Weekend Happenings

How was your weekend?  I hope it was wonderful!

We had a great weekend!  It was productive, successful, and filled with pretty things.

We did some some plant shopping and came home with some beauties.  Here's one of the flowers we got for our front yard.  Isn't it gorgeous?!  I love the colors in this verbena!

We planted these and several other kinds of flowers in our front yard.  Shortly after we'd finished and we were standing in the yard admiring the pretty new flowers and how nice our yard is looking, a hummingbird buzzed around and discovered some of the new flowers.  It quickly started eating from them.  That made us so happy!  I love having flowers that the wildlife enjoy!  In fact, we bought two bushes that are supposed to attract butterflies.  I'll be sure to post pictures when they start blooming.  Maybe I'll even get some butterfly pictures.

Our spring and summer garden is shaping up nicely, so far.  We continue to add more to it.  And, we're already enjoying food from it!  Our lettuce and arugula are doing so well that we haven't been able to keep up.  It's so cool to go out and pick fresh food right before a meal.  I'm excited that the arugula is successful because I love arugula!  It's so tasty!  I usually buy a bag every week or so and they often have a lot of moisture in them and don't last long.  Right now, I get it fresh whenever I want some and don't have to worry about it spoiling in the fridge.  I find myself munching on it whenever I'm in the backyard. It makes great pesto too!

I twisted my ankle a couple of weeks ago and have been resting it since.  It's feeling quite a bit better than it has been.  So, I went out Saturday morning and tried to hike on it.  It felt SO good to get back out there again!  I love hiking SO much!  I was encouraged that it felt pretty good.  But, it started to hurt a bit after about 20 minutes.  So, I turned around and kept my hike short so I wouldn't make it worse again.  It was a short hike (only about 40 minutes) but a hike nonetheless.  So, I counted it for my 52 hike challenge and I'm still up to date.

Here's one of the pretty flowers I saw on my hike...

Probably the best part of the weekend involved our SUV (aka what we use to pull our camping trailer).  About a week ago the brakes locked up and started smoking.  We were near a mechanic/dealer that we thought we trusted and pulled in to have it checked out.  It made sense because the only other way to get it home would have been by tow truck.  Well, to make a long story short, they told us the entire brake system and more had melted and that they needed to do $8,000-$10,000 of work on it.  What?!!!  That's insane!  We thought, explored, and shopped many options and ended up having it towed home.  The tow truck driver told us that he tows cars from that mechanic to other places all they time because that place is so crooked and expensive.  Well, now we know!  And, he looked underneath and didn't see anything melted.  Hubby took it apart, found the problem, and fixed it this weekend for about $200!  Whew!  He's going to change out everything in the brake system and more just to be on the safe side.  However, the total cost will be significantly less, about $1,000!

It was a good experience to go through because we learned not to trust that mechanic.  And, we found out, after lots of shopping, that we still like our Yukon XL better than anything we could find to replace it with.  It has so much of what we want on it.  And, best of all, it's paid for!  Besides that, fixing things is so much better for the earth than constantly throwing things out and getting new.

Wishing you all a wonderful week!

Garden Update

Our garden is growing!  In fact, it seems like it's growing so much that it looks different every day!  It was especially surprising when we got back from our long weekend away and saw that small seedlings had exploded into large plants!

The Patty Pan squash are growing the fastest!  I'm excited for them to bloom and start growing yummies!

Here's another raised bed with zucchini, a couple of tomato plants and a pepper plant.

The tomatoes have grown a lot.  And, every plant has baby tomatoes!  A few of them have some yellow leaves.  We need to look it up and see what that's all about.

Here's a bunch of baby yellow pear tomatoes...

And, one of the many tiny chili peppers on our one little plant.  We need to plant some more of these!

