The Garden: What Came Back This Year

Outside in the front, the pots are starting to come to life. Several plants from last year even sprouted up on their own...

Bless my little brown thumb...I'm as shocked as you are!

For instance, this Hydrangea died out early last summer, but look...here it is again.

I was just a few days away from buying a new Hydrangea plant when I realized this one was coming back on its own.

I'll bet this happens to you all the time, but it's a first for me.

Wild Bill's little fig tree popped right up again and already has figs coming out. 

It's a 3rd-generation-cutting tree (cutting from his grandparent's tree became his mother's tree, and a cutting from mom's tree became ours) that wilts and dies down some in late fall each year, but as soon as it gets some sun the leaves start popping out again. It's a hardy one!

It's long past time to put the little fig tree in the ground, but we're trying to keep it in a pot so it's movable.  That way, if we sell the house this year we can still take it with us.

Rosemary, Mint, and Boxwood are three more plants that came back this year along with a few more that I have no idea what they are!

Boxwood And Rosemary From Last Year

I read last year that Mint is one plant that can get away from you if you're not careful where you plant it. Lesson learned! 

This is one of the Mint plants after I pulled half of it out...

Mint Gone Wild

Why plant Mint? I read that Mint will keep vermin away so I had to try it. Don't know if that's true, but it sure smells good as does the Rosemary.

There's even a few Ruellia plants that popped up by themselves in the rock bed...

Here's what Ruellia looks like once the flowers bloom. 

Source

Ruellia's nickname is Mexican Petunia, and this plant loves the heat and takes very little water to grow. It also spreads like crazy and will come back each year, filling in your empty spaces by spreading itself as far as you'll let it go.

I bought several new plants in pairs to plant in the pots on either side of the entryway.

Doesn't it always seem like you bought a lot of plants until you plant them? I'll have to make another trip to the nursery soon to buy a few more to fill up the empty spaces in the pots.

I'm thankful today for all the rain we've been having and all the plants that came back this year without any effort, especially that Hydrangea. 

How about you? Do you have any tips on what you plant that returns to your garden each year?

Thanks for dropping by!

Adorable Little Free Pantry

In my last post, I showed you the Little Free Library on a street in the small downtown area of McKinney Texas. 

Right down the street there's also a Little Free Pantry...

When I say small, I really mean small as you can see from these photos. It's just a large cabinet with simple directions...

Take What You Need - Leave What You Can

The glass doors of the pantry have further instructions. The left door says it in English: 

To best serve the need, please take only 5 items.

The right door repeats the instructions in Spanish:

The next trip we make to McKinney, I plan to take some of our extras, both books and food, to help stock the little pantry and the little library. 

It's such a worthy cause, especially because it's "People to People" without any supervision and lengthy rules!

I also plan to stop in the two shops that the Little Free Library and Little Free Pantry sit in front of, and I'll ask how the pantry and the library came to be. 

There's a story there, of that much I'm sure...a story of giving and community.

Thanks for stopping by!

Joining the party here:

Foodie Friday And Everything Else

The Little Free Book Library

Now I have one more reason to love the little Texas town of McKinney. This adorable little Free Book Library...

The colors are happy and the base container holding the little library is perfectly imperfect. Don't you agree?

This little library is in front of two buildings. One is brightly colored in mustard yellow, terra cotta, and black and white stripes. The other is a restaurant called Hugs. 

I plan to do some investigating to find out how this little library came about!

Right now though, let's take a look inside and see what's available. 

Books on the top row and mostly magazines on the bottom... 

I've read about these little personal libraries in the past few years, but this is the first one I've actually seen.

The little library is just so darn cute! I may have to make one of my own...how about you? 

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Joining The Party Here:

Foodie Friday And Everything Else

The Answer Is Yes!

If you were kind enough to read my last "Woe Is Me" post, and if you are wondering did the cabinet show up today...the answer is yes!

We would not have been upset had they cancelled today because it rained all night long and only ended about 6:30 a.m. 

The installers were scheduled to come at 8 a.m.  They showed up right on time to our surprise. 

It stayed overcast all day, which made picture taking hard, but kept it cool in the house. We had to keep the door wide open all day since lots of sawing and measuring went on outside, and the guys had to continually go in and out.

Is the cabinet what I was expecting after giving the cabinet shop lots and lots of magazine pictures and descriptive info? 

Well not exactly...you can see the pictures I gave the shop to work from in my original post HERE.

But, we can fix anything by adding lots and lots of trim on the china cabinet side here. 

And on the entryway side below, we need to add a shelf and a board running across for hooks to hang coats.  Somehow all that got overlooked by the shop despite photos and written plans...

Mainly I'm glad to finally have a wall between the glass windows on the front door and the rest of the living area. 

The months and months of waiting for the shop to get it done don't seem to matter to me anymore. I am a happy girl old lady!  

The cabinet is bare wood at this point, and very sturdy and well built. It's built with paint-grade poplar as I prefer painted cabinets and woodwork, and it's cheaper than stain-grade if you're painting it anyway.  

A creamy white paint would be my choice, but we're choosing to wait a while before prepping and painting it.  The walls in both rooms will be painted first, and then we'll chose a trim color based on what looks best with the new wall colors.

In the mean time, we'll be adding more trim that will make it more vintage looking and not so modern looking.  

