Happy Canada Day everyone!! (and a happy early 4th to all my American friends!!)
Sorry things have been so quiet on the blog this week but things just got so busy here around the farm that I just couldn’t get the time to come share with you! But, I will be back next week for sure!! This year we are spending our Canada Day at the lake and I am very thrilled that the weather looks good for a fun filled holiday weekend! I am so proud to be Canadian, always have been. I do have to say, I admire Americans for their patriotism and have always insisted I wish we were more like them. I always see these amazing celebrations and decorations and it never seems to come across the same way here up North, not sure why that is…
We have no specific plans on how we are going to be spending our day other than it will be filled with laughter, family, sunshine, bbqing, swimming and even some boating!! I baked my favorite coconut cupcakes (in festive wrappers none-the-less) that we will be enjoying throughout the day..
and I even made these fun little pinwheels that we can decorate with our play with!!
and to top it all off, I even made a little card for Canada Day that I am just in looove with
So however you are spending your weekend, I hope it is filled with love, laughter and great memories!! Happy Canada Day and happy crafting everyone!!
By now its nothing new to you when I tell you I love my garden. Every day I look forward to meandering thru the paths, looking for new growth, whats grown where and what popped up over night. I get excited by every little speck of green as it pushes its way thru the soil towards the sun and most evenings I stand back after a day of weeding and I can envision what this little slice of heaven is going to look like in a month or two when everything is growing, it actually makes me giddy! I will have rows of corn and sunflowers to hide in and mounds of pumpkins to step over, its going to be pretty awesome. This garden has definitely inspired me and I truly do have the gardening bug now. The garden, and my chickens, are my little happy places this summer. If you need me, thats where I’ll be.
Today, after going around and counting the new seedlings pushing up thru the soil {I planted Cosmo’s, Peas & Potatoes last Monday. So far 23 peas are up and 25 Cosmo’s!}I started thinking about the kind of yard/garden I want when we move over to our farmhouse {once this dome is done, we are switching houses and renovating the old house}. I want a vegetable garden that is straight out of the movie, It’s Complicated. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Here’s a photo for your viewing pleasure:
I want a white picket fence that surrounds the raised bed garden and at the West end I will have my chickens and their coop placed there so that I can see them all day from my living room window or while I’m out tending to my vegetables. Ahhh…I can picture it now ***
But the yard..well, the yard is going to be something {hopefully} special. For as long as I can remember, I have loved the English cottage style of gardening. A mish mash of beautiful heritage perennials with a mix of highly scented annuals thrown in for good measure. Every time I see an English style garden in a magazine I pick it up, buy it and oogle over every square inch of the page until I have it burned into my memory for future reference. Then came Pinterest and well, my days of hoarding ripped out magazine pages are {almost} coming to an end! If you are on Pinterest, come join me here
And since a good gardening inspiration post cannot be without a few droolworthy photos, here are some of my pins I’ve made lately that I will use when building my own English Cottage Garden..I can just smell the roses already!!
All photos can be found on my Pinterest board with link backs to the original owners of these beautiful photographs!
Accidents happen. Mistakes happen. And in most incidences, it only takes a second for something tragic to happen. Everyone knows this but when it happens to you, you often find yourself in a state of shock..disbelief even. And that is exactly what happened here earlier this week. It was early morning and I needed to get 2 new bags of chicken feed from the truck down to the coop, so I loaded them up on our golf cart {we have one to get us around the yard if we have stuff to transport} and made my way to the coop.
  Our golden retriever, Simon, loves getting rides on the golf cart..he’s lazy like that. But Jakey prefers to run ahead and enjoy all the joys of running with abandon in the country…he’s fun like that. All of a sudden, Simon started barking at Jake and Jake turned around to bark back but it happened in an instant and before I knew it, Jake was under my front tire, yelping with all his might! I tried to react and back up but before I could, he had made his way out from underneath the golf cart. Thankfully, he looked fine..just a little shocked. I quickly checked him over and didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary so hugged him, loved on him and made sure he was okay before proceeding to the coop to let my chickens out for the day.
