WOW... May is nearly over

Here it is the 26th of May already... POOF and it will be gone. I guess I need to catch up on here again. So much for daily blogging like I used to... really need to get back on the stick.

Ok where to start? I find if I check my camera I will find the prompts I need to write about every time. So lets go...

May 7th we were wrapping things up and I took a few photos to remember the work we had gotten done and to share that Greg has taken an interest in gardening and has planted nearly the entire garden in vegetables. So far he has peanuts and watermelon growing out there. I really miss the garden so very much. Now that I am home full time once again I could be out there every morning. AH well life has taken us on another path for now. Hopefully one day we will have a new home and a new garden to work.

 Of course Bernadette was happy we had come down. Amelia and Bernadette always love a freshly mowed lawn.

Totally Random here... I found a punk wig for Greg's mannequin at a thrift store so she is no longer bald... for less than $2 .

On May 10th Scott and I took a walk along a portion of the Swamp Rabbit Trail in Travelers Rest. It is a GORGEOUS walkway and could easily be our replacement for our beloved Cayce Riverwalk up here. I am really hoping we can find a new home in Travelers Rest as it is so beautiful up there and that is where Scott father grew up. It holds a lot of special memories for Scott. The Real Estate is quite expensive up there though so we will see if we can fins something that we can afford that fits our needs/wants.

 A ghost bike to remind people to watch for Cyclist.

 Scott noticed this carving in the rock from 1935. Most of it was unreadable from weather ware.

 Flowers from the wildflower garden along the walkway, Dianthus and daisy's both begin with "D".

May 11th - was our 32nd Wedding Anniversary and Scott surprised me with a dozen red roses.

Tippy just "chillin~" with Mom... he is quite the spoiled little wretch.

I guess I will close this post here as it is already quite photo heavy and I know that some folks have a hard time with lots of photos loading. I will write another post to finish out May next week. I hope everyone is having a lovely Spring on this side of the World and settling into Fall on the other. 

Take care and love each other always.

FULL Sunday!

I awoke at 4:31 AM and have been going ever since. I read a bunch of Blog posts and watched a couple shows on TV Links with the headset on so as not to disturb the others in the house that were still sleeping soundly. About 6 I did my best to "quietly" gather all the laundry and got it started. Scott got up at some point and made a wonderful breakfast. After breakfast I did our taxes - we are getting refunds! Our plan is to put it all toward the car loan so we won't have that hanging over our heads anymore.

Soon to be PAID OFF!

After the taxes were completed I decided to clean my car inside and out - it's a "yearly" thing for us; or so it seems. Cleaning it now will help us see when the pollen starts settling on everything... yellow shows up so much better on a nice shiny clean surface.

How about that Carolina Blue Sky?

When I was out taking the picture of my nice shiny car I noticed the very first bloom on our tulip tree. You can see all the buds yet to open and I am hoping this beautiful weather continues so I don't loose them to a frost.

I decided to walk out back and photograph Scott's gorgeous garlic in the garden. It's doing amazingly well this year with a good mulching.
You can see where we need to do some weeding and why we need another roll of rolled roofing for our walkways.

We are going to get some newspapers from Scott's Mom tonight so that I can make up some seed starting pots. I'll be starting seeds this week.; tomatoes, peppers and perhaps some summer squash and cucumbers. We are very much looking forward to fresh produce from our garden.

I started work on another quilt block; it's one of the two I have remaining to do for the FQ swap. This block will be "hopping the big pond" to England to Irene. What looks to be tan is really a golden yellow; the sun has started to go down so I have little natural light coming in through my sewing room windows. Hopefully she will forgive my horrible delay.

My Vegetable Garden and Dual Dog Walking

OK so the first picture you come to is NOT part of the Vegetable garden but it IS a really COOL mushroom that came up in our back yard. I don't know a thing about identifying edible mushrooms so this one will remaining in the yard to feed the bugs that enjoy it. It's nearly as big as a salad plate.

This next picture is of the little green beans that have sprouted in the garden. I actually planted two rows; one on either side of a row of tomato cages. I am truly hoping to have enough to put some in the freezer for later.

