I love this time of the year. It is cool overnight and then heats right up during the day. The leaves of the trees are just starting to turn and there are birds flocking in their branches. Something is happening with the light: it is bright, but coming in at a lower angle that is the first hint of the southern winter sun to come. Mostly my garden is done blooming and this is when I decide which plants I want to save and bring inside for the winter.
One thing is for sure. The indoor plants this year will be pink bloomers. I did plant some other colors. I was rocking the orange and yellow in June, but those guys have quit for the year. There was a lot of lavender and purple for awhile, but now there is mostly pink.
I have four pots of flowers blooming on my deck by the lounger. The one that is doing the best is that pink daisy. Hmm… I’ve never kept a plant like this inside over the winter. I wonder how it will do?This lantana is actually three years old. It hangs out with the orchids by a window under a grow light all winter. The leaves drop when it goes back outside in the spring, but it always recovers. It sure is blooming now, so it’s coming back inside for another winter. Look how cheerful it is! Perfect for the gloomy days to come.I also have four of these pink lantana plants in pots in my front yard. I’m torn about trying to save all of them. It doesn’t make sense to spend a ton of money for grow lights, but they sure are nice plants… I really miss the greenhouse that I used to have connected to my classroom in situations like this.This geranium is coming to live in my bedroom over the winter for sure. The plant is actually 5 years old and had grown leggy and over 3 feet tall while living inside. I took it back out this year, laid the long branches across the table and let nature take its course. The old leaves all bleached and died in the sun while the plant sprouted lots of new leaves down low on the stems; I cut all the long upper stems off and this is what was left. It started blooming late last month and really looks healthy now.Out of curiosity I dipped sections of the cut-back stems in rooting hormone to see if I could start some cuttings. It worked!! Gosh, I really need that greenhouse again. I guess I’ll check the price of grow lights that I can add to the shelves in the craft room. These plants will look great along the front walk next spring.Even the pink roses are outdoing themselves. My orange roses haven’t a bloom anywhere on them. These Home Run roses, however…
I also have a pot of tea roses that will move indoors. Guess what color they are? Everything that is coming inside is pink. Not exactly the color that I had planned for my winter-time flowers, but these are the ones that will be making the big move. It is just too hard to let the garden go over the winter; I always cling to as much as I can for those months of snow shoveling and gloomy afternoons.
Wait what am I talking about? Winter is the months of spinning yarn, knitting like crazy and baking yummy breads and indoor blooms. Instead of knitting outside in my garden I will be working among my garden plants inside.
Gosh, I really like this time of year. Maybe I can get a deal on the grow lights. 🙂
Summer heat has arrived, I’m feeling better, and it is definitely past time to attend to the needs of the garden. Yesterday I weeded out front in the shade of the morning and then mowed that lawn in the evening (well, I actually mowed only half of the lawn. A neighbor then arrived and took the mower away from me to finish things up. I love my neighbors!!) Look at what has been happening out front while I was engaged in an indoor scleroderma-induced slug-fest.
My new roses (Hot Cocoa) that I planted a couple of months ago burst into bloom!This is what the blooms look like as they open. I bought these roses as they are recommended for my location (Colorado, USA) even though I wasn’t completely sure about the color. I’m really pleased with the dusty orange color now.. Look how healthy those leaves look! Let’s hope the grasshoppers don’t notice…The ice plant that I planted along the front walk has also gone into overdrive. The color made me so happy I didn’t even mind pulling the weeds!
This morning I moved into the back yard with the cats to see what I could accomplish in a couple hours of coolness and shade before the afternoon heats up. Oh dear, it is somewhat of a jungle, and the cats have been running wild.
Guess I need to mow this lawn too. See how intently MacKenzie is looking upward? He’s watching the squirrel the cats had treed earlier this morning after chasing it all over the yard.Yellow Boy has been busy building nests in several locations in the yard and the garden.The yarrow he’s nesting in is all over the garden and I need to rip most of it out. He was so cute I just let him have it today. Wait a minute… I think yarrow can be used to dye wool. Maybe I shouldn’t rip this out yet…My pincushion plants have spread like crazy and the blooms are looking good! Please ignore the grass in the photo. That’s what I did and I feel much better for it. 🙂MacKenzie has also staked out a nice shady location to nap in near the cat mint. He is my good boy: he’s sleeping on dirt and not in the middle of a plant. 🙂
Things are looking much better than I thought they would. I weeded like crazy, filled up two garbage sacks, and then planted some new flower seeds in one garden where a rose died over the winter. By then the day was heating up and I was starting to feel a little dizzy again. Time to head back into the house to rest up for afternoon knitting and lawn mowing later.
