The Plants Ate My Blog Post (and Other Excuses)

Early blooming purple irises

Hello – J.D., Annake’s Garden Gnome here. Annake is taking a short break from blogging, but didn’t want to lose the momentum we’ve built these last few months; so, she’s asked me to jump in and explain what is presently occupying so much of our time and attention.

First, an apology to readers using our archived posts. Due to Google’s decommissioning of Picasa (in favor of their new Google Photo application), we temporarily lost connections to all the photographs for our older posts. It took some time and a great deal of work to restore those posts, but I believe we have pretty much fixed the problems. To be fair, it took longer than it might have because I took the opportunity to address some other issues that arose from changes made over the last three years by both Google (to the Blogger software) and in the way we use the platform.

Our archives are extremely important to us: unlike many (perhaps most) of the blogs on the Web, the majority of our content is never supposed to become obsolete. We always intended that our archives be a continuing resource for readers, old and new. We do not shut off comments for those archived posts, either; so if you encounter a problem or if you find our content useful – we want to hear about it!

On to other matters: as Annake mentioned in our 3^rd anniversary post (February 29, 2016), we are now heavily involved in area farmer’s markets. The original plan (a year ago) was just to add another venue for selling our crafts; as things worked out, we discovered a market for surplus from the kitchen and herb gardens, as well as excess from the flower gardens which Annake has struggled to give away for years. So, in an effort to make the Garden more self-supporting (a notion expressed way back in our very first blog post!), we are expanding our horticultural efforts with commerce in mind. The pictures below show some of what we are doing.

Straw bale planting - growing crops in straw bales - is an idea that seems to have taken off in the last couple of years. Since we had a good local source for the bales (a fellow Farmer’s Market vendor), we thought we’d give it a serious try. In addition to the additional crops, we've thought of other benefits this method might provide for us, such as -

Planting deer-repelling fragrant herbs among the rose bushes: even the heavy wire cages you can see around the roses don’t keep the really determined beasts out, so we’ll take any help we can – even if it’s just depriving them of places to graze from;

A “deer maze”, to discourage pregnant does from birthing more fawns in the space behind the storage sheds;

A way to contain and rehabilitate last year’s compost pile: beans, squash, and chard have already sprouted in that rich compost, and we’re planning on planting things the deer won’t like in the straw bales that surround it.

And the straw bales are not our only additions. Here’s a picture of the beginning of a new perennial herb bed we’re putting in. Up to now, our herbs have mostly been planted among other flowers and shrubs in the decorative garden areas; our aging bodies and local demand convinced us that we needed something more, dedicated to herb cultivation.

We also erected a  temporary greenhouse so that we have someplace protected to store plants we winter over in our permanent greenhouse, some of which have gotten completely out of hand despite the short days and cold weather...such as “Big Red,” the geranium shown in our last anniversary blog post or these potted herbs below.

Rosemary (left) and pineapple sage overflowing their pots; lawn sprinklers show scale

House plant "starts"

The space we’ve cleared in the permanent greenhouse is quickly disappearing under new houseplant pottings, the result of other greenhouse occupants’ insistence on  propagating themselves right out of living space. These offspring are headed for the Farmer’s Market, as well.

So, that’s a partial list of just the agricultural pursuits that are keeping Annake away from the blog at the moment. 

Additionally, we are creating more craft stock, items that are variations on things Annake has discussed in previous posts over the years that weren’t different enough to write a new tutorial on;

And, Annake is planning several new series of tutorials that haven’t gotten to the project stage yet;

Oh, and we're planning to publish several short e-books - starting this summer - based on compilations of some of the blog post series Annake has already written, complete with NEW additional content, patterns, and projects that won’t be available anywhere else (oooh, I just LOVE dropping bombshells like that in passing comments!).

As you can see, we are kind of busy around here; which is why we don’t have a craft tutorial post for you this time. But next time, we will - so keep watching!

J.D.

 Small "Jinx" irises blooming away in the Garden

 This post by Annake's Garden is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

...And Nothing Went to Waste -- Crafting in an Earlier Age

I grew up at a time and in a place where growing things to eat or sell and making what you needed with your own hands was just the way everyone lived.
 

A Garden View, NOT Annake's Childhood Home!

I was born on a poor dirt farm in east central Illinois. The house where we lived was built in 1815. It replaced a sod house, or soddy, where my ancestors had lived for several seasons. The house was made of weathered clapboard, held together with wooden pegs and iron nails that looked like miniature railroad spikes. It had three rooms, a large pantry, a screened-in back porch that served as a summer kitchen and a small, open front porch. The back porch was a blessing because most of the canning, pickling, and preserving that we did had to be done during hot weather. My “room” was an emptied closet with a curtain across it.

Hit-or-Miss Afghan, made from leftover yarn

There was no electricity, no running water, no indoor plumbing. Light was provided by kerosene lamps and lanterns. Water came from a well out by the road. It had a long-handled pump that had to be primed in the summer and thawed out in the winter. Sometimes the water level fell too low and we had to haul water several miles from an artesian well shared by the whole community.

Laundry was done on a washboard in a big galvanized tub. The clothes were wrung out by hand and hung on an outdoor clothesline to dry – summer and winter. Linens that needed to be bleached were draped over bushes in full sun. We took our baths in that same washtub. The groundwater was somewhat 'hard'', so we caught rainwater in a barrel for hair-washing and delicate hand laundry. Our other bathroom needs were served by an outhouse some distance from the house (and the less said about it the better). Small rugs were hung on the clothesline and beaten with a heavy wire paddle to remove dust and dirt. We cleaned the living room rug in the summer by covering it with wet, crumpled newspaper, which we then swept away. In the winter we swept it with clean snow.

Tied Comforter

We ironed with “sad irons”. These were heavy cast-iron blanks shaped like modern irons. We heated them on top of the cook stove. You had to test them on a piece of paper before you used them so that you didn't scorch what you were ironing. The older ones had their own handles, but we had a state-of-the-art gadget that snapped onto and off of the bases. When one iron cooled too much, you could quickly switch to another hot one. I had to stand on a small chair to make myself tall enough to do the ironing.

Full Size Nine-Patch Quilt, Hand-Stitched & Hand-Quilted

Sewing, mending, and darning socks were essential skills. I can't remember when I couldn't sew. I made a nine-patch doll quilt when I was five. We did all hand-sewing for several years before we acquired a treadle sewing machine. (I would dearly love to have one to use today.) Chicken feed came in pretty print cotton sacks and we looked long and hard to find ones that matched.

Badly-worn clothes were cut into long strips, braided, and sewn together to make rag rugs. Sewing scraps and pieces of better clothing became the tops of quilts and comforters. (A comforter is pieced, padded, and backed like a quilt, but is tied together with yarn rather than being quilted.) Leftover yarn became socks or mittens or afghans. Everything possible was reused or re-purposed. Nothing went to waste.

When I became a teacher, I used to teach students of all ages a little rhyme my grandmother taught me:

Use it up,

Wear it out,

Make it do,

Or do without.

You'd be surprised how many classroom materials that saved! I only had to repeat it a few times when anyone was being wasteful before the students started reciting it to remind each other.

Annake

Fused Glass Bowl, Made from Recycled Glass

 This post by Annake's Garden is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.