things are growing in the garden

I am usually impressed by how fast things grow here (out west), but this is a new record.  The garden we planted mid-May is growing hearty and already making an appearance on our dinner plates!

Now, anyone who has grown radishes before probably would have known this, but I was amazed.  These ones are a variety that can grow up to the size of baseballs, but I don't really need that much radish in my life.  I'll probably let a few get that big, but just for the photos.

My little helpers are really loving it too.  They do most of the watering and some of the weeding/thinning out (mostly the thinning out where it doesn't necessarily need it, but oh well).

Marvelous, aren't they!

Also, our gnomes (who usually live in our garden, as glimpsed here, or behind us in the first photo) have suffered an accident (at the hands of Little Bean, she may be small, but is far from delicate).  While they're awaiting repair, we have a flamingo friend taking their place watching over the garden.  I'm calling him Havelock, the Predatory Flamingo.  This is Bugaboo's impression of him:

I have an unusual love for tacky garden ornaments.

garden jungle update

So while we were away on vacation, a friend of mine came over to water my garden for me. Assumably she also danced around it witch-doctor style or performed top secret botanical experiments because I left her to care for this:

And she somehow turned it into this:

By the way, this is not me complaining; it's fantastic! I've (as previously mentioned) never had a garden or even grown anything successfully ever! I to have a commendable track record for keeping cacti alive, and that's where it ends, but not this time. Just look!

Snow Peas!

Tomatoes!

Holy squash batman!

Even the watermelons that were dead when I left have come back to life!

And while the garden is a great joy for me, seeing it bursting out of it's little wooden confines, fussing in it in the cool morning while Bugaboo plays in the yard, showing him how the little plants grow; it's nothing compared to the joy and pride I get in feeding my little man yummy treats we grew together, picked fresh off the plant. It's absolutely wonderful!

Outside!

It's growing! My garden, the one that my little man and I planted, it's got green in it! It's hard to understand my excitement if you're a seasoned horticulturist, but for me, who has a good track record with indoor cactus (as long as I only have one at a time), a garden is a wildly adventurous thing. Our peas are up and looking hearty, our tomatoes have survived transplantation and now we're getting signs of life from our onions and squash! Yes, I know these are all beginner type plants, but still, they're alive (muahahahaha!). My watermelon are the only ones awaiting slightly warmer nights before they too join the group. They have a little while before they outgrow their little pots anyways, so they can enjoy the warm morning sun on the windowsill for a few more weeks. I've dreamt of a garden for many years, with various windowsill and counter top attempts (and subsequent failures) I am absolutely thrilled to finally be showing some green! It only makes it better that it's a garden built by my husband and that Bugaboo helped plant it; it's been a family project and we don't have many of those. Thoroughly pleased I am!

And with that, here's part two. I wish I had a better name than simply a 'list', but it's irrelevant.

A Dozen or So Things to Do With a Toddler Outside!

1. Nature Walk (grab a bucket and find all the exciting rocks and sticks along the way)


2. Garden; not a great one day activity, but a fun project from spring to summer.


3. City Walk (again, grab a bucket and maybe a piece of chalk, or just wander down a street stopping in the occasional toy store to play)


4. Go on a Picnic; fun with friends, or all by yourselves


5. Go to a Provincial Park / trail / beach / farm etc. There's only a little searching required to find awesome public gems in your community.


6. Take pictures. Especially fun if you have an older camera the little one can hold. Head out to the yard and have a photo shoot.


7. Blow Bubbles. Never not fun. The new coloured bubbles are a neat outdoor toy, and they're strong, so they don't pop when they land on the grass, but they're practically ink, so be ready.


8. Play in a sprinkler. Or better yet, if you live by a water park, they can be very exciting.


9. Play ball! Soccer, football, baseball, beach ball, toddlers love 'em and can surprise you with how well they can handle them at a very young age.


10. Enjoy a messy snack. Take advantage of not having to scrub the floors or wipe sticky off the walls and grab a Popsicle or dive into a watermelon. They're better when they're messy anyways.


