Green Thumb: Companion Planting

In Texas, we get spring started a little early,usually the end of February/beginning of March.  This is very exciting for a gal from NH, where spring doesn’t show her face consistently until at least May.  That is why I typically ignore the general recommendation to wait until after March 21  (when it is consistently above 40 degrees) to plant tomatoes, basil and peppers and get my garden in the ground around St. Patty’s Day.  This year, I dared to go one week earlier. This is how it looked after planting.

And this is how it looked the first week of April when we had a very late hard freeze. I did cover these bad boys, but this was no brief dip below 40. It was a chilly 32 degrees!

All my tomatoes, peppers and basil plants died along with a few beans. Eggplant was the sole survivor of this box. Even sadder, it was slim pickings at the Natural Gardener when I went to replace my crops as most everyone has purchased their starter plants by April.

Happily, three weeks later, everything is thriving. I used a concept called companion planting to plan out my raised beds. This is the notion that certain plants help each other out in terms of providing nutrients, pest control and pollination. I read a lot of articles on this technique, but found the chart on this site  and on wikipedia the easiest to follow. The list of crops I desire in my  garden includes:

• tomatoes
• eggplant
• peppers
• cucumber
• beans
• peas
• carrots
• onions
• shallots
• garlic
• lettuce
• strawberries
• basil

Tomatoes, eggplant and peppers are all part of the nightshade family. Good companions for nightshades include alliums (garlic, onions, shallots), mints (basil, oregano) and carrots. Basil increases the yield of tomatoes and carrots help them to grow, although somewhat at the expense of their own growth. In addition, marigolds or nasturtium flowers help repel pests.

Cucumbers grow well with beans, peas, celery and lettuce. Nasturtiums repel cucumber beetles and corn protects against bacterial wilt and gives the cucumber something which to climb. Cucumbers do not grow well with cauliflower, potato, basil or any strong aromatic herb.

Beans and peas work well with carrot, corn, cucumber, squash, radish, turnip, spinach, lettuce, mint, potatoes and brassicas (broccoli, cabbage, brussell sprouts and cauliflower). Corn lends climbing support and squash helps to suppress weeds.  Like other legumes, beans and peas contain nitrogen-fixing bacteria and are great soil amenders. They do not like to be planted with alliums.

Carrots help the growth of tomatoes and alliums. They are, in turn, helped by alliums, rosemary, parsley and sage, which all deter the carrot rust fly. Beans add nitrogen to the soil, which carrots love. They do not do well with dill or parsnip.

Alliums help nightshades, brassicas, and carrots, as already mentioned, as well as fruit trees. Avoid planting with beans, peas or parsley.

Lettuce helps radish by repelling earth flies while radish helps spinach (leafminers prefer the radish leaves). Both do well with strawberries and peas and beans help by providing shade these cool weather crops prefer.

Based on the above info, I mapped out my 3 beds.

Box 1 (4×10): Snap peas, beans, spinach, lettuce, cucumbers, strawberry (not planted this season as it was too late), nasturtiums

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Box 2: (4×10) Carrots, onions/garlic/shallots (to be planted in September), tomatoes, basil, marigolds

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Box 3 (4×12): Tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, basil, marigolds

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Things are looking a tad bit crowded in box one but will ease up once all the lettuce is harvested (likely by end of May). I can’t wait until all my hard work pays off! I really hope my veggies like their BFFs.

Mrs. Fix It

During my not so stellar week at the end of February, I learned two other tricks in addition to removing vaseline from a mischievous toddler’s hair.

1) How to Improve White Discoloration on Plastic Eyeglass Frames

My last two pairs of eyeglasses have had plastic tortoise shell frames. I love the look; however, plastic frames are a pain in the butt for two reasons. First, they lose shape quickly. This is a real problem for me since I apparently have a small head (my frames previous to this were children’s size and boasted of a Harry Potter emblem- enough said). The constant pushing of glasses back onto nose contributes to the second problem- deterioration of the plastic. Apparently, most plastic frames are made of a substance called cellulose acetate. Things like body oils, perspiration, UV rays and heat can cause the plasticizers to rise to the surface of the frame coating them with a milky white discoloration. This is what eventually led to me getting new frames a few years ago as the old ones were so discolored that they were unwearable. Unwearable until a certain toddler mutilated my new frames. Now I have no choice but to wear these sorry looking frames.

