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Fall Garden and Home Outdoor Decor

October 15, 2017 By Laura 2 Comments

Fall is here, and while nature readies itself to bless us with the year’s annual grand finale display of beauty in New England, our gardens had found it time to wither and fade, with an early prep for a long winter rest. Especially since we opted to not plant anything new for a fall harvest this first season in our new garden area.  We still have lots of carrots in the ground, and we’re still picking peppers of all kinds. But everything else was pretty much done. So with a good wait in front of us before a pure blanket of white snow covers all that is post-life and ugly, we wanted to keep the beauty going a little longer, with some festive Fall garden and home outdoor decor.  We thought you might enjoy seeing the photos of our efforts.

We worked with an abundance of the typical Fall elements: Glorious mums in a variety of shades, pumpkins of various kinds, straw bales, cornstalks, and gourds. But we also planted our first big arrangement in a huge whiskey barrel, and we’re excited to show you that!


We had started getting everything ready to go, but then Storm Jose’ was heading our way. So we put many plants out behind our house in a more sheltered area to wait. Besides, we were also still having some days that felt a whole lot like summer. The heat is no good for many of these cool-loving plants, so keeping them in the shade until things cooled down a bit, was the right thing to do, also. (Even though I was so excited to get working on making everything FALL TIME, like the calendar said!)
The days came where I couldn’t wait any longer.  So we got to work over a weekend, and banged it all out. 
Then we smiled.
–


Here’s an overvew of the fenced garden. We’ll give you a closer look around in a minute. But let’s talk about the fresh layer of straw over all of the beds first. We use it all gardening season long around the plants in the beds as a mulch, to protect the soil from the sun. It does a great job of keeping the beds moist, and not drying out to a dush in the heat. It’s important to be sure you are using straw in gardening though, as opposed to hay, because hay has seeds, and unless you are going for wheat fields, you really don’t want all these seeds falling on your garden soil.

The straw is not only a beautiful golden color for a Fall look, but throughout the bitter winter here in New England it helps protect any perrenial plants buried in the garden beds, holding in some heat from the earth. Come spring thaw, what is broken down can just be turned into the soil with other more enriching  compost.

Ok, less talk, more photos, now.


Our garden-entry gates.
Come on in.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: FALL Home Decor, Gardening, Home Decor, Home Page, Seasonal Home decor, The Homestead Tagged With: corn-stalks, fall-decor, fall-festive-gardens, fall-gardens, hay-bales, mums, outdoor-fall-decor, pumpkins

Early August Gardens, at Our House.

August 11, 2011 By Laura 6 Comments

00_

Just a quick update on how our gardens have grown. It’s August now.

The most exciting recent development, is we finally have some watermelons growing!

001_watermelon-patch They are still fairly small. I forget what variety we planted, so maybe they won’t get much bigger.

002_watermelon-patch
I need to find the seed packet, and find out, because we’ve got a (passed due) deadline here!

 

003_watermelon-patch We need to use the ‘Watermelon Patch’ as our ‘Pumpkin Patch’ soon!  If not yesterday.  If you were with us last year, you may recall we planted our pumpkins way too soon.  We had to harvest them by early October, and so we didn’t have any WE grew, by Halloween.  : ( But apparently, it takes 120 days to grow pumpkins!

That leaves us with…..83 days. Oh dear. This year we’re late!

004 I think we’ll just plant pumpkin seeds tomorrow, right in there with the watermelon vines. There’s room!

005 Are we blessed, with kids who LOVE to weed, or what?

I can answer that.

“Yes we are!”

006_cherry-tomatoes-on-vine Cherry Tomatoes, on the vine.

(The bigger kind.)

007_cherry-tomatoes-on-vine More Cherry Tomatoes.

And some other varieties too….

008_cherry-tomatoes-on-vine

009_tomatoes-on-vine

010_cherry-tomatoes-gardening

011_tomato-gardening
Soon, we’ll have Tomatoes to eat every day.  (LOVE tomato sandwiches.)  Right now, we are eating Cucumber spears every day, and we love it!! The kids eat tons.   The kids dip in Ranch Dressing. I like just Salt & Pepper.

 

012_green-bell-pepper-plant
We’ve got just a few Green Bell Peppers growing.  My mother-in-law was right. We should had started earlier, when we started with seed in the house.

Always learning as we grow.

Oh my favorite this year….

013_sugar-snap-pea-trellis
Our Sugar Snap Peas.

I just love even the SIGHT of them, growing up our trellis and twine.

  014_sugar-snap-peas

015_fresh-sugar-snap-pea It doesn’t seem we got as many as we should have?

