Summer has arrived - 2012

Oh, the summer heat has arrived!  yay!!

This is the situation in my garden today:

Finally weeding my garden; I didn't have any ambition to do so in June - too rainy!  Please note the ice cubes in the bowl of water. My daughter's dog is spending the morning with me. She loves being in the garden and loves crunching on ice cubes too!

Now that the sunshine & warmth are here - perhaps I will try re-planting some annuals!  Have a happy week all!

Easter is coming

Work has been busy,  I need a break.... here is the plan for the upcoming weekend!   (Four days!) To reconnect with family: my hub, Ms. Freshface, my tiny sewing-room, and especially my garden.  The Weather Network is calling for sunshine this Easter weekend!  So I plan to spend half my time indoors and half out of doors, in the garden!  I plan to visit my mother; spend hours in my tiny sewing-room; write long loving emails to our number 1 who is currently in Australia; make pancakes for hub; go to church; plant up my geranium pots, weed the garden; scrub down our patio furniture!    Ah, it will be glorious!

HAPPY SEWING & GARDENING ALL !!

Shades of What's to Come -2011

 Summer is waning when the hydrangeas start to turn color.  It is no secret that August is bittersweet to me. Especially this summer, as our beautiful summer weather really began at the beginning of August.   

 And, as I have said in past, this month should be my favourite month of the season, maybe even the year - it is my birthday month, my daughter's, my dear Dad's and my god-mother's as well. But no, I always start to feel sad once I flip the calendar to August.   It signals the coming end of summer, and in this beautiful, green but rainy valley I start dreaming of summer in January.  I wish summer could last six months long and they would be all June & July!  That is when summer is in full swing.  My favourite time.

I pout at the end of each summer, but here is one tradition that makes it a bit sweeter. At the end of season, usually in September I cut a nice selection of hydrangeas that have already started to turn color -  meaning that they will dry nicely.  The bunch below are all mop-heads - all originally blue but now turning green, grey and some even a nice mauve-grey.

I plan to refill one of my favourite baskets.  The basket shown here is at least thirty years old! Purchased in the early 1980's in Vancouver's Chinatown. I love this basket. Wicker baskets are a great investment -  always useful, alot more attractive than a plastic tote for storing household items, and don't be afraid to give them a wash! Mild soap and water, a good rinse with a hose... let them dry in the sun if you can and lastly, give your basket a good wipe down with some lemon oil polish.  Your basket will look like new!

See, here is the same basket - left - circa 1985, in our son Ryan's room - filled with stuffed animals.

Here is my favourite basket, all freshly filled with this year's crop of dried hydrangeas. This is an early fall tradition. It helps me 'cross over' from summer into fall a little.  And while I love fresh flowers better than dried ones - this arrangement is very pretty. It does help take the sting out of the end of August.

It is nice to share...

It is nice to share.  A friend at work was feeling a bit blue this week, so this morning I ventured into the garden to pick her a bouquet.

This bunch is for you Rachelle !!

Hydrangeas, hydrangeas 2011

 I love summer and here is one reason why, I really enjoy my garden. I don't consider myself a good gardener but I do know our yard which is very shady. The perfect shrub for our yard are these hydrangeas. I love them and they are so much tougher than they look. I can transplant them; have accidentally 'broken' a shrub when digging it up and both halves always survive! One reason my collection is growing. 

I have learned NOT to fuss too much with them, in other words prune very, very lightly!  But they can be pruned as a way to control their size. If left unchecked and in the right situation (shade, rainfall, soil) these shrubs can grow very large!

It is dawning on me.... that I have a lot of hydrangeas! I don't want to count exactly how many shrubs we have, but almost all my garden spaces are dedicated to these lovely, homey shrubs. Here are some of my mop-headed varieties. I must have a dozen or more of these shrubs.

This little pink shrub is called 'Quick Fire', and doesn't mind the afternoon sun! And I love the pink blooms as they all have lots of creamy yellow mixed in. So pretty. This shrub is only a year old and will easily triple it's size.

