Garden Tour!

Josh and I had the pleasure of going on a Garden Tour last Saturday (our friend Meredith helped put it on through her workplace), and all the photos can be seen here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sbarrington/sets/72157624113484573/

We took about 100 pictures, so I am not going to post them all, but I did want to post a few of my favorites, including some I converted to black and white. Have I mentioned my love for my iphone photo apps yet?

There were 8 gardens featured. One was a biblical garden, at a church. All the plants in it were mentioned in the bible, and there was a plaque at the base of the plants with a quote from the Bible mentioning it. There was an enormous fig tree there full of baby figs, and we just marvelled at the fact that someday, our little fig tree will be growing them, too!

There was even a Japanese inspired garden at one house, including a koi pond and a 'dry garden'. What's a dry garden, you ask? Well, it was full of gravel and had a few bonsai trees and a RAKE. Yes, a rake, which you can use to rake the stones and get all Zen (totally right up the Bip's alley).

One drawback of this tour, though? As if I didn't already have Hydrangea envy! It has turned into a raging case of it, thanks to this tour, and can be cured only by HAVING MY OWN HYDRANGEAS (which I still don't - could you people comment and help me convince the Bip?).

This is just ONE of two kitchen areas this guy had on his patio.

Oh, and here's his pool.

You know I fantasize about Japenese Maples almost as much as Hydrangeas, right? I also have a Magnolia-lust issue, but we will get to that another day.

The most envy-inducing thing of all (besides the Hydrangeas bigger than my head)? These people had not one, but TWO Greenhouses.

TWO GREENHOUSES!

The Bipster keeps telling me he is going to build me a greenhouse someday. I just want a simple one, made of old windows and doors (windows are only $10 a piece at the salvage yard!). Something like:

That would be more than enough for me. Just a place to start my seeds in spring.

After the tour, there was a lovely little Tea Luncheon. I was lucky enough to have this guy for my date:

I'm a lucky girl.

Gardening Messes and Successes

Yesterday was the last day of my long weekend... it was so good for my mental health just to take a couple of vacation days... I am looking forward to the other days off I have coming up. I'll be off 7/5 for the 4th of July holiday, and I also get my birthday off (which happens to fall on a Monday this year)! Then in September, the wedding/honeymoon/Labor Day holiday!

I felt a bit yucky yesterday during the early part of the day, but after some medicine and a nap, I felt a bit revived and refreshed and ready to make my last luxurious afternoon somehow productive.

So I went to Home Depot.

From reading this blog, you might think we're just a couple of green thumbs spreading plant-y goodness everywhere we roam. Not true. As a matter of fact, we've had a couple of disasters here lately. I am thinking the flood is to blame for quite a bit of it - many things that were doing well just didn't bounce back once that hit.

1. First off, our peony stopped blooming and some of the leaves turned brown. But my neighbors' (HUGE) peony bush is no longer blooming either, so I am going to take that as a sign that it is just resting for now. Maybe resting until next year. That's ok.

2.Our dogwood looks dead. I definitely blame this on the flood because it was doing great up until then. It started getting red leaves, and then all the leaves withered and died at once. This is what it looks like right now.

However, if you snap the branches, they are still green inside and appear to be healthy. I did some 'research' (read: Googling) and there is a chance that if we do not water or feed it and just leave it be, it will bounce back. So we'll give it until next spring before we dig it up and try something else. It's a very sad sight, though. I think the roots just got over saturated.

3. Sunflowers. Ugh. I hate to even talk about them. We had dozens and dozens of seedlings pop up, then the storm hit and washed most of them away. Then they all started dying. We tried to replant, but they just didn't sprout. We had one... ONE that was over a foot tall, one that was beating the odds. It was our champion. It's leaves kept getting chewed and it just kept on growing.

Then, over the weekend, I opened the back door to go outside and what do I see? Four very suspicious looking squirrels hanging around. Soon after, I found our beautiful sunflower broken in half, and next to it? A deep indent that could only have been made by a fat-bottomed, dream-killin' squirrel.

