Tostada Tuesday

Almost every Tuesday, and especially since the kids started school, we have tostadas.  For the most part we have also adopted Comida.  The tradition of eating your large meal in the early afternoon.  This works out great since 1.) Sam works a lot of evenings and dinner is over and cleaned up well before he needs to leave  2.) The kids come home hungry and waiting until dinner just makes them more hungry.  We have actually had left overs eating on this schedule.  That's pretty much a miracle with two teen boys.  3.)  Dinner is over and cleaned up and you have the rest of the evening free to do other things.  We usually have a lighter meal in the evening, something easy to fix and easy to clean up...like cereal, a sandwich, or left overs.

Tostadas are perfect for this schedule, especially on Tuesdays and Thursday.  On these days the kids workout hard the last hour of school and I try to go workout also.  When we get home everybody helps get toppings out while the beans reheat and dinner is ready!  One of our friends told me tostadas are comida floja...or lazy food.  Lazy or not, it is defiantly easy.  It is really that fast when you have refried beans that you took out of the freezer in morning.  Once upon a time, I blogged my bean recipe, but that blog platform isn't even available anymore.  I'll try to repost the recipe soon.  

Toppings always include beans, cabbage, and salsa.  Other options are sour cream, cheese, tomatoes, avocado, and chilis.  Everybody makes their own, which is even better.  

What is your favorite "comida floja"?

Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving Day!  

We were blessed to be able to celebrate with fellow missionaries that we love.  Everybody pitched in and we had turkey, stuffing, pecan pie...the works really.  And of course, we have so very much to be thankful for this year.  You can check out this post about Gracen's birth or this post of some of the fun ministry things we get to be a part of to see some of the awesome things we are so thankful for this year.

One of the things that is hard to find down here is sweet potatoes like the ones that grow in my grandmother's garden.  However, it might be that one of those sweet potatoes from my grandmother's garden ended up down here after one of our trips and it might have sprouted and then ended up in my garden.  Wednesday we dug up the area to see if we actually had any sweet potatoes under the ground...

Thought I would add this one, because, well, this is what is going on at our house and it's great!  Just have to share the cuteness!

Growing Luffa

Sam has set up a garden for me in almost all of the 15 or so houses we have lived in.  It is where I like to go to quietly work and think and pray.  It is where I can catch my breath and breathe deep.  Unfortunately, as of late it has been hard to have enough time to do even basic garden chores.  The saga of this garden is long and interesting only to me, so I'll spare you the details.  We moved into this house September of 2012 and I finally have a bit of green in the garden.  If we can only survive the dry season, we will be golden.  I wanted to share one of my successes from the garden and a new plant for me, Luffa.  It survived much neglect and powdery mildew when almost all other types of squashes and even the cucumbers perished.  

You can eat them in stir fry when they are green and young.  We haven't tried that yet.  We allowed ours to dry and turn brown.  Then we gave them a good shake to harvest all the seeds.  That was super fun and made a neat sound.  Once most of the seeds were out we soaked the dried luffa in water for about 45 minutes.  Below you can see Haden easily peeling off the out layer.  Once that is gone we laid them in the sun to dry.  

They work great for scrubbing both your body and your dishes.  I can't wait to include them in little gift baskets with some homemade soap.  We are loving the low maintenance, useful luffa plant.

We Won!

Well, somehow we won the war of the leaf-cutting ants.  I have to say, it's bitter sweet.  They were such fascinating, happy, industrious little creatures.  Now the garden seems so still.  Still, I'm thrilled to be harvesting all the beautiful produce.  

Beautiful beets!  This one was juiced with carrots and some wheat grass I also grew.  It made a very sweet juice.

I harvested most of the lettuce that was left.  Some of it was going to seed, since it's starting to get warmer.  This should be enough for our lunch salads for the rest of the week.  We've enjoyed lots of salad from this little patch this winter (along with the ants).  I was a little sad to pull it up, but that's how the cycle works.  I've planted bush beans in their place.

Lots of veggies for broths, stir fries, and salad fixn's

This is cabbage and swiss chard.  The six small squares of swiss chard are doing so well, that I have enough for green smoothies for the whole family about every other day.

The radishes are doing great.

Lena loves eating them right out of the garden.

