onward and upward

The first lesson in chasing your dreams is to never give up. Sometimes circumstances change, and with that, the path and your means of traveling it from point A to point B may also need to change. Onward and upward, friends!

Remaining in a city with dreams of farming proves challenging. Once you've filled your garden plot for the season, there's only so much weeding and watering that can be done until the plants start growing and you have to thin them, train them up trellises or can start harvesting your small crop. It's discouraging to wake up with the desire to be productive and get a little dirt under your nails when it appears there's little to no work to be done. That's when I look up. You can lay back and gaze up at the cloud-puffed sky, but I'm looking up to the roof.

When the ground is full and you have 20 more tomatoes and some herbs that need a home, and more seeds still sprouting in trays, it's time to think outside the box. Well, in the box, but outside the fence lines. I am fortunate enough to not only have a nice sized garden plot but also have access to a small portion of my building's roof that gets just the right mix of sun and shade. With the desire to dig in the ground is still very much present, it was time for another trip to the store. Soil, manure, perlite, peat moss and marigolds were on the list.

A couple beers and an afternoon later, a container roof garden was ready to grow.

Tomatoes, marigolds, herbs and other flowers potted for the roof garden.
Bamboo stalks were added in the pots to help keep those rowdy tomatoes in line.

dig in

There was a lot of digging going on today. Most of the garden beds are rich with top soil added over the past few seasons, plus fresh compost from our barrel. The top layer has grown a lot of weeds since we finished gardening late last fall, but the soil is fairly easy to till after breaking through the top layer. After a few minutes of shoveling, turning and raking the soil, it's a happy little place for new plants.

Trips to a few gardening stores this afternoon sent us home with a good mix of plugs and flowers. Normally, most of the seeds would have been started indoors and nearly ready for planting by now, but as I mentioned last time, spring seemed to have a pretty late start all around. Today's haul included cabbage, beans, cucumbers, zucchini, marigolds, onions and some perennials to attract bees and butterflies.

I snapped a couple of pictures just before dark and just before my phone died. It's a little piecemeal, but plants are getting in the ground so that's all that matters. Wheeler dog was a great helper tonight. She does a really good job of keeping the soil warm while she lounges around and supervises the work.

Bamboo is an invasive monster if you have it growing in your yard, but it can be a great asset to the garden. Cut it, give it time to dry out (to avoid having it start new roots when you put the cut poles in the ground), grab a roll of twine and you have some free trellises. The criss-cross trellis was a great support for cucumbers and beans the past two seasons, and will be used for the same again this year. Further down the bed, it also supports hops. A good watering after all the planting was done, and the "kids" are all tucked in for the night.

crafty home style: an autumn wreath

Autumn's officially here! Since I was a kid, it's been a favorite time of year for me. I loved school (nerd alert). I loved raking leaves in the yard - then jumping in them or running through them with the dogs. We won't mention that time my friend and I drove through the neighborhood late one night, blowing through everyone's leaf piles on the edge of the road. Ooops. My mom's birthday is on Halloween, so that was always a big event, too. There was dinner and birthday dessert at the grandparents' house, then all the cousins getting ready together for trick-or-treating. We'd rake in all the candy we could after making rounds through two neighborhoods...and my loot sat in my trick-or-treat bag all year on my closet floor while I was still developing my sweet tooth (my, how times have changed). Closing out the season, Thanksgiving was always a rowdy event - up in the morning to watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade while the day of cooking began. Again, the whole extended brood usually gathered at the grandparents' house where we would sometimes overflow into two dining rooms while we feasted. So you see, it's more than just being about the debut of the pumpkin spice latte, and I'm always excited to welcome the season.

I can't wait until the day when I have my own front porch to decorate with corn stalks and jack-o-lanterns, but for now a few decorations here there will have to work for apartment living. A holiday wreath is perfect for that. 

I found a tutorial for making felt flowers, and wanted to use that idea for a fall wreath. With a $5 grapevine wreath, a spool of ribbon, a few small sheets of felt, silk autumn leaves, straight pins, glue sticks and a hot glue gun, you'll have everything you need for your wreath. 

To make the flowers: Place a circular object like a CD on the sheet of felt. The small sheets in the craft section are big enough for three CD-sized circles. Trace the circular object with permanent marker. First, cut the full circle out of the felt. Then, begin cutting the full circle into a spiral toward the center. If you cut a wavy-line spiral instead of a cutting a smooth edge, when you roll the felt up, your flower edge will look like real petals. Once you've cut the spiral, pinch the inside end of the spiral-cut felt, and begin wrapping the strand counter-clockwise around the outside of the pinched end. Poke a straight pin through the flower from the outside edge to the middle, and you're finished! Super easy. You can also use hot glue to glue down the outside end of the felt strand after wrapping it.  

Make as many flowers as you want in as many colors. I chose a deep red, orange and yellow. The craft store had lots of pretty shades (you know, to avoid looking like you're making a decoration for the front door of your neighborhood McDonald's). Once your flowers are all made and secured, set them aside.

I bought a strand of leaves from the craft store, and cut off individual leaves that I wanted to use for the wreath. I played around with the different sizes, shades and overlap of the leaves. Once I figured out an arrangement I liked, I just wove them, stem first, into the vines of the wreath without any further securing. My wreath will be hanging indoors, but for an outdoor wreath you may want to use hot glue to secure the leaves to the wreath. 

After your leaves are placed and secured, it's time to add the felt flowers. If you finished your flowers with a straight pin, be sure to arrange them so that the head of the pin is not showing. The backside of the flowers should be mostly flat, making it pretty easy to add hot glue and attach them to the wreath. A spiral of glue on the back of the flower and pressing and holding it in place for a few seconds should make it secure. Allow the wreath to remain on a flat surface for a few minutes while the glue dries to be sure everything stays tightly in place.  

With your spool of ribbon, you can make a loop to hang your wreath - measure twice, cut once! Use a solid colored wide ribbon, or get creative by mixing different colored or patterned thinner ribbons and twine.