The Old has become New

Remember back in April when I spent all my birthday money at Goodwill on 50% off day with visions of a shabby chic backyard?  Well, it is slowly materializing!  Finally!  I found this top from a girl’s bedroom set… maybe from the bed or a desk hutch… and I could envision a garden shelf dealie to stack my pots and hang my tools.

Then I looked for MONTHS for a bottom piece to store my dirt and fertilizer and turtle kneeling pad.  I think it was in August or September that I happened on this gem at Goodwill… on another 50% off day!  Sweet mother of baby Jesus!  It was perfect.  The guy at the store told me that it came in from a monastery full of religious books all in Chinese.  So half of the finished product was in the ministry.  :o) 

After much painting and sanding and hammering 1×4’s on the back so it doesn’t fall and kill a small child or dog… it is finished!  My husband took one look at the finished product and asked, “So you had all that junk?”  Nice, eh?  Yes, I did… and one man’s junk is his wife’s treasure.  I actually will use the junk, well, most of it.  The ceramic butterfly in the center was handmade by my six-year-old self in Renton, Washington in a ceramics class at a neighbor’s house.  The rest is truly junk.  Not the butterfly.

We did have a near catastrophe whilst waiting for the 1×4’s to be nailed on the back.  I had it set up in the middle of our back porch… clearly capable of falling and killing a small child or dog.  The wind whipped up a gale to behold and knocked the top right off.  It fell backwards, hit the NEW, glass patio table, got a big bash-in on the back piece and fell to the ground.  Shoot.  I put the big tin plate on the top shelf in front of the bash-in evidence.  All is well now.  Why would anyone need this in their yard, you ask?  Because now my gardening gloves won’t get chewed and buried by the dogs.  That’s really what this was all about…. me having to repeatedly replace my flimsy gardening gloves from the dollar store.  See, all is well now. (I have since planted those violas in those six pots in the little green stand on the right.  They are darling.)

This Means WAR!

What you are looking at here are the remains of my green bean plants thanks to a naughty little ground squirrel who breathed his last naughty breath yesterday.  Yes, those are four-inch tall green bean sticks.  I was about to rip them all out, then I noticed some are sprouting new leaves.  Not sure what to do quite yet since there are fifty bazillion ground squirrels that live in the alley next to our house.  I did find the hole next to the house where they were getting in and they will no longer have easy access.  AND I bought some cucumber plants to replace the peas and beans.  It’s simply too hot here in the Sonoran Desert for peas past April.  We grew them last Fall with great success.  What was I thinking planting them in March??

Anyway, yesterday I was out watering the garden when I heard scurrying on the far side of the yard.  Our entire backyard is surrounded with a six-foot high block wall fence.  Yes, it’s kind of prison-ish, but it’s what they do here in Phoenix.  I dropped the hose and ran for the back door to get our Rat Terrier, Trixie, to come and earn her keep.  Rat Terriers are bred for killing rats…. and all related rodents, I was hoping!  That poor dog is getting old!  The ground squirrel was frozen in place next to my back flower bed, but Trixie couldn’t see it.  I threw her toys over there… I threw rocks, hoping the little ball of fur would move and get her attention.  FINALLY she sniffed around and when she got within six inches of the demon of destruction, it jumped into the flower bed and the chase was on.  Yes, several of my flowers were trampled, but I did not care!  Trixie caught it, shook it mercilessly and then left it lying on its back… dead.  I thought about laying the carcass on the outside of the block wall to warn all the other fifty bazillion relatives that doom was pending if they crossed the dead body.  But I just chucked it over the wall toward the alley.

A few months back I read the book Rabbit Hill to my children.  The tale is written from the viewpoint of the rabbits.  It had been a long lean year with no people living in the house where they burrowed near.  Finally people moved in and planted a huge garden.  The rabbits, mice, badgers, squirrels, etc. were wondering what sort of people they would be: trap-setting, pesticide people, or generous, nature-loving people.  They ended up being the latter, and at the time of the reading, I was thinking that I was a generous, nature-loving people.  Not true, as yesterday’s victory in the garden proved.

Backyard Update

Sadly, I can’t even get out in the backyard every day to finish my 27 projects.  Slow and steady wins the race. I know. I know.  But slow and steady also leads me into the broiling temperatures of summer in Phoenix. So the pressure is on!

The resurrected gazebo is coming right along…. other than being upside down, on the grass, and not painted. This is the one that flew over the fence and was a mangled mess of canvas and metal. 

My beloved royal blue lobelia are absolutely their happiest right now…. but they won’t last much longer in this heat.

The garden is coming right along…. beans are winning the growing race at the moment, but the zucchini is in a close second.

