Category Archives: Flora and Fauna

Merry Month of May

Leave a reply

Here we are, already in May and it is almost gone!  It has been a busy month for David and me and I really don’t know how it went so fast.  If you are old enough, and you have to be older  than the hills to remember this, but there was a movie called “The Time Machine,” where some men in the 1800’ s invented a Time Machine.  One of them took a trip in it and out the time machine’s window he could see the seasons go rapidly by. A tree would get its leaves inthe Spring and grow and then lose its leaves in a matter of seconds. Fashions would change right before his eyes. Everything changed rapidly.  Well, that is how time feels like to me.  They say as you get older, time does go more quickly because you have so little of it left.  So days I think I will wake up and it is Spring and by the time I go to bed at night, it is Winter!  Sounds crazy, but that is how fast time seems to be going.  Many say we are in the last days.

The last days are prophetized in the Bible and it surely seems we may be in them.  I don’t know why I veered into this Biblical post, but I have been watching what is happening in our world, wars, people turning from God, people having no self restraint.  Just this week a man who had Trump signs on his property was almost beaten to death by a Trump hater.  Why?  This man did nothing but have an opinion and now he may die because of it.  I see teen-agers rioting and looting. Where are their parents?  So many people seem to have no moral compass.  The Bible says this will happen.  Just never thought it would happen in my lifetime.  I don’t know what your situation is. Whether you believe there is a God and that He sent his Son, Jesus to die for us so we won’t be kept out of Heaven because of our sins.  He took them upon Himself.  One day and it could be any day, He is coming for His church.  Those who put their faith and trust in Him and then all hell will break loose on Earth.  You think it is bad now?  During the Tribulation, which it is called in the Bible,there will be so many horrible things happen that people will beg to die.  Boy, did I not mean to be a Debbie Downer in this post, but if you have Jesus,you have nothing to worry about. As a believer, I am told to make disciples for Jesus and I really pray those reading this will accept Him as your Savior.  Maybe I have turned some of you off my blog now, but I would be wrong not to tell people what I know.  I have been friends with Jesus ever since I was twelve years old and I am telling you, He has kept watch over me all these years. I am not telling you I am a perfect person.  I am so very far from being one, but I try every day to be more like Jesus who loves us.  I hope one day I will meet you in Heaven.

Now that I have either turned you away or you are a Christian or have accepted Jesus now, I will continue on with my normal blog.  God just put it on my heart to tell you about Jesus.  I love Him and you enough to tell you about Him.

So, it is May…oh, I already said that.  David and I had a new patio poured this month. Years ago when we put in our pool we got estimates for a patio, but we could not afford to pay to have it done so David bought a lot of 2feet by 2 feet patio blocks and laid it out himself.  It served its purpose for years but as the years went by, the blocks became uneven and I fell a couple of times tripping on them so we decided this year we needed a professional to come in and make us a smooth patio.

Here is the patio before. I use to spend hours on my hands and knees pulling the weeds from between the blocks. Looks like something from Jurassic Park.

Here is the patio being poured.  One young man did all the labor from digging out the space,to laying down rocks( he even spread the leftover rocks onour drive which made our drive much better and he did not charge us for it) to spreading and smoothing the concrete.  And they say Americans won’t do the hard jobs?  He was a hard worker. The work ethic is alive.

Smooth, at last!  We love it. Now we are in the process of putting flowers around it and we bought a new bench to put on it to sit upon. The puppies love it, too.

Our strawberries were prolific. I froze several  quarts and we have been eating them almost every day for a month.  Fresh strawberries taste so much sweeter than those bought at the grocery store.  These strawberry plants will continue to spread like a ground cover so next year we should have lots more.

Our old dog, Molly will be eleven this year.  Seems like we just got her. She loves our new patio, too, although in this picture we still had our old one. We started giving her hemp oil for dogs and I really believe it has helped her.  She was getting a bad limp and it isn’t as bad.

We took most of the plants out of the greenhouse and planted some new ones in pots and planters outside.  I will have to show you pictures another day, but I will show you a plant we bought at Lowe’s the other day. Made me think of Little Shop of Horrors.

