Things to strive for

Living with the seasons, making more with less, cooking more meals from scratch, all of these are goals I am trying to incorporate into my life. Actually, these are goals I have been trying to incorporate into my life for years now.

I work in the IT field, 70-ish miles from home in a 24/7 environment. My work schedule makes it a challenge at times to pursue my own goals.

I try to do what I can. Over the past three years, my DH was deployed twice. To make room for the extra responsibilities that left me with, I "outsourced" some of my life. While I have always been an affirmed ironer of shirts (I know, I am weird), I have sent most of my shirt to the dry cleaners. I neither liked the results, nor the expense, but I had clean shirts, so it was a good investment. DH is back for now and currently I iron my own stuff again, but come January, when I take another class towards my next degree, the dry cleaner will be there to pick up my slack if I need it.

I got help cleaning my house. Once a week or every two weeks, 2 wonderful ladies buzz through my home and dust, scrub, vacuum and sweep everything and then some. Sometimes I am lazy and use the time to relax, a lot of times I sew and often I take the time to work on some sorting/purging project. We have made a lot of progress towards a comfortable home over the past few years, but there is still a lot to do. If I need to, I will reduce the frequency of the visits, but I will try to keep them in the budget, not just for the clean house, but for the friendship as well.

Pretty much the first thing we did when we moved into our home was to establish a pantry. DH and I both love our pantry. It is nice sized and lovely. It is not as well organized as I would like and until a few weeks ago it held some small appliances etc that took up valuable shelf space. We finally made a space for those things in what we (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) refer to as our "butler's pantry". The bp consists of several sturdy shelves (think commercial kitchen style chrome wire shelves) in a cupboard under the stairs. In addition to the small appliances mentioned above, that space now also holds extra dishes, large platters and serving dishes, the silver flatware etc. The space will still need some tweaking, but it is already developing quite nicely.

The food pantry now has a surprising amount of free shelf space that I will have to ponder on and rearrange, possibly in the coming week (at least that's when I hope to get started on it). I think this will allow me to get a better grip on our stores and use them more wisely. Once I get things a bit more organized, I will try to use my price book and sales etc to replenish things.

We built 4 raised beds in the veggie garden this spring. Those crops did really well, the ones in the remaining garden beds not so much. We will add a few more raised beds next year and hopefully, little by little, we will have a larger selection of crops each year. With canning and dehydrating, we should be able to fill those pantry shelves in no time.

There are many things I would like to do better, but as long as we make progress towards our goals, I am happy.

Today's daily bread...

Look what came out of the oven this morning:






This is the first time I've used the Artisan Bread Topping from King Arthur Flour (http://www.kingarthurflour.com/shop/items/artisan-bread-topping-8-oz) That stuff is terrific!

Goodies!

Here are the wonderful things I found today:



As I mentioned in the last post, I found a great garden ornament at the Design House. The tall white rusted contraption to the right of the chair is it. The globe portion spins around the arrow. The height is fantastic, I can stick it in the back of the bed and it looks lovely (permanent place yet to be determined)



In the Community Center I picked this little goodness up. It's about 14 inches tall.




This came from the same booth as the dress form. I'm not entirely sure where I'll put it, but it is really pretty and it was very reasonable, so I decided to sort it out later.



Ah, cloches, I love them. This is actually my first one, although I do have a very nice short one, which is actually a cheese dome, so I guess that doesn't really count. There is some engraving on the bell, but it didn't show up very well in the pictures I took. Maybe once it's filled it'll be more visible.

After I left Lucketts and returned home, I "happened to be in the neighborhood" of Slindy's, our local treasure trove (sometimes more than others, of course)



This little picnic basket was mine for the bargain price of $1.99. Can't beat that and I already have a need for it next week when we have tickets for Wolftrap.

Also from Slindy's, for the great price of $1.50 is this little covered dish. I have a weakness for tureens, covered dishes and large bowls and if they are white porcelain or ironstone, I find it very hard to resist.



And finally, two aisles over, temptation loomed large. at $6, I didn't even try to resist.

A Fine Spring Day in Virginia

Today was the first of two days of the Seventh Annual Lucketts Spring Antique Market. Until a few weeks ago, I had never even heard of Lucketts, let alone the market, but after a recommendation I found on a blog I enjoy (I'd love to give credit, but for the life of me I can't remember which blog I found it on, sorry) I looked Lucketts Store up on that interweb thingy and found out that they were about to have their Spring Market, so I marked the day on the calendar and went along my merry way. Turns out, DH is away for the weekend on Reserve business and the weather is great. Lucketts, the town, as well as the store, is a few miles north of Leesburg on 15N. There is a cluster of nifty little antique stores across the street from the Community Center, so the Market included all of the stores as well as booths in and around the community center. I took a few pictures and I wanted to share them with you all.


This is Design House, where I found a great garden ornament. I think I'll post all of my finds in a second post. Anyway, this is a lovely place with neat ideas and decorating items. The prices are quite reasonable and the staff is extremely nice.



This is a picture of the inside, just to give you an idea.



Once more on the outside of the Design House.