I think this would be a great time to make lemonade out of lemons and plant some gardenias and hydrangeas where all those sunflowers were going to be, don't you? Someone help me talk the Bip into it. Now, before it's too late!

4. We lost our Gerberas immediately after the flood and slowly, in the weeks after, my shasta daisies and poppies died, too. Oh, I've been trying to nurse them the best way I knew how, but yesterday, I knew it was time to pull the plug. Hence the Home Depot trip.

I seem to have better luck with vegetables and herbs this year than I do flowers, so the poppies and daisies were replaced with sage, parsley (a mix of curly and flat leaf), and these little cherry tomatoes that were already growing....

Arent they so precious? I don't even like tomatoes. In fact, I dislike tomatoes so much that I bought a huuuge heirloom tomato plant. I mean, this sucker is so tall it's about to my belly button. As big as it is, I am afraid to transplant it, for fear it will die. It already has blooms on it, and it's container seems to be plenty big for more expansion. I guess we'll play it by ear. I moved it out by the garden. Hopefully I will be able to make a little salsa this year... since I'm not a huge tomato fan, I am sure I will give the heirlooms away at work if we get an overabundance of them.

Garden at 8 weeks, 1 day.

Big honkin' tomato plant next to it:

Poor thing at least needs a prettier pot, doesn't it? Dagnabbit, I am going to end up replanting the dang thing after all.

Look how tall our dill is! This is the first time I've grown it that it has not died within two days (normally I plant it in a container)... I guess it takes to the ground much better!

This photo tells you all you need to know about me. I am short, awkward, and I garden in my striped pj pants with plaid shoes and don't give a darn!

All in all, it was a relaxing, productive little 'vacation'. I feel really good (aside from this cold/throat thing) - I needed it! I also spent some quality time with the cooking channel (looove), and downloading yet more photo apps for my iphone (plastiq, toy camera, black & white to name a few).We'll be tackling more projects in the coming weeks, and hopefully I will post some (gorgeous!) pics tomorrow from the (stunning!) garden tour we attended on Saturday.

In the meantime, please help me beg the Bip to let me (us!) plant some gardenias and hydrangeas along the Sunflower-less garage wall.

Much love.

xoxox

What a long, strange weekend it's been! BATHROOM: Before and After

Well, my weekend is still going on! I had Friday and today off - originally we were going to go to Ohio this weekend to get my stuff out of storage, but since it was all delivered last weekend, I decided to keep the long weekend and use it to get some projects done around the house. We didn't get as much done as I would have liked - the Bip keeps getting called away to jobs (which is a good thing!), and I have been sick off and on with a throat/cold/fever thing. Friday I couldn't even get off of the couch. Saturday I felt fine - we went on a garden tour, ran some errands, painted the bathroom - then I got sick again around 9pm. Yesterday  I was sick until afternoon, then I somehow got a burst of energy, finished the bathroom and cleaned the house like a madwoman. No idea where all that energy came from, but it was insane, and I wish I felt like that all the time, you know?

Today Josh is working two jobs, and I had planned on painting some heavy pieces of furniture I can't move outside without him. And I'm also feeling kind of crappy again. So I think I'm going to catch up on some reading, enjoy my clean house, and go through some  summer clothes I found in the garage.

I have lots of photos to share from this weekend, but I am going to devote this post to the bathroom.

The bathroom had it's good points...ok, only one - the clawfoot tub. The sink and medicine cabinet were horrendous, the flooring makes me physically ill.... in short, it had the potential to be a BEAUTIFUL bathroom, but it just wasn't.

In time, we plan to add some beadboard, change the sink to something like this:

and change the flooring - if the original hardwood is still intact under everything, I'd love to use it, otherwise, we're tiling. But those things may be a year or so off, so in the meantime we had to figure out how to make it pretty and lovely for NOW.

 I'm happy to say, the total was very low:

Paint: $35
Medicine Cabinet (Target): $60
Drawer Pulls (Anthropologie): $16
Rug (Target): $20

Total: $131

Here are the hideous befores...

