Let the growing begin!

Last year I just had a dinky little garden for about 8 tomato plants, but this year I made a nice big one!  I think it's about 16x20', but I'm not sure - I almost feel like it's already too small, but I'm sure I won't feel that way when I'm weeding in July!

I made two wonky teepees out of branches for my purple pole beans.

I'm well aware that these are pretty unexciting pictures -  just a plot of dirt!  soon though!  I planted watermelon, a french melon, Ruby Queen corn, cucumbers, patty pan squash, pole beans, and some herb seeds.  I'll also be putting in tomatoes and peppers, of course.  I'm also doing flowers around the edges - I already have in some marigolds and foxglove that I started from seed in the basement!

If you want an exciting picture though, check this out:

It's a Luna moth sitting on one of the black walnut trees - super rare to see!

Gorgeous!!  And then there's this weird fungus growing in one of the holes of a silver maple! whaaat?

We have tons of weird mushrooms and fungus here so I got a book on fungus and mushrooms of Ohio from the Ohio State University - I see nothing in it that looks like this stuff!  

down with brown

when we bought this house, just about everything on the outside was brown (though based on chips in the paint, it's been every color of the rainbow over the years - including pink!)  The eaves needed painting and we wanted to do away with the brown shutters, so this week we painted!  I won't say it was terrible, but I don't want to have to do that again for a while!  Painting surfaces over your head is not fun.  The porch ceiling needed to be painted (overhead) and that took nearly a whole day!  The eaves were the other hard part, but the trim wasn't too bad.  The good part is that we LOVE it and the house seems so much happier and fun now!

The green is called Bold Avocado, but when I look out the kitchen window and can see the porch trim and the grass, it's all the same beautiful color!  It's like we trimmed the house in spring!

Also this weekend, I did a little mediocre carpentry (that's the only kind of carpentry I do - it's adequate for yard stuff!)  We love vines and I have a bunch of seedlings of several types ready to be planted.  I made this vine pyramid for them - it's about 8 ft tall.

Then I found a 2x8x10 in the barn!  I had to rip it down into 4 -2x2's to make the sides, but now I have a 10 foot pyramid too!  I don't have a neat little topper for it yet, but I'll get one the next time I'm at Lowe's!  The fella has requested a shorter one too - maybe 5 or 6 feet.  He's the artistic visionary and will put them out where they'll look cool - I have the patience that he lacks and will do the building!  We saw plans for a cool planter box/bench combo that would be cool around the fire ring - that may be my next project!

2 finishes!

I took this week off work and I've been getting some stuff done, let me tell ya!  Our main goal was to get the house painted - well, it's brick so we were painting the underside of the eaves, the shutters, the trim, and the ceiling of the back porch - pretty much all of it is overhead work which is just the worst!  we're almost finished - this afternoon it will be done and I'll take pictures!  But in other finishing news, I finally got the living room curtains finished!  yay!  it's been a real weight on my shoulders!  they're just sooo hard to wrestle - yards and yards of heavy fabric and lining!  oy!  but they're done and those old lady curtains that were up before can suck it!

Oh, we also painted the living room a month or so ago - no more white walls there.  So my plan was to have all the fabrics work together since they're in eyeshot of each other - the living room curtains, the dining room chairs, and the dining room glass door curtains are all from the same Premier fabric line but different colors and patterns.  I just love them.  We also decided to make the living room curtains shorter than the previous curtains (which went to the floor) just to lighten up the look a little.

In other finishing news, I kitchnered up the toe on my mom's Mother's Day socks last night!  whee!  I'm glad to have those finished and ready for her!!  I didn't want to have to think too much so I used the Go With the Flow pattern from Interweave's Favorite Socks book.  I changed the ribbing at the top, but other than that it was a really nice pattern!  I've been doing a lot of darning my my socks lately, so I think I need to cast on for some socks for myself!  Gosh, I sure hope I have enough sock yarn, HAHAHAH!  please...

Oh, this yarn is from Earthly Hues, which unfortunately isn't in existence anymore.  She was a lady who dyed and sold her yarn here locally at fiber festivals -- SHE still exists, but she's not selling yarn anymore, I believe.  too bad.  I bought a bunch of stuff from her years ago and this is the first time I've used it - I really liked it!