A google search led me to several possible solutions. There was a suggestion to sand the frames at the discolored areas. I was not brave enough for such a permanent solution so kept looking. That is when I came upon a theory that plastic frames need to be reconditioned regularly like you would wax your skis or care for the leather interior of your car. Among the suggested lubricants for the job were Amor All, Vaseline (you must be kidding), Jojoba oil, WD-40 and lanolin. Of those, I had lanolin on hand (leftover nipple cream). Here is what my glasses looked like after applying lanolin and leaving them to sit overnight.

Definite improvement. There is just a small amount of white discoloration where the frame sits on the bridge of my nose.  I noticed the white started coming back in other areas in less than 24 hours so applied some more lanolin later that night. Here is how they look now.

No more white! Yea! This is the good news. The bad news is that under certain circumstances (like when I wear my glasses while working in the heated swimming pool at work), the white returns. Fortunately, it goes away within a few hours and I reapply lanolin whenever it looks like I need to. My week was beginning to look up.

For more reading on this topic:

• Anyways: Plastic Eyeglass Frame Discoloration
• eHow: How to Clean the White Off Plastic Frame Eyeglasses

2) What To Do If Phone Gets Wet and Your Speakers Stop Working

So in stupor while getting in bed, I knocked over a glass of water/juice on my nightstand. This is where my iPhone was sitting and I thought I swept it up before there was any significant damage. There were a few drops of water on the screen. I wiped them off, plugged my phone in and continued on to bed. Big mistake. The next morning, while the hubby was frantically trying to get a hold of me, I picked up the phone and heard nothing on the other end. I noticed that the phone was indicating that my head phones were in so I put them in and could hear perfectly. I could also hear fine if I put my phone on speaker phone. I called and made an appointment with the Apple Genius bar expecting to have to replace my phone. But I also found there was plenty of advice-some good, some bad- on the world wide web.

The first thing I tried was putting it in the freezer for 90 seconds. I am not sure where I found this suggestion, but I later read that you should never freeze your phone or put a hairdryer to it. Luckily, it did nothing. Onto the next solution, cleaning the headphone jack with a q-tip. Here is a link to a video clip explaining this. Apparently, it works wonders for many. I was not so lucky. I was about to give up in despair when I called my little sister and she said I should power down my phone and stick it in a bag of rice. This did the trick and my phone was working fine in no time. God forbid if there’s a next time, I’ll stick a piece of tape over the charger jack so I don’t have to pick rice out of it, lol. Thanks little sis. I will be holding out a little longer before getting a new phone.

Triumphant Return of Green Thumb!: Lasagna Gardening

I love gardening. I obviously inherited this love from my father and grandfather who had very large and vigorous New England gardens. My Mom, however, is still completely dumbfounded that I have pursued this hobby in my adulthood. Perhaps, it is because I spent the better part of my childhood summers coming up with excuses as to why I could not help out in the garden. Picking rocks is not all that appealing to children, but if the love is truly genetic, there is hope for Juliette yet

Last year, I blogged quite a bit about my garden until I had to leave it at the end of May to move into our new house. This house has kept me plenty busy, but there was a void that could only be filled by dirt between my fingers. I told Dean he could help me LOVE this house by adding a garden to our priority list.

Fortunately, my father-in-law is handy and more than happy to make me some raised garden beds when he visited for Christmas. The dirt at the new house is very different from the old, although we are only 3 miles down the road. Instead of a clay soil (which was not fun to prep beds), we have very shallow topsoil with limestone underneath. We discovered this very quickly when we needed a pick axe to plant even 4″ starter plants by the pool. This would mean a LOT of work to prepare a 20×12 garden area like I had previously, so we decided to have three raised beds instead. I pinned a lot of raised beds on my pinterest idea board and found several sites boasting of plans for inexpensive raised beds- as low as $10. We got a good laugh out of that one when Lowes rung up all our materials. We opted for cedar for its longevity and I, err, went a bit over budget. Here are my beautiful boxes- two 4x10s and one 4×12. My FIL even routered the edges. Very fancy!

The next task was filling the boxes. I found a handy soil calculator online. You enter the length, width and depth of your beds and it tells you the amount of soil needed in cubic feet and cubic yards. The bad news was that my beds called for about 40 cubic feet for the smaller beds and 48  for the larger beds. That’s nearly 5 yards of dirt! Yikes!