11. Park play date. Or, if you're lucky like us and have a few parks in a small subdivision, go for a park-crawl. This one will wear them out for sure.


12. Bug Safari. Head off to the woods or a field and start searching. In fact, according to retired biologist Jennifer Owen, the best place to discover new species of bugs is right in your own back yard!


13. Watch clouds. Not for every busy little one, but for some, it's a new world of floating shapes!


14. Watch a construction site. Not too close mind you, but heavy machinery in real life is pretty impressive.


15. Go for a bus ride. You don't have to actually go anywhere, just a little adventure on a big bus.


16. Have a conversation. Have your little one tell you all about the things they can see, and you can tell them all about them too.


17. Watch planes take off/land. To some a trip to the airport is a lengthy drive, but we can see the airport from our yard (not always great) and Bugaboo loves watching the planes ("Airmapes" he calls them).


18. And last but not least, as I previously mentioned, Chalk! Makes a mess and washes off easy. Just keep them away from the cars.
    

Well what do you think of that, eh? As it's the cusp of June, yeah, these are all summer ideas. Maybe I'll do a part three in the fall/winter. Wait and see.

However, as my hubby is away this week, nap time is stretched a little thin by the things I want to get done around the house, so I'd best get to work.

Ta-daaa! (photo-heavy, which I kind of like)

So starting in reverse order of projects actually accomplished (silly, I know), my brother-in-law's baby is currently in the process of being born! Right now! Very exciting! Unfortunately, this is the baby for whom I've been knitting that blanket forever, and still haven't finished it, but I guess I have a little extra motivation to kick it in to knitting-gear and get it done.

Also, I have started a quilt. Actually, I've gotten a fair amount accomplished (not considering the actual quilting which will have to soon take place). I don't have any backing for it, so it's on hold.
My friend and I finally got together for some sewing, but only finished our aprons, and never got around to the hats. However, soon. Here's Bugaboo helping me with some cooking. We made Salted Caramels from this recipe here, and so I did most of the cooking (it being up on the stove) and he enjoyed a snack in his new apron.

We have finally broken dirt in the ol' garden, planting peas and some onions. I'm weathering my tomatoes so they can go in next week too. I'm getting excited, but I think I'll miss the lush forest growing on my windowsill. Perhaps a herb garden, something which greatly intimidates me, will have to be in order.

And lastly before I get to my fancy-schmancy BIG news, I made up some Mother's Day cards! We normally give our Moms and Grandmoms a call, but I was feeling we could do a little better than that, so here they are! They've all been sent out and I hope they get there (the other side of the country) on time. Well, we're normally late, so no one would mind, or be surprised, if they are a little bit belated. As you can see, some are more audacious and some are quite muted, but I figured that would suit my Mom, Mother in-laws and all our grammies respectively.

And of course we had to include a picture or two in each!

And now, are you ready? I finished my shirt! For the Spring Top Sewalong 2011! Done! Well, no, I need one more button, but if it comes down to the grind, I have one that's not quite the right shade of yellow. Maybe I can go hunting tonight...

Well, it's a glorious glamorous day, and my little Bugaboo needs to be woken up from his nap. I'll have the official super fancy posed-to-the-max shot of my shirt later, so I look forward to posting it too!

Tadaaa!

Peeky Peek - Work in Progress

After a wonderful Easter break with visitors and fun and great food, I'm super excited to get back into my many little projects on the go. The garden is still barren, but the windowsill is lush and flourishing so transplanting will soon be in our future.

(These are my tomatoes taking a bit of a bath in the sink after I moved them into bigger pots). Plans are in the making for some Chef-Bugaboo attire, maybe to be sewn up this weekend. And Grammy so wonderfully included a roll of quilt batting in with Bugaboo's Easter package, so I have schemes involving a lap quilt and a cheater baby quilt. Exciting stuff!

