"Tea with Dagny" and "Donuts"

My latest doodle. I have been drawing in the Mary Engelbreit style lately, enjoying her wood/china/fabric textures, but this is my own confabulation. On Friday mornings, I sometimes go for a visit to one of my friends from church, Dagny, who is in her mid-80s and lives alone. We always have some tea and a snack, chat and pray together. It is good to have friends of all ages! She is so sweet and always writes down my concerns in her prayer notebook so she can remember to keep them in her daily prayers!

This second drawing is by my 12 year old son. He was home from school with a cold on Monday, and was amusing himself with my art supplies. He was impressed with the effects I get with the Prismacolor pencils over marker, so I gave him some pointers and he made this enticing plate himself! He was very tickled at all the praises he got when he put the drawing on his facebook page!

We' ve Got Her Covered

Two posts in one day: don't go into shock on me!

Immediately after I finished my memory quilt last month, I saw this pattern for a "heartstrings" quilt online and wanted to make one really badly. It is made of foundation-pieced strips laid out so that the red strips form hearts and it is super easy and fast. So I raided my fabric drawer and started, not sure who it was going to be given to. As the month went on, I realized that one of "our girls" (my best friend's daughters whom we've been close to for 10 years) was leaving in early September to go off to college! Could I get it done in time? Yep. I can't post it on my Facebook yet or she'll see it before I give it to her. I hope she cuddles up in it in her dorm room if she's feeling homesick and feels our love. Click on the picture to see it larger.

Here is the embroidery I did in the lower right corner to dedicate the quilt. I backed the quilt with a very soft striped sheet I picked up at the thrift store and tied the blocks with pink embroidery floss.

Just for giggles, here's a pic of me and my hubby at a barbeque this summer. He has new whiskers - I like them.

Freedom Harvest August Tally

Here I am weighing in to the Freedom Harvest Challenge for August 2009. These are the results of two 3 x 8' beds, one in my very shady backyard and new one in my mostly-sunny front yard. Construction of a larger front yard garden with 6 beds is underway. This harvest is a huge improvement over last year's 1/2 lb. total (one unhappy cherry tomato in a pot). The last and largest item is the wild blackberries we pick from the bushes on the dead-end road nearby. I made 3 batches of jam from them this year and froze several large bags too.

- "Stupice" tomato: 8 lbs.
- Pickling cucumbers: 1 lb.
-Jalapeno peppers: 1 lb.
- Royal Burgundy string beans: 5 lbs.

- Basil: 1/2 lb.
- Copra yellow onions: 1/2 lb.
- "Mammoth" dill: 1/2 lb.

- Sunflower seeds: (the squirrels aren't telling)

- Wild blackberries: 15 lbs.

Total grown: 16.5 lbs

Total grown and gleaned: 31.5 lbs.

Outside and In

More construction is underway in the front yard. Hubby is digging a trench in order to inlay the cement chunks we have accumulated into a pathway. As you can see, the little pond is finished and the fishes are doing well and growing. They have survived a few exploratory attacks by the local raccoon gang - the pond advice we received was sound! I've been keeping my worker company, weeding the flower bed while he digs.

Indoors, I have been quilting. I finished a twin-sized quilt which I began last year. It took me a bit because I embroidered 12 of the blocks. It is a memory quilt, with blocks made from our boys' outgrown pajamas, blankies, our kitchen curtains, and lots of family odds and ends. By request I kept it "unisex" with not too much girly pink stuff. I backed it with blue flannel, and I tied it with embroidery floss at the corners and middles of each square side. The binding is pieced out of the extra 2" squares I cut.

The embroidery is kind of random. Images I liked online, drawings I made up myself. The sunflower is from a marker drawing that I did a few years ago.

Bathroom #2 Finished (a la Azteca!)

Inspired by the radical improvement in the upstairs bath remodel, I finally got off my uninspired rear end and finished the boys' bath downstairs. I had done a lot of the hard work last year, patching and repainting the ceiling, then painting the ceiling and walls with the cream and turquoise, but I stalled out at the "tile" mosaic. After dropping the "stamped tile" idea and cutting my own stencils for the 5-color tile design I created, I was finally back in business.

I stenciled the mosaic pattern all the way around the bath, then added a simple mosaic around the window to set it off.

I found a nice shelf unit at the thrift store and covered up the pink roses with dark green paint (thought the boys would appreciate that). I wanted a little more storage since this bath has no vanity.

The boys like it! Jo likes the lizards and Z appreciates his school colors in the design.

We Interrupt the Gardening in Progress...

...for a bathroom mini-remodel. We're having a potluck with some friends from church next Sunday here and it was motivation to finally check this off my summer to-do list.

The cabinets are the original 1960's vanity installed when the house was

built. With a little help from a friend with a mitering saw, we patched the chipped areas in the cupboard doors and trimmed the edges with molding from the hardware store.