The 12 foot ceilings make everything look short, but this bench is actually shorter than I like. At the top of our "Fixin' To Do" list is building a platform for the bench to sit on, which will create a shelf to hold our shoes and boots underneath.

I'm joining the party over at A Delightsome Life for Home And Garden Thursday and The Dedicated House for Make it Pretty Monday. Hope you'll stop by and join in.

Thanks for dropping by!

The Things We Keep No Matter What

My goal over the last year has been to reduce my possessions by half. I gave away half my skillets and kitchen things, then moved on to bedroom closets and garage shelves. Still, there are a great many family things I'll keep no matter what.

This plate was painted by my mother-in-law Jessie in 1979. I like to hang it during Christmas and throughout the winter. I guess this is why Jessie had so many brushes in this old, stained-up wooden bin I showed in the last post.

I put the paint brushes under a cloche and plan to hang the winter painting on the wall above it.

Jessie was injured during birth by the doctor, which resulted in her right arm being paralyzed and stunted in growth. You might notice her disability when you first meet her, but you seldom remember it later because her talents greatly exceed her slight limitations. Here she is riding shotgun a few years back.

My in-laws (both 4th or 5th generation Texans) had only one child, Wild Bill, and he was born on his father's 24th birthday. Now, here's the coincidence...a few years later, way far out in California, I was born on his mother's 24th birthday. 

Wild Bill and I met later in life, and we got married a few months after his parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. They'll be celebrating their 70th this year, and we'll be celebrating our 20th shortly after. Time flies!

When she was younger, despite having only one usable arm, Jessie painted and fired pottery and won many blue ribbon contests. She sewed quilts by hand and her stitches are tiny and perfect. She writes beautiful poetry and, at one time, wrote freelance for American Greeting cards. And she doesn't stop learning. In her early 90's now, her cell phone and laptop are always within reach of that one good arm.

If you ask Jessie where she got the confidence to live life so fully, she tells you about her mother who didn't see a disabled daughter... just one who needed to learn to do everything in her own way. 

In this season of Thanksgiving and downsizing, I'm thankful for my mother-in-law and all the family things she has handed down to me. I have boxes full of her blue ribbons, her old family pictures and her poems...I treasure her quilts, paintings, and her most precious son...all things I will hold on to no matter what.

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Timeless Tuesday...Ironing

Do you still iron? With all the permanent press items in today's world is it still necessary?

I know we think of ironing as drudgery, but can you imagine using this old fashion iron like our great-grandmothers did?

drudg·er·y

ˈdrəj(ə)rē/

noun

1. hard, menial, or dull work.

   "domestic drudgery"

   synonyms:

   hard work, menial work, donkey work, toil, labor; chores "she swore her daughters would never be condemned to a life of drudgery"

This is what an iron looked like in the "olden" days. You might ask "Where's the cord?"  Nope, none, nah-dah! 

Today we plug our irons in and whip through a few pieces of clothing in minutes, never worrying about whether it will stay hot enough to last...

but, in great-grandma's day, you had to heat up the iron on the hot wood stove and try to keep it hot long enough to get the piece done.

My mother-in-law handed this family iron down to me. It's another piece of family history that needs to be displayed better. We need to see it everyday to remember the loving women who quietly cared for their families and made us who we are.

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Laughing Through Tears

I'm taking a moment here to remember when I had to say good-bye to a very dear old friend a few months ago...and then to laugh at myself just a little. 

Oprah used to call it "The Ugly Cry". The one where your eyes, nose...really your whole face...turn beet red. That's why I'm posting this picture in black and white instead of color. I really don't want you to see my red eyes and red nose in color. Wild Bill was kind enough to take these three pictures while I paused to commemorate a passing a few months ago.

Here's my old friend...a 1993 version of the World's Biggest, Oldest (and Continuously-Used) Combination Radio, 10-CD and Cassette Tape Player Boom Box. "He" was a big expenditure back then for a single mom, and my youngest daughter (a savvy 13 year old then) had to talk me into venturing into the new world of CD's as I clung to my cassette tapes! I sure got my money's worth with this one...

Man, I miss that big guy!  "He" shared my love for T. Graham Brown's Bumper-To-Bumper CD ("we" had three copies of it, just in case one wore out) and he (unlike some of the other family members) never objected to playing it over and over for me. 

Through the years, all the greats hung out with us...T-Graham, Roy Orbison, Billy Ray, Willy...they all sounded better on this old guy. 

Trying to entice me away from my beloved boom box, Wild Bill bought me two or three new ones over the last 20 years that we've been married, along with a few I-Pods and such. But I just couldn't give my first love up. Those other CD players? They were too flashy with strobe lights that kept me awake - or they held too few CD's - so up in the closet they went.

I continued to stick with my good friend. That is, until a few months ago, when my CD's started warbling when this old guy was playing them. I knew it was time, but still I left him on the kitchen counter for two days, occasionally trying yet another time to see if the warbling problem had cleared up. Finally, Wild Bill joined me in a brief and tearful (on my part, not Bill's...he was doing the happy dance in his mind I'm sure) little ceremony as I said a final farewell.

Wild Bill snapped these three pictures during my tearful good-bye, then we quickly left before the garbage truck came to do the pickup. I just couldn't watch. Those other CD players are still up in the closet waiting. I'm in mourning after all. 

I hope this post convinces you to let go of a few old things that might be clogging up your life too. Just bite the bullet and do it. 

Thanks for dropping by!