Next up is some amazing yellow squash blooms. I picked our first yellow squash yesterday and it will be part of a stir fry for tonights dinner. I also picked enough salad greens for Scott and I each to have a nice dinner salad for lunch. I even had a small tomato from the garden to slice up and add on top.

The Dragon's Tongue beans have sprouted and are looking quite healthy.

And the Pinto beans have also sprouted and are growing well. I wish that it would rain so that I didn't have to water the garden so much as it will make for a rather high water bill and with Scott unemployed again that could get tricky.

All in all the garden is coming along nicely. We still have one walkway to clean out and mulch with something - I wish we had some more rolled roofing or some shingles that we could lay down to keep the weeds at bay.

The large vine in the raised bed closest to the front of the next photo is the volunteer Butternut Squash and we are going to just let it run where ever it wants to go and mow around anything that comes out into the yard. It all ready has quite a few squash on the vine. It's our favorite squash so we are thrilled to pieces. And there is a TON of mustard greens that came up on their own out there that I plan to just let grow. When I first moved South in 1982 the only "green" I'd ever eaten was Spinach and it took me awhile to learn to enjoy the greens they cook down here but now I LOVE Collards, turnip and mustard greens.

You can't really tell in the pictures but we have two electric wires that run around the vegetable garden to keep the dogs out; ok... Amelia out when she was a puppy as she could empty a raised bed in mere minutes and is still a digger. The new addition (Bernadette) just acts like they are nothing and we truly believe she has springs as she can be in the garden before we even see her approach. When we fuss at her she looks so hurt and dejected... melts my heart. Can you tell Bernadette is well on her way to being a spoiled little wretch?

Here is Scott at the beginning of our walk. I took Bernadette from him as walking her is liking walking a Treble on crack and she wretches his back. She'll get used to the lead eventually; we can tell she hasn't been walked much as she also wants to jump on people we pass. Amelia was just ecstatic to be walking by the river with her "pack". Once I took Bernadette there was no taking pictures as she just wouldn't be still enough for me to focus on anything. Perhaps next time.

My Healing Cat

Last night I took a hot bath followed by an Aleve tablet and a glass of water and went to bed before Scott. It wasn't long after I got settled in that my "healer" showed up; Tesla knows when and where my legs hurt and instinctively knows where to apply pressure to give me some relief from the screaming muscles. I called to Scott and told him to bring the camera; this is what he captured...

The reason for the leg pain this time was I have spent a lot of time squatting; getting down on my knees; and bending and stooping working on the new scrap-book paper layout - LOTS of new papers including ACETATE SHEETS! Something that EVERYONE has been asking for. And yesterday I had also helped unload 4 u-boat carts full of yarn in a 2 hour period. I really enjoy stocking and setting plan-o-grams more than anything else so I am thrilled that this is the position they gave me the opportunity to fill. Now if my body will just hold up to it all. I did have to buy some reading glasses as the labels are quite difficult to read - REALLY small print. 

Tomorrow I want to do a little gardening and some sewing since I am off from work. Will post about it all tomorrow night.

Garden in Spring

I just went out and took a few pictures of my garden and you can see the 4 raised beds to the left that I cleaned up/out yesterday well you can see 3 out of 4 anyway. Here are the 4 all cleaned up...

We used rolled roofing between the beds to keep the weeds from becoming a problem. We need some more to put down between the beds we added last year but it's not a financial priority so I will just have to keep after the weeds better by hand. The green you see in the beds toward the top of the photo are of Scott's garlic. Most of it is hard neck garlic and thats what we really like to use the most as the flavor is SO MUCH better than the soft necked garlic you get at the grocery store. Scott has found a couple sites that sell gourmet hard neck garlic and we plan to order some for next year.  Here is a close-up of some of the hard neck garlic...

