Summer Fun: More days at home please?

The last couple of months have been kinda crazy.  My days fill up with various things that I don't want to give as much attention as they demand, but they all have their reasons so I just sort of grit my teeth and deal with it.  Taking care of Mom's house really took a lot out of me and I'm still recovering from that, but next week I'll have to do it again, this time without Dad to help with the kitties.  They're going to a kubelwagen convention in Ohio and although Mom isn't thrilled to be going, she's not insisting on staying either.  They'll be gone for a week or so while I'm trying to prepare an audition and get the house (and myself) ready for my boyfriend to be here from Alabama for a week or so.  I have 3 days at home this weekend so I'm pushing myself pretty hard to get as much done as I can before my parents leave so I don't go crazy before my man gets here.  Last week I was home all day Sunday only, and the week or two before that I hadn't had any full days at home so my poor house was rather neglected.  On top of that, it makes me crazy when I can't have a day or two at home, I need the time to myself to fill with projects as I see fit.  Having 3 days this weekend is a wonderful thing and I wish it would happen more often like it was in the spring.

Quick rundown of what I did on Saturday:  Got up later than usual but still kinda early for yoga with my friends.  It's been at least 2 months since we were all 3 able to be together, the way our schedules have been.  The yoga was good, the girl talk was great, and I'm sure we all needed it.  We're hoping to meet on Monday too.  When I got home and before it got too hot out, I cleaned out my car, wiped down the dash, washed the inside of the windshield and windows, sprayed down the floormats, and vacuumed.  It needed to be done... badly... and that's one thing I wanted to cross off the list before he gets here. 

Next I worked on my poor little garden that has been as neglected as my house.  I've been able to water it enough and we do get occasional rainstorms that help with that, but something has been eating some of my plants and I hadn't had a chance to pull out the dead stuff and find more chicken wire to put up.  The first thing to go was my beans.  I'm still rather unhappy about that... the plants were doing so well and they had lots of flowers, in a few more days I would've had a good handful of beans to harvest, and overnight they were eaten down to the dirt.  That made me so mad.  I got some wire and put it up to keep the deer out, but since then something smaller has been getting in and nipping off my garlic.  That makes me suspect it's not a rabbit, since theoretically they don't like garlic, but I don't know that for sure either.  We've seen a couple squirrels out here, which is very unusual, and yesterday Mom had a skunk look in the back door at her, so who knows what's gnawing on my garden!

The lettuce and one tomato plant and all of the petunias have been nibbled down too, but that's probably from the grasshoppers.  Not much I can do about them, except I did have a lovely black and yellow garden spider that I had to move to work in the garden today.  She's not as big as the one down at Mom's house, but I'm glad to have her around.  I hope she finds her way back up into the plants and sets up camp again, she eats all kinds of bugs that we have too many of, like mosquitos and mud wasps and grasshoppers.  I was sad to move her, but I had to.  See that very sad cherry tomato plant behind her?  Yeah... Also, the fabric pot on the left used to have my beans in it.

I planted more beans in that pot, more carrots in another pot, Italian salad greens, and sugar snap peas and transplanted a couple petunias.  I found some more chicken wire to put up, so hopefully that keeps whatever it is out.  My cucumber plant is doing really well so I moved it so it has more room to do its thing.  I got 3 nice sized cucs off of it today and there are plenty of little ones there now.

I pulled a bunch of weeds out of my flowerbed and along the "walkway" to my front door, gathered rocks from my "yard" (if you can call it that lol) to put up against the skirting to keep the weeds down and help keep the weather out from under my house, and got another section of deck railing stained before it got dark.  The rock project will take a while to get all the way around, but there are plenty of rocks to do it with and when I get to actually moving dirt to fill the gaps there will be rocks in that too so it will kinda do itself once I get that far.  These red bricks will be replaced with limestone slabs like my little steps but for now, they'll do.  They're basically useless in the summer but in the winter they shovel easily, melt snow quickly, and the ice forms around them instead of on them.  They were a quick fix when the mud was horrible so they're not ideal by any stretch, but they work.  At any rate, I need to continue the gravel edging partly for aesthetics and partly to help with insulation and make upkeep easier.  It's gonna take forever to pick up all the rocks...there may come a point where I just buy several bags of pea gravel and use that instead.  We'll see.

