Crafty Garden Sprouts

I'm a total novice gardener, but I love my teen-tiny, baby sprout-y crafty garden:

Orange Tomato (for eating)

Don't you dig my non-lead vinyl blind plant markers?

Catnip (for the cat)

Birdhouse Gourd (for birdhouses)

Spearmint (for soap)
Melon (for eating) Speckled Cranberry Bean (also for eating)
Sunflower (for pretty, and also a support for the beans)
Asparagus (for yum)
And finally, some muscle helping out (for a change)
Matt loathes gardening (he has bad knees, and longs for one of those lawns you see on the toxic weed-killer commercials), so it was quite sweet that he actually helped out for a few hours today, complete with many fervent and stoutly-defended (and completely ignorant) opinions about how best to do things.


No, dear, the mulch works best if it's not actually on top of the plant itself.


Um, and yes, sweetie, you do need to take the sprout out of its plastic pot before you plant it into the ground.


Next thing you know, I'm going to turn around and find him also engaged in the children's favorite garden activity when they think I'm not looking, which is to dig up our seeds to see if they've sprouted yet. It makes me kind of want to do it, too, which is NOT helpful


Did I mention that I'm a novice gardener?

My First Day of Vacay

Ah, the bliss of the first day of summer vacation! I don't know how y'all non-teachers can handle your lives without the prospect of a 3.5 month break every year.

Wanna get jealous? Here's what I did on my first day of summer vacation:

I get up, Matt makes me some coffee, I drink it while reading Margo Rising, my newest web obsession--it's a snarky review, in order, of all the Sweet Valley High books. I did not realize during my young teen years, when I was reading those books for real, that Jessica Wakefield is a sociopath. She is, though. Cold, dead blue-green eyes the color of the Pacific Ocean and all.

After Matt goes off to work (poor dear), the girls and I spend HOURS making my Papa's biscuits. Seriously, hours. The dough was well-kneeded, I assure you:
They turned out pretty well, I think, considering that I used olive oil instead of Crisco and whole wheat flour instead of self-rising white and regular milk + vinegar instead of buttermilk. Oh, and I burned them.

So we eat ourselves some biscuits and then we go outside, where I do a RIDICULOUS amount of heavy yardwork. Seriously, I was literally gasping for breath after struggling with our reel-powered motor back and forth across the random, uneven hill in our side yard. I didn't even get anything planted or weed-whacked, which were my other goals for the morning, although the sunflower babies are up and so we can plant the cranberry beans now, and we have the potting soil that Willow's bachelor's buttons need, finally.

Back inside, I make the girls a lunch that they do not eat and bully Willow through dressing for school, tooth-brushing, hair-combing, shoe-tying, etc. Sydney plays until Matt gets back from taking Willow to school, and he puts her down for a nap while I eat cheese and bread and barbecue Baked Lay's leftover from the previous night's drive-in date.

I spend a while making some text changes and futzing over the book proposal, which I have GOT to stop futzing over and just mail, for Christ's sake.

The laminator is still out from when I was making craft fair signs (I looooove my laminator), and so I experiment with laminating some comic book panels I'd cut out. I am very pleased with how they turned out:It's a way to use them but keep them archivally safe, and unlike the comic panels backed with acid-free cardstock that I put in my pumpkinbear etsy shop, you can see both sides of the comic book page on these. After I experiment some more, I might add these to my shop, too.

While I cut out the laminated comic book panels, I catch up on Dollhouse and The Office on Hulu.

When Syd wakes up from her nap, I get her dressed and we go get Will from school. I want to go buy another printer ink cartridge after that (I swear, everytime I print something I feel like I am bleeding money), but Will has to pee and Syd is thirsty, so we just go home. The girls run in and out of the house and play for a couple of hours while I do some laundry and some dishes and look under couch cushions and behind the bed to try to find all the library books that are overdue.

When Matt gets home, I enlist him into FINALLY moving my compost bin to where I want it to be while Willow and I mend my jeans:
She's getting pretty handy with the seam ripper.

