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: Plan for the weekend

I have a plan for the weekend.  I’m going to bead.  A lot.  I watched a little of a webinar yesterday on Etsy critiquing a few shops and a couple of things really hit me: Don’t just list a few things and wait for them to sell before listing more.  That’s like opening a clothing store and only having one rack of shirts out… people want to browse through your selection, see your variety, and if they see what they need they’ll get it, and if they get inspired they’ll contact you further.  Keeping only a few listings up, while it’s cheaper, doesn’t help a beginner’s shop to only show a small sampling of the work.  People want to see a lot of variety to get an idea of what you can do for them or they’ll just browse on by.  That’s my goal now, I have plenty of beads to get it done and the listing fees aren’t bad at all so I just need to get to work.  Maybe that will help my booth business too, but in both cases, I just need to get down to some serious beading.

The other thing that struck me is that I need a new banner for my Etsy shop.  I have a dear friend who designed my logo who can do that for me so I asked for her help again.  We’ll probably spruce up the logo too, make it look more professional and reflect my art style. 

Dad and I got Mom a new camera for her birthday/Mother’s Day so maybe I can borrow it to get some better photos too.  Certainly can’t hurt to try, right?

However, I can’t sit on my butt all weekend.  Depending on how the weather cooperates, I need to finish digging for the terrace.  We have an idea for that also, using the frames from Mom’s old garden beds for the retaining wall instead of buying new bricks for it.  Mom thinks it’ll be super easy to just take the wood up and plop it down into place, but I suspect it’ll be a little more complicated than that.  At any rate, we need to take apart her old beds (some of them are so terribly overgrown I’m not sure how we’ll get to them…), which will take a while, but a couple are already in pieces so I could theoretically take them up the hill and try to make them fit.  I’m sure I’ll need to move some more dirt to make the corners square enough for something like that.  The tractor still needs some wiring work, but at least the problem was identified and the solution is in the works so I’m not worried about that much anymore.

I hope you all have a fabulous weekend!

Spring Fever: Thumb greening, fever breaking!

Finally! The last couple of weeks we've gotten some nice summery weather.  It's not quite consistent yet... and we're still getting some heavy thunderstorms that cause flooding in the prone areas... but it's finally warm enough that my little ash trees are taking off!  Took long enough.  It's been such a bizarre spring.

Yesterday I got the urge to plant things. Lots.  My terrace still needs some dirt work done (but at least the tractor should be working soon, we finally got that part of it going) but I'm eating lots of salads so I needed some more vegetables growing to support my salad habit.  Mom and I planned out some containers for me with seeds she had and made a short list of plants to pick up at the store and got to work.  Here's my plan:

Medium Smart Pot: Cherry tomatoes and petunias.  We had to get full plants for this pot, which is fine.  We ended up getting a cherry tomato plant, a yellow pear tomato plant, and a package of white petunias.  Why are people nervous about mixing flowers and vegetables in containers?  I was... I never even thought it was an option until Mom got a book like this one (might even be this one, I'm not entirely sure) that gave me permission to try it.  Why the stigma there?  Hmm.

I'll start some Lavender in a pot until I have a good spot to plant it permanently outside.

I started some catnip in a pot and I might split some to leave outside as a perennial and bring the rest inside.  Aside from the obvious feline uses (hehe!), catnip tea has a list of benefits that are definitely worth a try.  Those of most interest to me are relaxation, relieving pain from menstrual cramps and migraines, and helping clear sinus congestion.  There are more, like relieving fever symptoms caused by a cold or flu.  Definitely sounds like something worth trying.  I already have some spearmint growing for tea, might as well try this too.

Medium plastic pot: cucumbers and dwarf sweet pea flowers.  The sweet peas I planted don't grow tall enough to need support.  My favorite summer snack is fresh refrigerator pickles.  I'm an admitted pickle fiend (for some reason, that's the only thing that can calm my stomach when I'm feeling a little carsick.  Not sure why that is.) and these are so easy to make!  Slice up 1-2 cucumbers into a colander or strainer, sprinkle a good amount of kosher salt over them, stir them with your hand a little, and let them sweat for about 15 minutes.  Rinse the salt off, put the cucumbers in a bowl or plastic container, pour some vinegar over them (enough that 1/2 or a little more of the cucumbers are sitting in the vinegar), sprinkle with some dill weed and white pepper, stir, and place in the refrigerator.  Stir or shake again after 20 minutes or so.  You can vary this by trying other kinds of vinegar, other spices, or even adding onions or peppers.  It's entirely up to you.  I use a lot of dill because I love dill, but you can also find different spice packets at grocery stores.  Nothing tastes better to me than cold dilly vinegar when I've been out in the sun!