In researching an alternative way to fill my beds, I stumbled upon a concept called lasagna gardening. Lasagna gardening is a form of no dig gardening that involves alternating layers of carbon rich and nitrogen rich organic matter that will compost over time giving you rich, fluffy soil. This is typically done in the off-season so that the layers will cook down in time for spring planting; however, it can be done at virtually any time if you add a 4-6 inch layer of soil mix to the top. This is the option I chose since I didn’t prep my beds until the end of February.

Much of the layers can be gathered for free with a little bit of leg work.

Green nitrogen-rich layers include:

• Grass clippings
• Spent blooms, trimmings from pruning garden and flower beds
• Fruit and vegetable scraps
• Coffee grounds (free from Starbucks)
• Tea leaves and tea bags
• Alfalfa
• Manure
• Seaweed
• Blood meal or bone meal

Brown carbon-rich layers include:

• Crushed leaves
• Shredded newspaper (black and white ink only is preferable)
• Peat moss
• Hay or straw (straw preferable because it is less likely to contain seeds that will sprout)
• Pine needles
• Chopped brush

In general, your brown layers will be 2x as thick as your green layers.

Your planting soil will go on top of your lasagna layers and will follow the standard recipe:

• 60% topsoil
• 30% compost
• 10 % soilless grow mix (i.e. peat moss, perlite, vermiculite)

Here’s a look at my layers. First, I laid down cardboard and/or newspaper. This doubles as both a weed block and carbon (brown) layer. You can either wet down your newspaper as you lay it down or give it a good soaking with the garden hose.

Next came the alfalfa hay, which I purchased at a local feed store. I was able to use 1 bale for all three of my beds.

I covered the alfalfa with a thin layer of composted manure and wet everything down.

On top of that came the coastal hay. Again, I was able to use one bale for all three of my beds and I still have extra left to use as mulch once my garden is established.

I covered the hay with another thin layer of composted manure and gave it a good soaking. My next green layer was kind of a free for all. I had one bag of garden clippings, 5 big bags of coffee grounds from Starbucks and a couple weeks worth of fruit and veggie scraps to be composted. I distributed these as best as I could across the three beds.

For the next carbon layer, I used fall leaves, which are plentiful in my yard. These are better for a bottom compost layer since they take a while to break down, but I crushed them to give them a head start and figure they will have plenty of time to compost while my garden is growing in the soil mix I add to the top.

Since I had so much alfalfa left and space to fill, I added another alfalfa layer.

Next came my soil mix. For my 4×12 bed, I used 2.2 cubic ft peat moss, 2 cubic feet Organics by Gosh triple power compost, 4 bags of Scott’s premium topsoil, 2 bags of Organics by Gosh composted manure, 3 bags of Organics by Gosh Texas friendly topsoil, 2 bags of EarthGro topsoil, 1 bag of Earth Gro humus/manure and native soil excavated when I removed the sod and scraped the area around the bed.

The two 4×10 beds used 2.2 cubic feet peat moss, 2 cubic feet flower power compost, 3 bags Earth Gro topsoil and 3 bags EarthGro humus/manure and a good amount of native soil. I also added about a cup of bone meal to each of the beds.

When I finished, the soil came within a few inches of the top of the beds. I watered them down daily and we then had several days of rain prior to planting.They have already shrunk down by a few inches. I imagine they will continue to bake down throughout the summer and hope all will turn into lovely compost by next planting season!

In my next Green Thumb post, I’ll talk about how I organized my beds using a method called companion planting. Now this momma has to get herself to bed ASAP. Another long day of yard work and mothering is on the horizon. Oh how I love spring!

For more reading on this topic, check out my sources:

• http://organicgardening.about.com/od/startinganorganicgarden/qt/Making-A-Great-Lasagna-Garden.htm
  
• http://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/lasagna-gardening-zmaz99amztak.aspx#axzz2OL6tN5i2
• http://www.latimes.com/features/la-hm-nodig12-2008jun12,0,3964199.story

Failures in Parenting: A Tutorial In Removing Vaseline From Hair

This has been a trying week. Our septic went out. Juliette mutilated my glasses. Then she used her nap time to smear vaseline all over her hair. Later that night, I spilled a tiny bit of water on my i-phone and the speakers stopped working. The next day, Juliette used her nap time to scale her bookshelf and, at the same time, our pool lost prime indicating a problem there. It took all that I had not to move out of my house and run off on an adult-only vacation involving the sipping of multiple frozen cocktails.

Fortunately, I now have quite a few new tricks up my sleeve and I can share them with you.