Shortly after, while filling Adam in on what occurred, I looked down and noticed blood coming from Jakey’s front leg and I lost it. My poor baby! Thankfully, my brother in law was there to check him over and assured me it was simply a scrape, where his fur was taken off from the wheel of the cart and that he was fine otherwise. Instantly I rushed him inside, cleaned his wound, inspected it, applied Polysporin and then bandaged him up as gently as I could.
Once the adrenaline wore off for him, he started limping pretty severely so I gave him 1/4 of an Aspirin and my little man slept all afternoon, barely moving an inch for the rest of the day. I was really worried about him but every time I came to check on him, he was okay..just sore. Trust me, if any one every felt like the worst doggy mom in the world, it was me. I was just sick about what had happened and so grateful it wasn’t worse!
Thankfully, by yesterday he was already doing much better. Although he still has a slight limp, he has been joining in on the fun with the other dogs on the farm, running, playing and enjoying his life in the countryside. And when we all realized Jake was going to be fine, we all celebrated..including Simon, who danced a little jig for Jake.
He hit the ground..
He shimmied..
He shaked..
He was just so darned excited that his best bud was going to be okay..
And then they topped the party off with a nice, leisurely swim..
The End.
Warning: there is a severe amount of blonde-ness in this post…
I am a visual learner. Always have been, always will be. As I have stated, many times before, I have grown flowers for years but this year is my first vegetable garden. Sure, I helped out in my parents garden as a child, but that was years ago and I doubt I retained much info back then on how to tend to your growing garden. But gardening is in my blood, I was born to do it, born to love it. With that being said, I had a HUGE lesson in humility on Monday..
Note: My mom and husband are going to die when they read this and realize I blogged about it, but I can’t help it..its just too good!!
It was early Monday morning. I had just come back from letting my chickens out for the day, feeding them, loving them and even having some fly up to roost on my shoulder while I checked the coop out from the night before. On my way home, I meandered thru the garden, weeding, planning and making a to do list of everything I needed to complete that day. I planted another couple of rows of sweet corn {the first didn’t really take}, I planted cosmo’s and sunflowers, tomatoes and annuals..and on my way in, I came across this..
My potatoes had started to bloom!! Now, surely it was time to hill the potatoes! In all my newbie gardening glory I ran to find dirt to hill my potatoes with, inspired by how awesome my garden was doing and thinking to myself, “wow – I really can grow vegetables”. By now the potatoes had grown a good foot tall, they are stunning, healthy and strong and I was going to hill them up, just like my books said to do. In fact, I studied those gardening books and I could swear to you, for a fact, that they read: when your potatoes are approx 4-5″ tall, hill them up so that only 1 1/2″ remain. Allow to grow another 4-5″ then hill again.” So I called up my dear husband, asking where I should get some more dirt from to hill up my potatoes and he told me that I should just be able to use a hoe and bring up enough dirt to mound them from that and wished me luck while I went on my merry way. Of course, after hanging up with Adam I grabbed a hoe and started bringing dirt up, but..it didn’t seem like it was going to do the job!!
My potatoes before the “massacre”
So…I went hunting for a shovel. Yup, I did it. I grabbed a large grain shovel and started digging my way to China, folks. You see, being the visual learner that I am, I took those readings I read from my gardening book and told myself I needed to smother my poor spuds up within an inch of their lives..
It was at this point I started thinking something wasn’t right. So I called on dear Mom to ask her advice. What I got was a mother pissing herself laughing, shaking her head at her daughter’s poor, unsupervised decision. When I realized the gravity of my miscalculation I couldn’t help but laugh, pushing my hurt pride aside. After my mother explained to me that I was just supposed to merely hill up the sides of the potato to cover the roots so as to allow room for new spuds to grow {oh my good Lord, Dawn}, I rescued my poor plant from obliteration, digging it out of the dirt grave I buried it in and saved it from a most certain death..