Sunday's plan:  First thing, stain the rest of the deck railing.  The top part at least, since the slats take a while to do, but the top really needs to get sealed before the weather beats up the wood too much more.  It's already warped and splitting from the extremes, so that needs to stop.  Staining when it's too hot out does strange things when it dries, but doing it in the evenings means it gets dark before I can get very far and the water rinse to get the dust off doesn't dry quickly enough.  It's supposed to get into the high 90s again tomorrow so I'll get as much of that done first thing as I can before the heat kicks in.  After that, laundry needs to happen (which of course will heat up the house...but I can't put it off for too much longer), and if I'm lucky Dad and I might work on the terrace a little.  Maybe that's just wishful thinking... but the Deere has the front shovel on it now, and I'd like to see what it can do so I can maybe get some shrubs and fall bulbs planted before winter hits and I have to deal with the incessant mud for another 6 months.  If that doesn't happen, or if it's too hot to do it for long, I'll probably spend the rest of the day working inside. 

My office needs rearranging or something, the office closet needs painting and shelves put up, and there are a couple piles in the living room/kitchen that need to be gone through and dealt with before I'm comfortable having company.  The office closet is a big project that I can't get done in one day, so I may not attempt it just yet.  It took a day to do the front closet and that one's much smaller, although some of that included putting linoleum down and I don't have to do that in here.  I need to decide what I want to do about my desk too...hrm.  Well, for now it's time to get my horn out and practice, then bedtime.

Spring Fever: Weekend Digging part 2

I was disappointed with the fact that it rained this morning and the forecast made it look as though it would be raining nonstop for the next 4 days.  I really wanted to get that little plot done that I started yesterday so I could have one thing truly finished outside, for once.  Luckily, the sun came out for long enough that I was able to finish digging, edging, and planting!

Slightly farther than yesterday, I got a bag of peat moss to work into the naturally-occurring rocky clay and planted Mom's baby tiger lilies along the edge.  I put down a little landscape fabric in the tongue and started filling it with rocks and gravel, which I'll continue to do as more rocks surface in the beds and the terrace.

After about 6 work hours total, it's finished!  I dug out all the prairie grass and weeds, worked in some more peat moss, and leveled out the ground to allow for drainage and to fill the gap between the ground and the skirting.  You can't really see it from this angle, but I put the last of the edger bricks against the little hill up to the deck so the water wouldn't wash down quite as bad as it does now.  I planted a row of red morning glories to climb up the deck railing just for fun.

Looking at it now, the plots are too small for big bushes.  Unfortunately, they're too close to the house, so it probably wouldn't work very well.  Oh well, it's not like I have a bunch of bushes in pots waiting to be planted.  I wanted to get the dirt work done first, and for good reason.  My parents and neighbors have plenty of daylilies and irises to donate to my cause, and they'll work perfectly here.  It's just a matter of digging up and splitting what they have, which won't take very long once we get started.  The tiger lilies are small with bright orange flowers... should I get some of Mom's larger orange daylilies or peachy irises?  Or yellow irises?  I don't have many options without going to a store, but I'm not sure what would work best.  Thoughts?

It was very nice to start a project one day and finish it the next, for once.  That's not how things normally go in this house so the confidence boost was definitely needed.  I also went through old pictures from last spring when we first got the trailer (many of which can be found here)and remembered how far I've really come... that helped a lot too.  Overall, I'm pleased with my progress today!  Now to clean myself up, make some food, and set up for an evening of beading.

Happy Father's Day to all the daddies out there!

Spring Fever: Weekend Digging

Hi!  It's almost time to drop the "spring" label, isn't it?  Maybe when I feel ready for summer to hit... lol!  I have done a little beading this weekend, and I will be doing more after I'm done here, but I wanted to update you on my garden plan.

Today I spent a few hours digging at the end of my trailer to make room for two spirea bushes.  I'm pleased with the progress I made today!

I should've taken a true "before" picture, but oh well.  Just imagine that the front area looked like the back does.  This is after I had cleaned out some of the grass/weeds and worked up the soil a little.  As you can see, the tongue of the trailer sticks out, there's lots of prairie (read: tall, thick, sharp) grass growing everywhere around the house, and there's a little spot in the siding on the skirting that was falling off.  For the record, we paid quite a lot for a professional skirting job last fall, and we keep finding corners he cut, and we're not pleased.

