A low carbon footprint dinner

Tonight for dinner my husband and I made spaghetti. I know, nothing special about that, but we made the spaghetti sauce almost entirely of food from our back yard and also made the spaghetti noodles from scratch.

The spaghetti sauce used tomatoes (lots of organic heirloom tomatoes), basil, oregano, parsley, thyme, and lemon all grown in our back yard. The only things we added to the sauce not from our garden were vinegar, brown sugar, salt and pepper.

The pasta was made using eggs, whole wheat flour and some water. Of course we used a pasta machine to make the pasta.

We rounded out the meal with some wine, baguettes and homemade lemonade. For desert we had some vanilla soy ice cream with chocolate sauce.

The only trash we had that didn't go in the compost bin was the bottle from the wine we drank and the container from the soy ice cream we had for desert. It was also a relatively inexpensive meal, especially if you consider what you would have to pay at a restaurant for a similar meal.

It was a wonderful meal that we were lucky enough to share with a few friends under the stars on our patio, well we do also have some string lights up to provide a little light when the sun has already set like it had tonight.

Planning a garden

I have been starting to plan out our "garden" for a while now, but now that the house is painted and we are getting closer to fencing in our front yard the time to start the labor of planting things is quickly approaching me. I intend to transplant the vast majority of plants that were already on the property when we bought the house. We are hoping to go with an English cottage style garden in the front yard. Basically no grass, just flowers and herbs and things with paths going through the yard. I am still trying to decide on how I want to add a seating area to the front yard - do I want a small patio area in the middle of the yard or would it be better just to have a bench in front of one of the trees or a combination of the two (a patio area right off the tree with a bench and table and chairs).

While I looking up herbs (how tall they get, how far they need to be spaced out, what kind of environment they prefer, etc.) I stumbled upon this great webpage that discusses companion planting. This is of great interest to me because I prefer to keep as organic a gardening atmosphere as possible and knowing what to plant next to what to help control pests is very useful information. I was really excited to see that I can help deter aphids by planting garlic next to my roses. This was super exciting to me because last year I had a huge infestation of aphids in the rose garden at the house we were renting and the house we bought has several rose bushes as well. If you don't know what aphids are you are really lucky cause they are so disgusting to have all over your rose bushes. I saw them on pretty much every rose bush in town last year so I really hope that planting garlic with my rose bushes keeps those nasty aphids away.

Here is a link to the webpage I stumbled across on companion planting: http://www.thefarm.org/charities/i4at/lib2/complant.htm