freebie tomatoes are the thing sometimes.

i would really love to come back here more, to this blog. this weekend, i scheduled no interviews, hiking, or other plans. the hours of this weekend will be dedicated exclusively to gardening and yard cleanup and hopefully not burning to a pennsylvania dutch and irish crisp, with the help of some sunscreen and the floppiest straw hat i ever owned. and some sunglasses. 

i love when tomato parts mate and make new children. these are two happenin' offspring from near my compost area last year. the freebie plants that popped up via kind nature-efforts this year are still in the process of growing and are apparently leaning toward being more sizable. 

now that i think of it, maybe these tomato kids weren't in fact hybridized but instead ones that had blurred seed parents making their way to my yard from my neighbor's garden. either way, they were free. and i love when food ties in such freedom.  i am a grateful eater. nommm.

an ode to those little orbs of rainbow parts.

x-posted from news, not blues:

bubbles are everything that is fun in the world. 

go make some happen. seriously, though.

s'now way-- yet again.

i missed posting for a year. too many things to do, ah.

this winter is compensating for all the easy ones that came before it. a whopping snowfall today will soon have another one following it, just a few hours later.

i never expected to love a machine so much, a snowblower from a friend who was kind enough to give me very affordable pricing, and it was almost new when i brought it home.

today's revving and augering took more than two hours. thank lordisa for the snowblower. the thing deserves a name. i'll work on that.

while i now have social media dwindling due to liking privacy better, this blog may not be something even a few people stumble across if i begin posting again more, which is my hope. but that works for me. i really have missed this place and spending some energy on nature-swept eye-scenes and word throwings. it all benefits the heart and peace the world needs.

goldflame honeysuckle moves along in song-speak sometimes.

life-minutes for words about the two-toned sweet-smelling petal love here may be few, but at least some of the garden kindly takes care of itself while i'm working many a job and trying to squeeze hiking and other good times in on weekends.

take the good of the world and your garden with you in every new day !

Heirloom fruits & veggies are relics.

Before the food-growing industry's most practiced approaches were rewritten, fruits and vegetables took on a diversity of impeccable flavors, curious colors and skin patterns, and unexpected yet eye-piquing shapes. Heirlooms are the name given to those that survived.

The last century's strong commercial push involved seeds for crops being developed into hybrids intended to yield high amounts with sturdier outer skins.

This large-scale shift in agriculture, starting with the seed, led to a lot of sacrifice in taste while sometimes diminishing the nutritional value per plant.

Heirlooms are food relics all their own. They behave differently than mass-produced garden and field crops by having less-standard mature growth sizes and food-bearing periods.

To read the rest of this article, visit this lil' link. 

sassier salad selections.

when they sang on the simpsons years ago that ''you don't make friends with salad,'' i think it was just that whoever ''you'' was, was making a boring-as-a-curse word salad. 

this delish dish included hydroponic salad blend lettuce from butter valley harvest, tomatoes, avocados, craisins, hard-boiled eggs, olive oil, lemon juice, and pink salt. i forgot the snapea crisps. oops. still, nom and a half.

solar toys-- stirring my proverbial sun-soaked fancy.

meet my new crew. these fellows are a bit sun-inspired with their more positive provocations. the frog performs some darn happy hopping, the racecar zooms along with quick-spinning little tires, and the grasshopper jitters about-- all through the solar persuasion of their backsides.

over the past few months, i featured stokes solar green toys & goods on phillyecocity.com and also in lancaster farming, the reading eagle, and with some outside penning-assistance, in news, not blues as well.

john stokes, who is the man behind the oley operation of green-speak in toy-sly approaches to shifting how energy is viewed on the local level, also recently introduced a first-ever wind-powered toy to his lineup.

and another enticing update is that he's working on bringing educational workshops into schools, using the toys. children will learn how the fun-time perks are put together, building the critters and cars themselves, sometimes, to really absorb function-smart ways while seeing how solar energy has such environmental potential.

and of course, on top of all that, the crew is just darn cute. i am a lucky garden harlot to have such lil' props of versatility and excitement-stirring, sun-powered jollies. mhm !