But first and most importantly, I bring you this:

Can you tell what it is? I was finally able to start on my plans for the Spring Top Sewalong put on by the amazing crafty mind behind Made by Rae! I only have a week left (having withheld the urge to dabble while our guests were here), so here I go! I don't want to say too much, but it's light grey and yellow and will hopefully fit around my big-momma belly (I've noticeably grown in the past week alone, so I'm going to be making this big).

So it's going to be work work work (also can be read as 'fun fun fun'), and so I'm off!

Special Delivery - April

I'm finding increasingly, as the sunny weather is really starting to kick in, that I am very much influenced by it. On bright sunny days, such as today, I'm tidying, gardening, knitting and blogging with a fervor that I lacked all gloomy weekend long. However, I've suspected I'm solar powered for some time now, so this is nothing new. Have you ever had a day where you're outside, soaking in the glorious warm rays and enjoying a cool drink of water feeling like you might have been a plant in a previous life? Ok, maybe that's just me, however...

Our lovely garden is progressing. I don't say growing because it is still in the stages of being filled with dirt and other yummy treats for my future crops, so all the growing is still taking place on our window sill. I might have underestimated the amount of stuff it takes to fill a 1'x4'x6' raised garden. Oh well, it will be lovely once it's ready.

(This is my husband and son dumping another load of dirt into the garden. I'm pregnant, and so my husband offers to do any heavy shoveling for me. The trailer is still unavailable, so we've been hauling dirt down in our recycle bins and garbage can.)

As far a actually completing tasks, I've taken a brief knitting hiatus from my baby-blanket, and whipped up this for my April Special Delivery.

It's a coin purse from a pattern I got here: http://www.bernat.com/pattern.php?PID=4728. There seemed to be a bit of in issue with the pattern though, because while they do a decent job of explaining the 'Ssk' stitch which I believe is used to make the button holes, it doesn't actually appear in the pattern. I just omitted them and sewed up the sides. Either way I doubt I'd use it as a coin purse (it would be too easy to loose things that way) but a little pouch is sure to come in handy. I'm also really fond of the button, which I added just for show. It was in an antique sewing kit my grandmother found me at an auction, and I've wanted to find a good use for them. I think it's pretty!

The whole project took a little more than 2 hours to whip up, and I'd recommend it for anyone who is just starting to knit and wanting to practice their knits and purls (it's in seed stitch, which is just switching back and forth between the two).

Now that I'm back into the knitting swing, I hope to finish up that blanket, but I find big projects so daunting (short attention span I guess). Wish me luck!

ka-blamo!

So here I am blog-world! Lets see what we can do. Luckily, I start this blog at the same time I'm starting so many other things, such as picking sewing back up again, a new knitting project and (ba-da-da-DA) a garden!

It's spring and unlike in eastern Canada, where I grew up, here out west, spring is actually a warmer sunnier time than winter, and I can actually get my garden growing. So far, we're working with a raised garden (in an attempt to dissuade the bunnies), that my marvelous husband has built for me.

I've started filling with layers of cardboard, newspaper, hay, compost, and then more hay. The dirt is a bit of a holdup, because we're borrowing the trailer to haul it in, and so we are at the kind whim of our trailer-owning-neighbor.

However, my tomatoes are planted and looking very trim, and my onions are germinating in my entertainment centre (it's just so nice and warm (and baby-proof) in there). Oh, there is also a sunflower that Bugaboo has planted and diligently waters every day. I don't really know it's future yet, but I'm excited that it is growing anyways (he stands in front of it every time he waters it and says "grow, grow, grow").

Hopefully I'll have another project or two lined up for later this week. I'm in the final stages of knitting a baby blanket for my brother-in-law's baby girl due at the end of the month (which I've been working on since November, gaaaa), and I have some mischievous plans for new cooking attire for my Bugaboo. Oh, also, I have a craft group that once a month we all draw names and make a little something to mail out to each other. I just got my name for April and the wheels are a-turning coming up with a fun gift.

Well, I best get to work then!