How To Remove Vaseline From Hair

Step 1: WHATEVER YOU DO- DO NOT WET THE HAIR

Vaseline aka petroleum jelly is hydrophobic (repels water) and insoluble in water. It also has a melting point of 99 degrees so water cooler than that will only worsen your troubles. Wish I was thinking rationally about this before I put my screaming daughter in the bathtub. Doh! If you did this also, don’t worry. Just skip down a few steps. It will all work out eventually.

Step 2: Use a comb and paper towel to remove as much petroleum jelly from the hair as is possible. This may be a two-person job if you toddler is kicking and screaming as they sometimes do.

Step 3: Soak up as much of the remaining vaseline with a dry powder. I used corn starch but dry shampoo and talcum powder have also been suggested by some.

You should take a picture at this point. Here is J at her Albert Einstein best:

Step 4: This is the part where you get to wet the hair with your chosen medium for petroleum removal. I tried nearly all of these solutions at least once. For each of these, it is helpful if the medium is already warm and once you soap it up, rinse with the hottest water your child can stand. Lukewarm or cold water turns the vaseline into a white goop. Not helpful.

Dishwashing liquid containing grapefruit: We have the Kirkland environmentally friendly brand so I tried this following my first cornstarch application to wet (oops) hair. Her hair was not much cleaner after several applications, but then again it was a whole jar of vaseline. Child will likely be screaming at this point due to the combination of dishwashing liquid in eyes and hot water. J kept saying “I do not like this Mommy.” Mommy did not like it either. I tried several methods to keep the soap out of the eyes, but it was nearly impossible.

Dawn dishwashing liquid: I strip my diapers with Dawn for its degreasing power, so I should have thought of this without the internet prompting me. On day 2, we followed a dry cornstarch application with 2-3 washes with Dawn. My results were just slightly better than on day 1.

Baby shampoo mixed with 1 tsp of baking soda: Let mixture fizz and then apply to hair. The good news is that baby shampoo does not burn the eyes, so you have only the hot water to upset baby. Hair was slightly better at this point, but greasy enough that I still felt the need to cover it with a headband and hat when we out lest someone think I do not bathe my child regularly.

Clarifying shampoo: I bought Neutrogena’s anti-residue shampoo, which is something I myself used to use once per week to remove product build-up and gunk from my hair. We had the most success with this method. Several washes on day 2 and one wash on day 2 and 3 and hair was noticeably better. This picture is from day 2.

Olive Oil or baby oil: Apparently clowns wear make-up that is waterproof and they use baby oil to remove it or olive oil, if there is no baby oil available. From what I read, you saturate the hair with the oil, squeeze as much out as possible and then follow by washing with dishwashing liquid, clarifying shampoo or baby’s regular shampoo.

Step 5: Condition, condition, condition. Many of the above methods will strip your child’s hair of its natural oils in addition to the vaseline. Of course, you will not care at the time but I have noticed my J’s hair is still greasy in some areas and dry in others. A good conditioner should replenish some of that moisture and your child’s hair will recover in time. At the very least, the whole ordeal should cure them of ever smearing vaseline in their hair ever again. I cannot rule out other substances for certain.

Sources:

• http://www.hairboutique.com/tips/articles.php?f=tip959.htm
  
• http://www.hairboutique.com/tip951.htm (this is a slightly different version of the above link)
• http://www.fisher-price.com/en_Us/playtime/parenting/articlesandadvice/articledetail.html?article=tcm:169-18743

Me Do It!

That is a phrase I hear from my fiercely independent toddler a gazillion times per day. She says it while I am trying to teach her how to brush her teeth rather than suck on her toothbrush. “Mommy stay here,” she cries as I review the steps for going potty like a big girl. “No me,” she insists as I buckle her into her carseat.

I am trying to channel all that energy and independence into learning new skills. My sister-in-law is a montessori teacher and left me a long list of suggested activities. One of the items on the list was to make dressing frames. Dressing has been a skill we have been working on for some time. J has had some success putting on shoes and socks and threading her arms into her shirts after I help her to pull it over her head. She has recently gotten pretty good at pulling her pants up/down to use the potty. She has long mastered taking off shoes, socks, pants, diapers- usually at the most inopportune times!