At any rate, I dug up all the dirt on one side of the tongue, screwed the siding back on the skirting (it had been just stapled, which is why pieces like to fall off... one of these days I'll just go around the house with a bag of screws and my screw gun and get it over with), and pulled out the grass and weeds.  I went down to my parents' house for something and Dad pointed out some small edging bricks he had lying around that he didn't have a use for, so I measured them and the space and figured out that he has almost exactly the right number to edge my little plot I'm digging!  Bonus! They're also a good color, a red-grey, which works well with the other reddish touches I have out there.  The siding on the skirting is pinkish-red, the deck is a lighter pinkish-red (thankfully in the same color family!), when I get the deck railing and picnic table stained they'll be red, the dirt is red, it just all seems to be working out that way.  The same thing happened in my living room and I'm pleased with it, so why not?

So, after a couple of hours of digging and a few trips down to my parents' house, this little plot is almost halfway done!  Tomorrow I'll get some peat moss to work into the soil and plant some of Mom's tiger lilies around the edge, then work on digging the rest back to the deck.  I don't have the spirea bushes yet, but on my next trip to Rapid City I'll go to Jolly Lane and see what they have that won't get too big for the plot.  Looks like their Renaissance, Mellow Yellow, or Firefold varieties should work... need to see what they look like.  I have nice big windows at the end of the trailer and I don't want them to get covered up, nor do I want to have to prune the bushes back much.

I'm not sure what to do about the gap in the tongue itself... it's not big enough or accessible enough to plant and I don't want to be pulling grass out of it all the time.  Maybe I'll just pile a bunch of rocks in there so nothing will grow and call it good.  If there's one thing I have up here, it's rocks!

My yellow siding is ugly, isn't it?  Alas, that part's pretty far down on the priority list.  Oh well. I got pretty far on this little spot of ground today, and maybe tomorrow I can finish it up.  It feels good to do a project like this and finally see some progress!  I'm so used to staring at the huge amount of work left on the terrace and feeling like I'm getting nowhere.  Maybe the occasional smaller project is necessary to boost confidence a little.

Fresh From the Desk: Time for a change?

Purple glass donut pendant on off-white and
matte blue daisy chain, with rose quartz chips

Carved resin pendant on knotted hemp,
with wood and bone beads

Resin pendant on brown and off-white bead chain,
with brown shell and peace jade

I finished that purple necklace tonight, as well as two more! :) The pictures are bad.  Yeah.  Sorry, I'm in a hurry.  After this weekend I'll take some better photos of what I have left.  Actually, that brings me to my first bit of news.  Someone at our bank is interested in her own piece, which is easy enough, but she suggested that I bring in catalogs or something to distribute when people ask about it.  Hmmmm, that sounds like a great idea!  I don't know if I can pull together a full catalog in any kind of decent time, but I can work on a tri-fold brochure or something with examples of what I can do and options for your own custom piece.  Thoughts on this?  Have an example of hemp, daisy chain, and straight beaded, with options of length, color, and whether there's a pendant?  I think it may be worth a try.  It certainly can't hurt to print off a stack for her, she sees lots of people every day.  This means I need to start scheduling in dedicated time to my marketing.  I have also had a few order/requests from friends this week, which unfortunately will have to wait until I can get up to Rapid to shop again, but all these are signs that things are picking up for some reason. 

I'm also starting to teach violin lessons next week.  I'm not a violinist, and I never said I was, but I have taken the classes, I do play cello, I know the Suzuki method, and the student is only 6 years old.  This one I may be able to handle for a little while.  I'm nervous about it since I don't play violin, and haven't since that one half-semester in 2002 or something when I took the class.  I'm debating advertising for my lessons and setting aside a day each week for them, but I'm nervous about getting lots of requests for instruments I don't play, like the violin.  Piano or guitar, those I can pawn off on someone else in town...those I can't even pretend to play well enough to teach lol!  Also, I don't have a good centralized location for them.  My books, instruments, and tools are at my house, obviously, but it's not quite ready for company yet, it's not really set up for it anyway, and parking will be an issue if I have several in a row.  Maybe once I get the island finished, baseboards in, latch on the bathroom door, and the huge wood box out of the living room...but I digress.  My house isn't a good place right now.  I could use my parents' house, but it's their house so I'm not comfortable taking it over for a whole day every week and the students might be nervous with extra people wandering around.  I know I would be.  For just a few students I could go to their houses, but that means I don't have access to all of my supplies that are at home and are impractical to lug around everywhere.  Can't afford to rent anywhere, and the room at the State Home is way too big just for lessons and people wander in and out all the time.  Haven't figured out the plan for this yet, obviously I'm still a bit anxious about it and finding excuses not to really develop it yet.  Maybe after the lessons have been going for a while I'll have a little more confidence. 