And here are the glorious afters.... between my Bissell Flip-It (fresh from storage) and our Shark Steam Mop, I was able to get the nasty vinyl floor looking better than it ever has. We painted the walls "Love-In-A-Mist" (a Martha Stewart color), I painted the sink cabinet white and added new knobs, we added a new medicine cabinet, hung up a couple of things, put down a new rug and put out some fresh white towels and we can't get over how beautiful it looks! This will definitely tide us over for a while. Not too shabby, huh?

We would have loved to change out the towel bars, too, but we couldn't find all the pieces of the style we wanted to use. Maybe soon. Also need to change outlet and light switch covers, but for now, it's ok.

 

Photo Apps for the iphone

Most of the pictures on this blog were taken with Bip's iphone, mostly, the "shakeitphoto" app.

Now that I have my own iphone, though, I've found a couple of other apps and I just wanted to share the ones I really like to use. My apologies for the photos you've already seen before.

Of course, first we have the ever-popular "shakeitphoto". Josh and I both use this for just about everything. Once you take the photo, you actually take your phone and (to quote the great Andre3000) "shake it like a polaroid picture." It has a magical quality that makes colors more saturated and people more beautiful. It's pretty fantastic.

See? Magic.

Then I found another one, also called "shake it". This one really gives you that true Polaroid look and even takes a while to 'develop' (remember when people used polaroids in a non-hipster fashion? Like it was an ACTUAL CAMERA? Those were the days. I'm old and I still have mine). The only problem with this app is it doesn't automatically save to your photos, you have to save it before exiting the program. I stress this because I took some great photos of the dogs that are now lost forever because I assumed they had automatically saved themselves.

(I like this pic because my hair looks so long!)

Next is the "Cross Process" app. Since I've only had my phone a few days, I've only experimented with it a little bit, but I do love it deeply already. I think it loves me back.

Isn't it heavenly? Flowers courtesy of our sweet neighbors & friends Tim and Meredith. I adore Hydrangeas and cannot wait until we have our own.

(That's Julio 'talking' to me)

You can "Cross Process" a picture more than once, which is how you get the lighter tone.

Lastly, we have the "Hipstamatic" app. There is quite a lot of internet buzz about it, expecially in the blog-world. It is kind of cool because you can change out 'lenses', 'film', and 'flash' for different looks. However, of the photo applications I have tried on the iphone, this is my least favorite. I have gotten a few interesting pictures with it, but it's mostly a crapshoot. You never know what you're going to get with it, but most of the time it's not as good as you were hoping for. However, it's 'trendy' right now, so I guess people are going to like it even if it adds nothing to the photo most of the time.

(I have to confess, this is my favorite hipstamatic photo. Of course, I had an extremely photogenic subject.)

(looking a little green around the gills)

And, just for fun, here is an example of the Lego Photo app.

Sunflower:

Calculator:

This one is not nearly as fun as I thought it would be, I was thinking it would be something more along the lines of the White Stripes' "Fell In Love With a Girl" video. But it's still kind of fun, and maybe someday I'll capture something great with it, you never know! This is another one where you have to save the photos to the phone yourself or they are gone forever.

Ok, I am off for a four day weekend, to get some stuff done around the house and to try to sell my fresh-out-of-storage stuff on Craigslist. More on that debacle another time!

Garden update - Week Seven

Things are HAPPENING out there, folks!

Here is how we're looking at week seven.

We have jalapenos growing like crazy!

And here is the MOST exciting thing, discovered yesterday - our first zucchini!

Isn't it the cutest?


We've used lots of dill, basil and broccoli so far... the garden has been really useful to us and will be even more so in the comng weeks.

We know how to jam-pack a day!

Last I wrote, Josh was negotiating a cheaper way to get my stuff out of storage (it was in Ohio. It's a really long story). Turns out it would cost less for it to be delivered than for us to go get it. Josh and the guy were trying to agree on the price, but nothing was ever confirmed, until Saturday morning when we got word they would be at our house at 2 p.m. that day!