We planted this smaller variety of carrots.  The ground can be pretty hard, so these little guys don't have to battle the hard ground to grow.

This is the first time I have even planted broccoli.  They have done really well.  We also have leeks, turnips, collard greens, parsley, cilantro, and kale.  

So, there's my winter garden!  I just started some tomato, eggplant, pepper, and lemon grass seeds for the spring summer garden.  The little pods with seeds and all their potential are sitting on my dresser in my bedroom, just days away from sticking their little green sprouts out of the top of the soil.  I'll be able to put tomato plants out in March!  And just think our friends up in Greenland are celebrating because they finally saw the sun for 10 minutes last week!  Happy to be serving God in Mexico.  Happy Gardening ya'll! 

The Ants Go Marching One By One.

The ants go marching one by one.

Hoorah! Hoorah!

The ants go marching one by one.

Hoorah! Hoorah!

The ants go marching one by one;

The little one stops to suck his thumb,

And they all go marching down into the ground

To get out of the rain.

Boom, boom, boom, boom!

The song should really go "down into the ground piece by tiny piece with all my garden.  Grrr, grrr, grrr, grrr!"

mage courtesy of SweetCrisis / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

All the gardening advice I have for the US says that, besides the fact that ants sometimes cultivate aphids, they are harmless. Harmless!! They have obviously never encountered the leafcutter ant, because they are NOT harmless.  They have moved in and built a MASSIVE labyrinth of tunnels under my garden.  I am not exaggerating, there must be a million or more.  

"Leafcutter ants cut leaves from plants and trees and grow fungus on these cut fragments. The ants use this fungus to feed their larvae (the ants themselves mostly imbibe plant sap from the cut leaf fragments). ...

Leaf cutter ants are limited to the arid, semi-tropical and tropical regions of South, Central, and North America, but they are one of the ecologically-dominant ants everywhere they are found. They are arguably the most well-known of the ants to the local people and foreign tourists in these regions, mainly because of their spectacular habit of carrying colored petals or green leaves in foraging lines that may stretch more than 250 meters from their nest! 

Leaf cutter ants have one of the most sophisticated animal societies in the world. This is because of their unusual method of farming (they are the only animal besides humans who grow their own food from living matter), their extremely large colony sizes (up to 8 million individuals per colony in one species, Atta sexdens), and their fantastic caste system (with ants of different sizes and forms specialized for various tasks in the colony)." The Guide to Leafcutter Ants.

This is a formidable enemy! *sigh*  

Doesn't the mere sight of this cause you to shudder, bring cold sweats, toss and turn at night?

I have tried every trick I know, every trick I could google, and even resorted to spraying commercial bug sprays into their ant hills that are a "reasonable" distance from my organic garden.  All while the leafcutter ants march on, singing there happy song, waving their thanks that I am growing such wonderful plants for them in this very dry year, and rolling on the ground laughing at all my efforts to evict them.  I have gardened in three countries, four states in the US and two states in Mexico.  I have battled, aphids, slugs, powdery mildew, drought and I have been triumphant.  I am not a novice! 

My garden is my refuge, it's where I go when I am discouraged, unfocused, tired, bewildered.  It's where I laugh and cry and pray.  It's the one of the constants in my life.  It is where, to my great enjoyment, I have produced hundreds if not thousands of pounds of wholesome food for my family.  It is my deep sigh.

Happily marching along! Hurrah!  Hurrah!

Quite fascinating really!

Sawing down the carrots!  They love their greens!

So, here's some points to remember.  All my/our efforts have not be for not, we've shared but they haven't even gotten the grand majority.  This is actually my bonus garden.  We didn't get here until the 3rd week of August and I didn't plan to garden until the spring, but hubby knows how much joy it brings me, so he and a man from our home church prepared the spot.  And finally, I've still got a little fight left and a few more tricks up my sleeve, so watch out.  For right now, the kids and I go out and spray them off the plants with water, stomp out every ant we can find and generally try to disrupt their happy march several times a day.  It's not 100% and it's a good bit of effort, but it is keeping most of the garden from disappearing under the ground. :)

One for the blackbird.

One for the mouse.

One for the rabbit.

And one for the house.

I always thought that philosophy was for other suckers.  Look who's the sucker now.  LOL! :)