It turned out that the gorgeous purple cabbage I posted recently wasn't edible.  The plants had gotten a bad case of aphids early on.  We treated them with Neem oil and the bugs went away.  However, when I harvested it, the heads had brown buggy stuff throughout.  I kept tearing away leaves in hopes of finding an edible head inside but the brown went all the way through.  Such a bummer!  Like I said before, gardening isn't easy!  But, we're trying to stick with it and, hopefully, get more and more successful.

How's your garden growing?

Have a wonderful weekend!

P.S.  Are any of you who use Blogger having trouble with your posts not showing up on the feed for hours or not until the next day?  I've even noticed that the feed of blogs I follow has only been showing posts from hours ago and not keeping up too.  I don't see everyone's posts until almost a day later.  I've searched settings and haven't found anything.  It seems to have started about a week or so ago.  If anyone has had this problem and has found an answer, let me know.  And, let me know even if you haven't found an answer because I'm wondering if it's a Blogger problem.  Thanks!

How was your weekend?

How was your weekend?  I hope it was a good one!

Mine was good.  It was filled with a little of this and a little of that.

It started off on Friday when I got back from the market.  I found a cute, little, spray bottle at Sprouts that I couldn't resist.  And, besides, I really wanted to try making some homemade air freshener/linen spray.  So, when I got home, that's just what I did.

I found a recipe online.  I cut it in half so it would fit in my bottle.  Here's what I used...3 tablespoons of distilled water, 1/2 tablespoon of vodka (all I had was pepper vodka but it has an earthy good smell and worked fine (vodka/alcohol is used to make the oil and water mix), and 20 drops of lavender oil.  It turned out great and smells sooooo good!

My husband got called into work early Saturday morning to take care of a problem.  I decided to go with him to keep him company on the drive and later do a little shopping and be-bopping around by the beach....he works in Carlsbad...just minutes from the ocean!  :-)

When he was finished, we headed to Encinitas for breakfast at the "Potato Shack".  Yum!  Then, we walked over to see the ocean.  It seemed extra blue and gorgeous that day and the water was so clear.  I wish I'd brought my camera.  Oh well, thank goodness for cell phone cameras.

After that, we hopped over to REI to do a little shopping.  I got a new backpack!  It's the green one on the right.  I had gotten one a couple of years ago (the blue one next to it) but it turned out to be too small for actual backpacking.  So, this time I got one that's probably the biggest I'd get for my small frame...a 60+10 litre.  It should work just fine.  I think I officially have a backpack collection now.  lol  The other two are a small pack for day hikes (the turquoise one), and the smaller one I use when I go biking.

Our garden seems to be noticeably growing each day.  We have a few more seeds that have sprouted over the weekend too.  And, we got our first two tomatoes of the season.  Woot!

I measured off a new warp a couple weeks ago....with the "help" of my sweet Penelope.  I've since been slowly putting it on my loom.  You know....a little time here, a little time there.

I finished warping my loom last night and it's ready to weave!

Hooray!  I'm so excited to see how this project will turn out.  I'm going to weave some kitchen towels with some thread/yarn I have in my stash.  Yay...more de-stashing!

Here's to a great week!

Spring Garden

Persistence seems to be paying off with our garden.  We have been surprised at how challenging it is to grow veggies.  We remembered elementary school projects where we planted a bean or potato and it grew in what seemed like no time at all.  And, we've had gardens in the past that did great.  But, our veggie growing efforts have yielded almost nothing over the past few years.  We didn't give up though and we've put lots more effort into it this past year.  We built raised garden beds (you can see a post about that HERE) and have worked hard and spent a lot of money on making the soil better, battling grubs, etc.  I'm happy to see that our efforts are starting to pay off.

The cabbage we planted over the winter is looking gorgeous and ready to harvest...

The colors are stunning!  And, I love how it looks in the morning with water droplets from dew or watering.

Our dog loves to pull tomatoes off the vines.  She even got to them in the raised beds last year.  So, we built another garden area with a fence in a back corner of a yard.  We even put some wire mesh to try to keep her away from them.  We have six different kinds of tomato plants and they seem to be quite happy right now.  Yay!