Small Smart Pot: beans and carrots.  Again, doing a combination I'm a little nervous about, but the plants grow at different heights so it should be alright.  I looooooove fresh beans and I eat lots of carrots in my salads.

I started a new batch of baby lettuce greens and threw in a few seeds for butter lettuce from an old packet. They may not come up, but if I don't have to buy wilty lettuce from the grocery store it's a win all around.  I had one pot already but not enough to keep up with all of my salads.  Eventually, we'll probably bring the really big container up for salad stuff to take over.  It's really a stock water bucket, with a drain out the bottom, and mom used to use it as a little pond, but it works really well for container gardening.  Mom has no use for it at the moment so it'll come up here until she does again.  I may try to keep garlic going in that too, but it needs to get up here first and that won't happen today.

So, once I get my rear in gear, I have some work to do outside.  The soil up here is very rocky so I'm picking out the rocks I can as I come across them, but there are lots out in my "lawn" that will make mowing difficult, so I need to bring up the cart and start filling it with little rocks that I can use for edging.  I have a plan to put a pair of spirea shrubs at the end of the trailer, on the parking side, so I need to start clearing the ground for that so when we do get to the greenhouse to buy them they can go right in the ground.  I need to take my native wildflower book to the store and find seeds for some of our native wildflowers to spread out in my "lawn." Let me clarify... I live in the country, in the middle of native prairie in the Buffalo Gap National Grassland, tucked up against a hill amongst Ponderosa pines.  There's no point in me fighting the prairie to make a nice barefoot-grass lawn on the side of a hill.  It's a "fool's errand," as one friend pointed out.  However, I can encourage the wildflowers so it looks nice.  Bonus with that, they live out here already so they're already fine in this climate so that makes for minimal maintenance.  In fact, the less you mow them the better they do.  One good mow in fall serves to spread the seeds and that's really all you need to do.  Most of the perennials I want to plant on the terrace are similarly low-maintenance. 

I hope the weather is as lovely where you are as it is here today!  We had a big storm last night, but it was thankfully short-lived.  Hope you're having a great weekend!

Fresh from the desk: Multicolored summer anklet

For my first custom order outside of my circle of family and friends, I was asked to make a fun multicolored anklet out of whatever extra beads I had.  I suggested a few that I had used on my bookmarks, just to get an idea of what she wanted, and she liked these lentil-shaped glass beads with swirls of orange/red, yellow, and blue on a slightly purple-ish base.  There's some foil worked in there too, so these beads are really quite fun to look at, though the picture doesn't do them justice.

True to what she asked for, I used other beads I had lying around.  I have a couple packages of bead mixtures in blues and blues/purples, so those are perfect for projects like this.  I accented the blues/purples with red and yellow seed beads, both colors present in the focal beads, just to liven it up a bit.  The order of beads is cautiously random, without having too many of one color or size close together and making sure to flank the bugle beads and others with sharp-ish edges with large rounded beads to make sure they don't scratch the wearer.  I learned about that the hard way, which was sad because I really liked that necklace I had made.  Maybe I'll just have to try again on that one.

II think I may make more anklets and bracelets like this, with some Millefiori beads and others like these.  It's easy to find those in clearance racks and they're always quite fun, so maybe that'll bump up my impulse purchases.  Today I'll call her to pick it up, so we'll see how she likes it!

Saturday show on my own went well :)

This time, Mom and Dad were at a gun shoot in Wall so I went by myself and I didn't have their garage-sale-ish items to boost my table traffic like usual.  It was an absolutely gorgeous day, 75 degrees and sunny with a slight breeze, and I tucked my table up on the west side of the building so I got as much morning shade as I could.  I borrowed one of Mom's straw hats and a can of spray sunscreen because I didn't have any of my own.  That was a mistake... I'm horrible with spray sunscreen on myself and I missed a large chunk on my arm that's still red, days later.  Sigh.

I made 2 sales to strangers, which is an improvement in that the other sales were mostly to one of Mom's friends, and handed out several business cards to people that seemed genuinely interested in what I could build custom for them.  Time will tell on that one, but it's nice that I was able to get a couple pure sales from people I don't know.  I also got an order that day for an anklet from someone I barely know from work, which I need to go work on when I'm done writing, then the next day an order for earrings to match a hemp necklace I made as a gift for my masseuse (who was also my best friend in elementary school, otherwise I wouldn't have a masseuse! lol!).  I have some work to do tonight, that's for sure, but neither of them should take terribly long.