After doing some research on it, we found it is an invasive plant so it will stay in a pot and not get put with flowers in the ground!

Speaking of Audrey, I got her in my greenhouse.  Hope she doesn’t grow too big!  Ha!

Mother’s Day came and went.  This is my mother’s graduation picture.  She was senior class president.  A woman before her time.  She was a voracious reader. My aunt, her sister, once told me that when she was a girl she would even read while she was ironing.  Don’t know how she did that.  She taught me the love of reading and gardening. She also taught me how to cook through osmosis because I rarely cooked while I was home, but I watched how she did things and I am a reasonably good cook.  She was a wonderful mother and I still miss her.

My older son sent me flowers.They were very pretty.


The group I belong to on Facebook made little house quilts, but I decided to make little house potholders.

They were fun to make.

As our country’s 250th birthday is coming up, I have been making patriotic banners and quilts and bought a special flag to hang.  I will show you in another blog as this one is getting long and it is three o’clock in the morning and company is coming tomorrow so I best get to bed!

Hope you are having a lovely May.  Bye

 

 

 

Things I’m Loving

Leave a reply

 

Spring seems to go so fast here in Indiana.  No sooner than something blooms and poof! It’s gone.  The lilacs were so beautiful this year. Even the newer shrubs set on flowers and they smelled so good, but they are gone now.

The wisteria on our little cabin by the pool was just so gorgeous this year. I’ve been trying to grow wisteria for years.  Several years ago we went to a book signing of Susan Branch’s in Cincinnati, where she and her husband passed out wisteria seeds they had collected from their wisteria at their home.   So we brought those seeds home and planted them in pots and when they were larger, we transplanted them, one by the cabin and one by the house. Both plants took off, but this is the first year we have had such a gorgeous display of flowers.  The plant by the house is growing up the side of the house and birds are finding it to be a wonderful place to build their nests.  Birds also love this one on the cabin.  We watch them carrying nesting material into the shrub.

I finally have wisteria and I’m loving it.

For years I  tried to grow azaleas.  Once when we drove through the south and saw all the azaleas growing everywhere there, I wanted one, but thought our climate may be too cold.  Bought this azalea at Rural King a few years ago and this year it bloomed just like I was hoping it would.   I had another one in the front yard that bloomed so beautifully also.  It really must be a good year for flowers.

I have irises growing everywhere.  I love irises because they are so easy to grow and you almost can’t kill them.  They spread and you get a lot of flower for your buck.  I wish I had taken pictures of all the different colors of iris I have, from pinks, to rust, to yellow and these purple and white ones.

We made a trip to our favorite nursery where I bought a lot of flowers to plant in planters and I got this hanging basket for my shop.    Geraniums are another flower that is easy to grow.  You just have to dead head them a lot in order to keep flowers coming on, but they are worth it.

The snowball bush was loaded with snowballs.  Our old snowball bush wasn’t as pretty this year.  It needs a good trimming and I hope it will rebound next year as it looks a little puny right now.

My little garden in front of my shop has flowers coming up. Zinnias, lavender, nasturtiums, marigolds, cosmos and other flowers are coming up.  I just know this will be a thing of beauty later on in the Summer.

There’s even a chicken among the flowers.

I received these two hydrangea plants for Mother’s Day.

They were both set in this little planter, but I replanted them in the kitchen garden so they can grow big and hopefully have lots of hydrangeas in the future.

Speaking of blossoms.  Here are three of the sweetest ones.

Molly, Sugar and Lucy.  My sweet pups who keep me busy.  Lucy LOVES to play fetch. She’d do it 24/7 if I would play with her.   She has me well trained.

 

David finally got the pool opened and has taken advantage of it.  It’s still a bit too cool for me.

It makes me cold to watch him swimming in it sometimes.  Brrrr.  The water has to be in the eighties for me to go swimming.  We will have those days before long.

I have been mindlessly knitting two inch squares for one of my Christmas projects.  Let’s just say I’m loving what I am making with these and will show you closer to Christmas.

I am using a lot of my leftover yarn from knitting stockings.

