More Garden Pix

I know, I know, I'm getting sick of pictures of dirt too. But after getting all of the planting done on June 16 which we had started on June 7, it was so exciting to see how quickly stuff started to come up. The seed potatoes had seemed a complete loss since we had stuck them in the basement for a couple of months without opening them to see the instructions that said to plant on arrival or refrigerate. When we got around to opening the box, it was a scene worthy of a science fiction movie. The sprouts were up to nine inches long and completely intertwined with the mesh of the bag. That was about a week before planting was a possibility and I worried over them every day. After we stuck them in really deep holes to keep from breaking the sprouts, I told Ken I would feel blessed to get five plants. Today we have two 20 foot rows almost full of plants.

The cabbages were starts from our friend Doug and the rest of that row is okra. The tiny plants in the unfocused picture are pepper plants. I'm waiting for the second set of leaves so I can thin the three or four down to one. The 24 caged tomatoes are about 400% more than we've ever had before, but apparently not enough for Ken. Check out the picture of the herb garden in the next post. And I'm pretty sure the dirt picture will be the last one of just dirt. I just wanted to show the raised beds I dug by throwing dirt from the paths up there. Ken smoothed and raked them and got them ready to plant.

The Future Berries

My sister, Kate, called about a month ago and told me she wanted to give us a "new house gift" of some blueberry bushes since it takes a couple of years before you can start harvesting them. She said she had found a great place in Madison called The Blueberry Patch and they had a deal of six bushes and asked if I knew the place. I told her we had been to Madison (nine hours away in Wisconsin) but weren't very familar with it. When the plants came, two of them were snapped off pretty low to the ground and Ken noticed they had been shipped from Mansfield (half an hour down the road). I'm pretty sure Kate heard me say that we weren't all that familar with Mansfield. So we called and arranged to change the broken bushes plus we added two more when we went over. They sat around for a while before we tackled planting them: the instructions called for a 2 foot diameter hole 18 inches deep refilled with half soil and half peat moss, 6 feet between plants and 8 feet between rows. We've got lots of room to plant - it was just a matter of deciding where. Black raspberrries, which I had been pining over since I saw some plants at the auction, seemed a breeze by comparison so we got 13 little plants and put them in too. However, we used the last of the sunny days to get that done and are now waiting to get back into the garden. More on that soon.

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.

A Birthday Gift for Pam

We had a late birthday celebration for Pam. I was inspired by the handmade gifts I got for my birthday to make this little altered board book for her. It was one of the 10 I had started after her last visit and the only one I had really gotten caught up with. It's fun to make a friend the focus of a project and to think of their personality as the start of each layout. Most of the quotes I found in Angela Cartwright's " In This House".