In order to shift my focus to jewelry and music, I need to cut down elsewhere.  My regular job is fine, no problems there, it's a regular part-time schedule with minimal stress.  It may go full-time eventually, but it's not yet.  I have a once-a-month 20-minute job at the VA for $10, which is barely worth the trouble to get there but it's a jewelry vendor contact that I need to stay on top of.  Not like it takes much time anyway.  Symphony is done for the season, so that won't be in the picture again until the fall.  I have lots of gardening, landscaping, and general housework to do, which hasn't been getting done these past few weeks.  I'm on Weight Watchers now which requires more careful meal planning, which also hasn't been getting done very well.  There's occasional things like groceries, bead shopping, and having to hold a large cat that is currently draped around my neck because I've been gone so much the last week. 

Then, the major dilemma, I'm working an extra insurance day up in Rapid, every other week for 6 hours.  It was originally 3 hours once a week, on the same day as Symphony, which after gas and a meal just broke even with itself, but it was alright since I had to be up there anyway.  Now, we changed it to every other week so it takes less gas and therefore yields a little profit, but it still ends up being a whole day up there.  I'm torn in that I can't decide whether that extra $60-80 a month (after gas) is worth losing a day.  I really can't decide.  I guess the question is whether shifting my focus will yield more return, though I do need to go up there every week or two anyway for various reasons.  I really don't know.  My schedule at my regular job has been screwy the last few weeks, so that plus starting WW plus getting ready for spring/working on the house again plus (heaven forbid!) taking a weekend trip to see some friends, I feel like I'm stretched way too thin, like silly putty.  And, the little holes are growing the thinner I stretch.  As it is, no project can get the attention it deserves, and as such nothing is yielding what it should.  So, do I drop the extra day and use it elsewhere, or not?  I just went yesterday and I'm not scheduled to go back until Monday after next so I have some time to decide.  I keep going back and forth on it.  I'm torn!  Help!

Spring Fever: Landscape planning

This is the front of my trailer.  Isn't it epic?  The inside is much nicer, trust me, and at some point the siding will be redone to match/complement the skirting.  However, first in line is to take care of the pile of slime that my hill turns into when we get any moisture at all.  If you can't tell, I'm on a bit of an incline here.  It's basically flat where the house is but slopes down from there and on the back where the deck is the hill gets a touch steeper.  When we had a contractor here to build the skirting and deck, one of his helpers had a little tractor to flatten the spot for the deck and, without asking anybody (or billing us later), he dug up the whole front side too.  It's not as lumpy as it was and we would've needed to do some of that too, but he did it right before winter so I've been stuck with slimy mud every time it rains or snow melts.  I put down some landscape fabric, a little sand, and a few bricks to walk on to get through the winter without going too insane.  We still don't know who did it exactly, who said he should, and why we never got a bill for it.  It was one of a string of strange things that happened with that contractor so we're done working with him.  All that dirt work and there's still big gaps under the skirting that caused several days of frozen pipes this winter...if there was one thing I would've wanted done it would've been that.

Well, enough whining, what's done is done.  What I did yesterday was measured and flagged where my front entryway room, stairs, and garden terrace will go.  The sun beats on this side of the house in the summer and the wind whips around in the winter, so the front door needs a little extra protection from the elements.  We'll build on a little front room with a bench, coat hooks, a boot mat, and two cat doors (one from the living room and one outside, so the weather doesn't leak into the house), and a landing with stairs.  Those little metal stairs are hard to maneuver on and there's no place to set stuff down to open the door.

For the garden terrace, we'll add topsoil to make it level with the top and build a little brick retaining wall so there's a flat terrace from the edge of the skirting to just above where the propane tank sits.  I'm thinking below that in a semicircle between the new trees we'll build a little rain garden, fix the gutters, and set up the downspouts to drain into it.  Sounds like a lot of work.  At least I have it flagged out now.  Bedtime!

Spring Fever: More garden planning!