While I go inside to finish mending my jeans I let Willow borrow my camera to take some photos outside, and later I find some nice photos on the camera--
--and also all these photos that imply that she'd been running around the yard sticking my VERY expensive camera into holes and garbage cans and underneath the back porch, etc. Shudder.

We need to cook some ears of corn so Matt makes burgers while I straighten the living room and the girls play a "math game" on the computer:
Don't tell them that their "game" is just flash card drills, because they LOVE it. I set it to just give them arithmetic problems in the ones and twos because I'm encouraging Willow not to necessarily work the problem each time, but to see if she can remember the answer from the last time she worked it. Oh, and she accidentally wrote The Devil's Number:

Matt and I laughed and laughed, but don't even bother explaining to a kid why it's funny.

During dinner it turns out that Matt forgot to actually cook the corn, so we'll likely have burgers again tonight.

After dinner I wrote up a Crafting a Green World blog post about mending my jeans while the girls laid down with Matt and fell asleep while he played video games. I went in there like an hour later, only to find Matt sound asleep, as well. So I read some Neil Gaiman comics in the other bed.

Matt did wake up from his nap later, but that's another story...

Caterpillar

"Momma! Momma!" Willow yells, barreling up to me as I transplant ditch lilies from one garden to another (both in the quadrant of front yard that Matt resents me for planting in, as we both know it's the best part of our property, and HE dreams of a baseball field-like expanse of green lawn). "I found a CATERPILLAR!"

Obviously, I run for the camera (as if Willow is not finding caterpillars and roly-poly bugs and earthworms and grasshoppers all day long, each one the subject of its own photo shoot), and spend several minutes taking photos of the caterpillar, as Willow, an old hand at Momma's photography, does her best to show it off in the best light and at the best angle.

When I'm finally finished and about to stand up and pick my shovel back up, Willow says, "Here, Momma, you hold the caterpillar now, and I'll take YOUR picture with it."

As if the caterpillar is some sort of celebrity, and we're the fangirls with our cellphones out begging for pics.

I hadn't thought of having my photo taken today, or of holding a caterpillar in my dirty hands, but I do what my daughter tells me, and she takes my photo:

I feel good about myself, seeing me through her eyes.

Crafty Garden

While my Matt did design work on my book proposal all day, the girls and I spent breakfast-time-- (yep, we even have to dye our cream cheese pink around here) to dinner time--
(What? You don't permit your preschoolers to have a nice candlelit dinner every now and then?) wreaking havoc in the garden.

There were blossoms to pick off of things that I wish the girls wouldn't pick blossoms off of:

And dinosaurs to romp amongst the birdhouse gourd seedlings (and mulch leftover from the neighborhood clean-up day!):
Other components of my crafty garden are bushel basket gourds, lavender, rosemary, spearmint, catnip, and sunflowers. I'm hoping to grow my pole beans up my sunflower stalks, by the way--that sounds reasonable, right? I'm also hoping to include some obviously reclaimed elements into my garden design--powder blue sink I found by the side of the road YEARS ago, a couple of old drawers, etc.

The girls also had a ball picking out critters from our yummy compost harvest:

And we managed to completely uproot an entire ant colony--oops:

Yep. All day, a trip to the recycling center for newspapers and cardboard, and several emergency consultations with , and I managed to plant, like, eight things.

You're not going to believe the crazy-best news, though--this worker came over to our house this afternoon and warned us not to park our cars on the street on Monday or Tuesday because our next-door-neighbor's sugar maple tree is rotted out and they're going to have to cut the whole thing down.

He's talking about the sugar maple that sits JUST SOUTHEAST OF MY FRONT GARDEN PLOT!!!

I may just have one spot in my yard this summer that can accurately be described as "full sun"!!!

Rest in peace, next-door-neighbor's sugar maple. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

P.S. I've finally had some time to list the first of my vintage button alphabet. Check it out in my pumpkinbear etsy shop.

