31 posts tagged “garden”
My asters have finally bloomed! And they are purdy...
Which is appropriate, since I've been reading about the Astors for work... especially the one that was a local. (Yes, I just made a bad pun). The book is a total soap opera, but entertaining....
Anyhoodle, I was delighted when the asters that I've been watering and loving since planting the seeds in April finally bloomed, and in a wide array of colors-- pinks, peaches, purples, whites. The are well worth the wait.
There are a few other things making their way through the season-- August is tough, too hot, usually dry (though this year not half as dry as last year). The cucumbers are spent and unhappy, but the tomatoes keep coming...
Including the green zebras, which I looooove.
The return of the weapons grade peppers-- they're starting to show their firey nature...
And some sunflowers keep coming :)
Although I do need to say that the "drought resisting" abilities of the phlox I planted in the spring-- as advertised on the pot-- were a disappointment. (read: epic fail).
But the sesame looks great! Can't wait til they mature!
Of course, I didn't get everything done I was hoping to (not even close), but we did have a fun weekend, so who cares? P and I went to an abandoned mall in Richmond and shot some photographs (large format for me, so may be a while before I get them back). Found a wild blackberry patch and ate tons of blackberries (yum!). Went up to Charlottesville to retrieve my fixed cameras (yeay!). Had lunch at the Blue Moon Diner (yum!). Went to a crazy antique place where P got something that he's using in his new work (come see it at Irvine Contemporary this fall!). Had ice cream, and then came home and watched a movie. :)
Never got around to the garden tasks I was hoping to do this weekend.
But things grow with or without you....
Today I shot some pictures for our friend Carrie, who is being featured as applicator of the month for American Clay. She does super beautiful work, so if you are looking to redecorate or just beautify your house, you should give her a call. It was great to see her, and super fun to go out and shoot some pictures of her work and some puuuurdy houses.
With apologies to JJBT....
I would like to announce the engagement of Cucumber and String Bean. Neighbors their entire lives, they finally felt the need to bridge the gap.
Sooooo, last week was a bit of a whirlwind-- a very very full workweek, including several days out and about in the state, followed up by seeing the parents in DC and doing one of my shifts at Artomatic. Which would have all been quite a bit to start with, but when my usual two hour drive to DC turned into a five hour odyssey on the way up and a four hour one on the way back, it really put a capper on a very long week. Which is why I'm trying to think about my garden and stuff instead....
I've also been working on some hats as well-- these are meant for wee heads.....
Lastly, I finished up something that I've been making for a friend... the theme is very much up her alley....
Hope she likes it!
We were at Artomatic on Saturday night for meet the artist night:
Rebecca and I enjoyed Dale Hunt's funhouse like paintings. Of course we both like his work in any case, since we both have pieces by him from Artomatics past.
It was lots of fun. Artomatic is pretty superfantastic this year-- great space with lots of interesting stuff. Go visit while it's still going on-- through July 5th!
I spent a bit of the weekend out in the garden, though not as much as I would have liked. Sadly, I spent most of it doing my least favorite gardening task-- weeding. I got about half done, but now it's raining, so I'm sure that all my work will be for naught, as it's meant to rain for the rest of the week.....
We are still having serious earwig problems. They seemed to abate a little when I swabbed the deck (literally!) with homemade insecticidal soap, but with the rain washing away the effects, I'm thinking they'll be back in force. They've started chomping on the zucchinis and beans and peas, which I'm rather unhappy about. And boy howdy do they looooooove the flowers I have on the deck.
Sadly, yes. Many of the things I planted in containers this year are either a) dying or b) failing to thrive. It is a sad sad story, which I am rather upset about. Suggestions from gardening forums have included: 1) overwatering; 2) underwatering; 3) bad soil; 4) bad plants; 5) bugs; 6) not enough fertilizer; and my favorite, 7) gardening is often frustrating, so try again next year.
For the second year in a row, plants in the garden have failed to hit full growing steam prior to the heat wave, which seems to stunt certain things. I planted a full month earlier this year in response to this problem last year. And what happens? The brussel sprouts very excitedly began to finally grow last week. Today it was 94 degrees and they are looking all wilting.
Much more worrisome is that I have not seen a single bee-- honey, bumble, what have you-- since April. The peas are finally coming into their own, as are some of the tomatoes, and all of those flowers are going unpollinated. No bees, and not even really any butterflies. Nor hummingbirds. And I don't have the time to perform plant sex activities on these things. So we may not get much in the way of food this year.
On the upside, we did manage to have one salad out of the garden last week.
I also ended up making another container using the same materials and colors, although I added some handles to that one....