Here is a little peek at some things I have sewn.  Oh, I love what is in those rolled up little packages.    This week I’m working on aprons.   They aren’t as fun for me to sew for some reason, but I have so much fabric I need to use that would make cute aprons.

That’s all I have for you right now.   David is looking forward to surgery this Summer which won’t be fun for either of us, so I’m getting as much completed as I can before he has it done.

Hope you are enjoying the warmer days.  We did have really bad weather go through our town this week and a lot of people were without electricity.  We weren’t, but our neighbor lost a huge limb out of a tree.  I’m thankful all we lost was the internet.  Bye.

 

 

 

Glorious Spring

Leave a reply

Spring is like youth. It’s beautiful and fleeting. When you are young, you spend all your time trying to be older and then when you are really old, you wonder where the years went.  Youth is wasted on the young, one famous person once said.  Maybe not wasted, but we don’t appreciate being young while we are.

Spring is so like that. It comes  and goes so quickly, you hardly have a chance to enjoy it.  Right now everything is in its glory.

The Viburnum is especially pretty this year.

The Daffodils have been so pretty, but their days are almost over for another year.

I love PInk Flowering Almond.

The Redbud. One of the first harbingers of Spring. And they grow wild here in Indiana. Aren’t we blessed?  I did plant this one which came up in our back yard years ago.

Our Jeep goes right along with all the Spring colors!   By the way, the Jeep’s color is called Snazzleberry.

Our neighbors’ lilac is so lovely and we get to enjoy it, too.

I’m preparing my little garden outside my shop.  I find that if I plant things here, they won’t be dug up by pups.  They dug up three of the peonies in the back yard. We did replant them and put a fence around them, but peonies don’t like being moved, so it might be a few years before they do any good.

We went to Lowes yesterday and I bought two more large flower pots, some pansies and three other plants that I can’t remember their names at the present, but I will show you once they are planted.   One is a low growing, spreading grass and I don’t know where we will plant that yet.

Easter came and went so fast I can hardly believe we celebrated it. Our church choir sang a cantata which was lovely and then we had dinner with nine family members.

Our granddaughter and her husband(I still find that funny to say) were here. They have almost been married for a year already.

Our daughter and her family.  These are our “youngest” grandchildren now.

Our son and his wife and son were here as well. We didn’t get their pictures for some reason.  I always mean to get pictures of everyone and I always leave out someone.

David picked Daffodils for the table.

The Christmas cactus bloomed for Easter, too.

Our son and his wife had visited a nursery the day before and was I surprised when they gifted me with some presents.

This is the top of the garden stand.  Looks like angel wings, doesn’t it?   I could put birdseed in it, but it’s too pretty to have birds pooping all over it so I will probably just set it in the garden where I can enjoy it.

 O

Our son thought he got the best present for me, though.

A rooster windmill.   Yes, I do love it.

It’s been given a real workout with the windy days we’ve been having.

They also brought me a Russian Sage to plant. Or, as my son calls it, a Ukranian Sage.  He even printed it on the tag.  Our son, by the way is a Russian linguist and said he wishes he could go back into the military to help fight.  I’m glad he can’t because I worried enough about him while he was serving in the Air Force.

Miss Honey Sugar Dumpling,   Sugar, for short. She is such a sweet dog.

Cocoa Lucy Belle or Lucy for short is always and I mean always wanting to play. In fact, as soon as I finish this post I’m going outside and throwing her some balls.

It’s been a special time and now we are getting ready for all the work planting gardens and keeping the yard entails.  I’m also busy sewing for my Christmas sale. I know it seems far, far away, but the time goes so fast, it will be here before we know it.  I also got more fabric.  I don’t think I have enough. Ha!

Hope you are enjoying Spring or maybe it’s Fall where you live. Sometimes I can’t get my mind around the fact that when I am in snow, others are in Summer and when I am in Summer others are freezing.  Enjoy every day of Spring. I know I plan to. Bye.

 

 

 

A Summer Drive

2 Replies

David and I bought a Jeep last Spring and haven’t really driven it many places except to work and the grocery since we got it, so one day last week we decided to take a drive through southern Indiana.   Indiana in Summer is so beautiful.  Everything is just bursting in bloom and leafing out.  The corn is growing and most fields will be knee high by the fourth of July.  That means the corn will be ready to harvest after the first frost.

