MY SUMMER "TO DO" LIST

NOW APPEARING!

Or, perhaps I should say "Should've Been Appearing" in the Wildly Abandoned Garden (henceforth to be referred to as the W.A.G.), since half the cast seems to have dropped out of the show at the very last minute!

All those huge rudbeckia heads that were ready to unfurl?

Gone!

All those gorgeous liatris stalks that were just beginning to fluff out?

Vanished!

There should have been a ton of these pretty little cornflowers in bloom at this point. Not a trace.

 Gaura and gazania? All decapitated, and mostly defoliated.

Just about the only thing we do have in abundance are these little hoof prints! I did mention, didn't I, that all bets were off once the babies arrived?

Of course, this isn't really the whole picture. As you can see in the picture of the full bed above, the cosmos and zinnias are still going great guns, and there are many succulents, native shrubs and deer resistant perennials throughout the Cantina Garden that are still doing just fine. Plus there is an absolute ton of milkweed that reseeded itself from one little plant a year or two ago. The deer haven't touched that.

They do, however, have an army of assistants who are doing their diligent best to take care of that task for them! I will leave them to it. The payoff in winged splendor will be well worth the sacrifice.

LAST TIME I SAW PARIS: PLAYING WITH PARCHMENT

Right around this same time last year, we were packing up to head out on that long-awaited trip to Paris and southern France. You might recall from my post here, that one of my favorite things about France was all the little flower shops, whose goods spilled out onto the sidewalks everywhere you looked. So, when I discovered that my latest class assignment was learning how to make buckets of coneflowers out of baker's parchment, well, my mind couldn't help but wander back to those flower stalls in France.

To make the flower petals, we took a sheet of parchment and smeared on several different shades of craft acrylics, letting them overlap and blend together in places. After the paint dried, we were supposed to cover it all with a thin layer of ModPodge, but that kinda slipped my mind until after I'd cut out a whole heap o' petals. Fortunately, they still turned out ok -- at least, as far as I can tell.

Our original class supply list had called for "tissue paper with words on it", and the only one I had been able to scrounge up was meant for baby gifts -- all gooshy and pastel. When I found out what we were actually going to use it for, I had to say "Oh heck no, I don't think so!" I bought a package of black with white dots instead. Then, just by chance (because my bag was starting to weigh a ton) I was pulling an umbrella and a sketch book from my purse, when out popped the cutest little zebra-print gift sack -- just seconds before I was to begin cutting out the flower cans. Talk about synchronicity! No telling how long the sack had been in there, or where it came from in the first place.

Since I had only used a tiny fraction of the polka dot tissue, I just couldn't resist adding a little window awning, like the ones you see on so many French shops. Unfortunately, that left me with no room on the page to journal, other than on the flower cans themselves. Maybe that was for the best. As they say, sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words.

ALAS, THEY ALWAYS GROW UP!

My favorite little neighbor isn't quite so little anymore.

Above you see him as he was just a month or two ago, when the bluebonnets were in full bloom, and I had just met him. So stinkin' cute, and FWUFFY!

Here's what he looks like now -- still stinkin' cute, but not nearly so fluffy, I'm afraid. Our babies, they grow up fast, don't they?

COLOR MAD MONDAY: PALETTE DU JOUR

I had a simple assignment this weekend: take one sheet of paper, and dab upon it the colors that are rocking your world right now. Then assign each color a word, perhaps one that describes how it makes you feel -- kind of like one of those Rorschach ink blot tests. Funny, isn't it, how "simple" so often gets way out of hand? This time, it started with me flipping idly through a few magazines, to see which colors jumped out at me. As you well know, our tastes often change, so I wanted to nail down exactly where mine were focussed at this particular moment in time.

I tore a few of those magazine images out, and ended up gluing them onto my color inspiration sheets. Then I remembered some of the things I had seen online lately, and printed up a few of those images as well. Next, of course, I had to get out all my paints, water-soluble crayons and pastels, water color pencils, etc., so I could try and figure out just which ones came closest to matching the colors in the photos.

Before I knew it, our dining room table was covered in color inspiration sheets! I still haven't done the actual assignment, but there's one thing we now know for certain. Miss Becky ain't no fan of muted or pastel! But then, I guess you already knew that, huh?

KEEPIN' IT REAL: TO WOMEN WHO GALOSH

As soon as I began my latest art class assignment, I was immediately reminded of this post about "farm girl fashion" over on my very favorite blog -- the one that has kept me coming back on a near daily basis since, well, since I first discovered blogs -- Soule Mama.

Image from www.soulemama.com

The assignment was just to create this precious girl in layered skirts and aprons (pieced from fabric and paper), and place beside her something we are passionate about, whether it be sheep, art supplies, gardening tools, or even cupcakes! Well, I'm not passionate about sheep, but my instructor Junelle most certainly is, and as soon as I saw the roly-poly cuties she creates from paper, I just had to try it for myself!

Therefore, I decided to dedicate this journal page to the women who are out there keepin' it real. Those anti-sex-in-the-city-women who wear galoshes, not as a fashion statement, but out of necessity! Women like Amanda Soule who, on any given day, might:

• kill a snake
• birth a lamb, a blog post, an amazing book on The Creative Family, an inspiring new magazine called Taproot, or perhaps her own child, right there at home
• knit a sweater, whip up a few more skirts or jammie bottoms, or sew costumes for a ballet troupe
• rehab a 200 year old farmhouse
• plant veggies, feed an army, then put up some preserves
• gather eggs, honey, flocks, ruffles, or her five kiddoes for their home-school lessons

So, let's hear it for all those women like Amanda -- the women who are out there turning "homemaking" into something RADICAL!

MY WILDLY ABANDONED BED: LATE SPRING

Not only have I been taking a class called the Art of Wild Abandonment, I've also created my first ever Wildly Abandoned flower bed! Normally, I'm all about design and composition -- about getting the perfect combination of colors, heights and textures. However, after planting everything we had purchased at the nurseries last fall and early spring, I still had this one bed that was mostly empty, and I was feelin' kinda lazy. Plus, it's the bed that the deer have easiest access to, so I didn't want to put a whole lot of money into it. The only things in it were three rudbeckias and that amazon dianthus, all picked up out at the Arnosky's big blue barn, and a sprig of lantana that had barely managed to survive the drought and freezes of the last couple of years. Since I also had a veggie drawer in my fridge that was full of leftover wildflower seeds, I decided "What the heck!" I mixed them all together and just tossed them out, then added a few liatris bulbs, a division from my big Magilla perilla plant, and decided to just sit back and see what happens. I thought it might be fun to take pictures of it every couple of months, just to see how it changes through the seasons. Hmmmm, now that I think about it, maybe I should call it my Seasonality bed!

The magenta-colored dianthus, a cool-weather plant, was the first to come into bloom. I cut off it's towering stalks and brought them into the house for Easter. It's still giving us a nice splash of color, but I expect that will fade as the weather warms up. Next to pop up were the pink and white cosmos flowers (from Wildseed Farms), followed closely by these precious little orange and yellow Persian Carpet butterfly zinnias (from Renee's Garden).

The lantana (Irene, I think) has finally filled out and come into bloom, and the tall liatris stalks are just beginning to show some color...

but it looks like these rudbeckia blooms will be stealing their thunder before long.

As you can tell from the pictures at the top, I haven't thinned out the seedlings, or done much of anything, really. Like I said, we're just gonna sit back, and see what happens. Could be interesting, huh?