The Brussel Sprouts made me do it…

September 23rd, 2009

There has been an ongoing mystery this summer about what kind of monster had been attacking the good stuff in the garden.  Swiss chard.  Brussel Sprouts. Tomatoes. It was a massacre.  I built a “fence” around the beds– but it kept on happening.  Apparently the beast was not fond of weeds as there were still plenty of those to go around.  Quite the quagmire.  Then there was the day that I came out onto the front porch and saw a blur… a really BIG sounding blur run under the front porch.  Yeesh.  I went out to meet the school bus yesterday and here is what I found:

(This is just a bad phonecam photo…not taken by satellites)

LOOK AT THE GIRTH OF THAT MUNCHER!!!

Sure

Sure it might look sort of cute with it’s squinchy little face, but that is NOT a guinea pig.  And it looks like I am not going to  get one single brussel sprout or tomato out of my garden.  Crime, really.

How do I make my garden HOG PROOF next year?

I dyed a bunch of wool and am in the process of spinning it up.

More will eventually follow.


Sometimes, it’s just about the poppies.

June 10th, 2009

It’s been really busy.  Only 2 days until the great SUMMER VACATION.  Here’s some poppies for you, they really do love a camera.

I’ve got so much to share– gardening, graduating,spinning and the makings of.  I’ll be back tomorrow for some of that.

Sweet dreams of poppies.


Memories of warmer days.

October 29th, 2008

Here are some images that I am trying to keep in my mind as I sit here mis-typing words because my hands are soooo coooold. Brrrr.

One of the Fairy rooms outside

Brawwwwk!

This beautiful day. I know it was warm. :)

This is where the gnomes meet up at night to talk crap and play pinochle. Isn’t that a great word? Does anyone really play pinochle?? Teach me please.

The Godseye tree. It’s the giant Dogwood. We eat dinner out here many nights.

Up in the neighbor tree. This is where it is best to talk to Erin and her tribe.

Urban Gnomes?? Or deconstructionist witches at the Home Despot??

Ok. I am off to bed. I have a BUNCH of really lovely handspun to update the Etsy Shop with tomorrow. More then!


Autumnal vortex

October 24th, 2008

I sent rosemary to school today with her VAMPIRE cape, and Jimmy and I showed up with cookies at 2 for the Halloween party.

You know, the one that is next Friday.

swirly, spinny, dizzy life.

At least the kids were happy to see us. No we didn’t give them the cookies anyway. Yes, the teacher now has a pretty good idea what kind of apples are on our tree.

I had the VAMPIRE TEETH in my pocket.

WoooooooSSSSHhhhhh!

Back to our previously scheduled blog post.  I wanted to show you some views of my world this morning.  Its chilly and wooly and so pretty out there.

Beets for Erin

morning glories reaching for the moon

mmmn the colors.  Blueberries in the Autumn are so pretty, and these Asters– they’re ok too.

Some and more of Peg’s dahlias

The end of the season for beautiful Hyacinth beans and still very much the season for prayer flags


Chilly big girl ( in her new neck warmer– pics of my new obsession coming soon)

Toasty little girl.  She is like a yarn shop on feet.

More later! It is rumored to be a cold and rainy weekend– I am sure we’ll come up with some sort of mischief. :)

Happy “send your vampires to school day!”


The Artful Environment

September 29th, 2008

As threatened, here are momentary thoughts on GARDEN and life ART .

First– I am the kind of person who has crap really great and important stuff everywhere.  It drives Jim crazy.  It may be the reason why I am crazy.  Shall I post a poll?

I hang stuff on doorknobs, I pile stuff on the steps… heck, I pile stuff everywhere!!!  My windowsills and frames and picture frames and any other spot that I can claim as mine, are covered with little shrines of said stuff.  Little parades of the ephemera of my life.  Kids sculpey creations, rocks, marbles,nature, tiny stuff, candles, bits of this and that.  It’ sort of the same way outside.

Is it not written–the way you do anything is the way you do everything.  This pop philosphy both comforts and terrifies me. :) I find it both a measure of truth and a measure of where I need to examine/change the way I do things.  I am such a creature of habit– though I love the excitement of change. It’s such an easy slide down the slope to that wise-guy Einstein who (maybe) said that Insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.   It all makes a difference. Every. Thing. We. Do.  I am voting for change everywhere, my own little world included!

Anyhow– skipping analysis of the ALL of my life, the GARDEN is full of stuff.  And I like it like that.  Stuff in trees , stuff on sticks, stuff.  I like to think it not so like Sanford and son, but more in the realm of art and memory and visions that have inspired me like Derek Jarmon’s lovely garden.

