As a child my very favorite things were art and craft supplies, journals and photo albums. This was, of course, in the era prior to our current scrapbooking culture (which I, supringly, never had any interest in. But I digress…). In an effort to instill the love for creative documentation of a young life into my daughter, we created a memory board for her today.

She would have enjoyed the project more, I suspect, had she been able to help. A pile of nails and tacks and a hammer and mommy’s overwhelming need to have the fabric stretched perfectly evenly was not conducive to a group project with a four year old. But she was a great couchside cheerleader!

Below, my daughter, Sidney, rocking out at her preschool “graduation”.

Though my garden season didn’t begin so smoothly, I can honestly say that the chickens have been fantastic. They are big girls now! I haven’t seen any eggs yet, though the alpha seems to be so advanced that we keep checking every day, even though they aren’t due for egg production for another month or so.
No, I haven’t painted the coop yet (but we bought the paint!). Yes, I’ve been lazy (the summers in Florida are a bitch!). But I don’t hear any complaints from the girls. They love rice spinach and have pretty much snubbed their nose at chicken feed. They wait patiently (ok, not too patiently) for our meal scraps and I don’t think they enjoy anything more in the world than a little rainstorm. They get in the mud and bathe in it. They look like little stealth ninjas when they are done.

My dear Daddy delivered the coop! This beautiful creation weighed a shit-ton but was deposited, no serious injuries involved, into our backyard this very weekend. I will have to wait until mid-March (after my last art show of the season) before I can paint and mural it, but it looks amazing already!

Small but beautiful! They went into a rice and chicken dish that very night!

Strangely enough, it felt unnatural to dig something out of the ground and eat it. As if I may accidentally ingest something poisonous or hallucinogenic; as if the earth could have tainted something I planted with my very hands! I am, I suppose, the product of a grocery store generation. I have forgotten where such treasures come from. I am reeducating myself and teaching my daughter along the way.

The green onions I planted and harvested are Onion Lilia.

The Coop Door Mural!

(In case you’re wondering – my dad, the person building our beautiful coop for us, is “Paw-Paw”. The chicken tattoo is paying homage to the coop creator.)

And to the victor go the spoils!  In this case, the victor is the almighty gourd and, well, let’s hope none spoil.

It seems like a match made in heaven, me and my gourds. As an artist, this is a resource I could certainly use. There are many crafts that involve gourds, from very functional bowls and drums to merely decorative gourd art. I’m sure that I (in all my spare time) can find a use for a few, at least. The rest I can sell to my fellow artists and craftspeople. Maybe donate some to a local high school arts program.

I’ve already purchased my seeds. I have large bottle gourds (the kind most people are used to), snake gourds (which, as the name implies, snake around on the ground into really fluid fruits), large dipper gourds (which are shaped, for lack of a better analogy, like polite penguins) and goblin egg gourds (think large poultry eggs – but green).

I have the perfect spot in the yard for them. It’s cut off from the rest of the yard by a gate and it gets the first sun in the morning. It’s a mess right now (because no one ever sees it and I couldn’t come up with a plan for it until now) but my project before the end of Winter is to have it groomed and waiting for multiple gourd transplants come Spring. It’s 10×30’. Time will tell if that is big enough for a small backyard gourd farm. (Please keep in mind that I use “farm” in the humble, most ironic, sense of the word. Perhaps gourd “nook” is more appropriate, but it lacks a certain vision and pizzazz.)

Behold, my vision:

I am arriving at similar conclusions when considering both spices and exotic pepper blends: lack of passion.

Though I find lined baskets of colorful ground spices intoxicatingly beautiful, aside from an occasional fresh basil leaf in my omelet I don’t really use spices! I subscribe to the theory that spices serve only to disguise the taste of already tasty food!

Though I love the mystery behind growing rare peppers and peppercorns for my very own custom blends, which I see as a way to stretch my creative muscles, I’m not a big fan of peppers either! I always order my Tai mild. I growl when my husband covers my delicious dinners with Tabasco sauce.

Hmpf.

As a woman and a lover of all things sweet, vanilla appeals to me greatly.

While doing a bit of research on the allusive Vanilla planifolia variegata (the vanilla orchid), I am discovering two things. A beautiful flat-leafed vine, which would be stunning hugging rows of trellises in my yard…and a daunting introduction to an intensely laborious hobby.

There are the years of growing (daily watering, weekly weeding and debugging, monthly organic fertilization) before the first pods even appear, delicate hand-pollination, not to mention a lengthy fermentation process to obtain those sticky black vanilla beans we all know and love.

Still not entirely discouraged by the prospect, I have been searching the internet for plants. I have found one supplier. ONE.  With shipping, I am looking at a total of $30.00. Per plant. Not exactly the kind of startup financial obligation I had in mind. How many plants would be needed to fill my “plot”? Approximately 15? Yowza.

I don’t have a very large backyard. Especially for one who has hobby farming on the brain. I do have a very roomy/average yard for my little city-town, luckily.

I don’t have any illusions that I will be living a self-sustaining lifestyle, or making a living selling organic tomatoes at our Saturday’s Farmer Market. I would, however, like to grow something back there. Something different, a road less traveled – something that I might be able to sell small batches of, just for fun.

I have pondered and researched and bounced ideas off of my very patient and supportive husband. I have narrowed my plans to four possible farming ventures:

-vanilla beans
-specialty peppercorn blends
-gourds
-spices

Much more pondering ahead, lots more research, perhaps chucking them at Dear Husband a bit more forcibly. I will probably post some logs in the coming weeks exploring each in more detail. I wonder which will come out on top…

…Perhaps I’ll try a little of it all.

I’ve never been a fan of the stereotypical pet names. Fluffy, Rex, Oreo, Snowball, Midnight. All those can hit the road, Jack.  I’ve never swung the other way and named my pets Martha or Isobel or Jonathan either.

My pets have simple names with a little bit of quirk that err on the “humanish” side: Mango, Tatum, Fig, Whale, Bayou, Lola, Potem, Blue and Nine.

With my chickens, I think I will have some serious fun! Zelda is high on my list. As is Astrid. Maybe Xena. Jezebel, perhaps. Is there a guide book called “The Wacked-Out Woman’s Guide to Crazy Chicken Names”? I should Google it.

The inside should be pink
The outside should be green
Behold, the most unripe watermelon I have ever seen

Now, only a mere four years later, I am working on a new sweater for the poor child of store bought winter wear! Needless to say, she has grown out of the one above. The new one will be a sweater vest with hood. I thought I’d crochet this one. It’s been a while since I’ve picked up the hooks!

My progress!:

It will be able to slide out for cleaning and each divider lifts out! I squealed when I saw this!