The best part of the morning? I didn’t see a single slug!!
On New Year’s Eve I made some resolutions. I’ve been keeping up with most of them, but there were a few that were one time deals that had to wait for the right time of the year. Now that spring is here it is time for me to address one of the big ones. The roses at the front of my house are just awful. They were really nice roses for several years, and then they got a dose of bleach when my house was painted, and the extreme rainfall of the last two years was too much for them to handle. They struggled and what did manage to grow was munched by every passing insect. Ugh!
Ugh! This is what the rose garden looks like now. Sure, I can weed it and put in some bedding plants, but the roses just aren’t doing well anymore. Time for them to go!
I have changed my landscaping around the house and had new rain gutter installed. It is now time for me to rip these roses out and to replant them with some others that are hardy, full of blooms and resistant to insects.
Off to my favorite nursery I went to look at roses. Here’s what I was looking for.
My house is pointed a creamy white with gold trim. I have rust colored gingerbread trim and this happy sun above my kitchen window. I decided I wanted floribunda roses that were deep rusty orange.These roses are called Hot Cocoa and are hardy and disease resistant. I’m hoping that the insects won’t find them as tasty as the earlier roses. They should bloom for most of the summer and the flowers will be deep smoky orange. After 2 hours of digging and ruthless weeding, I finally got the new roses placed in the flower bed.Here’s one of the new plants in the ground after a good soaking. The graft point on the bushes are about 3 inches below the ground to help the plants survive our winters.
The weather here in Colorado will be warm all week except for a couple of day of rain. These guys should have a nice week to make a good start. Welcome to your new home little guys!
Well, this is it. There are only a couple of hours left for the year. The end of a really busy year, and I have no idea what exactly was accomplished over the last 12 months. Well, I did read a lot of books and did a lot of knitting, but since I didn’t keep track of things, I don’t exactly have any numbers. I do have a memory of a quilt that I made for my younger son, and then there was the enormous landscaping project along the house, but seriously, the year is just a blur.
This year I would like to set some goals and then measure my progress. With the best of intentions, here is what I’m planning for in 2015.
Seriously, how many sock books does one knitter need? Wait… that’s not a fair question.
Knitting
I’m going to go through my sock books and select a different sock to make each month. Then I will knit the sock! Seriously, I will get this done.
I will knit the socks with the STASH YARN!!!
I will make a really serious effort to record my projects in Ravelry.
I tend to make multiple items of the same pattern, so I will also start a spreadsheet to list my knitted items. Ha! Next year I will know exactly how many baby booties I actually made.
Here’s my beautiful Schacht wheel. Poor baby, the flyer is in pieces and it actually has a loose screw.
Spinning
I dropped my spinning wheel. Parts fell off. I finally sucked it up and told Maggie Casey of Shuttles, Spindles & Skeins (Boulder, Colorado) that I had hurt my baby. She told me (3 months ago) to bring it in and she would fix it. I will for sure absolutely without fail take it in this month!! next month before summer.
I’m struggling with the spinning wheel because I bought 5 ounces of Paco-Vicuna roving to spin. Wow! This stuff is soft beyond belief. I’m afraid to spin it. If the wheel is broken, I can’t be expected to spin it, can I? All right. I’m a big person. I will without fail get this fiber spun before the end of the year.
The Paco-Vicuna is from a local grower, Jefferson Farms. The name of the animal is Gulliver. I promise to call them up before the year is over and I will go visit Gulliver. Won’t that be a fun post!
This fiber is so soft I am scared to spin it. I need to settle on a project first, I think.
Books
Goodreads says I read 25 books this year. That can’t be right!! I know that I am reading more than that. Therefore I resolve to list every book that I read at Goodreads this year.
I will even review every some of the books that I read.
Maybe I should start a spreadsheet while I am at it.
I would love to read 100 books this year. Ha! Really, it will be fun!
Here are the Home Run on the day I planted them. The shrubs are now 2.5 feet tall and covered with blooms after two years of growth.
Roses
The roses at the front of the house, Showbiz, look just terrible these days. Mainly they serve as food for wandering insects. Maybe I shouldn’t have dosed them with bleach while painting the house two years ago. They have never been the same again…
I am going to rip those roses out and replant with some roses that are hardy, full of blooms and resistant to insects. The Home Run roses at the side of the yard look great. Maybe I will get some of those for the front.
