Small, growing things.

Well, the garden seems to have bounced back nicely after that hail storm a week and a half ago. We've since had a pretty nasty wind storm as well (strong enough to rip a piece of our siding trim off the front of the house and throw it into the back yard!) but the plants don't seem to have been bothered.

This past weekend Frank helped me get the rest of the tomato cages painted and put out. The tomato plants in the raised bed are still smaller than those in the containers, but considering they were planted two weeks later and took a beating in the hail storm, I'm not particularly surprised. As you can see, the rest of our veggies are starting to sprout nicely!

The last thing we needed was more tomato plants, but I caught sight of this little beauty at Home Depot and couldn't resist- it's a tomatillo plant! Tasty little green tomatoes that are great for Mexican sauces. Mmm mmmm! Seems to like its new pot, I swear it's doubled in size in just a few days.

More good news post-hail: My cilantro livesssss! This one is snapping back nicely after nearly getting obliterated by the hail. The second cilantro plant is still looking a little sad, but I'm hopeful it'll recover as this one did.

More tomato plants, my little jalapeno plant, a few small rows of carrots, yellow bush bean plants and lots of onion sprigs poking through!

Updated shot of my container tomatoes. Check out the difference compared to my earlier photo!

This Early Girl plant is the biggest of our tomato plants so far. I noticed today that it even has its first little yellow flower!

Even my teeny-tiny Roma plants are starting to take off!

In addition to all the green stuff, I've also got some furry babies I'm taking care of. We do foster care for the local Humane Society, and sometimes I get teeny babies that need bottle feeding. These guys are around a week old, and I've got 3 of them- two boys and a girl. Two more boys are with another foster and 3 from the litter unfortunately didn't make it.. they were found abandoned in a box inside a public restroom. :(

This is the larger of the two boys, and has a brindle coat pattern. The other boy and girl are light tan with a black mask. It's really too early to tell what mix they might be, exactly, but I'm guessing shepherd/pit.

Hail Fail

Last night Charlotte got hit with a pretty nasty hail storm out of nowhere. The weather all day was great- warm and sunny. Next thing you know, quarter to baseball sized hail! Very glad our cars were parked in the garage. I have a feeling a lot of people are calling their insurance companies today.

Our raised garden bed took a real beating. Most of my poor tomato plants are missing branches this morning. We hadn't even put the cages on yet, so there was nothing to deflect the hailstones.

The basil got smacked around pretty good, but not as bad as our cilantro- which pretty much got pounded into oblivion. :(

More tomato carnage. Thankfully the container-planted tomatoes were virtually unscathed. Frank moved them next to the fence yesterday afternoon while he was mowing, so the fence and two trees above them deflected most of the hail. There were tons of leaves and twigs in the containers this morning from their tree-shield, but other than that they seemed unaffected.

Gardening news was not all bad this morning though, as I noticed while plucking debris from the raised bed that our onions have started sprouting! Yay! I adore red onions. My favorite vegetable, hands down. If I get one edible tomato and one edible onion out of this garden, I'll consider it a success.

Sewing projects continue. Icarus is trying to help. Post-storm it's very cold and gray outside today, so I have a feeling I'll have ye olde sewing machine cranking much of the afternoon. I may make a run out to the fabric store later to see if I can get any good clearance scraps.

Sewing Projects: The Resurrection

Terrible sci-fi'esque title aside, I finally purchased a new sewing machine earlier this week and have been getting acquainted with it over the last few days. I dug up a huge stash of fabric I purchased for a quilting project I started almost 8 years ago and set about finally finishing the darned thing.

 Behold, the resulting carnage that was once our dining table. Although, to be fair, we never actually eat on it anyway- so I don't feel too guilty about claiming it as my new crafting territory.

My new machine is a Singer Esteem II. Pretty cheap and simple, but more than enough for my purposes.

My first assembled quilt chunk- yay! Really, I know little to nothing about quilting so I just made up the pattern based on the number of cloth types I had. This block will be alternated with another in the same pattern but with different color placement, and I'll have a border of some sort to add in later. I'm aiming for Queen size as that's the size of the batting roll I purchased originally, but we'll see.

I'm also attempting to make a new set of place-mats for the table we never eat on. I originally bought a pretty expensive set, only to have half of them ruined by an accidental bleaching (thanks Frank!). This is a rough draft, as I need to clean up the stitching.

Carpenters and farmers

This year my husband and I decided to start our first backyard veggie garden.

I should start by pointing out I have no talent for green things outside of killing them. My husband had a house plant for 5 years before we met, and within two I'd offed it.

Naturally, I'm starting big. I couldn't decide which way I wanted to go, so ultimately I ended up with both a container garden and an in-ground raised bed.

I'm primarily growing tomatoes. I don't even eat tomatoes but from what I've read, they're reasonably easy to deal with- so hopefully they'll prove resistant to my efforts of veggicide. Keeping with the grand scale of my project, I selected not one or two, but SIX varieties of tomato plant- the classic Big Boy, Early Girl, Roma, Celebrity, Lemon Boy and my favorite based on its name alone: Mr. Stripey.

I recycled some old buckets that originally stored cat litter into planting containers. They got a thorough scrub, a new paint job, a dozen or so holes drilled in the bottom of each and a chunk of landscaping fabric in the bottom to keep the soil from leaking out through said holes.

Here's a few filled, mulched and planted. I'm mostly sticking with determinant varieties in these containers, as supposedly they grow smaller and more "bush-like" rather than tall and viney. Even so, I painted some tomato cages bright white and added those to the containers as well to provide support.

This is the raised bed we constructed. It's approximately 10'x4'x14" and made from untreated 2x4s of some cheap Home Depot mystery wood. Again, I lined it with landscaping fabric on the sides and bottom to stop soil leakage and weed intrusion.

Nyxie's enjoying our new gardening kick. She's an indoor cat, but I've been taking her outside with me when I work in the yard and she seems to enjoy it.

The finished raised bed, filled and planted. We did a row of tomatoes in the back (left) and herbs at each end (basil and cilantro). Up front I have a lonely jalapeno pepper plant, and the rest of the space is filled with a hodgepodge of red onions, garlic, carrots, yellow bush beans and snow peas. I figured I'd just go the trial and error route with what I plant.. we'll see what actually grows and adjust accordingly next year.

Originality, restated

I have not blogged in a long, long time. Since college, in fact- and that's nearing on 10 years ago. I'm not sure what compelled me to start this one. Perhaps I just have too many ideas running around in my head and needed a place to jot them down in some sort of orderly fashion.

So why would anyone want to read what I have to say? To start, I believe the concepts of originality and individuality to be pure myth when it comes to the internet, or most facets of life for that matter. Sure, we still hear the teenage mantra that everyone is unique and special, but really? These days no one can say or write anything that could truly be considered original. Whatever glittering gems you have buzzing around in your head, however based on or shaped by your life experience and the world around you, have buzzed around in the heads of countless people before you.

Now, before you start to think I'm slipping into some self-pitying, world-hating spiral of delusion- let's bring this concept to purpose. My name is Julie, and I love many, many things. Travel, my sweet husband, the cavalcade of four-legged companions that reside in my home (both permanent and temporary), pop culture, and not-so-pop culture. I garden, sew, play hockey, rant, cuss and go to the opera.

Which brings us to our title. This paraphrased life. I'll post a lot of random things here, some interesting, some drab. All of it paraphrased from other people in some shape or fashion, intentionally or not. But whatever the topic, it will be fleshed out and rounded as I see fit.

That said, I honestly hope someone gets some measure of pleasure from reading this thing- as I'll no doubt enjoy writing it!