I did a little research on montessori dressing frames. You can see some of the pages I pinned  for inspiration here. I also did a search on Amazon and found that you can buy individual dressing frames for about $10 a piece. I am far too thrifty (read “cheap”) for that so needed a different option. That is when I remembered that I am a Physical Therapist in addition to being a mom. Technically, activities of daily living  (or ADLS as we like to call them) fall under the umbrella of Occupational Therapy, but we PTs do our fair share of helping patients relearn life skills. I peeked into the OT closet at work and hit the jack pot- wooden frames with fabric stretched across them and a variety of fasteners including buttons, snaps, zippers and belts. Some one had hand-made these frames, and it looked as though some light sewing was involved. I wanted to make this project as cheap and fast as possible. All the other posters had used $1 wooden frames. I couldn’t find any that cheap so ended up settling on these $2 wooden boards from Hobby Lobby. I got a variety of shapes and sizes as I didn’t know what would work best.

Then I hunted through a pile of clothing Juliette had outgrown. Clothing in the 9-12 month range provided the best fit for my boards. At first, I carefully scrutinized the clothes not wanting to damage perfectly good clothes that could be passed along. But I was also determined  to make these dressing frames without any sewing or cutting.  I used upholstery tacks to fasten the clothes to the boards. The tacks can be pushed in by hand or hammered if not cooperating. I recommend a hammer or rubber mallet but must admit I used my meat tenderizer (don’t worry, it was clean!). The best part is that the tacks can be easily removed if need be. Total time commitment <5 min per frame.

I made one frame for buttoning:

One frame for snapping:

And one for zipping:

J is making excellent progress with zipping. She can operate the slider and just needs help to seat it in the bottom stop. She can align the snaps together and just needs to put a little more muscle into her snapping action. Buttons are a bit tougher but I think she’ll catch on pretty soon. I have approached the learning from a rehab stand point as that is what I know best, but there is a good tutorial on the montessori approach found here. I plan to add frames for buckling, hook and eye fasteners, lacing and tying when appropriate. I’ll post pics when I do. Thanks to Debbie for the idea!

Related articles

• Zips and Buttons. A Coat Basket. (howwemontessori.com)

This Old House: Dressing Up the Exterior

To set the scene, I must replay the story of this home purchase. We were happily living in our first home. We had not quite outgrown it yet, but were keeping an eye out for something with more land- something that is scarce within the city limits. I came across the listing for this house and we were wowed by the pictures, spend all of 20 min looking at the home and immediately submitted a bid.  I am not the least bit impulsive.  In fact, the Libra in me usually has me agonizing over even the smallest of decisions. My husband is the impulsive one, and usually I consider it my duty to interject with some sound reasoning lest we act too hastily. This is the one time I went along with one of his spontaneous plans, and I think it is because I was impressed by the possibilities of this house.  I didn’t have the big vision. That is all Dean. But I could immediately tell you what I liked and did not like. And I can tell you that upon moving in, we both had a little buyer’s remorse because one of the things we did not like was the look of the house itself.

Upon closer inspection, you can see why:

First of all, the house itself is limestone, which I like, but laid out in brick rather than flagstone style, which is not as charming. Worse, the gutters and trim were printed red and the fascia burnt orange. True, we are home to the UT Longhorns, but I see no reason to drag your house into it. The existing limestone walkway was showing its age and the hedges had long become unmanageable.

Probably our least favorite part was these massive stone columns, which obscured a good part of the front windows.

The trees provided a lot of charm, but the landscaping left a lot to be desired, and there was an awful lot of grass beyond that to mow and water.

We decided that we wanted to tackle the landscaping in the fall.  We had some experience transforming a blank canvas in our previous home, but had never attempted such a large project. We decided we would seek help with the landscape design and implement it ourselves over time. What really happened is that we fell in love with the design and wanted to see it come to fruition a little sooner than we could manage. I love gardening so it killed me not to get my hands dirty doing it myself, but in the end, we decided to have Sagebrush Landscaping implement their design and boy are we glad we did.

At the same time, Dean was adamant that we needed to do something about the orange and the unsightly columns. We came across this house on one of our weekend rides in the TX Hill Country , and he became convinced we could achieve a similar look. In fact, that is how we found Debbie of Sagebrush. She did the landscaping for this house also. Notice all the texture she creates by mixing mulch, gravel and decomposed granite beds with the grass providing a pop of color in between.

First up, our trusty mason Juan of CM Masonry took down the original columns and replaced them with more eye-pleasing tapered columns with stacked stone. Our carpenter, Jonathan, gave us a nice vaulted cedar ceiling and rustic cedar shudders. When the original stone came down, we discovered the house was held up by twigs (I’m exaggerating but not my much), so we were glad to know something more structurally sound took its place. The results far exceeded my expectations. As Dean says, “I don’t know why you ever doubt me.” Good eye, Dean. Good eye.

