Tag Fall Garden

More Than One Way to Slice a Jalapeño

Intentergy 2 Comments

What do you do when your buddy Timmy gives you four 5-gallon buckets of jalapeños? You get creative with jalapeño.

Never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, Hubby took Timmy up on the offer to pick some peppers, cucumbers, zucchini, and squash from his massive garden late this past summer. I was excited about the fresh produce and eager to give at least one new recipe a try. Little did I know I would soon be up to my eyeballs in stems, seeds, and researching ways to preserve the plentiful peppers.

Each day I spent 2 hours slicing and seeding peppers by hand for the first two or three days. These carefully crafted slices went into pickled jalapeños. Of course, I wore gloves to protect my skin from the spicy juices but my hands and wrists started to get a little worn out by Day 3. I pulled out my little Pampered Chef food processor and started blending away at the buckets of peppers, but didn’t make much headway because of the blender’s small capacity. Plus, I had moved on to trying a second new recipe. This time I was attempting to make jalapeño relish, and we weren’t too sure if we would like it or use it much. (*We did like it. ** We used it a lot.)

Hubby asked why I didn’t have a bigger blender. I told him because Santa hadn’t brought it yet. Well, Santa came in August with a fancyshmancy, BIG blender. It was going to be perfect for peppers, zucchini, slaw, all the things…. but it was really BIG. The jalapenos were plentiful but petite. This is when we really had to shake things up with how we sliced our peppers.

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Digging for Spring

Intentergy 9 Comments

via Daily Prompt: Bury

Digging for spring is something I find myself doing in the fall. Most Octobers or Novembers I scramble to clear out dying plants and add a few bulbs to my flower bed, but this year I am showing some real ambition for spring. I have extended one flower bed and added another in front of our home this week. (We’ve lived in the house 3 years and I am just now getting to these beds. Don’t judge.)

Tulips and daffodils are my bulbs of  choice this year. Hopefully I will have the chance to enjoy plenty of new blooms come spring, but for now I get to look at fresh turned dirt and mulch, while feeling the pain of more shoveling than my shoulders are used to. 😉

Digging for Spring (3)Even if you are not a gardener, you can appreciate the need to dig for a more beautiful future and maybe that requires us to bury somethings that aren’t so pretty. My favorite things to bury are guilt and worry. I want to stick them deep in the ground and pray that they fertilize something much more enjoyable in the next season of my life.

Digging for Spring 5In addition to the bulbs, I have added a few mums. Mums are my favorite perennial because they bloom for a long time and come back every year. There are plenty of perennial elements in our world and I encourage you to celebrate and give thanks for recurring pleasantries. Whether that annual awesomeness comes from birthdays or anniversaries or more frequently, like weekly coffee with your BFF or breathtaking sunsets each evening, relish the dependability that blooms in your life.

Right now I encourage you to dig deep for intents that will bloom into beautiful moments and memories. Bury ugly and unfruitful practices, habits, and influences and let their absence make room for more fruitful experiences. Planting positivity always blooms grace, gratitude, and joy.

By: Melanie A. Peters

P.S. Fertilizer is stinky, but so are guilt and worry. Don’t use too much of any of those. It really burns up the joy in planting.