Mom and I and a few of her friends went up to Hill City today for a seminar on container gardening sponsored by the Hill City Garden Club.  It was only an hour long, but it was nice to get out of the house and change pace a little bit.  Not that I needed to get out of my house, I've barely been in it for weeks, but Mom's been cooped up with her cold/flu for far too long so we made a field trip day of it.  We all ate at the Alpine Inn (their tomato basil soup is fabulous!), went over to the seminar, then stopped at The Farmer's Daughter to browse antiques.  Mom got a nice ceramic planter and I got an adorable 3-bottle wine rack.  On our way back we stopped in Custer at the sister's house of Mom's friends for some goat's milk and fresh eggs.  We'll be getting some yogurt and goat cheese from her when she has some made, haven't tried it before but I figure why not?  All kinds of healthy benefits there.  Now I'm at home sipping some amazing tea I ordered from Tea For All Reasons on Etsy.  I considered it a little splurge for myself and I've gotten more than enough enjoyment from the 3 cups I've had to justify the cost...wow.  Just...yum.  Yes.

So, on to the garden seminar.  Mom started container gardening last summer because in the spring she had broken one ankle and the other leg.  Yes, she had two broken legs.  At the same time.  Blame the deep mud puddles that formed in the driveway after a very wet winter and spring (and the fact that we had hired at least two people/crews to fix them who never showed up to do the work).  At any rate, she couldn't till or work the soil in the regular garden or do lots of bending/squatting and I was so busy working at the store that I wasn't home enough to do it all either.  She found out about Smart Pots from a friend of hers and ordered a few for herself and it ended up being the easiest and best gardening she'd done for years.  This year I'll be doing some of the same since I'm sure my dirt work won't be done in time to get a full garden in.  Today's seminar was more about how to pair flowers in a container for the greatest effect, so here's a list of the general concepts to keep in mind:

• Get a color wheel and use it.  (I need to get one for jewelry anyway, so it's definitely on my list.) Consider the color of the pot as well as the foliage and flowers of the plants to complement it.
• Once you have ideas for good color combinations, look for plants of differing heights, leaf textures, and spreading tendencies for the greatest visual impact.  Mix a spreading shiny vine with a velvety mounding flower and a spiky grass, for example.  The max height of the plants should be about 1 1/2-2 times the height of the pot itself.
• Consider water/light needs and group plants accordingly.  Read the labels for this info as well as the full size height of the grown plants.
• Be sure to fertilize regularly.  Potting soil often says that it includes fertilizer but it's often not enough for the plants to thrive in a self-contained environment.
• Don't be afraid to mix vegetables with flowers.  They use and contribute different nutrients to and from the soil, not to mention it's unique, fun, functional, and many vegetables have beautiful foliage.  We'll be trying that with some side-planting baskets Mom got this year, she has a book on combining vegetables and flowers and the pots in there are just gorgeous!
• Group plants into odd-numbered groupings.  The eye somehow prefers odd-numbered groupings.  Same goes for pots.  And jewelry.  And art groupings on walls.  And just about anything visual, for some reason.  Not sure why, but it's true!

I've decided to not really fight the native prairie when I start with my flower gardens.  I picked up a booklet on what plants are native to the area and how to create a garden with them in our semi-arid climate, since I know I'd be battling with the native plants anyway.  Might as well make them work for me!  I can't for the life of me understand why anyone would buy yucca when we have *so much* on the property out here!  I may as well make a native rock garden out back by the deck for minimum maintenance/weeding.  The front where I'll have my terrace can be a little fussier, but it gets very hot on that side in the afternoons so I need to be careful to pick full-sun plants that will stand up to the wind.  I want daylilies for sure because they do very well at Mom's house, and I'll probably grow a bunch of ornamental grasses, maybe some succulents, but definitely stuff that won't curl up and die in full-sun.  The stuff on the deck and the back hill needs to be part-shade probably, but I'll need to watch and pay attention to what the sun does exactly.  I know it beats down on the west wall quite a bit in the late afternoon and that's the terrace side.

Last summer we planted two ash trees down the hill from where the terrace will be, and when those grow they'll cast shade on the office and living room windows to help keep the house cooler.  It was late in the season when we put those in, so I hope they survived the winter.  Time will tell.  Below the tree line I put down some grass seed so hopefully some of that took, but that's mostly native prairie down there too so I don't want to fight with that too much either.  It's too much of a slope to have a nice lounging lawn and no natural boundaries between that ground and the field, so my nice gardens will be on my terrace and on the hill behind my deck, plus whatever containers I end up doing on the deck itself.

So now that I've rambled on and on, how does that sound?  Any pointers on semi-arid plants or perennials that would withstand hot sun and wind?