The Garden Continues to Evolve...

I've spent a lot of time the past two weeks preparing one of the planter beds in the front yard of the studio house, shopping at Annie's Annuals & Perennials, then planting all of my treasures. I've turned this:


into this:



Taking my lead from a fabulous new book, Ivette Soler's, "The Edible Front Yard",


I planted a mix of succulents, tall flowers and grasses in the front half of the bed (in order to form a screen of sorts), then filled up the back half with kale, spinach, eggplants, tomatoes and peppers, and some more flowers and succulents. I'm really happy with the results, and can hardly wait for it to fill out and not look so "new".

I'm about to get started on preparing the third of the four planters, as well as cleaning up the pathways that surround the planters. Lots of work still to go, but I'm having a wonderful time!

Happy Birthday!

Today is my husband's birthday. We didn't do anything special... just hung out at home; he did Sudako puzzles and I puttered in the garden. I fixed his favorite dinner: Curried Eggs... cheesy, buttery, eggy, spicy, rich, rich, rich... yummy! You can practically feel your arteries hardening as you dine!


I also steamed up a mess of green beans from our garden, and tossed a green salad with tomato and cucumber, also from our garden. Dessert was a decadent chunk of lemon cream pie. All was accompanied by Korbel Champagne.

After dinner Martin took a nap and I zoned out in front of the computer and decided to see who else shares his birthday, and came up with quite a list of talented folk...

Gustav Mahler...

Marc Chagall...

Harry von Zell (100 points if you remember this guy!)...

Gian-Carlo Menotti...

Satchel Paige...

Pierre Cardin...

Hank Mobley...

Ringo Starr...

Jig-Saw Puzzle Quilt

A few years ago, ten of us in the Vallejo Piecemakers Quilt Guild made a jig-saw puzzle quilt. Annette, the most artistic among us, designed a 12-piece puzzle on paper (about 8 feet square), then cut out the individual pieces and passed them out among us. The object was for each of us to make a quiltlet in the shape of our puzzle piece, and then "assemble" the puzzle. We put the completed puzzle on display at our 4-Guild luncheon, and it was a big hit. This afternoon, I was hiding out in my dark computer room, cruising through some old files while trying to stay cool, and I found a picture of the completed puzzle, as well as some pics of my puzzle piece. Here's the completed puzzle:


This is my piece:

And some details of my piece:





I'm going to plow through some more photo files and see if I can find close-ups of the other pieces, and will post them when/if I do...