2013 Garden Update I

This year Cliff and I are ahead of the game when it comes to getting seed into the ground.  We are going to be more successful this year!  So far here is what we have brewing in pots, on the hillside, and in the garden.


Outdoor Pots:  Right after Christmas, Cliff and I bought a ton of 50% off bulbs at Jerry's Home Improvement. We planted crocus (mix), ranunculus (red and yellow), allium (blue and white), iris, ixia, narcissus, and hyacinth.  We layered the inside the pots so that we should have some blooms spring through late summer.  I'm really excited as once they start to bloom we will be able to scatter the pots around the cottage so that we can see color from all of our windows. It seems too soon for the bulbs to be coming up but Cliff reminds me that we are quickly coming into spring.  We had so much snow last year.  it didn't feel cold enough this winter for it to already be over!  I'm hoping that some flowers are up in time for Andrea and Joe's visit.

Indoor pots:  Two or three weekends ago Cliff planted our pretty orange/red amaryllis bulb that we had bloom last year.  It looks like we didn't kill out red one from last year (despite unnecessarily storing it in the fridge over the summer) which is a relief as we were both pretty sad and worried.  He also planned our new white amaryllis. We are excited to see them both in bloom in a few weeks.  We also planned lots of basil starters this morning and put them in our mini greenhouse.  The more basil the better.  Grow little plants...grow!

The hillside:  As you all might remember we planted a ton of crocuses and daffodils last year.  See...they were really prettyhttp://lyddanesinoregon.blogspot.com/2012/05/day-4-flowers.html! Well...they are starting to come up!  This is a really crummy photo but I promise you there are four little clumps of pretty purple flowers there.  There are other little white ones starting to come up in other pockets as well.  There appear to be little baby daffodils starting to come up as well.  Our white daffodils were amazing last year.  They were so beautiful and managed to stay white and alive looking for weeks.  My fingers are crossed that we have the same luck this year.  Another hops is that my next photo of the flowers is way better...so that you can actually seem them

Lastly, we got seed into the ground today!  Over the last few weeks, Cliff and I have spend a few hours each Saturday or Sunday making a garden bed right outside of our window (as we hope this area will get more sun that our little patch last year).  It is about 12 feet long by 2 1/2 feet wide.  Today we planted: two kinds of parsley, New Zealand spinach, fennel, broccoli rabe, two kinds of chives, oakleaf lettuce, dill, more spinach, chervil, mustard greens, cilantro, tom thumb lettuce, arugula, and radishes.  In a few weeks we are also going to plant flowers (like California poppies).  Eventually (mid-May) we are going to get to tomato starters and hope that they get enough light this year.  it will be fun.  Now we just need to decide on a CSA to help round out our greens and herbs.

Happy planting to everyone and we will keep you posted on our successes and learning moments!

Thrift Store Christmas Decor

As you know, I really enjoy estate sales and thrift store shopping.  From Thanksgiving to Christmas might be my absolute favorite time to hit up the stores as they have their holiday decorations out.  This year I've collected a few new goodies.  

99% of the items cost me $.49- $.99 except for this creepy little cutie.  He set me back $1.99.  In case you can't see it, he is holding a banner that reads Merry Christmas.  He chills with the garden gnomes and greets people on our stoop.   

So I found this little guy two years ago but I still wanted to post about him as I found him in a CHKD thrift store in Virginia.  He is a 1999 Annalee.  He is our version of elf on a shelf.   Favorite.

Stained glass Santa!  He looked really beautiful yesterday as it was sunny for a few hours.

I like to call this decoration "inappropriate snowman" as he looks a little suggestive.  Perfect decoration.

So I apparently really love Annalee holiday dolls as I have two other little ones.  I found these guys at St. Vinnie's in Eugene last year.  One is a Santa mouse and the other mouse is in it's nightgown.  Cliff has the genius idea of putting them on top of the coo coo clock (like hickory dickory dock).  Awesome.  Love it.

You gotta believe.  Maybe I like this sign so much because of my time in Baltimore when the "Believe" campaign was going on but it doesn't matter... I really like this sign.  Believe in Santa!

Speaking of Baltimore I found this awesome ornament in Goodwill.  As a Maryland girl, how could I not buy it?

