probably about half a dozen though, so not too many.

she admits to being a fan of my glider chair and spent some time in porch rail jail too.

we also trotted our way down to a playground on franklin street where lilly could not go on one of the three blue slides because somebody had pooped on it. who poops on a slide ? the nearby teenagers have vengeance for that place ever since parents and neighbors started complaining about the hoodlum ways of older kids loitering and smoking around the playground. it's a shame. so i suspect the fecal joke might be a result of their efforts.

but we had a jolly old time despite the one out-of-service slide. and lilly jay worked on her fear of the see-saw so that she could appreciate how darn fun those things are.

that is a sly face, i know.

pumpkin spice and everything nice in a bar of soap.

last night, my two-year-old (coincidentally almost six, as she says) niece lilly jay and i made rounds up in oley and yellow house, some escapades of which i'll write about in a future post. but one place we stopped before picking up her cousin lillee grace was the soap shop in oley, amber hills herbs & gifts.

lilly jay implemented use of her nostrils well and picked out raspberry and lemonade, manderin neroli, and  fresh ginger & lime to take home to her mommy and daddy. we already had a bar of amber set aside for her papa from the batch of soaps in one of my bathroom cabinets. we ended up letting lillee grace's mom pick out a soap from the small collection too, and she chose the fresh lime & ginger.

while at the shop, owner tammy abraham gave me a sampling of her latest scent endeavor which i had suggested she try out when i last visited-- pumpkin spice soap.

with fall being just around the corner, and pumpkin as its own sniffing  episode i can't get enough of at any time of year, i thought it was the perfect new scent for her to try out in her recipe-swept minutes.

bearing a somehow lightly but pleasantly pink shade to the chunky bar, blueberry seeds are also incorporated and mingled into the autumn-rich, happiness-instilling soap.

as they're freshly made and new, they're not on shelves yet, and i believe she has just a few more than a half-a-dozen bars from what she prepared weeks ago, once all sets dried in their trays. so if you are interested in the pumpkin spice soap, call the shop a 610.689.0025.

mystery plant-- an answer revealed.

all summer long, i have been itching to find out the name of this plant. it has wide-brimming white flowers that are open by early morning, but once the sun peels out and shoves shadows out of the way, the blooms tighten up and close for the rest of the day. 

the little white dots in the middle of this scene below are the flower.

they are like puffs of whipped cream on paper-thin pieces of nature attached to greenery.

by searching on google, i discovered a blogspot page that finally answered my question-- this is called moonflower. unfortunately, i can't find that same blog again to give the blogger credit.

moonflower is related to the morning glory, which makes good sense in that it opens in the evening and closes up by morning.

weeds grow in dump trucks too.

certain scenes evidence that we have incredibly good garden soil at our 30+ acre location i'll call my place of employment. below, notice the three to four foot tall weeds thriving in the back of this dump truck. the truck is stick shift and has no second gear. it is a trooper ! and apparently so are those weeds, baking in the sun.

but as ghetto as it appears, the truck bed has been cleared of these weeds by now, as we had to take it to the mechanic to be worked on. still. those are some vivacious weeds, in my ever-humble opinion.

so you can tell some other trucks were being used in its place for a few weeks. it's not a vehicle we use every day, especially with the whole second gear being missing and all. that takes a talented driver to maneuver.

mums, asters, and pansies are here !

a shipment of 100 nine inch mums, 40 eight inch asters, and 48 four-and-a-half inch pansies came in today at the garden center. mums and asters are $5.95 each or 3 for $15.00. the little pansies are $2.95 each. stop in if you'd like to check some out for the fall !

a good amount of the asters are already showing their blooms in light purple, darker purple, and some with yellow centers. a few white- blooming asters came in too.

but the mums are mostly still budding, and budding well they are. there should be an assortment of colors in red (including a rustic sun-burnt hue), orange, yellow, white, pink, and purple.

i'll take more photographs once they're actually in full bloom.

the mums are sold as hardy mums and usually come back the next year if you plant them in the ground, not just leaving them in a decorative pot. the asters come back too sometimes but tend to get quite leggy and should but cut back in june if they do become tall. and the pansies sometimes survive as well. it's always nice when certain plants unexpectedly come back the following year.