One of the plants even has little tomatoes on it!  Woot!

And, all of the plants have blossoms.  We have very few bees to pollinate them though.  So, I'm planning to head down to the nursery for some bee attracting flowers to help out.

This is part of that little corner garden area.  So far, we have tomatoes, zucchini, peppers, two kinds of pumpkins, and various varieties of sunflowers planted in this area.  The pyramid in the middle is for strawberries.  We still need to fill it with soil and plant it.

In our raised beds, we have Patty Pan (flying saucer) squash...

Bush beans...

Three different kinds of eggplant...

The first planting of radishes are sprouting...

We also have a bunch of pickling cucumber plants that have recently sprouted.

The onions and garlic we planted in the winter are growing nicely.  We enjoyed beets and beet greens over the winter and spring.  Our lettuce grew so well that we had LOTS of salad.  It's now big and about ready to harvest the seeds so we can replant.

We've added more barrels to our wine barrel herb garden.  I'll post more pics of that after I do some more work on it and get it growing more.  But, I have been enjoying basil again, along with parsley, thyme, oregano (that grows all year 'round), sage, and rosemary.

Our fingers are crossed that our current success will continue and result in a veggie filled future!

Lucky Lettuce

Our brown thumbs just might be turning green....maybe!  Or, we just got lucky!  We have somehow managed to grow lettuce!  We're not the best at gardening and we've never had any luck with lettuce...until now!  Every time we planted lettuce in the past, nothing came up.  This time, it's not only coming up, it seems to be thriving!  We had a salad for dinner from OUR garden!

Here's our harvest for the evening...

We even had some beet greens that we picked and added to it.  We were going to try adding some radish greens as I read that they're even more nutritious than the radishes themselves.  But, they were spiny and it turns out it's best to use young, non spiny leaves.  So, we'll try that another time.

The lettuce is growing so fast that we're going to need to eat a lot of salad in the near future!

For anyone who's following along about my mom...here's the latest...

She passed her driving test.  Sigh!  But, I've heard it's common for that to happen and that it may not be until a person gets lost, in an accident, or has a scare that they're willing to stop driving.  A doctor needs to sign off on it for her to keep her license.  She was able to get a doctor to extend it for six weeks but she'll need further evaluation by a gerontology doctor to see if she can keep her license.  That appointment is scheduled for mid-March.  That's good news because she may willingly go to that doctor appointment now.  Before this, we weren't quite sure how we were going to get her there as she has been very adamant about not needing to go.  I just hope the doctor sees what we see...that it's not safe for her to drive now.

Garden Makeover

The drought in Southern California is serious and so is that monthly water bill!  So, we decided last year to give our backyard a makeover that would cut down on water usage and provide a way to grow some of our own food.  We turned the water off to the lawn (which seemed to have an unquenchable thirst for water) and removed it.  Then, we drew up a design for raised garden beds with benches around the top.  Hubby built four of them.  We stained and sealed them a dark brown to match our patio cover and to help make the wood last longer.  Hubby ran pipes to each one so we could later hook up drip lines.  We bought a LOT of pre-mixed garden soil from a local bulk supplier and moved it in several trailer loads and then lots and lots of wheelbarrow loads to the back yard to fill the beds.

Salsa did a great job of supervising...

  

Then came the fun part...planting.  We planted a tomato in the center of each bed and added little pyramid trellis' that hubby made.  I think they look really cute.

The benches around the sides work great to sit on and to set things down like plants, tools, seeds and even an ice cold beer!

It was fun to see the garden grow and take shape.  And, Salsa thought it was fun every time we went out to check on it and spend time in the yard. She runs around in a state of complete joy whenever we go out there.

It was so exciting every time we saw a baby squash or other food start growing!

We realized that gardening will take a lot of learning and practice as we didn't have the best of luck.  But, we did manage to grow a few things we could eat.  Radishes were one of the things we had a bit of success with...