Farmers are getting in their hay. It’s been good weather for it.

Bales of hay laying in the fields assures the farmer he will have feed for his cows this Winter.

I’ve seen my daddy baling hay many times while my brothers walked along behind the wagon he would pull and stacked the hay bales that would taken into the barn.  So much of the hay baled today are the big round bales and oftentimes they are left out in the field.

We saw this huge field of hay bales and it looked so picturesque.

The farmer’s pond was below the hayfield and I bet his cows were standing around it on this hot day getting a cool drink of water.

Farmers use to have barns that looked like this.  So many barns are going into disrepair.

Like this one. One time this was a grand barn full of animals and hay.  Now it stands as a sad reminder that if you don’t repair a roof, the rest of the building will soon be destroyed by the wind and rain.

It’s what happened to the barn on my family’s farm after it was sold.  The roof came off and the barn caved in. So sad.

At one time a farmer’s wife probably planted this rose and now it grows wild along the fence beside the old barn.  This barn looks like someone takes care of it.

Barns aren’t the only buildings that are falling into the ground. Old houses pepper the landscape along the backroads of Indiana.

Then we pass well cared for homesteads that you know the people love and want to keep it up.  This house is just beautiful and all the out buildings are in very good repair.

We couldn’t decide whether this was a newly built barn or someone’s house.  It has a lot of windows, but it looks like a barn.

We wondered why the trees were like this in just his area and we saw this sign.

Pin Oak trees in a wetland.

Such a sweet picture of mama and her baby.

We passed the Hoosier Horse Camp where people can bring their horses and camp and there are covered stalls outdoors for the horses to stay in when they aren’t being ridden.  How much fun would that be to camp with your horse?

There were ponds in many yards and fields.

Someone had a mailbox high in the air and had Air Mail painted on it.

Caution:  Death scene ahead!!  If you don’t want to see it, don’t scroll any farther.

 

 

 

 

 

We came across this grisly scene.

A dead deer in a field and many turkey vultures having their dinner.

There was a bunch of them. We disturbed them when they stopped and many flew away.

This one refused to budge.  I call these birds God’s scavengers because they scavenge the countryside in roads and fields and eat all the dead animals they find. I can see them lazily skimming the air currents above our house all the time looking for some small animal to eat.  I tell them to stay away from my chickens!  If not for these birds, there would be a lot of dead animals laying around and smelling so I appreciate them.

Our ride took us to Madison, Indiana, a little town on the Ohio River. It has a lot of cute little shops and it has many tourists that come visit.  I use to always come here for fabric at Margie’s fabric shop, before quilting became a fad, because she carried the old reproduction fabrics I could not find anywhere else.  There is a wonderful antique mall here and a park along the river with benches all along it where people can come sit and watch the boats go by.  They have a regatta every year with speed boats and that brings thousands to this tiny town.  David and I found a bench and sat and watched all the river activity.

We saw this bird sitting on a rock looking for fish.

The more pictures I took of it, the longer its neck seemed to get!

There were several ducks swimming on the river and down the way, children were leaping off a pier and swimming. Oh, to be a kid again.

Madison has a beautiful courthouse and this statue on its lawn.

We saw this tree all a bloom, but I didn’t know what kind it was.

It was loaded with white flowers.

Anyone know what this is?  It sure was pretty.

I have the sweetest little plant in my kitchen garden called Mallow and this year it has flowered very well.

The flowers look like tiny Rose of Sharon flowers.

I am going to have to try to paint these.  They are so pretty.

I’ve been doing some projects and this is one of them.

That white mailbox I showed you a while ago is now painted.

I copied this planter. I’m not an artist, but I do love to paint.  I’m working on a larger mailbox painting quilt blocks on it. The watering can behind these was painted by one of my grandsons years ago when I had them for camp and this was a project.

And last, but certainly not least, David cut some rhubarb for me the other day and I made the first pie I have made in a very long time.  I can’t remember the last time I had made a pie, but this one turned out very well.