Here are more mop-heads which bloom my all favorite hydrangea colors; aqua blue, lime green and purple-blues.  Love them all.

Here is another Quick Fire that I purchased from the SuperStore in Chilliwack two years ago. It has tripled in size already.  The stems of these pink blooms are much sturdier than my mopheads!  Of course, it is lovely having fresh flowers available for inside our home too!  I am cutting bunches and bunches. They are in every room.

 

I still have my pee-gee varieties (white flowers) and some sturdy dark purple hydrangeas to look forward to, but the blooms on those shrubs are at least a few weeks away. 

I think I can consider myself a serious hydrangea fan!  Have a happy week all.

Shades of what's to come.....

It is August. It occurs to me that this should be my favourite month of summer, after all my birthday falls in August as does my daughter's, my dear dad and my lovely godmother's; but alas it is not. 

I will always love the month of June with the whole of summer just ahead of us and the garden looking so fresh.

 But luckily August is a long month, I start off feeling abit melancholy about how fast the summer has gone by, but usually by September long weekend I have resigned myself to September.....

New Sunny Garden

Here it begins.  This weedy corner  (see above) will become the site of my new sunny garden. This is the only sunny corner of our backyard, as our house backs onto a densely treed green belt. Which means we have lots of shade. We asked  Mirror Landscaping last May to dig my garden bed.

Freshly dug garden bed....nice. But my Limelight hydrangea looks a bit lonely, it will eventually become the cornerstone of this sunny garden.

Hub was kind enough to gather up several wheelbarrows full of Clayburn bricks for me  (see below). We have a large collection of these beauties. Our house's original patio was made up entirely of these bricks. Charming, but the patio was always very 'weedy' as there were so many cracks in between the bricks. So we had a huge stamped concrete patio poured by Art Derksen, now we use these lovely bricks for other gardening pursuits (namely...small retaining walls around my garden beds)

See what I mean, and for some reason, I really enjoy building these little walls too!

It is hard to believe, but I use at least 4 to 5 courses of bricks. The goal is to fill the garden bed full of soil...once it is planted up with shrubs & flowers, this little brick wall is very sturdy.  It is a fun hobby.

This garden bed is larger than I imagined - now that the time has finally come to fill it up, I realize its' size.

Once the shrubs, roses & lavender start to fill in the garden will be very nice, but until then it will look a bit skimpy. I want to have a 'french lavender' garden in the center of this garden plot. The bees in our neighbourhood will be very happy once everything has started blooming!

In the meantime, I will keep on the lookout for nursery sales...I have become very fond of a new breed of roses called 'carpet roses'. They are low growing shrubs, spreading and flower profusely. But they have no smell! Many of the new breeds of roses are lovely, but I think a rose should smell ...well like a rose! So I will have to make room for the old fashioned tea roses.

I have only shown half of the garden bed, as the other side has nothing planted yet! One Quick-Fire Hydrangea and that is all.  This sunny garden plot will be my summer long project. As rose shrubs can be very expensive, so I will have to collect them over time.

More Summer Jam

This time of year is what I would refer to as 'high summer'; it is the warm sunshine, it must be. I feel very content and yet motivated to keep working on my summer projects. Top of my list is jam-making.  As we happened to have over-ripen fruit sitting around on the counter why not take a break from my blueberries and see if I could come up with my own concoction of fruit jam? This experiment is called "Pear-Banana-Apple-Lemon Zest" jam.  A great way to use up old fruit destined for the compost.
The recipe used is from the Certo packet; I improvised on the Bartlett Pear jam recipe and used a medley of fruit to make the 4 cups of prepared fruit called for.  I must caution you about it being too sweet (the lemon zest helps, but it has a baby food sweet taste to it!).  I would cut back on the sugar by at least 1 cup and give it another go. I do like the flavour of banana in the recipe and it would make a nice topping for many cakes! This experiment was a success.

