Easy Baby Food

Does someone at your house eat baby food? Consider making your own! Making your own baby food has multiple benefits:

1. You know the source of your child's food. Food-born illness epidemics (E. Coli in Spinach, salmonella in peanut butter, etc.) are most often spread through food that has been subjected to multiple handling, processing, and packaging steps.

2. Easier access to wide varieties of vegetarian, vegan, and/or organic foods for your child.

3. Cheaper than buying the individual, tiny containers.

4. Less packaging waste. Even recycling the glass containers uses energy that isn't required when you make your own.

How easy is it to make your own baby food? Really easy! A blender, food processor, or kitchen food mill can easily make baby food at home. But small, portable food mills that you can stick in your kid's diaper bag abound too! For an example, check out the Wean Machine. You can even find light and portable food mills at stores like Whole Foods.

Garden in Central Florida

Gardening in Central Florida, we have some unique challenges in our experimentation with the earth. These are some of the elements we will be learning to work with:

First, our soil is very sandy, which makes it extremely easy to work with, but it lacks rich organic matter and drains water quickly.

Secondly, our seasons in no way resemble those described in gardening books. We sort of have two seasons: "decent" (October through April) and "extremely hot" (May through September). Add to this the fact that we have a "wet season" (June through September) and a "dry spell" (April and May), and you see our confusion when it comes to ordinary "spring," "summer," or "fall" crop divisions.

Likewise, and thirdly, our climate thus requires modifications to many recommended gardening methods. For example, we must ignore the most often recommended watering regiment (water deeply but not often), since the heat dries out the sand quickly.

Then, of course, comes the humidity, which makes many Southern gardens more susceptible to plant diseases. And with no winter, we have no respite of pests either.