We had plans to have some friends over for dinner and drinks and games at 6, so we knew we'd be rushing around. We ran some errands that day, important things* like Target, the grocery and liquor store (haha), and before we knew it, there was a tractor trailer in our street, blocking in the neighbors and giving everyone something to stare at. We were the last stop, so all my stuff was at the front of the trailer (or the back, depending on how you look at it).

The sweat spots on my pits really make that picture.  This was after about half of the stuff was out. Look at all those boxes! I've only had time to look through about three of them, seriously. I don't know how or when I will get the chance to really look at every single thing. We got everything out of the trailer and into the backyard - finding a way to fit it all in the garage would be the next challenge.

Our dear friends and neighbors (and eventual dinner guests) helped us get it all arranged in the garage, just as the rain started to fall. That pushed our dinner plans to 6:30 instead of 6. I had forgotten to get lemonade, Josh wanted to make sweet tea so we could try out his special wedding cocktail, and we desperately needed to wash the sweat off of us.

It was such a hectic time, it still hasn't sunk in that MY STUFF IS HERE. I did notice one thing was missing, a wooden chair, nothing big. And I don't recall seeing the box that my Kitchen Aid mixer is in, but I am hopeful that will surface eventually (it had better, we've been apart for 5 years!).

However, I threw myself into entertaining mode and whipped out my new tablecloth, some cloth napkins and napkin rings, and set the table:

I absolutely LOVE the tablecloth, as it has all the colors I am trying (hoping?) to incorporate into our living and dining rooms.

We had the sideboard/credenza set up, too, with various drinks and mixers. And fresh flowers, of course! I wish I had taken more pictures. This is the first time I've really gotten to have a sit-down dinner with guests and go all-out in this house. And it was also my first time doing so with Josh. He was like "Uh, I thought this was going to be casual and laid back, but you're pretty serious about entertaining." Yes, I am, thank you for noticing. I hope we get to do more of it as the house gets more put together.

The menu was simple. Just two dishes and dessert. Dessert was store bought mini-cupcakes (Whole Foods). Appetizers were crackers with cheese and fig preserves (hey, when we find something that works, we run it into the ground). The side dish was the broccoli with dill & lemon sauce I posted a few entries back (and the dill was from our garden, and so was some of the broccoli). For the main course I adapted one of Giada de Laurentiis' recipes, and it's one of my favorite things I've ever made!

First, I peeled and seeded a 2 lb butternut squash and cut it into cubes. Then, I diced about 2/3 of a medium sized vidalia onion. Tossed them with vegetable oil (it is what the recipe specified) and roasted it at 425 for about 45 minutes. I boiled a pound of penne and reserved about 2 cups of the pasta water once it was cooked and drained. Then I added (to the pasta) 8 oz of herbed goat cheese and some of the pasta water until it became a beautiful cheesy sauce. Then I added the roasted squash and onions, salt and pepper, and basil from the garden. One of our guests doesn't eat meat, so this was a perfect dish! However, I did buy a rotisserie chicken at Kroger and had that on the side so those of us who do like meat could add it to our pasta. It was delicious! This is the only photo I took and it was half-consumed at this point. The original recipe called for toasted walnuts, too, but that's just not my thing

Josh's drink (Lemonade, Sweet tea, and Jack Daniels) was a HIT! Many were consumed. It may already exist in a cocktail book somewhere, but Josh has named it "The Southern Swagger" and it will be a signature cocktail at our reception. Games were played, and the festivities ended around midnight.

*one of our 'important errands' Saturday was getting on the same phone plan to save money ... and I got my early birthday gift - AN IPHONE! So all the lovely pics posted on here from now on will be from my very own iphone, and not from the Bip's (he's been so gracious with indulging me with all his photo apps). I am having a great time finding new photo apps, and it just amazes me that a PHONE can take such great photos. Who needs a camera, seriously? The only thing I don't like about it, is I can't find a macro app, and I love taking super close-up pics of plants. I am sure one will show up eventually!

That's all for now... more posts coming soon... I'm sure I will find some treasures from long-ago when I go through my boxes. :) I've already found a lot of pictures from when I was hot and skinny. Talk about depressing!