Life of a garden - March

Well today is officially the first day of spring! My husband stuck his nose out (think groundhog) and declared: "It smells like spring." Despite all that it really still looks like winter here. However I dug around a little and did see a few signs of life in my perennial beds. The Heuchera is coming back, as seen by the little green leaves. This is a garden staple for me. They do well in shade and are resistant to the slug army in our yard.

The Sedum is also coming back, despite being a succulent type plant this again is a hardy workhorse of the garden, plus it can be propagated and divided with ease - almost accidentally sometimes. I love Sedum and have it planted in various sunny locations.

Our vegetable garden is still covered in snow, will be awhile before we get in here to turn the soil and plant our veggie seeds. The garden bed is about 10 feet by 20 feet, which isn't huge, but we do manage to get a fair amount of produce out of it. We can salsa, spaghetti sauce, hot sauce, sweet relish and pickles. Plus we froze more veg last year so that it didn't go to waste. I blanched and froze lots of spinach and peppers too.

Until my next post I'll be dreaming of warm sunshine on my face and arms, and the far away sounds of the sad and beautiful mourning doves.

Recycled T-Shirt Totes

Every now and then I get the urge to create. And being the spend thrift that I am I found some cheap t-shirts with really cute designs and was inspired to try my hand at making totes out of them!  These are my first attempts, and I think they look kind of cute. The t-shirt fabric however is hard to work with if you don't have a serger. What I ended up doing was zigzagging all the raw edges and then sewing the bags together, this seemed to work out a bit better. I even did a little applique on the handle of one of the totes. Although I have to admit, the "Kiss of Death" Geisha bag was my favorite!

I also experimented with felted wool sweater totes, and determined that I liked working with the wool better, it's much more forgiving, and when you block it you can reshape it a bit if needed. I'm now sewing up more recycled t-shirt totes, and so far all materials that are going into them have been either purchased at thrift stores or rummage sales. More to come on that project!

Life of a garden

Like many others in this area, I come from a long line of farmers. My parents and theirs before them worked the rocky, loamy soil here in North Dakota.

My mom would tell stories of working in the field with grandpa and grandma, wearing hats and grandpa's long sleeved shirts they would walk among the potatoes and in order to keep pests down they would knock off destructive potato beetles into a can of kerosene. For as long as I can remember, my parents had a huge garden at our farm. My mom would buy me special "kid" seeds from Burpee that I would plant excitedly. Years after that I would help with the harvest and canning. We would have baskets full of cukes and tomatoes, cabbage, lettuce and carrots. A day of picking cukes and canning might yield 30 quarts of pickles - it was quite the job!

My own garden is not so grand, but I like digging in the dirt and watching the little seeds grow. I am dreaming of spring even though it still looks like winter here. I've already orderd a bunch of seeds, I get them locally and also order from Territorial Seed out west. They have a unique variety of flowers and vegetables. This year I'm planting Nelson carrots, London springs lettuce mix, snow peas, Kentucky wonder pole beans, beets, radicchio as well as the standard tomatoes, cukes, spinach, basil and dill. Looking forward to planting, should be getting the garden ready around Memorial Day, want to make sure we are past the point of hard frost. Once things start growing I'll take pictures and show the plant progress. Here's hoping we have sunny spring days coming our way!