Zucchini was our most successful crop.  In fact, at one point we had trouble keeping up with eating them as fast as they were growing.  And, they seemed to get large rather quickly.

We harvested a few tomatoes here and there through the summer and fall.  And, in the fall there were a few butternuts that we got to enjoy.  They were delicious!  The marigolds we planted to help keep some kinds of insects away did really well.  They were pretty all summer long.

I've always got herbs growing in my half wine barrels all year 'round.  They always do best during the summer though.  I love the flavors of fresh herbs!  They really bump the dishes we cook to a whole new level.

We had fun shopping at the garden center in the fall for new things to plant.  We got onions, garlic, beets, cabbage, and a couple new herbs.

Look, they're growing!  So exciting!

And, it's about time to plant some more things in our garden for spring and summer.

Oh, and the water bill?  It's a lot less since we took out all that grass!  Yay!

We still have more to do in order to finish the yard as a whole but we hope to make a lot of progress this spring.  I can't wait 'til it's done to see how it all turns out and to share pictures.  Stay tuned!

A Fairy Garden and a Week on Instagram

Wow!  Last week flew by and I didn't get anything posted on my blog.

It was kind of a weird week.  But, I did get a few things posted on Instagram.

Here they are...

My daughter came home from college for part of the weekend.  When she arrived on Friday 

night, she asked me to close my eyes.  She had a little Mother's Day surprise for me.  

What a sweetie!  She bought some adorable little plants and a little arbor

and gates to start my very own little fairy garden!  Aren't they cute?!

I've wanted to make a fairy garden for a while now.  In fact, my daughter and I went shopping last Spring to find containers and supplies.  Life got busy and I never got any further than that.  But, I finally got around to making one this weekend...thanks to her!  I used the old roasting pan that I found last year at a thrift shop.  It was the perfect size to hold everything she got for me.

Here's a close up photo.  I've since added a little bunny tucked in close to the bush on the right.

I'll be watching for a few more things to add a little more character and cuteness to my fairy garden.

We've been careful not to use insecticides around our house for the past few years.  I don't want to hurt the birds or other wildlife that my live here.  By doing that, we now have a great insect control system...lots of lizards. There are several different kinds and colors.  And, we sometimes have tiny babies running around.  Some of the lizards are getting big.  And, some are very colorful!  I found a couple of them on Saturday that were bright and colorful in the sun.  One of them had glistening green and blue on it's back.  This one had glistening blue.  It's even prettier in person.

Sometimes, I just NEED to crochet.  And, sometimes, it just NEEDS to be on a rock.

It might seem a little weird but it's so much fun!  I enjoy the creativity and problem solving

required to design something and make it fit nicely and snuggly on the rock.

I treated myself to a little ball of turquoise crochet thread on Friday.

I've been eyeing it for a long time but hadn't bought it because of my yarn diet.

Sometimes, a girl just needs a treat of new yarn!  I came home and quickly got started.

Here's what I came up with...

Here's the back...

Little Nellie (Penelope) is a big part of every week and everyday!

I love this little girl!  She was very snuggly last week.

She hopped up on my lap a lot and just wanted to be held and snuggled.

How can I resist taking more photos of that?!  She's so cute!

Wishing you all a wonderful week!

Summer Fun

Summer doesn't officially start for a couple more weeks.  But, for us, it's already here.

Our daughter is home from college for the summer.  The weather is warm.

And, we're busy planning and doing lots of summery fun things.

A lot of what I've been doing is trying to work on projects that

 I've been needing to do or finish for a while.  I'm on a mission!

I'm having lots of fun with it.  But, there are so many things I want to do that

 I sometimes don't know where to start.  But, I'm trying to keep moving and 

not get stuck.  I'd like to cross a lot of things off of my mental to-do list

and see lots of finished and wonderful projects by the end of summer.

We recently re-planted our front flowerbed.

We planted two Madame Julia Correvon Clematis and some Society Garlic, Marigolds,

Alyssum, and Lobelia with the Baby Tears that were already growing there.

