Health and Wellness Apps You Need In Your Life

June 4, 2020November 14, 2020 ~ Loreeebee ~ Leave a comment

Guest post by Amber Theuer, originally published on ivee.com, edited and modified for publication here on Loreeebee.wordpress.com

There’s no denying that our phones have become a vital part of our everyday routine, so we might as well start using them to support and develop our wellbeing. From meditation to sleep to hydration, there’s an app for whatever area of your health you’re trying to improve.

Waking Up: A Meditation Course

Created and narrated by neuroscientist, philosopher, and New York Times best-selling author Sam Harris, Waking Up is a meditation and wellness app that takes users along the journey of mindfulness. Described as “a guide to understanding the mind, for the purpose of living a more balanced and fulfilling life,” Waking Up truly helps you find the inner peace and stability needed to excel. Plus, it offers exclusive theory courses, similar to podcasts, that reinforce the meditation practice!

Sleep Cycle

Having trouble sleeping? Looking to improve the quality and length of your night’s rest? Sleep Cycle is the wellness app for you! With Sleep Cycle, you can record your sleep and receive an audit that offers tips on how to get better rest to improve your overall health. This app also includes an intuitive alarm clock that gently wakes you during your time of lightest sleep — so you feel refreshed every morning.

MealPrepPro

So you want to clean up your diet, but you get tired of eating the same thing. Or maybe you can’t find the time to cook at every meal. MealPrepPro makes eating simple. This wellness app curates meal plans according to your diet, taste preferences, and health goals. With MealPrepPro, you no longer have to spend hours searching for new recipes. It also keeps things exciting with nutritious meal suggestions each week so you can keep your fridge stocked with healthy options.

Ivee

There are many apps that help track hydration, but none that directly offers it. Ivee is the on-demand wellness app that delivers IV therapy to your door. Whether you’re feeling under the weather, had a long night out, or simply need a boost, Ivee’s got your back! Simply select your treatment and enter your location, and a nurse will be at your door. In no time, you’ll be living your best (hydrated!) life. Covid update: Ivee will reopen in New York some time in July.

Streaks

Streaks is the ultimate wellness app to keep you on track with your health goals. It allows you to create personal to-do lists that renew each day. Everytime you check these off, you add on to the consecutive days you achieved your goal. Streaks delivers a report of your habits, allowing you to see in real time how well you are doing while remaining on target! Accountability is difficult, but Streaks makes it easier!

Check out the five health and wellness apps above that help you achieve your health objectives and have you feeling better in no time.

Brown gravy, naturally

October 12, 2019November 2, 2020 ~ Loreeebee ~ 1 Comment

Do you know how to make rich, dark brown gravy the natural way? Without the store-bought box or package of gravy? No package of seasonings or dyes ever touches my gravy. I learned this trick from my mother years ago. Before you put the turkey in the roasting pan, slice up a small onion and a few cloves of garlic and add them to the bottom of the pan. As the turkey cooks, the onions and garlic will brown up, colouring and flavouring the juices, creating wonderful dark brown gravy.

You can puree the onions and garlic with the gravy if you like your gravy smooth and lump-free, or leave it chunky. This trick works for roast beef or pork as well.

A few other holiday dinner tricks:

Gluten-free brown gravy thickener: reserve (approximately) 1 cup of the water you boiled your potatoes in before you drain them. That water contains lots of potato starch, which is naturally gluten-free. Add the reserved water to your gravy, let it simmer for 10 minutes until the gravy thickens. Works like a charm, without the use of a roux made of wheat flour.

Decorating your dinner table: I like to use whatever is colourful in my garden at the time. In spring it is tulips or other bulbs. In fall I use leaves, ornamental grass spikes, and decorative gourds. Place the collected items in a vase, display on a cake pedestal, or lay them right on the table cloth (leaves work well flat)

Getting the creases out of your table cloth: Do you ever forget to take your table cloth out early enough to remove the folds/crease? Or change your mind on which table cloth you want to use at the last minute, and then cringe at the creases? Remove wrinkles and creases, without the use of an iron, from table cloths or your clothing with a wrinkle remover in a spray bottle. Keep some in your laundry room and bedroom for a quick fix.

I hope these tips come in handy when you are preparing your next holiday meal. Our Canadian Thanksgiving is this weekend, so I plan to use them all.

Groundcover, the good, bad and ugly

September 29, 2019March 13, 2022 ~ Loreeebee ~ Leave a comment

Groundcover is an integral part of most gardens. Groundcover is self explanatory, basically plants that cover the bare ground, usually between larger (taller) plants. The use of groundcover in gardens helps to minimize the appearance of weeds, which is always beneficial. There are thousands of varieties out there, some good, some not so good (in my opinion) and some downright ugly! Let me help you decipher some of my favourites and others that I encounter on a daily basis in my gardening business.

The best:

My favourite groundcover includes sweet woodruffe and lamium for part sun to shady areas as well as sedums and stonecrops for hot, sunny spots. Each perky stem of sweet woodruffe sports six shiny green leaves and tiny white flowers in spring. Even after flowering this groundcover remains attractive all summer long. Sweet woodruffe requires no deadheading either, which is an added bonus.

sweet woodruffe after blooming

sweet woodruffe in bloom

Lamium’s flowers are flashier, either pale pink or lavender in colour. Its variegated foliage (green and white) also remains attractive all season. Deadheading after blooming will create a second bloom time too.

I guess that’s what I like most about these two groundcovers; even when not in bloom they look great. Although both spread, they do so in small clumps, but are not invasive. Both are shallow rooted, so easy to remove from areas you don’t want them. I use both of these as edging plants in my gardens as well. I have also used lamium in shady hanging baskets as it trails nicely as it grows.

For hot, sunny and dry spots in the garden, including tucked between or cascading over rocks, or even in containers, you can’t beat sedums or stonecrops. Both come in a wide variety of bloom colours. I especially love the dragon’s blood (red) stonecrop and the cute rosettes of hen and chicks.

stonecrop and sedums in a hot, sunny container

Others:

Violets make a successful groundcover as well, but they can be invasive…

Some of the not so nice (looking) groundcover that crops up uninvited in gardens are clover and mosses. Clover is cute looking too, some people actually confuse sweet woodruffe with clover leaves. However, clover is much weedier and invasive. I don’t mind clover in my lawns, but pull it out of my gardens. Some people encourage moss to grow between their stonework patios and walkways, not a look I am fond of.

The only time groundcover in your gardens does not work well is if you prefer mulch between your plants. Not that you can’t have both, the problem is that most groundcover is low growing so the mulch can overpower and even smother it. For this reason, I don’t usually recommend both mulch and groundcover in the same garden.

As I was snapping pictures of these varieties of groundcover the other day, I spied a garter snake peaking out at me from the cover of a hosta. As a kid I used to think they were called gardener snakes, most likely because I saw them mostly in gardens. I probably (unintentionally) disturbed this cutie’s sun bask. By the time I focused on him, he was off, slithering away down the stone path to safety…