Yeah– I am a lot more wabi-slobby.  But it still is part of the garden magic for me.  My gnomes, and kids art and shells that I dutifully put away in the Fall each year and bring out again in the Spring.  The things I would have out there if I had real magic and money were dirt.  ( see Gypsy Vardo on ebay)  Anyhow, I love my garden and the outside world of this house.  The barn and docks of Jim, all of the little nooks and crannies, the front yard as food garden/weed farm.

My friend Peg has been working on a wonderful sculpture for us  inspired by the Helligan Giant.   This the Heligan version–

Here he is blooming.

I’d like to visit that garden some day.

Our is more of a non-botanical garden scale.  Just right for us.   It makes me smile everytime I go out to the back-world.

The birth of our mud/moss-person is  a long evolution, which I love, because it means gets worked on now and then while we visit and have tea.  I sort of hope that it never is really ” done” but keeps evolving through time and our friendship. It’s lovely.  It grew hair recently.

Lovely variagated green hair with purple highlights.

I’ll continue to post the changes, and thank you Pegella.  We love it.

I have an ongoing collection of Garden-as-sculpture images.  Here are a few that I’d love to share with you, they fit right in with our lovely garden head.

This beauty won the 2006 Chelsea Flower Show in London.  I think it was called “Garden of Dreams”.  So nice. The sculptors were Sue and Peter Hill, who have done other, similarly gorgeous works.

Belinda Villani

2 hysterical mentions:

( this biggest chia pet evah!)

I could go on and on..

A piece that really touched my heart was this prayer hut at the 2007 Bioneers conference in CA.

Environmental artist, sculptor and Santa Cruz firefighter ( !) Wendy Domster made this amazing piece.  It was created from a field of leek blossoms from an ‘excess crop’ that would have otherwise been just plowed under.

Leekhut

“It was a “gratitude hut”, with a dark interior where you could go to sit and ponder the miracles of your life, and remember what you were most grateful for. Inside it was full of ‘milagros’ or little charms and notes hanging from the walls in representation of all those miracles.”  I love the idea of this…all of it.

Milagro


knitty calculations– now with more, more, more mantises!

September 13th, 2008

Back to knitting news.  For the family in fact.

I am working on those lovely sproingy-patterned socks for Knitty Spring Forward . It is a really fun pattern, looks great, is easy enough to remember, but has enough going on pattern-wise to be a fun knit :)

Marigold, per usual is a experiencing crafty-schizophrenia.  The weaving is to the side now and we’re back to knitting.  She is knitting her first circular-knitting project,  A hat.  She is planning to make a LOT of hats.  She wants to jazz’em up too– viking hats, egg hats, wig hats.  It ought to be good!  We have found this site so helpful for calculations.  Many helpful tools there, including the ever daunting ” how to knit a bust dart”.  I don’t think we’ll need that for her hats– but still good to know it’s there.

Still with the mantises.  Went to grab the doorknob the other morning and almost got a handful of THIS.

I mean, WOW.  Look at the size of that thing!

And there have been more– on the kitchen window… ” Look Mama here’s one and it still has it’s head.”

And THAT folks, is good for the garden.


Kids Post– yarn for dinner again??

August 23rd, 2008

(Story and Photos by thing 1 and thing 2.)

Mama’s yarn ladies came over.  They brought  reeeeeeally good food.  My favorite was the  asparagus quiche and both of us LOVED the BERGER COOKIES!!  Here they are.  Kellie and Bonita couldn’t come.  I hope your poison ivy is better.

berger cookie for the little girl

I baked a cake, and guess what??? It DIDN’T EXPLODE!  ( see a few posts back for that photo)  I wrote knit on it with m&m’s.  It fell apart a little when my mama “helped” me with it.  It was delicious though.

I liked looking at the African safari pictures but my favorite part of the night was eating my cake.

Once you eat fairy food, you can never leave the fairy realm

AAAAAHHHHHH! ( she’s staying!)

So is mama.

nice dogwood picture

tiki torches

experimental photo of the candelier.

The evening was fun and extravagant.  I wouldn’t say it was elegant because I kept tripping in very un-elegant ways.  I am sure that was entertaining at least. :)

Rosie says she had fun.  she swam in the moonlight and the booger cookies were awesome.

the end.


Faeries in my garden… and action-girls at the park

August 15th, 2008

Packing every sweet drop of summer we can into the last 2 weeks. School in TEN days. TEN!