The vines and most of the flowers are doing great.

Except for the Marigolds.  Some kind of critter has eaten most of them.

I love the purple/blue color of the Lobelia.

Sometimes it seems to glow.

We finally planted something in the flowerbed at the side of the our house.

It's something we've been meaning to do for a long time.

We decided on a Star Jasmine.  It's right near where we store our trash cans.

So, the floral scent will be nice over there.

Hubby built a trellis for it.  I love how he wove the wood.

This flowerbed and trellis line up with our office/soon-to-be-guest-room window.

It should be really pretty when the vine grows up.  And, it will provide a little privacy.

I finally got around to painting our family room.

The paint color doesn't show up very well in the photo.  It's actually a lot warmer and prettier.

The color is Benjamin Moore, Everlasting.  The room looks so fresh and pretty

with it's new coat of paint.  It was just builder white (Swiss Coffee) before.

I originally blogged about the room make-over HERE.

Life just got busy and then it was winter and a bit chilly to have the windows

open for painting.  But, now it's warmer and I'm on a mission to finish projects.

Hubby still needs to install crown moulding and mount the speakers.  And, I need to sew the curtains.

We got the moulding last week.  I'm planning to look for hardware today.

I'm hoping the room will be complete by the end of the month.

I've finally worked up the courage to try and figure out how to re-cover my dress form.

I found it a few years ago at a thrift shop.  It's in good shape but the purple color

doesn't look good with most of the projects I want to photograph on it.  

So, I've been working on making a pattern...first with tissue...

Then, I used the tissue to cut out white fabric pieces.

I've pinned them on and adjusted it a bit.

Now, I need to sew the fabric together to make sure it works.

If it does, I'll use that as a pattern for the neutral fabric I have to re-cover it.

Wish me luck!

Another project that's been waiting around for way too long is a rug hooking project.

I bought it years ago on a trip to Texas.  I didn't enjoy doing it as much as I thought I would and

it's been sitting in the closet ever since.  I pulled it out the other day and I'm trying to work 

on it a bit each day.  It makes my hand hurt.  So, a little each day is better than nothing.

It'll be nice to finish it and enjoy it instead of moving it out of the way

when I need to get things out of my craft closet.  

I wound my new yarn from the Yarn Over Truck and bought the pattern for the shawl I plan to make.

So, I'm all ready to get started on that.  Yay!  I'm so excited!

But...

Last night, at knit night, one of the ladies (who also dyes yarn...Inner Yarn Zen)

showed me some yarn she'd just dyed.  It was LOVE at first sight!  It's gorgeous.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to capture it's beauty in a photo.

She asked if I'd like to test knit it for her to see how this new base yarn is to work with.

Of course, I agreed!  Eeeee!  I'm so excited to play with this beautiful yarn!

I came home and started searching for patterns and have narrowed it down.

Last weekend, my daughter hosted a party to view the film she worked on this past school year.

The film was created by a student for his masters project and it's based on the true story of a harpist. 

My daughter wrote and performed harp music for the film, acted as a hand double for playing the harp, and coached the main actress how to sit at the harp and look like she was a harpist.  We were very impressed by the film.  It was so well done that no one would guess it was made by a student.

It helps that the college has a top notch film school with great equipment, facilities, and instructors.

We are so proud of her!  And, very grateful for all the wonderful experiences she had this last year.

Besides the film, we enjoyed the company of family and some of our daughter's friends.

And, she made Sangria and a delicious tart that was gluten and dairy free.

It turned out beautiful too!

There are just so many fun things I want to do this summer!

I just wish the days were longer, that there were more days in the week and weekends,

and a few more months in the summer because I know it's going to go by very quickly.

Although, that kind of adds to the fun, I guess.  It makes it a challenge and

 a bit of a game to see how much I can squeeze into it.

I've heard several other people talk about how they're also on a mission to try and finish lots of projects.  What are you up to this summer?  Are you on a similar mission?