relax mode

After a week of trying to get things done and being frustrated by my sore hands I’m finally getting into the season and relaxing a little bit.

My main gift in my family gift exchange is done and in the hands of the recipient, we had a great time with friends on Sunday evening, Kev’s folks are here, and we’ve had some low key evenings with friends. Life is good again!

I haven’t been able to do as much sewing as I would like but when I got word that my mother had broken her wrist on Friday I felt compelled to move into action. (No my mother does not have weak bones or a propensity to fall.) She was complaining about the hospital issue sling and when I had the fracture that changed my outlook on skiing, hockey and mountain biking, I had a similar problem so I bought a more comfortable one. I thought I’d throw it in with the package my sister was taking home but it’s navy and white and I knew my mom would wear it reluctantly because it’s so darn obvious. Taking into account her love of green and corduroy I fashioned this:

It should get to her tonight.

In addition to cleaning up the house, I’ve been trying to make some of our blah areas look a little nicer. Last week I covered up our reference library (which is heavily used in the summer but sits dormant through most of the winter) and made a home for our candles and the plant from the kitchen. Since my wrist and thumb have settled down I was finally able to replace the pieces of our window trees that have disappeared since last December and today I also made a swag for our door.

Following in my mom’s footsteps we always have a swag of conifers and cones at this time of year but since we haven’t made it to the u-cut tree farm and I don’t believe in paying money for branches our door has been empty. Whether we’ll have a tree or not remains to be seen so I waded through the knee deep snow to clip a sampling of twigs from our backyard. It’s small and simple but it works for me!

Oh, and how could I forget baking!  There’s been chocolates that Kevin and his mom can eat, chocolate almond bark for the rest of us, caramel popcorn, caramel coated puffed sorghum, cosmic power cookies and more…  These treats alone would be too sweet so we’ve also been enjoying salsa and corn chips, veggies and hummus and of course, oranges.  I hope you and yours are enjoying a happy holiday season too!

flowers

This yard… it’s rather blah.  If we weren’t planning to sell it soon we’d probably do something about the blah but everything I seem to come up with requires a substantial amount of money and work.  Repainting the deck and boardwalk are likely as far as we’ll get this year but I digress.

In our front yard we have a little garden against the house.  It’s a weird space.  The window is so high above it so it would be nice to have something tall but at the same time, the garden isn’t very deep so there aren’t alot of options (apart from rejigging the whole thing).   Plus the previous owners (who said there weren’t any perennials around) stuffed the whole thing with short flowers.  I couldn’t seem to find a suitable solution so two years ago I picked up all the native plants I could find (it was slim picking) and finally we have flowers!

Last month I was surprised to find that the anenome in that front garden wasn’t only alive – it had even flowered FOR THE FIRST TIME.  Oh, it made me so happy as it opened and closed every day for more than a week.  It has since passed its peak but today I got another surprise – the white mountain avens (dryas) has now flowered too.  Another first!  I know I still have some work to do this summer to make this garden space work but knowing that I haven’t killed these ones yet is certainly making me feel better.

In the backyard, things are coming along a little better.  We only have one fairy ring (and at 8 ft diameter its small compared to the ones in the front).  We back onto the treed side of a pathway and slowly, we’re starting to see some red osier dogwood come over onto this side of the fence.  Now if I could just coax it to start on this side of the fence we would be set.

With so many trees our yard feel like an oasis, especially now that most of the trees have leafed out.   The downside of course is that the veggie garden is in the shade more as a result now.  It didn’t hurt production last year but we do harvest a little later than most folks we know.  Oh well.

Over on the other side of the yard we were blessed with chives… and aphids.  I tried growing dill the first year but it was hopeless – what those little bugs didn’t eat I was afraid to touch.  I thought maybe we’d get less without the dill but last year the aphids attacked the  columbine (another perennial that came with the house) so badly that it never even flowered.  I’m not sure what Fortunately the three flowered avens (sold as a native plant but I’m not so  sure), geranium (so close but clearly not quite like the native purple sticky geranium) , native-looking columbine, thyme and lemon balm have done better.  And while it’s not native, I’m really glad we started growing woolly thyme.

What started as two tiny plants now covers a lot of our garden, reducing weeds and making the space seem so much nicer.  We’re not so keen on lawns and since we don’t water this one we get a lot of weeds – not to mention fairy rings.  When we first moved in we talked about making a flagstone patio near the aphid garden and using wooly thyme between the cracks or possibly across the whole yard.  If we were going to stay we would definitely do it.  Friends of ours inhereted a patio like it and the bugs leave me alone.  I love it but I do have hesitations because of the environmental implications not to mention the cost!

For now what we have works.