That’s it. There is only an hour left to the year. Goodbye, goodbye 2014.
My mom was amazing. She had a life that could serve as the foundation for a novel, but to me she was just mom. The lessons that she taught me were a reflection of her time, but they have turned out to be good life lessons for any generation. Here they are:
We are all citizens of the world. My mom was born in Japan to American citizens of Swedish descent; her first spoken language was Japanese. The family lived overseas due to my grandfather’s job, and she was raised in Illinois and Argentina. Along with the English that she learned in America, she was also fluent in Spanish and had some French on the side. After marriage she lived in Hawaii and Southern California. She had a cosmopolitan view of the world and would not tolerate any prejudice of any kind. If she didn’t like someone, it was absolutely personal. Lesson learned.
People are more important than money. My parents valued service to others and the nation above making money. My mom was a nurse and my father was in the civil service. They gave as much money as they could to charity; one year they were in the newspaper because they had donated so much to The United Way. My mom was a pediatric care nurse when I was young, and she fostered some of her patients who needed homes after leaving the hospital. She always gave 10% of her income to her church. We weren’t rolling in money but we always had enough. I learned from mom that you don’t need money to be rich.
The most valuable thing you acquire in life is your education. My mother was admitted to a university after finished high school, but her father wouldn’t let her attend. When I wanted to go to college myself she moved mountains to make it possible for me, and then entered college herself. We raced to graduation with mom finishing a few months before me. She told me we were making the best investments of our lives, and she was right. Cancer cheated her of her Master’s Degree, but I thought of her the entire time I worked on mine. The diploma on my wall is hung next to her picture. Thank you, mom.
Get your vaccinations! My mom was a Red Cross nurse during the polio outbreaks of 1945. It was a dreadful time. She was a nurse at an outbreak in Illinois where hundreds of people became ill, and many died or were left with lasting damage. When the polio vaccine became available we were some of the first to receive our shots. She worked on the pediatric ward of a county hospital and saw many children die or suffer permanent injury from “childhood” diseases such as measles and diphtheria. Throughout her life she insisted that we get every vaccine available as soon as we could. To this day I regard vaccines as one of the greatest achievements of science.
Take germs seriously when it is appropriate, but don’t worry about them the rest of the time. Wow, we learned draconian germ control methods when there was an outbreak of illness in the house. Safe food handling was a way of life for us. Otherwise, things were pretty casual. She kind of felt that your immune system needed to see germs to develop normally, and mom would have laughed at all the anti-bacterial products on the market. I have to say, I very rarely become ill. Mom knew what she was doing.
Repurpose, recycle, reuse, and eat your leftovers! My mom was a child of the Great Depression. She did her homework writing in the margins of the newspaper. She invented Life Hacks before anyone else knew about them. She knitted, sewed, cooked, and made all of our presents. She empowered me to learn how to sew baby clothes, can peaches, tape drywall, lay tile and make plumbing repairs. This is also why I can’t seem to throw away all my biology teaching stuff in the garage. I just KNOW I can use some of it again for SOMETHING.
It never looks how long it took you to do something, only how well you did it. Usually this was said as I ripped out a zipper to sew in for the third time. I think she meant it to comfort me, but it was really good advice. Don’t ever settle for less than your best.
Feed your roses every month, prune them every three months, and if they don’t produce the way you want them to after a year, rip them out and go get some new ones. Mom took her roses seriously and her roses were amazing! People came off the street, knocked on her door, and asked her about them. I remember them as 6 feet tall and always blooming (OK, this was San Diego and such things were possible). When you think about this, her advice for roses is also good for life. Sometimes, no matter how much love, care and time you spend on someone or something, there comes a point where you should cut your losses and move on. You leave that job, your marriage ends, best friends get downgraded. That’s life, mom would say. Move on.
My mom in 1986. She died of cancer a few months later.
My mom died 28 years ago this week, but her lessons live on. It is not possible to minimize the effect that she had on my life. Her lessons grounded me, and I’m still trying to live the example that she set for me. She surrounded herself with books and read every day. She established a scholarship to allow a woman to enter the ministry, created nursing courses to meet the needs of her community, and wrote her congressman when she wanted action. She was a woman of faith who demanded evidence before she made a decision. She has been and continues to be the role model for my life. I love you, Mom!
Yarn, Books & Roses 