Lastly, for your viewing pleasure, I scored six of these lovelies at 50% Off Goodwill last Saturday… YES!  Rick scrunched up his nose too at the thought of candles in the backyard, but last night I lit them all and he did think it was lovely, even though he never used the word lovely.

My New Theory on Birthday Money Spending

Last year, as you may recall, I received a birthday chair with an ottoman for my birthday.  It is a lovely sage/olive-green color that matches my bedroom decor perfectly.  That was the first year that I was given something other than stuff that is used up…. by that I mean, scrapbooking supplies, clothing, books to read, etc.  And I must say that I sit in that chair almost every single day.  I love it.  I love the light that comes in from the window behind it.  It is comfy and cozy and perfect.

So when this year rolled around and I was asked what I would like for my birthday, I couldn’t think of anything…. because in the back of my mind I was trying to come up with another non-use-up-able item… and I couldn’t.  THEN I went and got my hair cut at my friend Donna’s house… this is not an ordinary hair-cutting gal… this is an uber talented seamstress, tile laying wonder, gardener extreme, decorator magnifique and truly a creative inspiration to me!  I drooled over her back yard.  It is an oasis in Phoenix… flowers and vegetables and vines and fruit trees and stepping-stones and a pond and a covered swing and curtains outside and on and on.

THEN came 50% off day at Goodwill…. the day after my birthday.  Thank you, Jesus! I had a fist full of birthday cash that was burning a hole in my wallet.  (Darla bombed out on me and I had to go alone!)  The first Goodwill I entered… was, well, disappointing.  I left empty-handed… except for my fist full of money. Absolutley nothing to get my creative juices flowing.

Upon entering the SECOND Goodwill store, I didn’t even get a cart because I didn’t really expect to find anything.  Well, after seven minutes in the store, I had a pile of things on the floor… and no cart.  I spied a large plastic tub that was for sale… I used it as my wheel-less cart to drag my goods to the front while holding various other items in my free hand.

I have been admiring outdoor “rooms” for years.  I have pages and pages that I have ripped out of magazines and saved for such a time as this.  The time had come.  Goodwill was a shabby chic gardeners house of glory that day!  I stuffed the back of the van and still had half of my birthday cash left over!  Sweet mercy, I was thrilled.  Of course, to the untrained eye (which is MOST of my family) it looked like other people’s junk …. at 50% off.  But NO!  I have visions of grandeur coming!

This was my favorite find… a vintage mirror with a carved wooden frame.  And I paid $4 for it!  Unreal!  In an antique mall it would be over $100 I’m sure! Yes, I plan to hang it outside.  It was $4!  Why not?

Next we have the top of what will be my garden hutch.  I’ve already sanded it down to shabbier chic and I’m painting the back wall green. A table is needed for it to sit on….. and the next 50% off day is only 10 days away!  The plan is to put hooks for my tools, baskets for my gloves, cutesy jars for seeds, etc.  Just you wait!

This next item was a GOLDMINE!  Shutters are so hard to find… and in the window casing is just icing on the cake!  $8!!!!  My plans for these have been varied and not finalized at this point.  But in the backyard they will go for all to see and admire.  Donna hinted at planting herbs in them…. ohhh!

I’ve always been drawn to candles in the garden and when I spied this baby, I grabbed onto it like a flea on a fat coon dog.  (We are reading Where the Red Fern Grows right now.)  There were also eight votives that fit it… unmatching, of course.  Yes, the leaves are mirrors…. $2!  I know!  $2!

Several times I’ve seen shabby wooden ladders used in the garden… and lo and behold, my shabby ladder was at Goodwill when the birthday money was in my fist!  $5!  Shut the front door!  $5! I’ve already painted it white!  I’m gathering pots and birdhouses to set on the steps.

Soon I will have photos for you of my boring block-walled backyard that was transformed into a sweet sanctuary of delight that draws you from the house, no matter the soaring temperatures.  Really.

Linda, Linda, Quite Contrary

Garden Update #2.  The good news: Plants are sprouting!!!  The bad news: the dog buried a sock in the green onions.  Boooo!  I’m so impressed with the power in a seed!  Life… all dried up and shriveled… bursting forth into green goodness.  Does my heart SO good.  I go out several times a day and stare at the garden barrels.  Here are some photos to make you purely envious of my amazing gardening ability. (We’ll see if we’re all envious after the Phoenix sun does its duty in June and July!)

That is the spinach popping up their little heads toward the sunlight.

Little peas all straight in rows. (Thankfully I could see those seeds.  The carrots aren’t in straight rows at all.) Next is a cute and dainty green bean doing its thang.

