68 posts tagged “homelife”
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.
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).
Friends! We like friends! Today I got to see friends I don't get to see too much, staring with friend Tiffany. Phil made a portrait of her, which, sadly, did not come out as well as he'd hoped. On the upside, this means she might be coming back! yeay! She brought her brand new daughter, who was quiet as a mouse, and cute as a button. With so much hair and big big brown eyes. She will cause her parents trouble when she is a teenager, what with the boys who will be mooning after her. It was so very good to see the Queen of Real Small Art... we hope to see more of her!
We also had friend Carrie and her pooch Sky and friend Dave over, and P made a portrait of her. This came out better, and will surely be posted soon. It was good to see her, and I got a chance to give her the hyssop seedlings I'd grown for her. Sky chased squirrels and sniffed a lot. It was very good to see her, although the squirrels and chipmunks were traumatized.
My main accomplishments for the weekend included doing laundry and baking bread, which came out pretty good. I am here for a whole week. whoo! and then on travel next week.
Sadly, my garden has cutworms, I think, which would explain why we are having no bok choy this year, as the cutworms seem to like them very very much. As Phil tells me, this is what you get for not spraying everything with chemicals. Too bad, I dislike chemicals more than I like bok choy, which says a lot, since I love bok choy.
Also, go Molly go!
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.
Which was more or less what I did this weekend... and now I'm sooooo sore. We have some things blooming, which is nice. Especially considering that the squirrels and chipmunks dug up all the new bulbs I put in for the spring.
On the upside, one of our predecessors planted some bulbs that have continued to bloom (and a whole lot that have stopped blooming-- I have bazillions of non-blooming irises all over the yard. Lots of leaves, no flowers). So we have a few pretty things popping up around the house. But only a few so far...
I did some soil testing this weekend, confirming that yes, our clayey soil really is acidic. Shrug. It's pretty much what I thought, and the soil is so clumpy and clayey that I've needed to add to it just to be able to work it at all, but I guess confirmation is good. Also, it means that I'll go easier on the pine bark in the pit when I finally plant that rhodedendron that I picked up at the nursery to replace the one that the retarded squirrel killed.
Soil tested, I prepped the garden and planted the early stuff now that we should (I hope) be past having hard frosts. Radishes and lettuce and some more brussel sprout seeds to keep the ones that resprouted company.
I had a couple of little lettuce sprouts pop up as well-- black seeded, from last year, that must have self-sedded. I'm also trying soaker hoses this year, as watering was an issue last year.
P went at the space next to the garden with the tiller that his father gave us last year, so the garden has doubled in size-- whoo-hoo! I'm holding off on planting the second bed until it gets a bit warmer, as most of the other stuff I'm planning for the year want warmer feet. I'm also going to try to do some raised beds-- one I got on sale, and the other one I'm making out of bottles as per a suggestion in an organic gardening magazine. Recycling good, right? Of course, I ran out of dirt, as P thought I would, and had to stop part way through the process.
I'm actually in town this week, which is exciting. Especially since I'm going the two weeks after, solid, and almost half of May to boot.
So. We have lots of squirrels and chipmunks scampering and gamboling about our back yard now that spring has sprung. (Sadly, it appears that the evil, feral dogs killed all of the rabbits that had been living in the small copse of trees in neighbor's yard, which is very, very sad.) Generally, I think they are pretty cute. However, there are certain things that I find less cute in their behavior.
Thing one: we have a damaged squirrel trying to live in our backyard. Mentally damaged. I suspect that he fell on his head when he was a young'un. I am aggrivated with him because he is a killer: he has killed our rhododendron. He achieved this end by pruning the bush to death.
This pruning thing that they do was not something I'd been aware of before Mr. Dr. Birdcage pointed out that the reason why I am constantly finding little branches on our front stoop is that the squirrels are constantly pruning the large tree in our front yard, dropping the pruned branches onto our front steps. Mind you, they are supposed to use those branches to build nests, but they don't always retrieve the bits they bite off.
So. We have a squirrel in our backyard who is fixated on this one tree. It's a nice tree and all, but he is obsessed with the idea of building a nest in the crook of one of the big branches, and it just isn't the right size for a squirrel nest. He's built like twenty nests in that same crook over the last few months, and every one of them has fallen. The space between crooks is too big for the sticks that he brings to it. He's had varying success, but the longest one has lasted was three days before blowing apart. And he just won't learn. Mr. Dr. B and I have watched him bring sticks, clumps of leaves, bits of grass that he pulls up and runs up the tree to add... and then we've watched the whole thing fall into the every growing pile of nest detritus at the foot of the tree.
And this is where his killer instincts come in. At one point he decided that *the*thing* that would hold it together was leaves and branches from the rhododendron that was happily sitting at the foot of the tree. So he chewed the branches and leaves off. ALL OF THEM. That nest lasted about four hours. SIGH.
The other thing that the squirrels and chipmunks have been doing with abandon is digging.
In my pots, thank you very much.
But not exactly warm yet...
Also-- this is awesome. :)
