Results of My Spring To-Do List 2017

Memorial Day is past, and since that's the day that (in my mind) kicks off summer, I'd say it's time to see how much I accomplished from this year's Spring To-Do List.

~ Read Hood by Stephen Lawhead  Check!  My review is here.

~ Read Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome.  Fail.  I'm putting it on my summer to-do list.

~ Read 4 more books from my TBR shelves.  Check!  I read The Merchant's Daughter by Melanie Dickerson, Wizards, Hobbits, and Harry Potter edited by Mark Whitlock,  and two books for the INSPY Awards (I don't want to say which ones so I don't want to seem to have favorites based on which books I read first).

~ Read 4 books from the library.  Check!  In fact, I read TEN.  They were The Trouble Begins at 8 by Sid Fleischman, Rogue One by Alexander Freed, Black, White, Other: In Search of Nina Armstrong by Joan Steinau Lester, Jane and the Stillroom Maid by Stephanie Barron, Something Rich and Strange by Ron Rash, The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend by Glenn Frankel, April Twilights and Other Poems by Willa Cather, Superman Versus the Ku Klux Klan by Rich Bowers, I, Robot by Isaac Asimov, and one book for the INSPY Awards (but again, I don't want to name which one).  It was a great spring for reading!!!

~ Watch The Great Gatsby (2013)  Fail.  I wanted to get it watched before I started my read-along, but that's kind of not happening, I guess.

~ Watch 4 more movies from my TBW shelves.  Check!  I watched Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights (2004), Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (2008), The Three Musketeers (2011), Francis the Talking Mule (1950), and Ambush at Cimarron Pass (1958) -- that's five, and a nice mix of modern and classic.  I also finished season 6 of Castle and watched Alan Ladd's episode "Committed" from General Electric Theater (1954), so I got those off my TBW shelves too.

~ Start blogging about how 2017 is the 500th anniversary of the start of the Protestant Reformation  Check!  My first post is here, and there will be more to come.

~ Sew a skirt using a new pattern (I want to try this one) and the Jane Austen fabric I bought a while ago from Etsy shop Cute Little Fabric Shop  Semi-check!  I did make a new skirt for Easter using that pattern, but I used different fabric because I'm not sure the straight lines of the fabric I wanted to use would really work well with that pattern.  Still searching for one that will.

~ Finish knitting my Newt Scamandar scarf  Fail.  It's getting longer, though!  Almost 3 feet long, I reckon.  As long as I finish it before cold weather sets in again, that's what matters, right?

~ Finish the rewrites of "Cloaked" and be into the pesky line-editing stage.  Check!  My "editing team" has the story again, and I'm looking forward to their input.  Still planning on a summer release, probably in August.  This has gone from a long short story to a short novel, and I am looking into releasing it in print as well as e-book form.

~ Bake myself something ridiculously chocolatey for my birthday.  Check!  I made chocolate-orange cake from this recipe.  As you can see, we didn't wait quite long enough for the topping to set before we dug in, but it was soooooo moist and dense and delicious!  And a great size for us to just have it a couple times and then be finished with it, and thus not have cake around the house for days and days.

~ Make a miniature Hobbit home in one of my flower containers out on my deck.  Check!  You can read all about it here.

~ Hold my annual group yard sale.  Fail.  But only because we got rained out -- we will have it later this summer instead!  I have it all organized, and a whole passel of my friends have their sale items tagged and ready to go, so it's just a matter of there being a Saturday that works for all of us where it doesn't rain.

I had such a productive and enjoyable spring!  Did you get something accomplished, read, watched, cleaned, or made?

2016 Container Garden

It has rained nearly every day for over a month.  We've had a few moments of actual sunshine lately, though, so I seized the opportunity to take some photos of this year's container flower garden on my deck.  Here it is!

Also, down to the left we have my two bigger pots that used to have my lavender plants in them.  I got those in the ground at last (we'll see if they manage to grow or not), so now we have blueberry bushes in these pots, since those didn't do well in our clay-y ground.  So left-to-right here, we have blueberry bush, blueberry bush, a few lilies-of-the-valley left over from when I divided the patch of those out front, and some magenta petunias that Tootie chose at the store.

Moving on up, we've got these two lovely double-layered pots.  I planted purslane in the top of both of them, and then it never came up, and it never came up, and I gave up on it and bought some pretty purple lantanas for the tops... and when I planted those, I discovered the purslane is coming up at last.  So left that plenty of room in both pots.  I planted marigold seeds in the bottom of the left pot, and bachelor buttons in the right one, but the buttons never came up, so I put in some petunias that Sarah (yellow) and Sam (purple) chose instead.

My three biggest pots are a delight this year.

The ones on the left and right have yellow pansies and purple johnny-jump-ups that are from last year!!!  They stayed alive over the winter and started blooming in March again.  They're huge and bushy and great.  I stuck some pale-ish blue lobelia in those pots too because they each had an empty spot where something last year died.

The center pot is all new stuff.  I stuck a "bandana" lantana in the very back, flanked by a yellow dahlia on the right and a "starsisters" dahlia on the left that had a gorgeous two-color bloom on it when I bought it, which promptly snapped off in the car on the way home -- but it has lots of buds, so I'm hopeful.  Anyway, directly in front of the lantana are 4 celosia, one of which has already died off.  I tried them a few years ago and was disappointed by them, but my dad grew them really well in his container garden, so I thought I'd try them again.  We'll see what happens.  Then in front of those is a yellow "sunsatia" with delicate flowers I love.  Flanking that are two "Aloha Kona" calibrachoas, which should get drape-y and awesome like the ones I've had previous years.