It didn’t last very long, I will tell you that.

Hope your Summer is as lovely as mine has been.  Bye.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Check

1 Reply

We’ve had a busy and happy month while David has been off. We had several things we wanted to do during this time.

We wanted to have a cookout. Check, we had two.

We wanted to do some things with the grandboys. Check. We took them candy shopping and had them overnight and we had a fun time.

We wanted to see a movie. Check. We saw Aladdin and it was delightful. We all liked it so much when we came home I found our Video of Disney’s cartoon Aladdin and watched that and we all broke out into song  during the magic carpet song. I love that song.  And Robin Williams was such a good genie in it. I thought Will Smith was a great genie in the new Aladdin.

We wanted to swim. Check. I’ve been in the pool more this month than I have most Summers. Mainly because it’s been HOT.

We wanted to take a trip. Check. We went to Nashville for two days and had so much fun.

It’s been a good month. David returns to work Monday and I’m going to miss him being home all day.  He’s got a lot of work done around the house, too and that’s been nice.

We are going to go to our property in Brown Country tomorrow so David can try out his new bush hog.  We have three acres and haven’t done much with it, so David wants to clear it up a bit.

We’ve spent a lot of time sitting on our porch looking at our garden and the birds.  We have so many cardinals flying around I’m hoping they stick around through the Winter.

We call these Tiger lilies but our son-in-law told us this is Blackberry lily because the seed pods look exactly like blackberries, and they do!   I’ll try to remember to show them to you when they appear.

From one Hibiscus plant a neighbor gave me years ago it has grown to many Hibiscus plants all over the yard.  I love plants that plant themselves.

And they come in white, pink and dark pink.

This is phlox, but earlier I could not remember what it was called. David and I tried and tried to think of its name, but it just would not come to mind. Then, one night, after the lights were out and David was almost asleep and I was laying there thinking, the flower’s name just popped into my mind and I turned to David and just said, “Phlox.”   And he knew exactly what I meant. Then I thought to myself, phlox in sox in a box. And now, I never forget it’s name again!

The zinnias are in full bloom.

One of my top five favorite flowers. Easy to grow. Cheap. And you get a big bang for your buck.

And the lilies have just been amazing. I think all the rain we had earlier in the Summer has helped all the flowers.

This makes me think of fireworks.

And these are just gorgeous.  I’m taking in all the glorious flowers and will try to remember them when there is a foot of snow on the ground.

I can’t tell you what this is even though I planted it, but only one plant came up and it has all these flowers on it.

When the old porch steps were torn off, I saved them because they turned into the best flower boxes.  Here alyssum is growing in one.

David repurposed our old mailbox post into a birdhouse holder.  Not much gets thrown away.

I’ve been waiting for the perfect place to put this birdhouse.

And this one we got just last week at an antique store.

Probably won’t have nesting birds in them this year as it’s a little late in the season, but all our other birdhouses have had no vacancies all Spring and Summer.

I have done a little sewing. On the blog Country Threads Chicken Scratch, Mary Etherington had this pattern available.

Uncle Sam. I got him done just in time to put him up for the 4th.

I actually made two, but one of them is not Uncle Sam.

She’s Aunt Samantha. See her pretty earrings?  We girls are patriotic too!  She looks a little bit like Boy George with her braids  alongside her head.

She wears a floral blouse with the American flag emblazoned on the front. She is so proud of our country.

Meanwhile, Uncle Sam wears a shirt with patriotic words on it and a flag also emblazoned on the front.  Both will be brought out for all patriotic days. Flag Day, the  4th, Memorial Day.

I love the United States and could not pass up this towel I found in Nashville. David and I have been to almost all the states except Hawaii and Rhode Island. We have a wonderful country full of wonderful people when you take all the politics out of the equation.   I can honestly say I have never met any angry or mean people in any of the states. (Except for that one store owner in Ohio who yelled at us for parking where the Amish parked. ) We didn’t know!!   So don’t believe all the news you see and hear.

Hope you have been able to check off some things you wanted to do this Summer. Only one month left.   Enjoy it.  Bye.