We even got a new stocking for Rudy (in case you can't see it, it is a dog with a Santa hat on hanging by his tail).  We have to wait to fill it until Christmas as otherwise he would be a pest.

For work I bought a mini Christmas tree, a Hallmark Rodney the reindeer (like the one we had when I was little), and a little alpaca.  We named him Horacio the Holiday Alpaca.  He instantly makes people happy.  Cliff kinda giggles when he sees him as he likes Horacio so much.  He is handmade and awesome.

I love Christmas decorations!

Personal Victory

I started my first fire in the stove yesterday.  I completed the project from start to finish: split kindling, selected logs, started it, and worked the dampers.  This might seem like a small feat for most of you but I didn't use a fireplace growing up.  Also, Cliff has taken on the task since we moved into the cottage.  No worries, as I did it and yesterday.  I told Cliff to stay way and let me do it all on my own.  Personal victory. 

Garden Update

This afternoon we harvested our first non-herb goodies from our garden.  Look at our pretty radishes!  They are pink and purple.  I can't wait to see what the next ones look like.  The slugs pretty much ate a lot of our herb seedlings and a lot of our arugula.  Hopefully the rain will finally stop and we will see some serious progress with our plants.  But seriously, aren't they pretty radishes?

Yesterday Cliff and I bought a new planter for the cottage.  We have been looking for some nice big ones all year.  We were at Jerry's Home Improvement and they had their pots on sale (25%-75% off).  With the discount, the nice blue pot was in our price range.  We got a few more herbs (the orange mint smells amazing) and an ornamental grass (Cliff likes those) to go inside.  We also planted chocolate mint, pineapple mint, apple mint, and "the best" mint near our stairs.  

Cliff and I have decided to start a new garden plot next to the cottage.  This garden plot will be the home to okra, collards, butternut squash, and zucchini.  We hope to be done with it tomorrow afternoon.  It is a whole lot of work to double dig a garden plot!  The section was once a laurel and blackberry thicket.  There are so many roots.  My whole body is tired.

We also bought more flower seeds.  We are going to plant them all over the yard.  We have California poppies (my favorite!), oriental poppies, columbines, bachelors buttons, cosmos, and morning glories.

Cliff and I looked at each other tonight and realized we are living the dream.  It was nice outside, we were both digging in the dirt, we were planning dinner to feature our goodies and the dog was behaving.  It was a nice night. 

Haul Out The Holly

Yesterday Cliff and I decided that we wanted to kick off the holiday season by putting up a tree.  Decorating for Christmas always gets me all excited.  I proudly hauled two 18 gallon plastic containers filled with Christmas decorations across country when we moved.  Why does a person need to have this many decorations?  Well it is because I love Christmas ornaments almost as much as Fiestaware and I want our house to look like a Christmas explosion from December to January.

Growing up our Christmas tree was always so pretty.  We had red, green, and white button lights. Tons of glass ornaments.  Fun little decorations all over.  It is no wonder that I started collecting my own decorations in college.  Whenever we travel anywhere I almost always get some sort of ornament to hang on our tree.  I have a mini glass pumpkin from Salem, pewter skis from Burlington, decorated gourds from New Mexico,  a wooden ornament from The Hotel del Colonado in San Diego, and I could go on and on.  Additionally, mom was wonderful and let me raid the family ornaments and decorations so that I could have my favorites in my own apartment.  I obviously took some of the amazing glass ornaments but I also grabbed up the stuffed Hallmark reindeer that we got when I was a little kid.  I love Rhonda the reindeer.

So back to the tree. When we lived in Williamsburg we had an amazing six foot pre-lit tree with little white lights.  I got it at a thrift store in Portsmouth one day when I went down for an ODU game.  Sadly the tree couldn't make the trip with us (you have got to draw the line somewhere right???) so our good friends Rachel and Allen gave it a new home.  Since we are in the Northwest we decided to get a real tree this year (my first real tree in probably 18 years).  We went to the Northern Lights Christmas Tree Farm in Pleasant Hill which is about 20 minutes southeast of Eugene.   It was awesome!  They had seven different variety of trees to choose from and they ranged in price from $3/ft. to $7/ft.  Cliff and I decided on a scotch pine as they are small enough to fit in an apartment and they were only $3/ft.  All of the trees were so beautiful!  If we had a bigger place (or jobs) we would have totally gotten a big douglas fir or grand fir as they were gorgeous.