I got to chat quite a bit with the other vendors that were there, which was nice.  One is a professional jeweler in town who does metalsmithing with Black Hills Gold (characterized by the grape-and-leaf patterns that make up most of the designs, colored to be pink and green - it's fairly widely available, but not everyone knows about it), casting, and wire wrapping, among other fancy things.  I won't get into much of that, I'll leave it to her since I don't plan on investing in the equipment, but I think she and I could work out a mutually beneficial arrangement somehow.  Maybe, we'll see. I'm not sure what I could do to benefit her, but she took one of my cards so we'll see if there's something I can help her with.

I finished my first crochet project!  Pictures to come, I just don't want to spoil the surprise!

Spring Fever: Updates

I'm still digging on the terrace.  I get about 1/6 of the way in 30-45 minutes once a week, at most.  It's been raining too much to get it done faster and the nice days have inevitably been during the week when I'm at work, and the dirt needs a day to dry out after a good rain before I can dig in it without needing the rubber boots.  Hooray for clay that holds moisture!  Sigh.  I'm fast approaching the time where I truly need some help from a machine and Dad still hasn't tried to get the hoist working on the tractor, so every day I dig I get a little more frustrated with the whole thing.  We got up well into the 80s today, so soon it'll be too hot to work outside during the day.  I'm getting rather impatient with that project.

I've done a couple more batches of yogurt since the last post on it.  I've reduced the amount of dry milk I use to 1/4 cup per 4 cups of skim milk and it's closer to what I want.  I've also noticed that using the previous batch to culture ends up with a tangier flavor than I like after 3-4 batches.  I ordered some probiotic starter this week so we'll see how I like that after a batch or two.  I'm enjoying yogurt for breakfast with some homemade granola, sweetened slightly with some applesauce.  It sticks with me all morning, better than a bowl of cereal does.  On that note, I've lost a solid 7 pounds since April (maybe up to 9... not sure my first weigh-in was entirely accurate), so it's nice to see a little progress, but as each of my projects gets a bit more demanding my exercising gets pushed farther down the priority list.  I may not stay with Weight Watchers after my promo period ends, for now it's just more stress to plan the meals as rigidly as I need to to make any real progress so there's no point in paying for it if I can't go full-out.  My health is important, but I'm healthy now, if just a bit heavy.  I can handle a little more time like this if I have to, then when I can truly devote the time I need to meal planning and exercising enough I'll get back on the bandwagon.  There's just too much going on right now to make it the #1 priority.

My 4-day work weeks are going well. :)  Last week, my first week of that schedule, was a little bizarre.  My brain skipped Wednesday entirely or something, since normally (for a solid 8 months with few variations) when I worked 2 days in a row it was Thursday-Friday, so I spent all day last Thursday trying to remind myself that it was in fact Thursday, not Friday.  This week has gone better, but tonight I'll probably skip packing my lunch and just go to bed early.  The dishwasher is still running anyway, I'm too tired to wait up for it just to pack a salad.

I'm debating how to get more students and where to hold the lessons.  Going to houses isn't ideal, at this point mostly because of the distractions but also because of the impracticality of me wasting time between each lesson driving all over town lugging all my instruments around if I get more students.  However, it's also not a great idea to expect everyone to come out to my house.  It's out in the country, on a nasty muddy road with all the rain we've had, I don't have insurance on the house yet or a solid set of front steps or walkway, and there's still a major unfinished renovation project right inside the front door with tools and such... My 6-year-old student would probably impale herself on the tools there, if her parents could get her (and probably her sister too) packed up and out to my house for a 30-minute lesson in my small-ish living room.  As such, I really just need a little studio space centrally located in town so I could do several lessons in a row without having to drive all over creation.  Such a place is probably out of my budget for the one day a week I'd use it, so I'm not sure what to do there.  I need to get my instrument chops back up a little more and get a viola lesson to be sure my technique is good enough to teach beginners.  I did find out today that there's a real violin teacher in town, so that takes some of the pressure off of me, but she's booked.  Maybe I can do the super beginners then pass them off to her?  Need to talk to her.  Long to-do list for that one, huh?

Saturday is another show at The White Elephant so I've been beading a bunch this week.  I'll get more pictures up as I go, but at the moment my cell phone isn't working so I can't email them to myself to get a post up tonight.  Sounds like bedtime, yes?  Yes.