Some of the outside vendors in front of the community center. By this time I had my hands full with goodies, so the picture taking dropped of drastically : )



And another one...

How it all started

I promised some before and now pictures and after a little bit of digging I found a few pictures that ought to work here.



This picture shows the right front side of the house. The fence encloses what is currently the vegetable garden, although we decided to let it lay fallow this year and just work on amendments and maybe some hardscaping. Instead, we are going to try a share with the local CSA this year.



Here is the same point of view this afternoon. The large shrub in the front of the house, between the windows is a Purple-leafed Plum. Everything else is a bit hard to see, due to the distance, but thats okay.



This picture must have been taken a few moths after we moved in, 5 years ago. The foundation plantings consisted of dwarf Burford hollies and some Rhododendrons.




Slightly different angle, but you can see, there have been lot of additions made to the foundation plantings, including a weeping cherry tree, a weeping atlas cedar and a Japanese maple.



This is the house from the open area (well, actually it's the drainfield). Not much there, except for the satellite dish and some very large boxwoods on the side of the house (north-east orientation).



Much greener! In front of the boxwoods, that you can't really see in this picture, since everything is growing in front of them, has grown up a nice shade bed. Forward and to the left is the main (oldest) sunny border. That border is very exciting this year, it is really starting to coe together and looking really good.

So that's the big picture, I'll talk about the detailed stuff soon.

Location, location, location

So where is this garden I've been talking about? Well, it's in Virginia, about 75 miles south-west of the NOVA/DC cluster and about 40 miles north of Charlottesville. The USDA map puts me in a zone 6b, but my garden's micro climate is a little off, when compared to the neighboring yards. Our house is on an elevation and with the exception for the area that was cleared for the house, drive way and drainfield, most of the site is mixed, mature forest. All of this puts a few of my indicator plants (daffodils and forsythias for example) a week or so behind the same plants just a few hundred yards down the road. I don't know if that lag stays with me all year long, since I forget to keep track of it once the garden really gets going, but at least so far it still holds true for the bearded iris.

We are the second set of owners of the house. The POs, a couple with a small child, lived their for about years before we came along. They didn't make much of an impression on either the land or the house, so when we moved in we started with an almost blank slate. I have a few pictures of the "before" state of things and I thought I would share them, but I just realized that I don't have access to the garden portion of the picture right now, so it'll have to wait until tomorrow.

So it begins...

I'm not a great believer in New Year's resolutions--I believe in making resolutions and setting goals, I just don't think that they should be made at the beginning of the calendar year. However, if I had made a New Year's resolution, it would have been to blog more. It makes sense: I read blogs, I enjoy blogs, I occasionally have things to talk about or share and I do like the ability to go back and see what I was doing a year or so ago. Still, blogging doesn't come easily to me. I second guess myself, I edit myself, I don't make the time to do it, in other words I share all of the common symptoms of non-bloggers.

Well, I've decided to give it another go. I am making this new beginning with a new (to me) tool and a more general format in mind. The idea is to talk about the house, the garden, the sort of bread recipes I am experimenting with at the moment and so on. There have been a ton of things I could have blogged about over the last 5 years (since we moved to this house), had I but taken the time. Fortunately, I have pictures of most of them, so I can (and will) go back and talk about them now.

For today, I am just going to post a few pictures of the garden as it is today, just a little something to limber up and learn about Blogger with. Enjoy and let me know if you like it!

This is the main perennial bed, which is to the front right of the house (out of the frame on the left). I the back, you can just see the garden shed/workshop. Not much is blooming yet, of course, a few Columbines are being very busy and the Dogwoods are in full bloom, too.








Same bed in the foreground, but from a different angle. The garden shed and herb garden, as well as the swing set (inherited from the PO) can be seen. The open, grassy area is the drain field for the house. It is a nice, large open area, bordered by a hardwood forest. Eventually, I want to work my way around this circle, turning the area between the woods and the lawn into mixed borders. I've made to the left post of the swing set so far and am going to prep another section for fall planting over the course of the summer.



A close up of the herb garden and perennial bed that I installed last spring in the leftover fill dirt we used to level out the site for the garden shed. I used all of the rocks I've dug up over the last few years, to edge the slope of this elevated bed. Over time, I will still have to fill the area in between the rocks with gravel, for now, I've just planted some sedums and some other rock garden plants. Babysteps.





Looking over the herb garden back to the house. The goal is to eventually fill the walk area (currently just local clay) with gravel. The large pot in the middle is the mint container. I have to replant some of the mints that have lost the battle last year. The Korean Mint and the Spearmint are the clear winners. My Lemonbalm disappeared entirely, but I have others (happily reseeded in years past) that I can transplant. The obelisk supports a Clematis that is (somewhat) protected from the mint invasion by a deep bottomless pot that surrounds it.


The Clematis is a "Miss Bateman", if I am not mistaken and is the first one blooming so far. Speaking of not being sure, I have been less than great labeling my plantings, so I am sometimes a little fuzzy on the cultivars in any given spot. This year, I have finally started to install some more sturdy labels, so hopefully I will do better in the future.






How do you label your plants?