Does it still count as “early” April when you’re into the second week? I thought I’d better hurry up and post again, even though I don’t have much art-and-crafty stuff to share since last time. Keeping in the habit is best.
Getting Those Steps In
The weather is still nice enough for walking, so I’m trying to take advantage of that most days before the humidity and heat combine to make indoor walking preferable.
One morning in the past two or three weeks, we had fog, which made for a mysterious (mist-erious?) atmosphere.
On another (more recent) walk, I snapped a couple of photos of some clematis blooming at our main gate. The flowers are so pretty in spring. It’s just too bad it’s over so soon, replaced by my old nemesis, summertime…
We’ve seen a lot of animals since my last entry, too. We’ve seen one garter snake and one chonky rat snake, but mostly black racer snakes—multiple times in different places, including one that lives in our yard, a big one down near the pond, and a breeding pair at the edge of the woods in front of my parents’ house. Here’s one I saw near the pond when I was on my own:
They’re non-venomous but can still give you a fright when you come upon them unexpectedly! This one was holding his ground right at the edge of my path, not at all deterred by my presence, so I had to just hurry past and hope he didn’t get grumpy.
Another day, I saw a box turtle in the woods…
And yet another time we saw a pair of Canada geese on the peninsula at the pond—and a wild turkey on the easement (a week or so after Mom photographed it walking just outside their yard).
Then there was the night Donald and I had a small fire in our firepit at the edge of the woods near our house. Dusk was falling fast when we heard something rustling in our direction from the trees. We squinted past the fire and just made out that it was a possum (okay, an opossum, if you insist) out on the look for food. It was making its way toward us, and I was starting to get a little worried that it might come too close when it finally realized that there were people there, so it veered off in another direction. (Phew!) It was just moseying along, clearly not at all perturbed by the fire or us.
And of course there have been rabbits and squirrels and lots of birds. Oh, and the red-headed skinks have reappeared, along with the crickets and (sigh) the wasps. The outdoor world is more obviously full of life and activity again.
How Will Our Garden Grow?
It’s been several years since we planted a vegetable garden. For a long time, I just didn’t feel like putting in the effort. To be honest, I might not have bothered this year, either, if it were entirely up to me, but Donald and I talked each other into planting at least a few vegetables this spring. We got a small electric tiller that helped make it feel more manageable. Breaking up the sod feels like a huge hurdle when you haven’t done any real gardening for years, and not having to do it all by hand was very nice!
I didn’t take any photos of the beds themselves, but there’s really not much to see at this point, anyway. Here’s a photo of some of the plants that were left after we filled the new beds:
These are destined for containers, which are now ready to fill in the next day or two. Everything else is in the ground.
We long ago dismantled our slightly raised beds (really just rectangles of cinder blocks filled with soil). This time, we just went directly into the ground with rows of plantings. We’ll see how it goes and what we do next year, if anything!
Below are some of the plant tags from the things we bought this year:
Mostly we’ve planted tomatoes. Several each of ‘Early Girl’ and ‘Better Boy’, a couple of ‘Lemon Boy’ (mainly because they were cheap). One ‘San Marzano’… Not pictured here, we also have a couple of ‘Sweet 100’ and a ‘Super Sweet 100’, both of which are cherry tomatoes. (Those are going in pots.)
We also planted some Japanese eggplants (Ichiban eggplant), seeds for both yellow cookneck summer squash (‘Dixie hybrid’) and okra (‘Clemson Spineless 80’), and several peppers, including bell pepper (‘California Wonder’), jalapeno, and habanero. Oh, and we have one variety (‘Gypsy’) of something called a “mini bell pepper”, which I didn’t even know was a thing. Apparently they’re a cross between a bell pepper and a sweet Italian bull horn pepper, another thing I’ve never heard of until now. There’s also a pot of chives we’ll be planting… and I think that’s it.