I still have a lot of work to do out there but it will have to wait until Friday when I am off from work again. Scott and I are trying to decided where to plant some tomatoes where they would get a bit of shade as our garden gets FULL sun constantly and our harvests haven't been too great the past couple of years. I've even toyed with the idea of putting a frame over every other row with lattice across the top to create some dappled shade for our poor plants. And I need to amend the beds with more organic matter or clay so that they will hold water a little better.  It's all a work in progress and I love the smell of the earth when it's fertile ... most of my raised beds don't have that REAL Earthy smell yet.... COMPOST! I've got to find more organic matter that comes from yards that aren't chemical happy.... no fertilizers, bug killers, weed killers and the like. People don't understand that all those chemicals kill beneficial plants and bugs too. We will never control Nature; we must learn to PARTNER with her. 

Gardening and Crocheting

Today I went through our seed basket and found all the seeds that are listed on the Clemson Extensions planting guide for vegetables that can be planted at this time of year. There really is quite a lot we can plant now and I found... spinach, mustard greens, turnips, collards, peas (really pushing my luck as these should have been planted earlier); onions, radishes, broccoli, mesculen salad mix, and beets. I will also start tomatoes indoors to plant out later. Once I pulled these seeds I got busy on cleaning up some of our raised beds. I got four cleaned up and looking good; two all ready have garlic growing in them but I have two others now ready for planting. I'm hoping to get some seeds in the ground tomorrow before I have to be to work.

Today I also made a bit of progress on the sweater I am making for my niece, Abby. Only 6 more rows to add to the skirt section and then add some ties. Oh and I'm also supposed to add a couple more daisy's to the front. I sure hope that this will fit her. It's really cute! I don't know if I'm off work on Sunday or not but I'm hoping we will be able to go to her party on Sunday. I'll find out tomorrow. If I can't make it to the party I will mail this to her; hopefully in time for her party.

Time to call it a night... I hope everyone has a good nights sleep.

What happened to today?

This day has just flown right by. Scott worked on 2 different mowers today - one push mower and one riding mower. The push mower was a pretty easy fix and it went back with Scott's friend, Larry. The riding mower is going to take a bit more work. He is having to take the engine completely apart to fix it so he will continue on that tomorrow. I had planned to sew some today but got side tracked with a trip to Publix and watching Julia Child on PBS.com. I bought the ingredients to make her recipe for "Tarte Tatin" - a delicious caramelized apple dessert. I was going to make it today but Greg decided to take over the kitchen to make Mead - so I'll wait until tomorrow to make the dessert. The Mead will be "working" for 6 months Greg told me - GREAT!

This afternoon I made another attempt to find a few tomatoes that were good to eat on our tomato plants. We are having a horrible time with end rot. I did find a few that we will be able to eat once they finish ripening; I didn't want to leave them out there to rot. While out there I tied some of the plants up with pantyhose as they were over from the shear weight of the tomatoes on the plants. I weeded one of the walkways where we don't have rolled roofing down to keep the weeds away between raised beds and then I turned the soil in the 2 raised beds along one side of the cleared path and in one of the raised beds I planted lima beans and in the other I planted some pole beans and used some of the excess tomato cages for them to eventually climb up. I am hoping that we will be able to have a nice Fall garden as the summer garden was pretty much a flop. Just too hot.


Photo is of Larry - Scott's friend; taken at our wedding in 1985.

Saturday off?

I'm on call today but so far so good no one has called me! And I am hoping it stays that way as I have so much to get done around here and only this one day off to do it all in. The yard needs mowing, vegetables need to be picked and the garden also needs weeding again badly. Scott's Mom called early and wants him to measure windows for new blinds in her down stairs bonus room (also known previously as THE JUNK ROOM); she is getting it all fixed up for the day when she will have to live down stairs all the time. She is in her 80's now and has been seeing her sister go through so much the last couple years that she is worried about her own state of condition. We tried to stop by to help her some last Sunday but she wasn't home either time.

Our trucks' computer has died and Scott is hoping to work on that some today. It's always something with that truck. We've had it since it was new (1992) and it has had more problems than it's worth. Doesn't give us a warm fuzzy feeling about buying another Ford truck thats for sure. Of course we are in no position to buy anything right now anyway but if we were it would not be a FORD. About the only good thing has been the wide tail gate and it's ability to hold funny bumper stickers.