016_sugar-snap-pea
But maybe that is because we can’t stop eating them!  Never enough.

Can you believe we have not gotten as far as to even COOK some yet? They are simply sweet, crunchy, divine, and addicting, raw and right off the vines.

017_sugar-snap-pea-flower
I love the sweet little flowers they put off, too.

 

018_hornet-on-wood1 There are constantly wasps collecting wood grain, to make nests somewhere.  I’ve come not mind them around.  It’s actually interesting to watch them work.  So far, I still have a trellis so, it’s fine.

 

019_sunflowers
Lastly, we have some sunflowers, that the kids began to grow inside, and replanted in the gardens.  They make me smile.

And so do your visits here to our blog.  Thank you coming by. How are your gardens/flowers fairing?  Please take a moment to say hi, and invite us over to your place, if you’d like.  Most think we’re pleasant enough folks. : )




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Filed Under: Gardening, Photography, The Homestead Tagged With: garden-bed, Gardening, gardens-in-August, gardens-in-early-August, green-bell-peppers, New-England-gardening, pumpkin patch, pumpkins, sugar-snap-peas, sunflowers, tomatoes, triplets, triplets-gardening, wasp, watermelon-patch, watermelons

Getting Creative with Pumpkins

September 29, 2008 By Laura 3 Comments

unique-pumpkin-decorating_

On Sunday after mass, we went and picked up our pumpkins, having planned to paint some for our home decor.  It’s such a wonderful and inspiring time of year, and we were really looking forward to this project.

The kids worked together on this white pumpkin, below.  The polka dot theme was inspired by September’s issue of Better Home and Gardens.  The circles were embossed with an plunger-type apple corer.  While the directions instructed to insert the completely cored out pieces from other colored pumpkins into other colored pumpkin’s holes, (which is a great idea), we opted to just just partially carve a circle, and paint it in. We didn’t have enough different colored pumpkins to do the other way anyway. The kids all worked on this one together.

kids-painting-pumpkins

And it came out great!  So fun and whimsical!!

polka-dot-pumpkin

I was really excited about a design idea I saw in a magazine last year.  That particular project suggested using paper doilies as a template.  After going to 3-4 stores that were out of doilies completely, or didn’t carry them, I came up with Plan B….have my husband cut some designs out of vinyl, and use those as a template! : )  Seemed like a great idea, but applying a flat piece of sticky vinyl to a very round pumpkin, was a challenge and 1/2, to say the very least.

pumpkin-masking_

I had intended on painting it with some black acrylic I bought, until we tried some gouache markers we had.  They colored in like a dream…the coverage was unbelievably perfect, fast and easy.

pumpkin-masking

I thought this big pumpkin was my own to work on, but soon had begging helpers who got to work with me too. It seemed you couldn’t really make a mistake, so I let them join in.  I was anxious to peel off the vinyl template anyway, so the more hands, the better.

pumpkin-decorating

But I got too excited, too soon. When we peeled off the template, it had really bled (a lot!) underneath the edges of the vinyl.  What a mess. While the designs look pretty dang nice in the end, I can’t tell you how much cleaning up I had to do on the first big pumpkin. (The one we are painting in above.)  I mostly used the edge of an x-acto blade, but also some wet q-tips and a pencil eraser for the light smudges left.  Talk about tedious work.  But it was worth it to me. : )

Just 2 pumpkins took so much longer than I had expected, so after the kids went to bed, my husband and I got to work on the other big one, with acrylic paint and a sponge brush this time.  It went pretty easy still, and came out much cleaner.  Some cleaning up to do still, but not nearly as much.   Then we did the little ones, and I was sad when I turned around and realized we did the last pumpkin!  I wanted to do more!!  I just LOVE them. and can’t decide exactly where to put the 6 we did around our home, because I want them everywhere, in every room!

Below are all of the ones we did. We may do more if we have time this month.  If not, this is a project worth doing again next year.

unique-pumpkin-decorating

Today, the colors of Fall we have seen so far, continued to inspire everyone…..

kids-watercoloring

We’ve only just begun to enjoy our harvest festivities!  We have so many places we want to go, plans and ideas for creating, crafting and baking, and can only hope we manage to get them all in!  We don’t want to miss a moment of the joy this season brings.

Thanks for dropping in.  Come by again soon.  : )

Filed Under: Crafts & Creations, FALL Crafts and Creations, Home Decor, Seasonal Crafts and Creations, The Homestead Tagged With: decorating-with-pumpkins, fall-crafts, painted-pumpkins, pumpkin-designs, pumpkins, seasonal-decorating, unique-pumpkin-decorating

We are wicked happy to have you here! We hope you find much inspiration, help, humor and enjoyment here.




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