More 'high summer' photos.
This is a picture of largest parsley plant I have ever seen, never mind owned!
I think my other herbs (see the garden just behind) are quaking with envy!
This celery parsley will be flavouring all of our soups, potatoe  & green salads for months to come! This monster was a gift from a friend; she told me that this was originally an herb garden but the parsley overtook the container! I did manage to rescue  oregano, rosemary, thyme & chive plants which had been hidden underneath this monster parsley.They have all been transplanted to sunnier locations with room to grow.

More evidence of the season: an abundance of flowers are to be found both inside & outside of the house.

Summer Flowers

Even though our summer weather hasn't been as warm as I would like it to be, it seems very wrong not to acknowledge that is must be warm enough if I am able to bring in such pretty bouquets. 

Time to enjoy them now, in a few short months these flowers will be a lovely memory.

Hydrangeas, hydrangeas

I warn you in advance this post is  an unabashed opportunity to show off more pictures of my garden. Perhaps it is silly, but I am so pleased to have so many flowers this year.

Last year there were none as I had severely pruned my shrubs the previous fall. A terrible mistake because as I know now, if you severely prune back mophead hydrangeas in the fall you cut off all the buds and the sad result will be no flowers. So I am so pleased with the amount of flowers  blooming this year! I simply remembered to do nothing. This is a great result from doing nothing.

I have a favourite fantasy that each June I host an annual 'Garden Party' for my friends. This yearly event is always a charming luncheon for twenty or more dear friends and fellow gardeners. We sip lemonade, eat tiny sandwiches and enjoy strawberry shortcake. After lunch each friend then fills a container full of hydrangeas to take home as a memento from the day.  I really like this daydream.

Open to New Possibilities

Have I mentioned that I am middle-aged?  I mention it only because it seems this time of life allows a person to get back to doing the 'things' they always wanted to indulge in, but perhaps didn't have the time for in early life decades.

Back in the days when my day planner was full of orthodontist, doctor & dentist appointments; when week nights were all booked up with sports practice, girl guide meetings, dance classes & guitar lessons, & weekends were spent on the sidelines of soccer games or watching tournaments or delivering your son's newspaper route as he was away at a wrestling match!

Oh, I loved those days, those busy, busy days. Alas my children are grown now, and no grandchildren will be arriving for sometime.  It becomes clear that an opportunity has presented itself . One of free time to pursue interests, even passions that I never was able to fully explore during those early life decades.

Like baking, or sewing & quilting & gardening.  Oh I sewed extensively when my children were little - just ask my serger that now sits in the craft closet gathering dust.

And did I bake when they were little? Of course I did! I made the best chocolate chip cookies & some amazing muffins as well! No better way to round out a packed lunch than with some home baking.

And of course I gardened. Our little white cape cod house always had petunias, marigolds or impatiens  growing along the front walkway when our family was young. Our home was very charming.

But did I really have the chance to garden or bake or sew to my heart's content. Did I fully explore every aspect of these hobbies? Indulge in the best tools of the craft? Well of course not, we were on a budget!  My children were at the centre of my world and other interests were always peripheral. And I loved it that way, it seemed everything was in balance and that was how I wanted it.

But nowadays, life has changed. No longer do small children live in our charming little house. While I do work full-time at a very interesting job, there still seems to be many free hours in my day planner. So I have decided to make great use of this time & begin seeing middle-age as an opportunity to really expand on crafts/interests that I 've always loved: baking, cooking, gardening & sewing.  And maybe learn new crafts, there is a whole new world of fun applications using new technologies that did not exist pre-21st century- blogging being one of them!, or learn old ones (such as hand embroidery/stitchery - I think it could be a very satisfying handicraft).

Pictured here is a small sampling of cherry fabrics available to a quilting enthusiast! I have several more yards coming by mail in the next week as I plan to start working on some quilt projects this summer. And there is a flat of lovely french lavender that awaits planting in my freshly dug garden bed.