We probably could have/should have planted the squash earlier, but oh well. We’ll see what happens. I’m the only one who eats it, anyway, and I’m not that worried if it doesn’t live long enough to produce well before the bugs get to it. (They’re notorious for not living long, thanks to squash vine borers and mosaic virus.) For the price of a small envelope of seeds, it’s worth a try.
A Doodle for Yoodle
I haven’t really done that much doodling since last time, but here’s one that did happen.
‘Hyper Green’ Forever Ink in a non-fude nib fountain pen. I wanted to doodle plants in pots (for the zillionth time), so I did. A few cats popped up here and there, too.
And then I went in a different direction for the paint. I chose bright, extremely unrealistic colors for the plants (though pretty predictable and unadventurous ones for all the planters and pots). The cats I just left white, because I thought it would be more visually appealing that way. (Otherwise, the cats would have just disappeared into the jumble… more than they already do.)
I didn’t add much detail (layers, gradients, wet-in-wet color) in the paint and also chose not to add anything else (color pencil, paint pen). There’s already a lot of detail on a fairly small page, and I thought this would look best, this time.
The paint went outside the lines in a few places—sometimes sloppiness on my part, sometimes using a little too much water, probably… but also because I think the sizing on this paper may be going bad. Nearly done with it, so that’s not a problem. Maybe I’ll purposely go for a messier, less precise painting style for the remaining pages, if I remember, to avoid frustration.
Birds and Kitties Sitting Pretty
I saw a fun 60s magazine cover illustration of a sitting room that included a cat asleep on a chair and a bird in a cage, and that made me want to doodle cages with birds.
As you can tell, I didn’t even try for precision or anything resembling realism, and it was fun. I do wish I’d been a bit more precise with the paintbrush in a few spots, but eh, it was just for fun. I might try this again sometime…
Broken Dishes Quilt Blocks
I’ve worked a bit more on my broken dishes quilt blocks. I was doing them in batches, and at some point I decided that I need more to make the quilt a good size.
So I cut a few more phonebook foundation papers and plonked myself back down in front of the Singer 15 treadle. There’s something satisfying about powering the machine yourself!
My blue strings were running very low towards the end, but that’s okay. I could have stopped and found more fabric (maybe cut some more strings), but I just didn’t feel like it. It’s not a problem if some of these blocks end up more on the grey side. (The strings, if you don’t remember, are a combination of blue and grey.) These blocks will be scattered throughout the quilt, which makes it easier to create a balanced look.
These are the blocks I’ve finished so far. I started with all the busiest fabric, so most of the remaining ones will be on lower volume fabric—probably mostly white or white-on-white. I think it’ll work out okay when it’s done.
Still debating whether or not it “needs” another block with that fabric with the yellow flowers. That one stands out a lot to me, right now, as does the red butterfly print. I prefer “stand-out-y” things in threes… but on the other hand, I don’t really want to have to cut into more pieces of fabric than I have to, because that takes more effort and I’m lazy!
Garden Galaxy
I’ve been playing a new-to-me video game in the past few weeks—Garden Galaxy. It’s different from anything I’ve played before. It’s also rather addictive. There’s almost an element of gambling involved, because you feed coins/tokens into a pot and never know what’s going to come out in return. (The coins and tokens are doled out by “visitors” to your garden. At first, they feel precious, but at this point I’m getting so many that I can barely keep up.)
I guess you could say that a major goal in the game is to collect everything in the catalogue of objects available—but that doesn’t have to be your personal goal. You can also just use the things you’re given to build a fun garden and not keep track of which objects you don’t yet possess.
At this point, I’m still heavily in the “collecting” mode, but I might take a break from that and just start designing my garden. Right now it’s really just very slightly organized chaos with me trying to keep similar terrain grouped together and similar types of objects more or less where I can find them.
This probably doesn’t sound like fun at all, but it actually is (to me, at least). It’s another very low-stress “sandbox” game, which is my preferred type. There’s a lot of scope for just doing your own thing at your own pace.
…And that’s all for this time!
