Nice Trash

daphne on June 15, 2008

Once upon a time a catcall was a catcall. Superficial as it may be, boys, whether in the dorms or on the construction site, whistled at what they saw. And the twisted world made sense.

Now that I’m the resident champion of all things green, things have changed. Last week we had people over for dinner. Neal, my friend’s husband, swaggered into the kitchen and nodded approvingly. Ok, maybe he didn’t swagger, and to be fair there was no waggling eyebrows, but boy oh boy was he impressed:

Nice trash! How can you get away with such a small garbage can?

With pride, we showed off compost heap and recycling bins. Help me; when did my inner dork start roaming freely?

If you’ve known me awhile and are somehow holding on to a vestigial sense of my coolness, you may want to tune out for this next comment:

Our compost pile is super cool.

Not in the same way that two-for-one cosmos are cool. Not like swishing down the slopes sans kids is cool. But as far as back-yard-burb-tales go, we’re not generating a ton o’ trash. Let’s let that be exciting.

OK, you can open your eyes again.Compost Kids

Forget Disney, composting is fun for the whole family! Here are the girls, enthusiastically embracing their newest chore…the dumping o’ the compost.

Look at those smiles. Lucky lucky girls.

Show some respect for peats sake, I’m talking here. There may not be much junk in this old trunk, but you totally just checked out my trash!


Rhubarb, one tough old gal

daphne on June 7, 2008

Ahhh, reproduction. Who could forget fifth grade with its squirm-worthy talk of budding and asexual reproduction and new boobs and busy bees? Back then, nary a day passed without the girls getting herded off to the gym and the boys skulking down to the art room to hear promises of puberty, and treats and terrors to come.

Mama Rhubarb

But those seasons, they go round and round and now here we stand firmly on the other side. We’ve seen for ourselves from whence babies come, and those babies have themselves come home from school bearing their own dixie cups of sprouted peapods in hand.

It seems that although puberty is (thankfully) a thing of my past, I still don’t know all there is to know about baby-making. Just this spring I happened upon a new term of reproduction: propagate. As in, come on Billy-Bob, let’s get down and dirty and start propagatin’. Which brings me to rhubarb. We inherited one old plant.

Tough gal. Despite considerable overcrowding and our laissez-faire gardening approach, she bore us plenty that first year. We were cruel, ignoring her unless a hankering for rhubarb crumble reared up and demanded we pluck her plentiful stalks. However, when our neighbor poured concrete to reset his fence posts smack dab on top of her, my mothering instincts kicked in. It was time to save Rhubarb.

Mama Rhubarb and her little Rhubarbarinos

I searched online, followed some directions, and wham! bam! I made me some baby rhubarbarinos. You heard it here first–propagating is the wave of the future. And rhubarb? Oh, I have plenty to say about rhubarb. I’m just getting started. You’ll hear more about our old gal for sure.

Grab a cigar by the way, congratulations are due: Look what our tough mama created: Seven little rhubarb-arinos. Come on, aren’t they cute?

(Cute, yes, and mighty tasty too. Here’s a tasty recipe that has my kids chanting for more rhubarb!)