Crystal Madrilejos

After my 40 Days of Being Active, I’ve felt a lot of motivation to keep the momentum going. So, I’ve decided to spend the next 30 days following The Whole30 program. After a week of preparation, I kicked off the 30 days starting yesterday. I’d heard a lot about The Whole30 through different blogs I read and through people I follow on Instagram but never really felt the need to try it, until now. We usually take a common sense approach to eating in our house, and to use the phrase coined by Michael Pollan, we “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” and this has worked for us. (more…)

At the end of 2013, as part of my creative coaching session with Kathleen of Braid Creative I did a 40 day commitment to one aspect of my dream day. I chose waking up earlier. I had been craving some alone time to do productive work (mainly writing and creating) and the early morning hours were my only viable option. So, I made the commitment to wake up earlier – even if it was only 10 minutes. And now, almost six months later, I consistently wake up at least an hour and a half earlier than I had been before the 40 day commitment.

Because that technique seemed to work really well for me, I decided to use it to tackle another aspect of my life that I’ve been wanting to change for a long time with the goal of making it a routine:

I decided to make a daily commitment to being active for 40 days straight.

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Potatoes have been one of our favorite veggies to grow since we started our garden because they are so fun to harvest. It’s like digging for treasure! Up until this year we’ve mainly done one big harvest at the end of the season for storage potatoes. But our storage set up hasn’t been ideal and we seemed to end up with lots of sprouting spuds – okay for seed potatoes but not great for eating. This year we plan on harvesting as we grow (it’s a sign that potatoes are forming below ground when the plant starts to flower.) We’ve tried a few different growing methods over the years – planting in-ground and hilling the soil around the plants as they grow, a build-as-you-go bin, and last year started growing in a few different containers. I can’t say so far whether one has been more successful in terms of the amount of yield, though bins are less time consuming but a lot of soil is needed on hand to keep filling as the plants grow. (more…)

Thanks to our brother-in-law, we got hooked on kombucha a few months back. And thankfully, our last batch just wrapped up its 10-day ferment. We didn’t time our previous batch with our vacation which resulted in a a short, yet torturous, kombucha-less existence upon our return. Ha! But in all seriousness, this stuff is really good, despite looking like an alien baby floating in formaldehyde. (more…)

More photos from Q. Thankfully, the Endless Winter of 2013-2014 looks like it’s finally coming to an end. As I type this, I can hear the birds outside and it’s 6:45am and the sky is light, all the tell-tale sign of spring. These pictures pretty much sum up our winter. Runny noses and cabin fever.

If you’re coming here for the first time – Q is our 4-year-old son who likes to take photos. See past photos here and here.

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Years ago when we started our first garden we jumped all in and grew pretty much anything and everything we could, even if we had no idea what to do with it. Back before Kale was all the rage, we grew it because we were young and ambitious and wanted to just grow the weirdest things we could find (Kale being one such “weird” thing) and when it was time to harvest we were like, “Now what?” – we literally had never made anything with Kale. Fast-forward to our current garden. We’re a bit more selective in what we grow due to space and time restrictions, years (it doesn’t take many) of gardening toil have made us a bit less ambitious in certain ways and a bit more humbled by the force that is nature (aka the damn deer, the groundhogs, chipmunks, birds, bugs and the weeds). But Kale… good ol’ Kale… has become a staple that goes into everything from smoothies and fresh juice, to breakfast scrambles or kale chips. Plus, not only is it really healthy, but it’s a workhorse during our zone’s colder months, a superfood in more ways than one! (more…)

Whew. It’s been a wild couple of weeks… or months, I should say.

And with all that’s been going on, I’ve been doing some self-reflection and it seems that after many years of plugging away I’ve come to realize that not being hasty has worked greatly in mine and Andrew’s favor.

There has been an avalanche of action happening right now in our lives as I’ve been working through the launch of Wild Daughters and Andrew explores future ventures and we work to put ourselves in optimal positioning to hopefully, eventually build a house; many of our plans that we’ve been slowly working towards all these years are finally coming to fruition. Slowly, but surely. Pretty much goes against all notions that moving up in the world has to be accompanied by this fast paced, high-aiming trajectory, that moves at ever increasing speeds. Well, I’m here to tell you that perseverance and small-moves can be powerful work horses. (more…)

A little recap from week one of maple tapping season 2014! We started tapping our trees on March 9th and between then and the day we boiled (last Sunday, March 16th) we got about 20 gallons of sap. The weather hasn’t been ideal, with only a few days going above freezing, but it was enough for us to get a decent batch. Since we knew we were only going to be able to boil on the weekends, we had to store the sap in the meantime and were a bit thankful for the cold weather. (more…)

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It’s that time of the year again. When temperatures start reaching above 40 degrees during the day, but going back down below freezing at night, you know it’s Maple tapping season. We put the taps in this week and so begins our second year of tapping.

Last year we tapped the two huge maple trees in our backyard on a whim. I came across the post on Simple Bites where Aimee and Danny tap their trees with their kids and I was struck by how simple the process was. Put taps in the trees, collect sap, boil. Simple as that, though our process could definitely use some refinement. After only tapping for one year, we are hardly experts, but we did make enough maple syrup last year to get us through most of the winter (we just finished our last jar, but had to ration it towards the end) and are trying out a new boiling method this year. You don’t need any fancy gear, as last year proved. We boiled our sap in a large stock pot over a fire. It took many, many hours to do it this way, but it still worked. This year, we decided to take it up a notch because thats what we do! I plan on doing a post around our process this year, once we’ve got at least one boiling session under out belt so I can report on how our new set up is working out. But in the meantime, I reached out to a family friend who has been tapping the trees around her house for years to share some tips and insights into their process. (more…)