Those pictures were from Saturday.  Here are the pictures from TODAY… only two days later!

Peas on the left and beans on the right.  The no-man’s-land in the center is going to be peas too, but they were planted 4 or 5 days later than the rest.

Bringing up the rear of the photo montage is the two zucchini plants…. soon to be the SOLE zucchini plant.  If you have ever planted and harvested this yummy squash, you know the SECRET to raising zucchini….. you only need ONE plant per family!!!  We learned the hard way, 18 years ago, when there were only two of us and we planted eight zucchini plants.  I believe we lost some friends that summer after we filled their car with the prolific vegetable!  Good times!

Mary Mary Quite Contrary…..

My garden is 67% planted!  Yeah!  I ended up with six half barrels of my magic soil mix…. that includes some empty 2L bottles that I placed in the bottom of the barrels to take up space.  It’s sort of like the bricks in the toilet tank… remember that, anyone? 

I bought one plant, a cherry tomato, and Nora helped me plant it yesterday after the rains came down and the floods came up.  But not a seed found its cozy bed until today… when sunny skies returned to Arizona, and winter is now over.  My rainy day yesterday was spent indoors pouring over gardening books to figure out which plants need full sun, which plant grows with which companion plant, how many seeds to sow in each barrel for each type of plant, etc. etc. etc.  Of course, I drew a plan.  You gotta have a plan!  If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.  If you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time! (Sorry for all the clichés….. I’m a tad on the tired side.)

And the planting began…. green onions, bell peppers, carrots, spinach, cilantro…..

Yes, those green onion seeds are teeny and hard to plant.  But not NEARLY as hard as the carrot seeds!  I could barely see them, let alone try to pick up two at a time for each of the 96 little holes destined to cultivate Peter Rabbit’s favorite veggie!  Those carrots will NOT be coming up in perfect rows like Mr. McGregor’s garden.  I may have even missed an entire row…… anywho…. the proof will be in the pudding in about two weeks, when they come up and I see what really happened.

The reason I’m only at 67% is because I forgot to soak the peas and zucchini seeds before planting.  They will go in tomorrow with the beans.  More pictures to follow as the joyfulness in my heart grows with each little sprig of green that pushes up through the earth.

SpRiNg BrEaK!

Yes, we are a week late, but for a good reason.  Homeschoolers can take Spring Break whenever they want to!  So we did school all last week while our friends played.  This week, Rick’s brother, wife and daughter are in town to PLAY!  It started yesterday and shall continue for another six days!  WhoOoooo HOoooOOoo!

Today’s business was: street hockey game, dressmaking and container gardening.  Unsurprisingly, I chose container gardening.  (Only because I had half of the soil mixed on the tarp when the trip to the fabric store was announced.)  After much calculating and price shopping, the final mix for the ultimate container vegetable garden turned out to be: 1 cf (cubic foot) each of perlite, peat moss, compost and mulch.  There are so many different mix recipes out there, I had to do my research.  I do like the book The Square Foot Garden, but his mix is very expensive.  So I found all the ingredients and mixed it myself, well, with the help of my two sons and my 7-year-old daughter who LOVES to help!  And I added mulch.  Hey, it’s cheap and adds roughage to the mix.

Funniest thing happened as me and my sister-in-law were leaving the store with a flat-bed cart piled with huge soil bags….. the cart hit the first of the pavement bumps leading to our get-away car and half of the bags fell off onto the ground.  As we were laughing and setting our purses down to pick them up, a lady in a wheel chair pulled up and asked if she could help.  “Sure!”  (I was thinking, what exactly is she planning on doing to help???)  She held the cart still while we piled the bags a bit more securely.  That was nice!

One thing I did know was NOT to use the soil in the ground in AZ!  It is the same clay that the Hohokam Indians used to make clay pots.  After the sun shines on the clay soil at 120 degrees, it is as hard as a clay pot fresh out of the kiln!

As mentioned before, I was given large plastic barrels that were cut in half long-ways for my containers.  Yes, the hardware store sells cute little wooden fences for a 4’x4′ garden bed, but like I said, these were FREE!  And required next-to-nothing in set up.  I filled six of them today with my miracle mix and will plant tomorrow.  The heat and sunshine are always a concern here for wilting plants in the summer, so I lined the barrels along the west wall of our backyard, so they only get sun until 2:00.  Then they can recover until the next morning sunshine kisses their little leaves again.

(Pictures to follow when plants appear.)

God Cares About the Small Things!

It’s testimony time.  Please allow me a few moments on my soapbox to share the little surprises and victories in my life.

