Author: Lindsey (Page 10 of 88)

Starting Up the Garden!

March 23, 2013 / Lindsey / 2 Comments

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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Retreat

March 15, 2013 / Lindsey / 1 Comment

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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Did you know that art projects are magnetic?

March 8, 2013 / Lindsey / 4 Comments

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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Garden planning, more snow, and a catnip party

March 5, 2013 / Lindsey / 3 Comments

As I opened the bedroom curtains yesterday morning I was greeted by a peaceful gray day and gently falling snowflakes! I always get excited when I see snow. I made tea and turned on some soft harp music, which goes very well with snowfall.

In the afternoon, the sun was shining while the snow was still falling:

And now’s the time when I haul out the seed box and plan my garden. I always am puzzled about statements referring to gardeners delving into seed catalogs in December or January, itching to get going again. For much of the winter I can hardly think about gardening! I very much enjoy the break that winter provides. I love my garden, and I also love having a break from the work of it. And I absolutely can’t even think about garden planning and seed starting and fertilizer stuff and soil amendments… until I’m fully ready. Through the winter, my heart actually sinks when thinking about these things! Until one day… about this time each year… I think about gardening… and my heart lifts — soars, even.

And then I know that it’s time to begin.

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My cat Liz loves seeds perhaps as much as I do. When I lay out all the packets for planning purposes, she makes sure she’s there to help. We love to “play seeds” together.

Can you guess what kind of seeds she loves best?

When I left all the seeds out on Sunday night, I had forgotten about the Catnip.

And Liz had been playing seeds in the night — as I quickly realized on Monday morning when I saw the crumpled rug and strewn packets.

The life of the party:

So I guess to plant catnip this year, I’ll just have to rake a plot of dirt and shake out the rug!

(If you’re curious about planning a veggie garden, here’s how I do mine each year.)

And your garden… what’s it up to right now?

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Winter has returned!

February 26, 2013 / Lindsey / 4 Comments

The season has reasserted itself, and we got about a foot of snow on Sunday! It’s a fortunate thing, too, because winter was slipping through our fingers without much at all in the way of precipitation. I was getting ready to drag out the hoses and sprinklers but now thankfully I can put that off for a while yet.

Sunday was a lovely day of resting, reading, soup-eating, snow-ice-cream-making, enjoying the blizzard from inside our cozy warm house, and venturing out now and then to re-shovel the walkways.

And in typical Colorado fashion, yesterday, Monday, was a glorious sunny day. Not one single cloud anywhere. So I shoveled a tunnel to the clothesline and dried two loads of laundry outside. My grandma used to do that; she dried all the clothes of her household of nine (!) out on the line, even through the winter. She shoveled a walkway to the clothesline through the snow, for 46 Colorado winters, and didn’t get a dryer until she was in her 80s… but by then she was very sick, and never did get to use that new dryer. It’s just as well; my mom says she reckons my grandma loved every minute of the time spent outside hanging clothes, no matter the weather. I agree; there’s just something about hanging out the wash.

Then later in the afternoon when I was needing some birdsong in my ears, wind on my face, and sunshine in my eyes, I sat out on the sidewalk with some tea in my New Chair. I bought this fabulous chair, seemingly never used, at the thrift store for $4.99. I looked it up this weekend and it’s a $75 chair! (It’s a Howda seat.) It was one of those things I didn’t know I needed — as my mom says, “I’ll need it when I see it” — but it’s just perfect for one of the things I like doing most, which is to “sit awhile” in little random outdoor spots.

Today is another wintry, cloudy day with a little bit more snowfall. I love these days. But the shrinking band of winter sun through the south windows, and the increasing evening daylight means that Spring really isn’t very far off at all…