tidy-eclectic......journal # 32 6/27/2010

Women Walking on the Beach-Joanqin Sorolla Y Bastida

Outlook 
sunny and serene

On my mind

The ocean its moist air and mellow background sounds... ready for another California Coast adventure. With all the people moving away from there to all the other places I've lived there has to be a bit of empty space now.

Keeping a Home

Pantry Principle area 1--for the first time since we moved here, I had enough strength to weed the whole arbor bed at once. It looks great,  and I'm grateful that I could do it.

Deliciousness

Spencer and I have a date to make mushroom-spinach ravioli for dinner tonight along with a California Dream salad and local melon for dessert.

Toward Real Education

I really don't like Botany for Gardeners, one of the books for my course. I'm getting through it with the help of the Botany Coloring Book. It's not the first time I've studied Botany but the first time I've been responsible to actually know it for a grade. This makes me a bit more nervous about really getting it. Reading  Food for Everyone last year I gained a lot of practical agronomy/botany knowledge, but his chemicals are not organic whatever they say. However this along with EcoFarm are the very best I've read on the subject so far.

Toward Rhythm and Beauty

Morning has always been my most productive time of day with my routine pretty much set in stone. I've found the evenings right after dinner to be another such time. As I walk around with my watering wand, communing with my flowers and herbs,  little weeds are easily seen and easily dispatched.  Hive inspection is another early evening activity, which I enjoy.

Bee News

The activity in hive 3, our newest colony, has picked up tremendously this week. Hopefully I'll find it needs a super after inspection.  Saving for a honey extractor. 

Garden Gate

The raised beds on the carport are doing famously with tomatoes, potatoes, beans, cucumbers, peppers, egg plant, and herbs loving the sunniest location in our little kingdom. The back garden is doing better than expected with peas, sunflowers, cayenne, broccoli, squash, and beans. The arbor bed is cleared with oodles of strawberries as a ground cover--slowly we're planting perennials to have 3 seasons of blooming--will plant 4 mini dwarf nectarines and peaches this fall. The front garden is doing wonderfully, since we dug out the clay and replaced it with composted horse manure. However one espalier apple seems to have lost a branch in our last cold snap. Looking for someone who knows grafting. Garlic, squash and flowers look fantastic-front blueberries struggling--back ones look fantastic. Should have a bumper crop of raspberries and currents if all goes well

Biblo Fix

This week I had fun reading two from Mary Jane Butters, Outpost and Ideabook.  She was LDS as a child, her mother being what sounded like Relief Society President. Her books are RS homemaking meeting in book form. Relief Society must have made a big impression on her. Any way they are cute books, but her style is shabby, junky chic. Mine is tidy-eclectic.

Appearance

black cotton peasant skirt, plum peasant blouse, sandals...very summery, very comfortable... go well with my tanning skin

Scripture Meditations 

 "The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the dessert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice even with joy and singing..." Isaiah 35: 1-2

Praying For

This week our grandone of the week is  Sweet Samantha.  She is a wonderful, curious, intelligent, joyful little dear. I pray for her health and safety, her ability to be guided by God, and her desire to be a kind sister and obedient daughter. I pray that her parents will be inspired to know the proper way to channel her energy and intelligence. I pray that the world will be a safe place for her to grow up and  that children everywhere will be blessed with necessities and joy and peace.

What's Coming

After over three weeks as a widow, my hubby is coming home. When he travels, my life is a bit empty. Maybe some think I'm pathetic, but he's my best friend. When all others fail me, he is constant and kind.

Commitment to Loveliness

I've gotten a bit lax with my areas, since he has been gone--sort of apathetic and recovering from illness. It's not like me to leave things lying where the fall, but that's what has happened. So I need to get things back in order.  Still want to finish that batch of napkins.

Simple Pleasure

working in the soil to create a place of beauty

Images From My Life 
Can anyone out there help me identify this lovely creature. It loves shade here in the hot desert. It's height is rather upright and 24-30 inches tall. It's drought resistant and   perennial, spreading with seed. The flowers are about the size of a dime.

Poetry I'm Enjoying-

I Saw From the Beach 

Thomas Moore 

I saw from the beach, when the morning was shining,

A bark o'er the waters move gloriously on;

I cam when the sun o'er that beach was declining,

The bark was still there, but the waters were gone.

And such is the fate of our life's early promise,

So passing the spring-tide of joy we have known;

Each wave that we danced on at morning ebbs from us,

And leaves us, at eve, on the bleak shore alone.