I am a farm-girl trapped in a city-girl body and life.  I’m not sure where my love for all things country came from (minus the music), but I have strong dreams and desires for raising animals, growing veggies, fruit and nuts, spinning wool and diggin’ in the dirt.  We’ve had gardens in the past.  We’ve raised chickens and rabbits in the past.  Currently I have a few potted flowering planters and a plum tree that has a promising collection of blooms.  However, I’m secretly sucked into the backyard-garden section at every and all bookstores.  The book The Encyclopedia of Country Living makes me drool and salivate simultaneously.  Right now I have a book from the library titled The Backyard Homestead that clearly lays out how to raise all the food you need in as little as a quarter acre.  This is my idea of a piece of heaven on earth!

A few nights ago, in the dark of the night, I asked my husband how long he thinks we will live in this house.  The land here is not large enough for my illustrious plans.  There is barely room for a garden.  Container gardening is all that we could do here for the time being.  He gave me his answer, which did not meet my deepest desires.  Long enough to raise chickens, but not long enough to plant nut or fruit trees or berry vines.  {sigh} 

Last night after a lovely dinner at a Mexican cantina, Rick drove us through the back alleys behind some homes that sit on an acre each…. I rolled down the window and thirstily sucked in the country-smelling air.  Horses, grape vines, goats, chickens, sheep, grapefruit trees…. ahhhhhhh.  The slow trip in the darkness did my heart good. 

OK, so today we stopped by a friend’s home, that is a mile from our house, to buy farm-fresh eggs.  They have horses, chickens, a lame goat, two big, fat pot belly pigs and two little two-day-old pot belly piggies. Darling!  I even held one! They just finished planting their garden in fiberglass barrels.  It was truly lovely.  It gave me ideas just to see their set up.  When I got home there was a message on my cell phone from that same friend asking if I could use eight of the barrels for planting a garden.  Oh, could I ever!  It was an answer to an unspoken prayer!

God does care about the desires of our hearts, no matter how small.

The 2nd Gerber Daisy has Raised its Sleep Head

Gerber daisies take FOREVER to bloom.  Seriously, it’s only about 4 to 5 weeks, but the anticipation of a burst of beauty makes it seem longer.  WAY longer.  Back in March, my first Gerber daisy bloomed and was taken down by a wet towel thrown by a child that I gave birth to.  Unbelievable.  Then a bud appeared…. the promise of life anew….weeks later she opened her drowsy eyes and lifted her hot pink head.  FINALLY!  (Yes, I dragged my son out there to witness the beauty and miracle of nature to increase his appreciation of God’s hand in our backyard. He didn’t actually thank me, but I felt the thankfulness emanating from his little heart.)

The exceedingly good news is that there is already another bud forming….. so in May, I’ll have continual hot pink yummy eye candy to behold.

April is so wonderfully warm and inviting in Phoenix…. leads to the illusion that summer might linger off in the distance a while longer!  Makes me want to sit in the backyard swing and forget the laundry, the homeshooled youngin’s, cooking, cleaning, carpooling, etc., etc., etc.

The name of the following flower is still a mystery.  Please share your wisdom in the comment section concerning the name of said purple flower.

That is all.  Hasta luego.

My Stellar Green Thumb

I just had to share my fabulous sunflowers from the backyard.  Why I think they’re so fabulous is because they are actually growing in the SUMMER in PHOENIX!  Only the strong and drought-resistant brave the hell-like temperatures here.  Behold, The Ochre Goddess tasting the morning light:

And her six inch tall sister, Sunny Delight:

Yellow is such a happy color.  Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to sunflowers.  Now, before you go on thinking I’m a stellar gardener…. I must confess to smoke and mirrors with my photography.  Here is the truth for all to see.  Not a blade of a bad weed is growing in my “flower bed” (term used loosely) under the palm tree.  Even the third flowerless sunflower plant is on the outside of the brick that borders the “flower bed.” These beauties seeded themselves and are growing in the rocky border of our yard. 

But hey, any flower is good in my books.  Please stop by in November when my real green thumb is a bit more evident. Oh, and here’s Lizzy, one of our family of lizards that eat the bugs in the yard.  She is hiding on the wall behind the oleander, but I spotted her.  Her scales are amazingly colorful… well, for a lizard in the Sonoran Desert.  Aren’t they supposed to blend in for safety?  There are teal scales above her arms and the yellow scales seem to be in perfect patterns like the horse moves in chess.  God is so cool.

Here are two other happy flower pictures from Bishop, California…. on our 15 hour drive to Tahoe.  The first, The Lone Giant. 

The second, A Bashful Hollyhock hiding from the afternoon Sun.

Garden Strong, my Friend.

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