For more than a decade I had wanted a retro style 1950s dining table and chairs set in perfect condition that would fit into our mid century home. Eventually I settled on reupholstering an old set from the 1940s.
When my kids were little, I bought an odd gardening book from a used book store called The After Dinner Gardening Book, by Richard Langer.* I was curious and had to buy it just to see if it had some ideas for kid-friendly gardening projects that we had not already tried. It was an enjoyable narrative story about the gardening adventures of growing edible plants in an urban East coast apartment, but mainly from leftovers and seeds which were normally…
As most seasoned gardeners know, one of the easiest plants to propagate is the strawberry. It is possible to make only a minimal financial investment and buy just few strawberry plants when getting a bed started, and within a matter of a few short years, have a giant patch of strawberry plants, all clones of the original variety. This is because strawberries send out runners, or stolons, in order to reproduce. This time of year, at least here in…
Remember Penguin? She remains my favorite hen, even though she briefly went through a hormonal phase where she thought was a rooster. Because she started crowing early in the morning, last December she was exiled over to my friend’s flock across the street. Click here to read my post about having to banish her to Elba, I mean the neighbor’s house. For the last eight months, she has been a model citizen in K’s backyard flock, never once crowing or…
When I am not being a home maker/ gardener/ etc., on the side I am a decorative painter. Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to do a simple word mural for an 8th grade girl. Although I particularly like painting for younger kids because of all the creative possibilities, it was still a pleasure creating this one. Brianna choose her favorite phrase in a font that she likes to go over the window in her purple bedroom: “Live, Love,…
Yesterday was a “Murphy’s Law” kind of day. In Southern California, it never rains here in the summer. We usually have a long dry season from May to November. I bet you can see where this post is going…We were confident that we would be okay temporarily storing the furniture from our kitchen and the new cabinets for the laundry room/ mudroom/ office outside for a week while the rooms were gutted down to the subfloor of 1 x 6…
..out of the 100,000+ member pages at BYC, one of my pages was featured on the homepage of BackyardChickens.com today. When I started out with chickens 4 years ago, there were few resources promoting gardening methods to happily co-exist with pet chickens, other than keeping the chickens locked up all the time. Lots of folks said a pretty garden with free range chickens couldn’t be done; chickens would eventually destroy everything. I learned that isn’t true. In 2009, I decided…
Tired Old Vinyl Floor When we bought our home, the polyvinyl chloride flooring, often mistakenly referred to as linoleum, that the previous homeowners put in the kitchen wasn’t in too bad of shape. Although we didn’t care for the faux tile or how easily it got dirty, it wasn’t that ugly nor did we want to rip out something just because of ascetics. We decided to wait until it was truly in need of replacing, and considering it was 10…
People usually either love Pickled Beets or hate them. My daughter and I love Pickled Beets. This summer B decided to plant beets just for pickling. She planted Detroit Dark Red, mainly because we had three packets of them on hand, but also because it is a good variety for pickling and canning, plus they are really sweet. They took about 60 days from sowing to harvest since they weren’t in full sun and we also forgot them for an…
Last week I had to stop vacillating and finally make a decision in order to buy the retro colored tile for our mid century bathroom renovation and begin tiling. When it comes to making any kind of big ticket purchase or long term decisions, I ponder over them for days, weeks, or even months, rather than easily choosing. Tile fits under both of those categories. It didn’t help that the tile manufacturer, B & W Tile, had plenty of different…