Kitchen / Garden / Sanctuary - Urban Homesteading to Nourish Body + Spirit
Happy Easter to you today! It’s a quiet, sunny Sunday morning here in Colorado, and this morning it really seems like spring has come. The lawns are getting green, the finches and robins are chirping, the daffodils and grape hyacinth are blooming, and the trees and bushes — though still bare silhouettes — are coming to life again.
May you have a wonderful Easter, however you choose to celebrate the re-awakening of nature in this most welcome and hopeful season!
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What a dear holiday Easter is. I love the sweet, cheerful decorations, the colors of early spring, the smell of hyacinth.
Back in late January, I had clipped some aspen branches and brought them into the house. They’ve been such a nice touch of nature to have around, carrying on with their life cycle of blooming and leafing out, content in just a vase of water.
So naturally, our indoor aspen tree needed some Easter eggs. I do have some blown-out-and-dyed eggs from several years ago, and this year I blew out some brown eggs, which are beautiful just as they are.
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To make your egg tree:
Clip a few branches and place them in a vase of water or sand.
Blow out some eggs by piercing both ends with a sharp implement like nail scissors or a needle or an old-fashioned ice pick; blow the innards into a bowl.
A nice way to hang each egg is to get a length of thin branch and cut it into short bits, 1/2″ or 1″ (2cm) long (or use part of a match stick or toothpick). The branch I used was from an elm tree.
Cut about 12″ (30cm) of thread, and tie a double knot on the branch bit. The knot doesn’t have to be completely centered on the branch. It helps to start a knot with the thread, and then slip the branch piece into it.
Slip your branch bit all the way into the top hole of the egg.
Hang it like this. Tie off the thread about 3″ (7cm) above the egg.
Then decorate your little egg tree! Don’t worry, your cat will help you.
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It’s time! Time to crank it all into action, which is what I’ve been busy with all this past week. Actually the garden this year is happening on a delayed schedule since it’s been cold and wet here, but it did all finally begin last weekend with my dad and me taking our sorta-yearly ritual trip out to the landscape place to get a pickup-load of compost. Then digging up the wintering garlic, turning the soil, making sure all displaced worms were lovingly tucked back under, spreading and digging in the compost, spreading and digging in the fertilizer, re-planting the garlic, and finally planting the seeds for spring crops.
What a lot of work. I think gardener-folk are the only ones who know how much work it truly is! But it’s good work, and at the close of the day you feel satisfied because of all you’ve done out there, and because the garden looks tended, and because your body is that good kind of tired where you know you’ll collapse into bed and wake up the next morning in the exact same position.
And so begins a new gardening season, with a fresh, new, carefully considered garden plan full of dreams and anticipation and delusion…if we’re going to be calling it what it is…that It’ll be better this year! Which is why this year’s plan includes bell peppers and melons despite poor performances and outright failures in the past, punctuated by one successful year each — just enough of a dangling carrot, you can imagine, to tempt any stubborn gardener into disregarding logic and experience and plopping those fat little seedlings into the soil yet again because This will be the year.
Starting tomato and pepper seeds on their heat mat:
The garden, “before”:
The bedsheets… as soon as we dumped the compost on the garden, we had a couple days of very high winds, creating a mini dustbowl. So yes, the bedsheets.
Baby tomatoes:
The garden plan, and planting:
Laying out the garlic:
A beautiful sunrise:
Complete!
Good thing we got the walls-o-water set up just in time for them to freeze solid:
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I hope you’ve all had a good week.
I’m curious — what has the early Spring weather been like in your area so far?
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Last weekend I had a wonderful retreat.
My folks were headed to the mountains for the weekend and my kitty and I went along with them. I didn’t realize how much I needed that dose of nature. My heart has been heavy lately with worry and too much of the ‘big stuff’ on my mind, and getting out of my usual daily pattern and having a fun little vacation really lifted me up. We all had a wonderful time!!
Kiss the kitteh!
These icicles were bent. Weird!
One day it snowed. It’s a shame I was too lazy to go outside and get a proper picture of this enchanted forest at dawn in the snowfall. Instead I took the photo through the window screen. Ug. Next time!
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What have you all been up to lately??
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Yes. And how I know this is that each time I begin one, there is soon a cat on top of it.
This time especially because I was using my “light table” (lamp under a glass table).
A warm art project. How much more enticing can it get??
Sometimes I do manage to complete a project without too much cat hair stuck to it. Here are a few kinda recent ones. The first two are paper cuttings, also known as “scherenschnitte.” The other two are mandalas that I draw freehand and then color with ink and colored pencil.
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Welcome to The Herbangardener! This site is dedicated to nourishing the body + spirit, backyard organic gardening, traditional foodways, and homesteading in the heart of the city. Do come along and join me!
"There's nothing more pleasurable than making things by hand, and nothing more beautiful than handmade things."
"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."
- Theodore Roosevelt
"Only after the last tree has been cut down; only after the last fish has been caught; only after the last river has been poisoned; only then will you realize that money cannot be eaten."
- Cree Nation Tribal Prophecy
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