Sunday, May 23, 2010

Gardening and Decorating

We have the first hint of color on two strawberries. If the rain ever lets up for more than 45 minutes at a time, we are in line to have a good crop. That is a big "if". After the insanely beautiful March, it has gotten progressively rainier. Apparently everybody's having trouble with their tomatoes, so I didn't feel quite so bad when we bought our starts. We went to Zwink's yesterday and got 10 Roma starts, 2 green peppers, 4 cauliflower, 4 broccoli, and 2 eggplant. I'm banking on the 3 slicing tomato and 1 cherry tomato starts that I already had to pull through. On the bright side, the basil starts I transplanted last weekend have not yet died. Since I grew those from seed, it will make for very cheap pesto this fall. We also harvested over 2 lbs. of mixed greens this weekend for me to take on my class trip tomorrow. The 7th grade is spending 4 days in Astoria.

The pea trellis got put up, to my great satisfaction. The tall one is the Alderman shellers. The row of snow peas is going to have to make due with the shorter PVC one. I'll have to work something out for the green beans, bingo beans, and black-eyed peas in the near future.

Q was delighted to discover the grape grabbing onto it's support for the first time. That naughty grass keeps trying to take over. Again, if it ever stops raining for long enough I have to go out and hoe out the grapes and strawberry beds again. It will be nice when tree guy finally comes and finishes the job and leaves us with a nice big pile of bark mulch for the paths and the grape bed. That should help some.

We went to a fun new store yesterday called The Eugene Backyard Farmer. It's a charming store complete with two calico kittens, Sonia and Sophie, and two chickens, Martha and Marie. He's thoroughly supplying chicken stuff right now and is hoping to expand into beekeeping equipment soon. He also carries some garden themed trinkets and the we bought the prints above while we were there. I fell in love with them and upon coming home and checking out her website, I've fallen in love with most of Nikki McClure's work. She's an artist from Olympia, WA who has most of her work printed in Portland on recycled paper with soy based ink. My latest fancy is custom making doors that have the prints sealed in them so our bedroom could have "Disappear" on it; the media room/study could have "Learn". "Rely", "Treasure", "Congregate" (hung by the entry way?), "Gravity", and "Breathe" were some of our other favorites but we loved almost all of them.

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