Yes, it will be nice to have some structure. Sort of. And it will be nice to have some time in the day to call mine alone–however it is spent. But come on– homework, early rising, the bedtime struggles, the standardized tests and on and on. I am just not strong enough. It is too long a school year.

I am trying to think about the good fall things… pumpkin picking, hay-slides, lovely leaves, cider, crisp smelling air, holiday breaks! :) . It’s still not pulling me forth. This summer went by faster than any other in my life, and I am loathe to leave it. I sat next to a woman at the park the other night who wearily growled ” I can’t wait until they make school all year ’round for these kids.” I can’t disagree strongly enough.

Enough crying in my iced coffee.

Here’s some shots of the action-girls performing spazzy and death defying stunts.

Ok, may be not so death defying, but F-U-N anyhow.

They have been at the camera a lot this week. I may give them their own blog day, I think. The movies are just to-cry-for, and the photos are really great. Digital cameras are great, all discussion about nuances aside. I remember as a child taking a photo was so PRECIOUS. You had to ask for film, and then for the processing. ( Remember those FOTOMAT huts?  World’s weirdest job.) And then wait and wait and wait for them to come back.

Invariably you got a few talking-tos about the price of it all and the amount of crappy or totally black pics in the bunch. *harumpfh*

I think it’s awesome that they can compose their world in such an immediately gratifying way. Marigold is interested in light, and focus and her “message”. funny. So here are a couple of the many from the other day.


not so shabby!

I will have some crafty things to show you later– some more yarn and gnomes, some sketchbook exchange art and maybe some bracelets, if I am lucky!!


garden of earthly Delight ( or Delightful earth)

August 9th, 2008

My garden is a kind and forgiving creature.  I spent 2 days out there in my Lara boots and got it cleared of all plants in the wrong place– as some wise person once called weeds.

This morning I replanted for fall.  I am on the late side, but thought it couldn’t hurt– I had the seeds anyway. Beets, spinach, lettuces and mesclun, chard, brussel sprouts, bean and moonflower seedlings — think that’s it.  It has been so beautiful here these past few days.  It felt really good working so hard out there.  Yesterday felt absolutely like fall in fact.  I had that weird body-change-of-seasons-feeling.  Odder than usual in fact.  I cried alot of unprovoked tears.  Was so tired and just sad, sad, sad.

I even built a stick -gym for my passion vine  ( remember the butterflies host plant) 

which had THIS on it this am…

le sigh.

Other garden wonderment:

Yard long beans finally appeared in with my favorite fence-cover ( and one of my treasured plant names)  Dolichos lablab L. or the purple hyacinth bean vine.

and some ethereal inhabitants:

and a basket of goodies

Loads of herbs too.  Today we are drinking my continued attempt to match the heady experience  of an elixir which is on the menu of a local restaurant–

Limeade, basil, mint and lemon verbena all blended up and icy. Yum.

More views from the garden another day–hopefully with me being a better friend to it– there will be many more baskets of goodness before winter!


I’m back! And LOST in my garden!!!

August 6th, 2008

So we’re back from our cross-generational-family-natural-water-system-exploration-vacation. I have so much to share about that, so tune in for a few days.

( part of an ARTSCAPE installation that is speaking to me right about now.)

I am sitting here barely able to move. I think it’s going to take another motrin to save me. My garden looks like this… or did yesterday.

Isn’t that a horror?? I call myself a gardener! Truth be told , there’s loads of great garden hiding in there, but alas and alack…. I have not been a good steward of late.

So I had no choice but to sell my soul for some heat, perky boobs, and a bit of temporary hair color. It was totally worth it.

( TOTALLY REAL ACTION SHOTS OF ME IN MY GARDEN)

First I macheted the paths so I could swing through without scraping up my gorgeous legs.

And I have liberated the peppers, some tomatoes and the leek bed thus far.

I’ve cleared 2 and a half beds and have 4 more to go. I had to quit as It was dark and garden fighting by moonlight is not for Lara Croft possessions. Best left up to the real her. Also, it is a little known fact that while possessed by the spirit of Lara, you are more prone to mosquitos– sort of like kryptonite and the superman. PLUS, that double holster chafes if you are only used to a single one.

So I’ll be back at it today. First I have to put on my uber-mom disguise and hit the post office and market. Hope I don’t get mobbed by paparazzi– I don’t even think Jim noticed!

More on the epic joy-voyage tonight. I have some pics to get up so that I can illustrate my story.

ciao ( that is what Lara would say, for sure)

dd