Now that the weather is getting cooler and the leaves are starting to show their fall colors, I get busy planning our annual trip to the apple orchard.

Here are 5 ways you can plan a simple, successful, and dreamy picnic with friends at your local orchard.

1. Check out http://www.localharvest.org to find apple orchards in your area. Call ahead to confirm that they allow picnicking on the orchard property (most do) and when the apples are ready for picking.

2. Send out invitations to friends and family at least a couple of weeks in advance. I use www.evite.com

3. Plan a delicious rustic menu for the day. You could make it all yourself but I like to let my friends contribute to the meal. Here is my menu for this years picnic

Rotisserie Chicken Sandwiches with French bread and Cheese (variety of mustards and chutneys)

Cornbread Salad & Rustic Potato Salad

Cranberry Apple Tart & Pumpkin Cheesecake Brownies

Apple Cider, Coffee & Bottled Water

4. Bring along picnic supplies as well as quilts, blankets, a camera, and a small folding table to put the food on.

5. Most of all have fun and enjoy the simple pleasures of fall, friends, and fellowship!

~Visit HipHome blog for a journey through the art of homemaking and entertaining~

“Jungle Lomograph”

click image to enlarge, click again to shrink

by Whatsername?, seen on Flickr

licensed under CC 2.0

Fresh herbs

Summer has drawn to a close and your herb garden will soon be sleeping under a blanket of snow.  Make sure you preserve all that natural goodness to use throughout the cold winter months!

If you have freezer space, a good way to keep herbs handy while still maintaining their color and flavor is to freeze them.

Freezing Fresh Herbs:

FIRST, place several leaves of your herb in each opening of an ice cube tray.

THEN, fill the rest of the openings with clean water.  Place the trays in your freezer until the water is solid.

LAST, pop out the cubes which now contain your fresh herbs and store them in a freezer-safe plastic bag.  Whenever you need fresh herbs for cooking, simply grab an ice cube or two and place them on your meat or toss in your soup.  Easy!

Another way to preserve fresh herbs is by drying them.

Drying fresh herbs:

Traditional drying by hanging plants upside down is fine, but there is the problem of dust gathering on your plants.

• Place your freshly cut stems in small paper lunch bags and staple or fold shut.
• Make sure there is enough space in your bag for the plants to “breathe” so they can dry efficiently.
• Store the bags anywhere you want out of the way; perhaps in a cupboard or the top shelf of a closet.
• When the herbs have dried, store them in an airtight container.
• You can store the stems whole, or remove the leaves.

Check out the Blissful Food section in the Blissfully Domestic Ning for wonderful recipes to showcase your homegrown herbs!

Tamra Klaty brings common sense and beauty into keeping a home. You can find Tamra at It All Started With A Kiss, where her heart and soul spill over onto her blog.

photo by orangeacid

This may not be what you think — and it’s definitely not a get rich quick scheme.

The best way to earn the most money you can, working only a few hours from home, is managing your investments.

Think about it — you will spend hours clipping coupons or making food from scratch to save a few dollars, but one of your largest assets, your retirement fund, will only get an occasional glance. Do you know how your retirement account is invested? Could it be better?

You may be at a point right now where the idea of a retirement fund or investment account seems like a far-away goal, and that’s ok. Keep working to chip away at debt or build an emergency savings account, and bookmark this information for when you can start using it.

At Blissfully Domestic, we’ll be featuring articles to make it easier to understand how to manage your investments. So when you see them, I hope you don’t think, “oh, I couldn’t do that.” Just try to spend a few minutes each week learning about it along with us. You can do it.

Do you have any questions about investing or managing money? Let us know, and we’ll do our best to answer them in future posts.

Rachel loves writing about ideas to simplify your home at Small Notebook. She lives in Texas and often eats ice cream for breakfast.

Months, or even years ago, when you decided to start your blog and tell the whole free world about how little Jane and John were progressing in their lives, you didn’t think twice about using their real names. Why would you? No one’s going to actually READ your blog, right? It’s there for the sole purpose of sharing your children and their escapades as they grow up with friends and family across the miles.

But then something amazing happens. You realize that there are other moms out there who are also blogging. They are also sharing their lives with you on the internet, and you’re loving it because now you have someone to connect with, even if it’s only “through the box”.

People are commenting on your blog and you’re commenting on others and relationships are formed.

And then one day you realize that you’re sharing WAY too much about your home life and it makes you a bit uncomfortable.

You immediately think of new names for your children such as Thing 1 and Thing 2 or TweedleDee and TweedleDum, and from that day forward, you never mention your children’s real names again.

That’s all fine and dandy, but what about all the old posts that call them by name? You think to yourself that as you have free time (ha ha) you’ll go back and change them - after all, they’re old posts. Surely no one will scan the archives.

If this describes you, have you been back through your archives yet to manually change all the instances where you’ve revealed who you are and where you live?

Don’t feel guilty. We don’t have time to do things like that and it’s understandable. We’re moms. We’re busy. We’re blogging. Getting today’s post up about how you are up for the Mother of the Year award, again, for forgetting to send lunch money to school, again, is way more important than all that work that your blog is demanding.

I can offer you a solution, but only if you’re a self-hosted WordPress user. (Another great reason to be self-hosted.)

Enter Search Regex, a WordPress plugin that will scour all of your old posts and find every single time that you’ve uttered your child’s real identity and replace it with their newfound one.

Seriously.

Simply install the plugin, activate it, and then head to your manage tab where you’ll find the Search Regex options. Then you can find and replace anything you want!

This also works great if you move from another blogging platform to WordPress. Set your permalink structure in WordPress to match that of the old platform and then replace the domain name using the plugin.

Now, the world will be none the wiser that you ever referred to your children by their real names - unless, of course, they read your blog back then.

When the memory eraser plugin comes out, I’ll be sure to let you know!

How do you feel about using your children’s real names on your blog? Are you for or against it and why? Head over to the Blissfully Domestic social network and share with us!

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Heather Jacobson is a self-taught web geek, mother, and blogger, and embraces the very meaning each title. You can find her online blogging about her quest for sanity (including her children’s real names) at Desperately Seeking Sanity and all things WordPress at Desperately Seeking WordPress.

Photo Credit: Vevera