We took a hayride on a tractor to get out to the trees and we found a beauty.  We found a short little skinny tree that was full all around.  I got all excited to document the cutting down process but before I knew it Cliff was done.  We rode the tractor back to the main barn and when all was said and done we paid $12 for our fresh cut tree!  They put it on the shaker for us to get all of the dead needles and bugs out.  We opted not to get it baled in plastic as the little guy could fit right in the back of our car.  While we were at the barn we saw a family bring in their 11 foot noble fir.  I looked to be the most perfect tree ever.  It was so big that when they put it on the shaker the machine could hardly move and their baler was really in trouble.  We watched them try to bale it for probably about 5 minutes and when we left four guys still had not been able to push it through.   It was pretty crazy so I took a photo.

 

When we got home we trimmed the bottom of the tree and put it into our new $3 tree stand (thank goodness for thrift stores).  It fits perfectly by our desk and the bookcase.  This year we have multi-colored lights on the tree as I only have red button lights and I didn't think that would look all that Christmas like (I'm going to hit up Target after the holiday to see if I can get white and green button lights for next year!).  Holy smokes I had forgotten how prickly and scratchy needles are on real trees!  Most of our ornaments fit on the tree, the reindeer and nutcrackers are out, and the Santa pants have been moved into the pajama rotation.  It is officially the holiday season.

Since it is the holiday season that means I get to dress Rudy up as a reindeer again (don't judge....I was an only child).  I love our dog. 

So get out the Neil Diamond and Judds Christmas albums because Christmastime is here!

Home Improvement

The exciting thing about our new place is that there are pieces here and there that we can really make our own.  For example, we have a really nice porch that will eventually have some patio furniture and maybe a little fire pit thing, a little hillside outside our door where we are going to plant daffodils and wildflowers, and we have a pretty long window box. 

Over the past two days Cliff and I have been working on the window box.  We are late enough in the season that a lot of home and garden places are starting to discount their plants.  We lucked out as we got 11 four ounce plants for only $1 each!    For the window box we bought a little honeysuckle boxwood, an ornamental grass, and tons of Sedums.  We really love Hen and Chicks and those types of plants grow really well here.  I took a photo so that you guys could see our progress.  We still have a bit more space to fill so we are keeping our eyes peeled for goodies while we are out and about.  Also, the garden gnome is a lot happier now that he actually has plants to look over in our mini garden :)  Side note: we bought tarragon, rosemary, tri-color sage, and lemon thyme.  They are currently living inside but will get moved outside in the spring.

We are hopefully going to plant the daffodils within the next few weeks.  We really loved Williamsburg in the spring because daffodils were everywhere.  We are going to try to recreate a mini version of that in our own backyard.

Our other major project this weekend was to install a bike lock on the side of the house.  We have really nice overhangs so Cliff's bike won't get wet when left outside.  We wanted to be able to secure his bike since it is his "car".  Cliff researched and found a steel sleeve online that would allow for us to park our bikes together using a heavy metal chain.  In order to actually make this work we would need to secure the steel sleeve in concrete.  No problem!  We went to Home Depot, bought two bags, and were ready to go.  I am so impressed with this process as we mixed and poured a concrete slab using the limited resources available to us: a pickle bucket, a borrowed garden hoe, a stick, a milk jug, and some good old fashioned yellow dish gloves.  Cliff and I had never been around wet concrete so we did what any good 16 year old kids would do...we carved our initials.  Awesome. We know.  Now the bike is not sitting in the middle of our kitchen taking up precious space.  Yesterday was an exciting day.

Other than our home improvement activities we have been doing quite a few 0-5 mile hikes around town.  Most of the hikes that we have done pretty much require us to walk up big hills.  From being outside so much (and the help of Cliff's new tree book) we are able to identify more and more plants each time we go out.   I'm sure Cliff will post about it later but I did want to share a photo of a fallen leaf from a big leaf maple. Look how big it is! It's nuts.