After the phone call to my mom
After hanging up with my mom, I finished hilling my remaining spuds the correct way & made my way in to the house to prep lunch for my husband and the minute he came in I burst out the tale of my morning lesson. All he could say was, “oh baby”..over and over again! He then chuckled in his low throaty voice and explained that most people have a problem with not hilling enough but nope, not his wife. Apparently she’s a diligent potato mounder 😉
So here’s todays lesson folks…yes I should be 100% embarrassed by my actions and probably could’ve saved face by never mentioning this story on the old blog. But this is real life, mistakes happen, sometimes to my demise and others amusements but this is my crazy life here in the country and I don’t want to forget all the little lessons I learn as I go. And just like my mom and hubby said, hey..I’m trying and I’m learning..and there just ain’t nothing wrong with that!! But please folks, if you’re growing potatoes…”hill” them, don’t “bury” them..but I’m sure you knew that already…
I still don’t know what I want “to be” when I grow up. I thought it would’ve come to me already, my calling..but, alas, it hasn’t shown up yet. The photo above was taken at my finance job in the office I occupied for 4 years. Looking at that photo now, I can hardly believe I worked there. Sitting in an office all day, answering phones and pushing paper. The money was good, some of the coworkers were awesome..but wow, did it ever not fulfill me! I would work Monday to Friday {no complaints there} from 7:30 – 4. Pretty decent hours, I’ll even admit that. But then I would be set free and all I would want to do is spend my time outdoors, in the garden, with my dog. Or crafting and photographing things around me. I longed to be free of working for someone else. Fast forward a few years, I met Adam and dreams of a simple life in the country became a reality… I would not give up my life now for anything. I love it with every beat of my heart. I love that I get to wake up with my husband every morning {or sometimes an hour or 2 later!}, let my chickens out for the day, check on my garden and then continue on with whatever TO DO list item I created for myself. Somedays its working in the garden all day. Other days its baking and cooking and cleaning, etc. It is awesome and I am so grateful for it.
That being said, I still want to create something with my time. I want to do something that isn’t all about the money but helps out around here. I want to be able to work from home {or wherever we may be} so that I can take care of my husband and our future kids. I don’t want to leave the farm, I don’t want to work for any one else but myself..but I don’t know what I want to be.
For a few years now I have been so intrigued with the idea of carving out your own path in life, creating a career out of thin air and making it work. Women around the world are doing this every day and I want to be a part of it. I just have to figure out what my angle is, I guess! Some women blog for a living, some scrapbook and teach classes..it really is up to you!!
After a recent conversation with my husband on this very subject, I blurted out, “maybe its because I love too many things, that I can’t just focus on one for a living?” to which, of course, he laughed. Yes, it is true..I do have many passions and loves in life!
I:
-am a published papercrafter
-am a blogger
-am an artist
-a chicken enthusiast
-am a writer
-am a photographer
-am a dog lover
-am a gardener
-am a baker and amateur chef
Now, clearly, I have a variety in my interests but there has got to be something in there that will fulfill my need to become proficient in a career of my own choosing/creating. I just don’t know what yet. The biggest block for me is that I become so excited over a new concept, I research it to death, dream up huge successes and then I get bored with it and put it aside til next time. And even I know you can’t run a business on that!
Only time will tell what I end up creating in the end but until that day comes..I guess I’ll keep on dreaming about what I’ll be when I grow up!
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dawn - Hi Dawn,
Such a cute post this was to read. I love they yummy dessert and the card is so cute!! Fireworks are the best aren’t they.
Hope your doing well and the garden is growing, the chickens are healthy and happy and all is good.
We are going camping tomorrow, so excited but worried a little. The temps are in the high 90’s and we will be HOT no matter what we do. Hoping to have energy and excitment to carry us thru the day and night. Our first time taking the dog also, should be interesting, lol
Enjoy your weekend.