The Garden Revisted

Gardening can be such hard labor!

The Garden Visited

For weeks now our focus has been to get the garden ready to plant. Moving in the fall and dealing with spring weather gave us quite a late start considering how much work needed to be done. We moved 38 tons of dirt and sand into the garden with wheelbarrows and rakes. The first photo is the last of the dirt which is about 8% of what we put in. The next photo is bags of compost (about 2 1/2 tons of that) waiting to be spread. After we spread the poop, we rototilled the whole area both ways . Ken loves to take pictures of me using the heavy equipment. Needless to say, we have been doing nothing but preparing the garden other than keeping up with the mowing and occasionally sleeping. And dreaming about the garden.

Morel Hunting

We had seen some Morel mushrooms at the auction last Friday and the neighbors had said there were some in the woods, but neither of us had ever gone hunting for them. I decided to try to find some and Ken said he would go along. We found a website that told us likely places to find them but instead of mushrooms we found lots and lots of trillium, wild phlox, wild columbine, some amazing little red things that looked like tiny fairy horns pointing straight up, and whole fields of those crazy big leaves that were hiding a beautiful yellow flower under them.

I knew that if we found even one mushroom, Ken would be the one to spot it, and sure enough, about an hour and a half into our walk, he found one under some other greenery that nearly covered the ground. We got excited enough to try for another half an hour but found only the one. We took it next door to make sure it was a Morel, which they confirmed. They said they hunt them but don't eat them considering the flavor to resemble the odor of rotting trees. We cooked it and liked it a lot.

Paducah Quilt Show

My friend Jean invited me along on one of her annual pilgrimages to the Paducah Quilt Show in Paducah, Kentucky. The quilts were stunning; the vendors seemed to go on forever; and I have never seen so many quilters in one place in my life.

The three I've shown here are: #1246, Flights of Fascination by Anna VanDemark, #1423, Water, Earth II by Pat Pauly, and #1416, My Mind Drifts Along with the Stream by Eunjoo Kim.

We preferred the wallhanging sized quilts to the bed sized quilts mostly in that they were more free formed. My program says there were 1626 competition quilts at the show!

Although I do make the occasional wall quilt, my sewing is pretty limited. I did find some batiks at the show and at an amazing fabric store, Hancocks of Paducah, and managed to fill a void in my stash - yellow and orange batiks with red and pink overtones.