Also, we now have some official followers to the blog.  Thanks Aunt Kay, Aunt Peggy, and Uncle David.  Hope all is well with you guys and thanks for reading!

Home Sweet Cottage

Greetings!

Cliff and I are happy as clams right now are we finally finished moving into our new place!  To get us here we needed an ABF pod to move us across country, a 17ft u-haul truck to get our stuff from the pod depot to the new place, a dodge mini van plus our car to get our new furniture home from Ikea, one week of literately doing nothing but emptying boxes and putting together furniture, and two trips with our car filled (and I mean filled) with collapsed cardboard boxes to the recycling plant.  To put it simply we are totally smitten with the cottage.  It is smaller than our old place but it has a lot of charm and it will keep Cliff and I from buying more stuff...as we can't fit it anywhere! We wanted to share a few highlights.

We have chicken friends!  They aren't actually ours as they belong to our landlords but we get to see them and interact with them.  There are a few more running around that are not seen in this photo.  They are so amazing.  Lots of goodies in our compost bowl now goes to these guys and they love us for it.  Awesome right?  Rudy is so mesmerized by them.  We will walk him up to the pen and he will stand super still as the brave chickens come up to check him out.  We are all big fans.

Getting storage options was really important for us in this apartment as we have so much stuff (i.e. books, school binders, VHS tapes, throw blankets, photos, kitchen stuff, and Fiestaware). Cliff has always wanted one of these desks and it is really going to help us keep all of our daily stuff contained in one place.  Also the shelves give me nice spots to place our nick-knacks and framed photos.  We have another nice square bookcase that helps to separate our living room area from our bedroom.  So useful!


Few things make me as giddy as getting to play with all of our Fiestaware.  Sad.  I know.  Don't judge me.  So I'm sure you can image my excitement when we found a big, bright red cabinet for all of the dishes to call home.  I seriously spent probably two hours standing in front of the doors figuring out different ways to place everything.  This isn't even all of it!  We are actually using many bowls and other dishes throughout the kitchen to hold things.  I stacked like items on top of one another so that I would have room to fit everything in there that we needed.  This cabinet gets bonus points as it is big enough to hold our cookbooks and our huge red pot.  Ahhh.  This cabinet makes my heart sing.


The new place comes with a wood stove.  Before we even came to look at the place Cliff was excited about the stove mentioned in the ad.  It is a bit finicky (Cliff is still working out the kinks) but it can really put out the heat.  It has been chilly here the past week so we have had a fire almost everyday.  It is really nice.  I feel so cozy watching TV with the fire and hot beverage in hand.  Also, Rudy is in love with the wood stove.  We always knew that he was not a cold weather dog.  At our old apartment his favorite thing to do was sit by the sliding door in the sun and bake.  I'm not sure if you guys know this or not but Oregon tends to be a bit rainy. We aren't going to see much sun soon so the wood stove was a must in order to keep the pup sane.  

I'm sure that many of you have heard me talk about my wishlist of things I am going to get once I strike it rich.  First thing on my list is an industrial shaved/crushed ice machine, followed by one of those endless pools, and then a sauna (this might be the only item that Cliff and I would agree on by the way).  Well our new place has a small bathrooms that is decked out in sauna wood paneling and it has a heat lamp!  When you combine these two factors (along with a little imagination) it makes you feel like you are kinda in a sauna.  The bathroom sadly has no storage and we have not figured out a solution yet but even with this going against it I still think the new bathroom rules!


Oh man...this brings us to the kitchen.  Cliff and I love to cook and bake and because of this we have a metric ton of kitchen stuff.  Seriously. Our last apartment was great because it had so much kitchen storage and counter space.  We knew that we were not going to be able to top it at a new place.  Welcome to the world smallest kitchen (probably not)!  We don't even have a full sized oven.  But you know what?  We don't care!  It took us three whole days to mentally prepare to organize the kitchen but it was well worth it.  We have enough room for everything.  The best part is now that we don't have a ton of counter space we are forced to do the dishes more often.  This means more manageable dish loads and a happier Kim and Cliff.


That is all for now.   Hope you enjoyed the virtual tour of our new place.  Come and visit!!!