How to Reseed Your Sunflowers!

This is how my sunflowers keep coming back each year. As I clip the spent flowers, I place them at the base. The bees are still happy and my flowers keep growing:

Morning Blackberries

Good morning! My blackberries have been taking their sweet time this summer and they're finally beginning to ripen. It's great to be able to walk out back and grab a few fresh berries to enjoy with my breakfast. What is difficult to show you here with this photo is their size; each berry is approximately 2 inches across! 

Do you have a great recipe including blackberries?

Fantasia Sunflower

Today was the perfect day for finishing up what felt like a million tiny things. It was exciting to mail out my gift for the Handmade Gift Exchange and the anticipation of having it be received is making me anxious. Nothing like waiting until the very last minute to get it shipped. I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone sent and received too! Mostly, I hope it's loved.

After that, took some time in the garden. Sure, it needs to be weeded and the tomatoes need to be guided through the cages a bit, but when you step back and realize it's all you and your work that made such beautiful things flourish, it's pretty rewarding. This week will be perfect for drying some thyme and oregano.

I hope you have a lovely Independence Day weekend. I'm looking forward to friends/family, watermelon, fireflies and fireworks. What are you looking forward to?

Poppied

I nurture my poppy plant all year long. It's growing larger and larger each year and blooms more and more too. The flowers now reach my waist and though I've tried unsuccessfully to start another from this beauty, I've not had luck. I'm still happy with this one Jurassic sized specimen. 

 

I find the poppy to be stunning and showy. I hope to make some progress this weekend with the gathering of old things for a yard sale I've been procrastinating with, but I wanted to share these photos with you and wish you a lovely weekend. What are you doing for fun today? What are your wishes for the upcoming summer?

Frozen for Winter

wash and uncap

boil just long enough to easily remove skins

set on a plate, tops down and slide the skins off

halve and cool

Adding a sprig of fresh basil before freezing locks in a fresh flavor. I use Big Mama Plum tomatoes and usually start them as seeds myself in recycled newspaper pots I also make. They are meaty and enormous and make beautiful sauces. There are minimal seeds in this type of tomato, so there's no need to remove the seeds, unless you really want to. 

Today, I skinned and halved one bushel and expect to have another before the season it finished. Happy gardening!

Postcarden

The idea that you can mail someone a garden is great. This would be great for a cubicle or office desk, do you think?

This is why...

...exactly why. When I open my bedroom curtains each morning, I see this. I'm a self-taught gardener and I learn as I go. When I first moved here, there were a few gardens in the front yard, but nothing in the back. I created a perennial garden outside my bedroom window as well as a vegetable garden out there. I'm still in the process of shifting a few of the plants around, it's a constant work-in-progress.

Monkey, geraniums, oh my!

I've been placing certain plants outside and I'm already seeing results. This geranium was adopted from my mother last Fall. As she was getting ready to throw them into her compost, I asked her for one. It's beautiful.

I'm beginning to work on some side-projects in my spare time and one of them is to continue my Monkey Socks. This is a project I started last Spring and haven't really looked at. In fact, I purchased another set of size 1 needles to accommodate for my procrastination. I was so busy that I didn't even think about this project much at all. I am comfortable with this well-written pattern, but not as pleased with my choice to make them using Knit Picks' Palette yarn. I do like the edamame color, but this yarn splits too easily. A photo of my progress is shown below and hopefully, in the end will resemble the sock above. So far, so good. 

Good Things

Today was my slowest Monday ever! I stayed in bed for a little while before getting up to open the curtains and walk the two pugs who are usually tossed about above and below the comforter somewhere. It is super sunny and 70 degrees today and there is plenty to do: cleaning the house, heading to the post office to ship this weekend's orders and of course stopping to find some new fiber for custom projects. Not bad weather at all for November. We had a yard sale this past weekend and today's late morning was well-deserved.