Animal, Vegetable, Two Kids? Unpredictable

I think I've mentioned before (many times) that neither Matt nor I are either able or willing cooks, that I have caused numerous kitchen fires, that Matt has never caused a kitchen fire mostly because he confines himself to boiling tortellini and grilling things on his wee little George Foreman, that things that I make generally turn out weird and even though I know exactly why this happens (in a madcap manner, I make healthier and apparently unworkable substitutions, and I treat all amounts and times as approximate), I can't seem to stop myself from keeping on doing it...

Y'all, this book is gonna change my life

Barbara Kingsolver is awesome, and if you haven't read her before, read The Bean Trees: A Novel and The Poisonwood Bible, too, but first read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Sure, the premise is cool--she and her family eat locally for a year, growing a huge garden, befriending local farmers, raising chickens and turkeys for eggs and meat, learning to make cheese, etc.--but it is all integrated within a larger discussion of the ethics of food production, food transportation, food pricing, in just a clear-headed, evocative, plain-spoken manner.

If anything can inspire me to cook at all, much less locally, this book can.

Of course, I obviously ran right out to Bloomingfood's with the girls to buy some wholesome, locally grown produce, and of course the prices nearly knocked the food ethic right out of me. I mean yeah, we try to eat healthfully and organically, but we're also totally dirt poor--we buy organic milk just for the girls because I don't want them to go through puberty at age seven, and I was thanking god that the College Mall Kroger's put in a big, swanky natural foods section so that I could buy bulk nutritional yeast and rolled oats without having to save up. The smack end of the growing season, and Bloomingfood's, was possibly not the best place for a dirt-poor family of four to begin their locavore adventure: I ended up with two locally grown tomatoes, four apples, some milk, and some cheese.

And, um, a sprouting jar? Don't even ask, cause I. Don't. Know.

Anyway, at least when we got home it was a fine afternoon for a change, so I got a chance to rake what used to be here----over the tops of my brand-new lasagna garden beds (although the prospect of the leaf vacuuming team driving by and sucking up all my lasagna beds, which are near the road, is DESTROYING me!), and the girls got to goof around outside a little:
Then, in honor of Barbara Kingsolver, I did not turn to the girls and say, "Peanut butter or cheese? Name two fruits or vegetables," which is how, um, I usually feed them. Instead, we made a whole wheat pizza crust from scratch and, praise be (or perhaps it was the salt and soda I snuck in), the mess actually rose this time, and we all got our own quadrant of deliciousness to decorate: Yummy looking, right? Things like that don't usually come out of our kitchen. Syd did up her lower left quadrant in mozzarella, grape tomatoes, brussels sprouts, and one artichoke; Will did hers in brussels sprouts, one tomato, and one artichoke, Matt had all tomato, and I had pepperjack (local, thank you very much) and artichoke.

And oranges are for making faces with: P.S. I've got tutorials for these here and here, but I also have some new handmade blank books and a set of bigger Christmas-colored crayons up on my etsy shop.

Headbands are a Check!

So the house is still pig-filthy, the girls are watching a movie (a Nova documentary on ants, on account of we're weird), I have not graded my two late Project #1 papers nor found a movie clip to show my students tomorrow NOR scheduled their upcoming(!) library day, and Matt and I have no idea what we're going to have for dinner after the kids are asleep, but never fear, my babies have headbands!I meant to just make Will some, since, you know, she's the only one who needs them, but obviously I ended up making matching everything for Sydney, and even a couple of matching ones for one of Will's best little girlfriends. I sewed a denim one for each girl out of old blue jeans and embroidered it, an alphabet-print one out of the fabric I scored at Strange Folk, and a red wool felt one out of what was formerly a dumpster-dived trenchcoat, but the most awesomest of all?

Kerchiefs!These have 3/4" elastic instead of ties, and if I'd known how well they hold my daughter's floppy hair out of her snotty face so that she doesn't constantly have to run her filthy hands through it, I'd have made the girls five of these and no headbands, because they are brilliant.

All that sewing, and we still had time for Matt's softball game (this is the tail end--the girls and I generally go fabric shopping at the westside Joann's after dropping Matt off at the field. Today's score? Shiny tulle at 40% off)----and a visit to both Menard's and Lowe's so that we could set just a couple of our lasagna beds: Yeah, if it looks like the girls helped, they totally didn't.