In my garden

Of course I couldn’t help myself during my last visit at the garden center. More veggies. Some beets. I never tried to grow those before, so we’ll see how that goes.
And some all time favorite (though not my favorite meal): endives.



In the herb bed things are growing very well. That’s peppermint and lemon balm, and in the right behind it you can just see the cola herb I planted (it has a different official name, but it smells like the soda).  To the left there’s chamomile, but the little white flowers are other flowers, just for the beauty of it (and for picking, but I can’t have flowers in the house with all the hay fever going on).







The next batch of radishes is coming up already.



And some carrots are too (but just a few).



The lettuce isn’t coming up at all. I sowed it in that little corner of the bed, but nothing is happening. Next year I’m ordering biological seeds again (I had those two years ago, they did so much better than the garden center stuff I have now).



Luckily my three sisters are doing quite well. It’s a bit full and messy, but I love seeing it all grow together.



The first zucchini flowers. Love spotting these.



Not in the garden, but on the roofterrace: a salad bar. I bought some lettuce seedlings and planted them in our old barbecue (it has a few holes – rust- in the bottom, but some anti root fabric (how do you call that in English?) took care of that). I hardly ever see snails up there (spiders I do see, but that’s another story), so I hope to outsmart them like this and finally have some home grown salad this summer.



It is growing well. The picture above is from when I planted them (the 26th), the one below is from this morning
.


Oh, and the red is meant to be, I’m aiming for a happy mixed salad and bought some red lettuce too. I was wondering why it was called red when I planted them, since there was only a little red in the leaves, but now I understand ;-)

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Summer

Sometimes I feel like I’d better stop blogging and taking pictues, because I’m constantly repeating myself. But that's life. Cycles. And what would my blog be without these familiar summer pictures?

:: knitting on the roof terrace



:: “farm fashion” in accidently matching colors



:: laundry drying outside



:: trips to the garden center


:: and flowers, of course

 

A bit of thrifting

I did a bit of thrifting today and I thought it would be fun to take you with me. Wanna come?


I didn’t buy any of this, but now I regret it. That little tin (1 euro) is so beautiful. And I also love that iron cup on the right. It looks and feels handmade and it was only 50 cents.


I liked these too. Cast iron feet, nice glass. But I have no place to put them, so I left them behind.


Metal seems to be a theme today, since these three are metal too. I don’t like the color, but I do like the design. And it was only 5 euro for the three of them.

 
I love, love love sewing baskets and this one almost came home with me. But I don’t really need it, so I put it back. Oh if only I wasn’t so reasonable…

 
Only 5 euro for all these tennisballs. If I had (small) kids or dogs I would have taken them…


Yeah right. I don’t think so.

 
I wish he could, maybe then this cute dress/tunic would have fit me.


Funny, I realized this morning that sofa’s like this catch my eye because one of my most favorite bloggers has one (and blogged a lot about wanting one before she got it). Luckily her blog also tells me it doesn’t work for a family to hang out on and since I don’t have a library nor a studio it stayed right where it was, saving me 250 euro (and a lot of dismay from my family too, I think).


This makes me feel nostalgic, although I know we never had one at home. I didn’t buy it, since I never use gadgets like this (I’ve had some).


Of course there were plates and dishes and bowls calling my name. There always are. If my house wasn’t so small I’d have an incredible amount of these.


Blue ivy? Hmn… not sure. Which is fine, since there were a lot of these to be found in the piles of plates in the second store I visited.


Never use cups and saucers, so I’m not allowed to buy them. But I did like the blue ones.


I always think it’s a bit sad to find these homemade paintings in a thrift shop. This one was kind of nice. But I also don’t have a lot of walls to cover, so I left it there.


Always checking to see if a piece of furniture is good handwork. This is.

 
To be honest I really, really want this little dresser. If only to save the beautiful wood from being covered with chalkpaint which seems to be the thing to do lately (sometimes it’s nice, but in this case it would be a shame – imho). But I have yet to think of a good spot for it, so I fear it’s doomed.

No, bookcase. I know you’ve been trying to talk me in to buying you for weeks now, but I just don’t have room for you. Even though you have the perfect shallow shelves that fit just one row of books. I do like that very much, you know that. But I’d have to buy another house to fit you in and that would be way too expensive, don’t you think?

Well, there you have it. Sixteen pictures of things I didn’t buy. I saved so much money ;-)
But what did I buy, you ask?


This. A Staub Dutch oven. It was 7,50 euro and that’s really cheap (look here for proof of that). And I know I’ll use it a lot (I have another one, but this one is smaller- which is good when kids are moving out).

Yep, that’s what I call a happy ending to a fun bit of thrifting ;-)

In my garden

I haven’t had much time and energy to actually do some actual gardening. So, my garden is from from looking as good as it did last year. But still, there are things that are doing great despite my neglect.

I didn’t do really well planting these “three sisters”. I just put everything (corn, beans, zucchini) in the ground at once and didn’t realize you’re supposed to start with the corn and add the rest later. And that seems the right way, since my corn isn’t high enough yet to support the beans. But we’ll see how this ends. These are all easy-to-grow vegetables after all.



My strawberries are going strong. I completely ignore them, but each year they come back and give me some wonderful sweet treats.
 



The borage is doing great too. It’s really big and healthy (I bought just one small plant). I haven’t tried eating it yet (both the leaves and the flowers are supposed to be edible), but I love how it looks, especially when the sun is shining.
 

Radish. Also an easy grower. I had a really nice little harvest and immediately sowed some more.



And while I was at it, I also sowed some lettuce. The snails got my first try, but let’s see if they’re willing to share this time ;-)

A simple hat

My knitting has been very slow this year. I’ve been working on a sweater, but frogged it. And then I started knitting squares for Knit-a-Square, but I wasn’t really enjoying it. So I sort of stopped knitting at all.

Last week I decided to knit something just for fun. Something I used to enjoy knitting. And so, of course, I cast on for a hat. The little accent brim is based on my very favorite hat pattern, the rest is just a simple standard hat. I have no idea what to do with it (it’s far from perfect, KAS has a surplus of hats and I rarely wear them myself).

But I did enjoy making it. So that’s good.

In my garden

Friendship

Pictures don’t do this beautiful quilt justice. I should have waited taking pictures of it until my house was in a state that made it possible to move it around a bit. But today I decided to start taking daily (or at least regular) pictures in and around the house again to kick this blog back into action and immediately landed on this favorite corner of mine. And than I realized this post should be about the quilt, not the corner.

I got the quilt in the mail last week. A gift from my friend Elizabeth. We met through our blogs (hers is here) and somehow commenting and emailing grew into a real friendship. A friendship that, despite the fact that we never really met and live thousands of miles apart (she’s in Minnesota) is real enough to make her sent a handmade quilt that she’s been working on for years to me. I can hardly express how well timed its arrival was. Let’s just say I really needed a bit of love and friendship that day. And it continues to bring a smile on my face every time I see it.

Thank you so much Elizabeth! (I sent you an email about this, but I’m not sure you got it).