Finally, I experimented a little with some scrap fabric that I have had around, literally, for years. It's actually scraps going back to my first attempts at sewing a quilt, which I did my first year at grad school, now more than a decade ago. (I thought it might relieve some of the stress of grad school. It might have done, if I hadn't skipped the part where you take a class or at least read a book. Instead, I just bought a bunch of fabric, cut it up, and started sewing it all together. I still have some of the blocks, and it isn't as bad as that sounds like it should be. Although it's probably okay that I never quite finished that project). In any case, I used the scraps to make an oval shaped vessel, and to try out making a lid.....
time, right? Weekends I often try to get some cooking done.... but lately I've been too busy and out of town too much for grocery shopping. So there's been a lot of fridge clearing cooking going on....
I love the farmer's market. I have no idea how it is possible for me to go home with all that produce in May. I mean, it's mid-May. I started seedlings in March. And I have.... sprouts. They look pretty good and all that, but uhm. We are weeks and weeks away from eating anything other than two strawberries and some lettuce from last year (it self seeded. And looks awesome).
And now it's Sunday evening and I still have a huge list of things I was supposed to do this weekend. Sigh.
I was in town this week-- a whole week!-- which means that I got done things at work that don't get done when I'm away. I didn't quite get to things at home, so of course the house is still a mess and the bills are still in a pile on my desk, waiting to be paid. Blerg. But, on the upside, I did manage to finish the most pressing issues at work, including putting together two public talks on two unrelated topics and then giving both of them, in front of people and stuff. Which isn't that big of a deal (I've never had a problem with public speaking), except that I had to give them on Wednesday and Thursday respectively, and on Monday had nothing prepped except for some research on one of the topics and an idea about what to say. On the upside, the talk on the topic that is nothing I really know much about was short. On the even more upside, the long talk was on Cambodia, which is what I wrote my dissertation about. (Not the same topic exactly, but the talk was more or less all the background stuff I needed to know to start doing dissertation research, so stuff I know pretty well).
Even better, my travel time for a while is winding down. A bit more through June, and then I should be in town the majority of the time. Whoo-hoo!
We've been getting a lot of rain lately, which is advantageous in some ways, however, the way our house is situated and all the trees in our yard (which I am not complaining about) mean that the garden gets precious little sunlight as it is. Part of it gets about six hours a day, part of it gets more like five. It seems like most vegetables want six plus, so we'll see how this goes. With all the rain they've been getting more like negative two, which might explain why all the peppers look so sad and stunted. At least that's what I tell myself. We went for an evening stroll a few days ago around the 'hood and there were a whole bunch of pots in front of one house, each one with giant tomato and cucumber plants crawling up through tomato cages. These pots were under large trees where I know they weren't getting any full sun eight hours a day, but they were huge, and I was so jealous. SIGH.
The one thing that is growing full bore in the garden is bugs. Chewing, chomping, seedling mowing down bugs. So far I have found earwigs chomping on a sunflower seedling (and more scuttling around everywhere, including our mailbox), slugs chomping on another sunflower seedling, and have lost all of the bok choy, spinach, some beans, and some romanesco seedlings to cutworms. I also have birds doing damage, and squirrels and chipmunks digging things up. In fact, we had a chipmunk emergency yesterday. In an attempt to get strawberries from the strawberry plants this year, I covered them with bird netting (birds had already gone wild and ripped apart about half of the green fruits). I was weeding yesterday and moved over to the strawberry patch where I saw something moving. I moved aside some leaves and there was a chipmunk. But he wasn't going anywhere... I looked and he had one of his back legs caught in the netting. I'd freaked him out by coming over to the patch where he'd been eating one of my strawberries (I found the gnawed fruit later) and had gotten himself tangled in his attempt to escape. Phil managed to get him out, cutting through some of the netting. Poor little guy (though he shouldn't have been eating my strawberries, damnit).
I finally managed to finish the top of this quilt. I really like the way the diamond and diamond + sashing quilts look, but boy howdy are they a pain in the butt. I have the *worst* time trying to get things to line up.This one just goes into the pile of quilt tops awaiting quilting (which I don't like as much as the piecing, and thus tend to avoid, which is why there are three tops waiting at the mo).
I also took a short class to learn how to make containers.
It was pretty fun, though something of real size would probably take quite a while (I did, however, learn a really need trick for making bias tape).
I also got to use one of the shop's machines, which was a bit of a revelation. My machine is about a half step up from a treddle machine. Actually, it's more or less an electrified treddle machine-- options are limited on what it can do, and there's a lot of manual actions involved. The shop's machine, however, was all kinds of fancy schmancy. It was interesting using a much more upscale piece of equipment than I have. (And also a little intimidating. I wasn't sure I was every going to figure out how to thread the thing, or to wind the bobbin).
A place I hardly ever see. I was gone all week, and when I came back things were sprouting and growing and all sorts of things in my absence.
I went to a "sheep to shawl" demo over the weekend, and got to see sheep being sheared all old skool....
Otherwise, packing packing packing for yet another week away from the ranch for work.