Finally, to the right of that trio is another double-decker pot with a purple lantana and some tiny purslane shoots on top, and more marigolds coming up in the bottom.  The yellow pot in the foreground has another lantana (I got a little nutty with those this year -- usually I just have one or two, but now I have five).

And the three on the stand belong to Sam, Sarah, and Tootie, arranged according to their age, with Sam's on top, full of bachelor buttons we planted as seeds.  Sarah's middle pot mostly has these succulents called portulaca that seem to have reseeded themselves from last year.  She planted a few marigolds in with them, though, because Sam and Tootie were getting to plant seeds.  The bottom one is Tootie's, with different bachelor buttons from seeds.

Now I'll share a few close-ups just because I love taking pictures of flowers :-)  Here are the johnny-jump-ups:

The lobelia:

The sunsatia:

The calibrachoa:

The dahlia (and yes, I totally chose these because of the Alan Ladd movie The Blue Dahlia):

The "bandanna" lantana:

And here are a few of the johnny-jump-ups and some roses from the bush by my front door, which I stuck together in a jug to decorate our table when we had some company over for supper last week:

I don't know much of anything about arranging flowers, but a bunch of fresh blooms stuffed in a little jug almost always turn out pretty, I think.  We were celebrating my mother-in-law's birthday, so I wanted to dress the table up a bit.

Spring, Spring, Spring!

Spring is bustin' out all over, folks!  I took some photos ten days ago and again today, and wow, there's a major difference to be seen.

Daffodils 10 days ago

Daffodils today

Daffodils and hyacinths coming up by the front steps 10 days ago.

Aren't they miraculous, poking sturdily up out of the ground?

A hyacinth today!

A little garden fairy I bought years and years ago.  

A robin!

I wintered my two lavender plants beside the house in a little sheltered nook.  They seem to be okay.

My sad and lonely container garden on the deck.  I'll be planting flowers in a few weeks!

I planted irises all along one wall of the house last fall.  They're up!

Sadly, they all have brown tips to their leaves cuz we got snow after they came up.

Garlic up in the vegetable garden!  All sixteen bulbs I planted have come up.
Thanks, Heidi!

Little helpers prepping my garden soil.

Our "square foot" vegetable garden.  And the back of our house.

Our bird bath.

Our compost buckets.  I should do a post on how to compost on a small
(and non-stinky) level like we do.  It's so simple!

And inside my kitchen, I have these narcissus that I found for 98 cents at Walmart!

Daffodils are my favorite flower.

And I couldn't end this post without including the song I got my title from, could I? 

Francis, Daffodils, and The Garden

So... I've named my new camera Francis.  After Bruce Willis' character in Red.  Yeah.  Hee.

Anyway, I got it earlier this week, and have been having a blast trying out all the new settings!  I'm so happy that my daffodils bloomed later than everyone else's, because they're still lovely and I got to take all kinds of pictures of them.  They're my first daffodils of my very own, which is so exciting to me because they're my favorite flower.  So here are a few of the photos I've taken of them this week, using some of Francis' settings:

See the nifty effects I get to play with?  That one with the shadows in the corners is called "toy camera," and so far it's my favorite.  This last photo shows where the daffodils are in relation to the front of the house.  This fall, I plan to plant more so they totally encircle that tree instead of just being around the front half.

Here's what else we've been doing outside:  building a garden!

We decided to try a Square Foot Garden this year, since it uses all new dirt.  Last year, our  garden failed abysmally.  Cowboy planted a peach tree in the middle of our old garden, and clover all around it:

There you can see how the tree and garden are up on the hill behind our house.  We planted clover around the peach tree because the two are supposed to grow well together, and because bunnies like clover and we have bunnies.  They and the deer are why we have the fence around our garden.  Cowboy just finished putting up the fence today, and I'll be planting peas later this week.  He built our box a couple weeks ago, and filled it with dirt earlier this month.  Doesn't it look like it'll be fun to plant in?

So anyway, I have lots more photos of flowers on our property, but I'll post them some other time.  For now, I'll just say that so far, there's only one thing Francis isn't very good at taking clear pictures of:  little boys riding big-wheels :-D

I am ready for spring. I realized this Saturday night when I was baking a carrot cake for the Papoose's first birthday party and all I wanted to listen to was the You've Got Mail soundtrack. That's almost always a sure sign I want springtime to spring. Besides, nearly all our snow has melted, and it's supposed to be 57 later this week, so I think my hopes are about to be fulfilled :-D

Also, I'm in a much more chipper mood lately. I'd been kind of draggy and blase for the last few weeks, but I seem to be regaining my energy a bit. Plus, I watched the Richard Burton version of Hamlet recently and now I'm reading a book about the production, and that has cheered me up immensely :-)

Ugh. It's been obscenely warm these last few days. Actually, since Christmas, we've only had actual snow on the ground once. Several times it's been in the upper 40's or low 50's, including yesterday. So of course, with no snow to keep me happy with Winter, I am now eager for Spring. Especially because if it was Spring, I could be playing in the dirt. My flower bed below the front window is all bare and empty, except for a bunch of dead leaves. I want to dig around in it and finish getting rid of all that nasty sand now that I have an actual trowel and don't have to do all my scooping with my fingers (thank you, Daddy!). And then I want to put flowers in it and water them and weed them...I can smell my earthy fingers already!

If I was in North Carolina, I could conceivably start planting things in February. But I'm not, dash it all. I'm in Wisconsin, and I don't dare put one plant in the ground before mid-May. Grr.