If you've ever considered composting your food scraps, I say "What are you waiting for?!?" The above photo represents not even a day's worth of food scraps generated by my family of four. It almost covered the entire surface of an 11x17 inch cookie sheet. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that approximately 20 to 30 percent of your trash is comprised of food scraps and yard waste. When added to a landfill, they release methane gas, a highly potent and low profile cousin of carbon dioxide. Both are harmful greenhouse gases. As a gardener, it's a no brainer to convert our food scraps to "black gold." My first attempt involved a process used by Trudi Temple, a well-known Chicago area gardener who buried her food scraps in holes around her yard. I did this too, ...
Egg-Free Oatmeal Cranberry Cookies
When my daughter was diagnosed with SIBO and allergies to eggs, soy and nuts, it quickly became apparent that cookies were a no-no. Gasp! If you find an affordable egg-free cookie that meets the criteria to keep her gut healthy, I'm all ears. Since her diagnosis last year, I've spent a lot of time in the kitchen trying to come up with recipes that were appealing to all of us. What mom has the time to create individual meal plans? And what I found is that it is possible to have an egg-free, relatively healthy cookie that we all can enjoy. I say relatively because butter, flour and sugar are involved, but it's a cookie for crying out loud and the butter's grass-fed, the sugar's brown and the flour is whole wheat. I also added ground flax seed for some nutritional punch in the form of Omega-3 ...
Shake the Winter Blues with a Visit to Chicago’s Garfield Park Conservatory
I had never visited the Garfield Park Conservatory so when my friend and fellow writer/plant lover Beth Botts offered a guided tour in the middle of February, my guy and I were Johnny-on-the-spot. A two-acre public greenhouse is good medicine for winter weary souls. Often referred to as "landscape art under glass," the conservatory is part of the Chicago Park District and is located on the city's West Side. It's a horticultural phoenix, rising from the ashes of disrepair, public disinterest and a colossal hailstorm in 2011 that shattered half of the glass panes in the fern room. For months, workers armed with tweezers painstakingly removed shards of glass from priceless plants, some of which have been there since the conservatory's opening in 1908. The conservatory was designed by ...
The Day Mister Lincoln Found Peace at the Tropicana – A Rose Tale
It's hard to say when the gardening bug bit but I think it was more like a culmination of bites that swelled into one enormous green thumb. The result? A pleasant itch that must always be scratched and a plethora of memories that share a common theme. Plants. I was raised on Jefferson Street in Harvey, IL, and if you know Harvey, you know it ain't all that pleasant. It wasn't then and it still isn't. Poor, gang-ridden, loud. The kind of place where you're lulled to sleep by gunfire, barking dogs and screaming. Where if you had a lawn you were the exception. We didn't have a lawn. But I could make one badass mud pie complete with clover flower "frosting." Our next door neighbor, Mr. Randall, doted over his lawn. It was a verdant carpet that met it's demise in a drive-by. Some kid ...
Growing Figs in the Midwest: An Experiment
Hard to believe, but I had big plans for these two little sticks the moment I laid eyes on them at Costco last March. What gardener isn't hungry to play in the dirt after a long winter? They didn't look like much but the moment I realized they were Chicago Hardy figs (Ficus carica) I was instantly envisioning fig jam, prosciutto wrapped figs, figs stuffed with blue cheese. Figs. Figs. Figs. The reality however, is that I haven't got a clue how to grow a fig tree, but the fact that it's got Chicago AND Hardy in it's name has to mean I might not kill them. Right? At just four inches from root to tip, the saplings were on the dry side, the tiny leaves crisp and barely hanging on. A bit of condensation on the inside of each bag told me they weren't completely parched but the roots would ...
SIBO: More Than Just A Tummy Ache
You never realize the importance of the passenger seat airbag "ON" light illuminating until it doesn't any longer. Little things like this are taken for granted. Kinda like how the sun will always rise. Until it doesn't. So when the light glowed last week (for the first time in over a year) as my daughter Abigail settled into the seat, we were silent. It's significance meant more than just the reassurance it provided, it meant my daughter was healing. The sun was rising and man was it bright. At 82 pounds and 13 years old, she was slight but strong, her weight enough to allow her to sit in the front passenger seat. This was June 2016 and around this time, things started to change. Long tearful stints in the bathroom, tummy aches after every meal or snack. A general feeling of malaise that ...
