Around the House
Loving these signs of spring!
Woo-hoo! Here in Kansas City, we had a beautiful, warm weekend, and all the bulbs hibernating underground loved it! It’s so exciting to see the colors burst out of the ground. Seriously, this makes me smile and improves my mood. I despise winter, so to get to this point each year is a huge milestone! Most of the daffodils are many years old. Bless them for returning year after year! More recently, I’ve begun a new area that includes crocus. It takes a while for them to make any impact, but this year, they can been seen from the street.
Just 56 Days!
Everywhere you turn, you hear of frozen pipes, cars in ditches from icy roads, and caution to get your animals inside from the frigid cold this winter. With all this in mind, I wrote a poem called Winter Blech. Winter Blech!Bare trees.All gone dormant.Plants reside in the basement,under grow lights.Bee hives are securedfor the winterwith mouse guardsat the entrance.Time to settle infor the long wait’til we see Jonquils again. As of today, January 23, 2024, Spring is only 56 days away! Now, don’t you feel better?
A Great Lotion Recipe
A few years ago, a friend gave me a home made jar of this stuff. It’s great for dry skin in winter. I’ve used it ever since. I thought you might like to make some yourself. Here’s the recipe. You can get all the stuff online or at Walmart. 13 ounces of Vaseline Petroleum Jelly 12 ounces Vitamin E Cream 27 ounces Johnson’s Baby Lotion In a large mixing bowl empty the 13oz of Vaseline Petroleum Jelly. With a hand mixer at the highest speed beat the VPJ for 2 minutes,
Blooms in any season!
It’s not your traditional holiday flower, but it’s blooming, and that makes me happy! I love indoor flowering plants. I’ve get a few orchids, the African violet and a Christmas cactus. The cactus is starting to bud, so it might be flowering on time. One of the orchids just finished a bloom cycle, and another is starting one! Do you have flowers growing inside? Any tips and tricks? I’m about to buy poinsettias next week!
Hoping the harvesting pays off
I’ve been busy harvesting the seeds from my garden of zinnias and cosmos. Hoping that I can plant the seeds in the spring and have another robust and colorful patch of flowers next year. I have so many destructive squirrels, chipmunks and rabbits around my yard that I never know from one year to the next if everything I plant is going to be mowed down by the varmints. But the new garden not only survived–it was prolific! Gathering the seeds is easy. The spiky seeds from the cosmos are obvious and you just pinch them off. The zinnia seeds
Zinnia patch is a hit!
Last year, my husband and I started a new flower bed in our. It was kind of an eyesore through the winter, as we’d covered it with cardboard to help get rid of the scraggly grass and weeds. This spring, we planted a ton of zinnias and cosmos to give a pop of summer color in the one sunny spot in our yard. All grown from seed. It’s been fun to see it grow full with so many colors and varieties of zinnias. An added bonus: the birds, bees and butterflies like it, too! The colorful bed is cheery and
Love the Colors of Summer!
It’s lily season! The first roses have finished their cycle, and the hydrangeas are just beginning to bud, but the lilies are in their glory days! The orange daylilies are pretty ordinary, but planted in a mass, they make a colorful statement. And I love that they give some color up off the ground. Flowers are one of the best things about summer! What’s blooming at your place?
World Traveler Welcomed Home
Recently, grandson Sam, visited Egypt and Tanzania where he climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro. While there, he texted his mom and asked, “Do you think it would be rude, if when I got back we invited ourselves to Grandma’s house for pot roast?” I think he was ready for some good ole’ down home cooking! The day after he got home we gathered to feast on pot roast with carrots and potatoes, asparagus, fresh zucchini from the garden, and kale salad. Oh, and a cake made with French vanilla pudding mix. We heard of his travels and viewed his collection of travel
Flowers thrive in summer sun
The property around my home is quite shady, thanks to several old, giant trees. So growing flowers is a challenge. I don’t have enough sunshine for most of the summer flowers to thrive. We have a few lilies and some roses, but the lilies have a short season, and the roses do well at the beginning of summer then kind of waste away. But I love flowers! So this year, we decided to dig up a spot that we can only see from one room in the house, but that gets full sun. Fingers crossed that it will soon be
Bring summer–skip the bloodsuckers
Summer is my season. I don’t mind the heat, as long as it doesn’t come with high humidity and inch toward the upper 90s. I love almost everything about summer—vacations, long days that allow me to enjoy the evenings outside, warm temps, summer flip-flops, reading by the pool, tropical iced tea, the flowers in bloom, and probably much more! Pretty much the only things I hate about summer are the bugs, mosquitoes, and spiders. Ugh. I’ve tried so many different ways to keep the mosquitoes away. Citronella candles make me sneeze. And I hate spraying chemicals on my skin or