Two coats of paint and we were ready to rehang the doors. Then we painted the mirror wall lavender (mixed some white and deep purple wall paint we already had), framed the mirror with some wider molding to hide the aged edges, and painted the light fixture to hide the rust. Viola! Mini-makeover for $25! Well, that doesn't include the parts to reseal the leaking toilet I discovered when I was painting down there... but at least we caught it before the floor was damaged!

Behold the scary "before" pic. It didn't look this bad when we moved in 7 years ago with our then 8 and 5 year old boys...

Recycled Rubber = New Pond!

Last night, our neighbor (who has a pond landscaping business) came by with a "recycled" piece of a pond liner that he had recently replaced on a job. Just the thing we need for our front yard mini-pond! I laid the liner pad in, then the liner, and J helped me fill it up and add some rocks today. We'll need to trim the edging and cover it all around with rocks, but it is looking great, and at the right price - FREE!

We have the cement blocks laid out on top of the grass, fit together in a mosaic pattern. Hopefully we'll find more recycled broken sidewalk this summer to complete the other part of the path. We plan to dig it in flush with the ground then plant the crevices with creeping thyme or some other hardy ground cover.

Back & Front Yard Successes

Yesterday I "harvested" all the spinach and beets in the shady, poorish-soil backyard bed (you can see where this is headed...). After washing them and taking off the stems, I think I have - a cup and a half. Maybe one salad's-worth. Sigh.

But on the other hand, the Sugar Snap peas in the same bed are doing terrifically! My husband helped me with emergency height-extending poles to train them on up to 6 or 7 feet, since they had outgrown the tomato cages and started to flop over. I picked up another packet of the same seeds, so I can start another crop for the fall. Hey, if I can get something to grow back there, I'll stick with it! I'm sure improving the soil would help...

In the SFG (square foot garden) bed in the front yard, the one month old Regal spinach was ready to pull this morning. Other than some minor bug holes, it is gorgeous. Gotta plant more of this!

2009 Harvest totals:

.5 lb radishes

.5 lb spinach

one individual strawberry!

Mid-June update

An updated aerial photo of my veggie bed from this morning: compare to here. The empty blocks have been seeded with carrots and fennel (for friendly bug attraction purposes).

The spinach is ready to harvest too. I still have the squirrel-proofing up and it's working great - no invasions at all. We'll see if it's coon-proof when the

corn gets ripe!

2009 harvest to date:

.5 lb of radishes

Successes and Failures: all learning experiences

Lots of changes in the home garden here! Let me catch up:

- We harvested our first crop! Our "square" of radishes was ready to pull, true to the seed packet's prediction at 21 days. Very pretty and fun to pick. If only we liked to eat them...

- The spinach in the backyard bed has bolted in the warm weather. It is only 1-3 inches tall, so THAT experiment was a bust. The spinach in the front yard is about ready to harvest and is a good size and only about 4 weeks old. The sun exposure makes all the difference.

- The sugar snap peas, on the other hand, are doing TERRIFIC in the backyard. They have outgrown their tomato-cage trellises and are blooming like crazy now. I'm thinking of planting more for the fall since they've been so successful so far.

- The new asian pear got "pear blight" in the one variety branch that bloomed. So snip, off it came! It looks a bit unbalanced but there is still a stub to regrow for next year.

- I planted a whole bed of purple bush beans in the 2nd backyard bed, just because I had them. With the low light, I'm not sure how successful they'll be. I've grown them there in the past, but the surrounding trees have grown to block even more sunlight since then.

- Lastly, we were able to acquire a whole BUNCH of these broken cement sidewalk chunks for free from a neighbor down the street. They will be used for path paving according to our plan...

April Showers Brought May Flowers

The new 5-way cherry has blooms on all 5 varieties: Montmorency, Early Burlat, Kristin, Rainier, and Lapin. Wouldn't it be cool if we could get at least a couple cherries to taste the very first year?

I had to try and capture the beauty of our Clematis montana which grows up about 15 feet into our big maple. The pale pink blooms just hang in long garlands from the branches - so beautiful.

The sugar snap peas are finally taking off (yes, they are trellised inside old tomato cages). I think it was less a light issue (they are in the shady backyard beds) than a warmth issue. Once the temps hit the upper 60s then 70s, they started growing in front of our very eyes!

Growth in the Garden

Top row: Heirloom tomato, 3 pickle cucumbers, 2 blocks of sweet corn, 2 Sugar Pie pumpkins, Stupice tomato.

Second row: Jalapeno, purple string beans (not up), onions, 2 basil plants (toward back to allow the zucchini below more room), Mammoth dill, onions, empty, jalapeno.

Bottom row: Strawberry, beets, lettuce, 2 spaces for one Gold Rush zucchini, spinach, radishes, strawflowers.

Beautiful weather here lately: mid-60s to 70s and clear sunshine. The garden is thriving. Under the dogwood tree, the birds enjoy a place to drink and splash, surrounded by sheltering rhodydendrons. I have moved many clumps of aquilegia to grow with the white bleeding heart under the bird bath.