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Self propelled flowers
I mentioned in my last post that I was making garlic powder. Well, it was a successful experiment in that garlic powder was the end result. However, all that work peeling garlic (7 or 8 heads) and the hours spent drying it in the oven only yielded half a spice jar of garlic powder. Needless…
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0% chance of vampires
I hate growing garlic. Don’t get me wrong, I love the taste of garlic. But I find fresh garlic to be extremely tedious, so I always just use garlic powder and jarred minced garlic. Of course, I had an entire bed of nothing but garlic this year. Garlic that I didn’t plant. But it was…
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Choose your suffering
I’ll admit it: there are days (many, in fact) when I am tempted to just bulldoze our five acres and start over from scratch. A clean slate. Strip the turf grass. Burn the weeds. Start from bare earth. (The trees can stay, though, except for the ones that are obviously dead.) But it wouldn’t matter.…
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Restored
Our last house (and the house we owned before that) was one of those suburban cookie-cutter subdivision homes. You couldn’t throw a stone without hitting another house with a nearly identical exterior and layout. Somehow, we owned two houses like this, even though it was never the type of home I dreamed of owning. (I…
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As spring fades into summer
Today is the first day I’ve been out to work in the yard in over a week. Last Saturday was my birthday, so I took the day off from working outside. (Even though the weather was perfect!) I took my morning coffee out on our screened-in porch, listened to the birds, and played my word…
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Not gonna eat a lot of peaches
I posted recently about our peach tree. It wasn’t producing much fruit –probably because it’s still young. But I was excited to see maybe 20 or so tiny, fuzzy peaches on it. (I said 10 peaches in that post, but it was more than that. Certainly not more than 20, though.) And then we had…
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Where the Cottonwood Blows
It’s that joyous time of year when downy cottonwood seeds float through the air. And then they land. And cover everything. We actually had big clumps of them all over the yard. They got in our clothes, our shoes, Blitz’s fur … Thankfully, I’m not seeing quite so many this week (she writes, as she…
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Ebb and Flow
I know I’ve been posting a lot about how grateful I am that we ended up here. This house on five acres is never the type of place I imagined we would be, but I know a peace and joy here that I haven’t known anywhere else. That said, it’s not always coming up roses.…
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Remember and Honor
Shortly after I moved to Germany, I signed up as a volunteer for the Girl Scout troop at U.S. Army Garrison Schinnen in The Netherlands. One of the most rewarding experiences I had as a volunteer was helping the troop place American and Dutch flags on the graves at Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten. It…
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Movin’ to the country, gonna eat a lot of peaches
Fun fact: One of my childhood nicknames was Peaches. Though I honestly don’t know why. OK, so this peach tree is actually pretty small, and I don’t think 10 peaches are even developing on it at the moment. But I’m delighted to see that I will have peaches this year, provided nothing happens to them…
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Karyn Johnson 