I may have forgotten to mention, that we have an orange roof made more orange by the burnt orange fascia. I actually took a shingle over to Sanders at Roosters Paint and Decor on South Congress. He came up with a list of his top five brown paints that would downplay my roof and we ended up going with Benjamin Moore 1232 Fresh Brew, which is a chocolate with red undertones that looks great with the white limestone. Love that Sanders.

 

Benjamin Moore Fresh Brew (clipped to polyvore.com)

 

Debbie was no slack herself. Her crew worked its magic over the period of a week creating a front yard oasis, all while working around our septic tank and leach fields (with which I was a bit obsessed not wanting to end up with poop backed up in the front yard and all).

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We now love the rustic charm of our updated house and hope to enjoy it for many years to come!

Foreign Exchange Part II

This post was supposed to follow shortly after my Sharing the Thanks post in November. Since it has already been well established what a horribly infrequent blogger I am, I’ll skip the excuses. Instead I’m going to take full advantage of the fact that my daughter is sleeping and husband is out of town to make up for lost time.

The original Foreign Exchange, hereafter known as Part I, remains one of my most popular posts (popular being a relative term when you blog mostly for your sanity and not an audience). I think the majority of visitors are looking to pilfer images via a google images search. However, for this little exercise, I am going to pretend that the real attraction is the content- namely, the excitement of a new experience or new product in a country not your own.

This time the Brits and Dutchies visited us on our home turf. We welcomed them with these three Tex-American gems:

1) Hop Doddy’s, Austin, TX

Nothing says American food quite like a burger. Hopdoddy’s is no exception. The writing on the wall states, “Hopdoddy was created to express the perfect union of burgers and beer: Handcrafted Beer (Hop) + (Doddy), the nickname given to the native cow in Aberdeen, Scotland.” Burger and beer- double score!  Bonus point for representing the UK in the name. Niels, who has visited quite a few countries, calls this the best burger he has ever had. Whoa. That is quite an endorsement. They should seriously put his picture on their website.

2) The Salt Lick, Driftwood TX

You cannot visit TX and not have BBQ. That would be sinful. We like to drive our visitors out to the Hill Country to the dry town of Driftwood, where you get to bring your own beer to go with your brisket. You can sip your Shiner’s while you bask in the aroma of mouthwatering ribs, sausage and brisket coming from the open fire pit.  With your belly full, you will think you have just about died and gone to heaven. Then, they break out the peach or blueberry cobbler for dessert. Heck, you might as well try both. Lucky for us, Andy is a cardiologist.

3) The Alamo Drafthouse Cinema

The Alamo Drafthouse is a cinema pub. I’ll admit, I’ve only been to one other cinema pub prior to moving to Austin, but I think the Drafthouse gets it right. The food is usually delicious- I recommend the green chile mac and cheese and the chocolate peanut butter shake- and you can chow down while you are enjoying your flick. This is quite a time saver, especially when you have a sitter on the clock. In this case, we enjoyed the new James Bond movie.  I  think our friends are plotting European franchises as I type this.

In exchange for our fine hosting abilities, we were bestowed with the following gifts.

1) Nestle Smarties

At first glance, these look like tiny M&Ms. But they are soooo much better. Seriously, I do not know if I can ever look at an M&M the same way again.  Juliette was immediately hooked and we do not give that child candy but if she’ll go poo poo on the potty, I’ll import a whole bag from the UK for her. They are really that good.

2) Stroopwafel

A Dutch treat, a stroopwafel is two thin layers of baked batter glued together by a caramel-like filling. I like to pretend that they are a breakfast food rather than a dessert. I often forget about stroopwafel when making my request list for Niels and Minna. Fortunately, they have my back on this one. Totally worth the visit to the Netherlands just to try one.

3) Sinterklaas Candies

Sinterklaas, who might actually be the precursor for our own Santa Claus, is a jolly old fellow who lives in Spain. In November, he makes his yearly trek to the Netherlands by steamboat rather than by sleigh and stays for three weeks, culminating in a family celebration on December 5. During that time, children leave their shoes and stockings by the fireplace to be filled with treats including chocolate letters and my favorite, kruidnoten and pepernoten (addicting little ginger cookies). I am only sad that Niels did not actually put my candies in my shoe.

***************

Another successful exchange was had. We have been doing this for a long time and there is always a new (and usually tasty) surprise. Can’t wait for next time. Already planning our trip.