Tomato Tuesday - Why your veggie garden should always have flowers

My garden is really coming along.

I've got these little mini peppers ripening.

I'm about to pick them, actually. Gotta figure out what I'll do with them. Mmmm...

And lots of 'maters. 

We had a couple of the cherry ones already. They were GOOD.

Yellow squash is blooming.

And I've picked one zucchini so far...

Pumpkins are starting to flower.

And bush beans are starting to grow.

Here's my secret...

Flowers!

Lots and lots of flowers!

Veggies ain't gonna grow without pollinators. 

It's not the birds and bees talk for nothing, folks. ;)

Bees and butterflies are always welcome in my garden.

Squash vine borer is another story, but we'll revisit him another time.

How do you attract those bees and butterflies?

With food!!

Which, for them, means lots of flowers.

Fortunately, my flowers are looking quite lovely, if I do say so myself. So I'm just going to give you some eye candy and call it a Tomato Tuesday. ;)

Hope you enjoy!

I attempted to grow a number of violas last fall and didn't get them in time before frost. But they all popped up this spring. A number of them appear to have interbred and made lovely numbers like this one, which I did not plant myself. Just popped up.

Good heavens, I'm a sucker for zinnia. 

Zinnia!

Amber's Kiss Viola

 

Oh that color.

 

Some lettuce still hiding in there. It's starting to bolt.

Mmm marigold. A gardener's best friend. A lot of the nasty beasties  hate the smell, so they stay away.

This little sweetie is getting ready to pop soon!

Backyard Bliss - Progress

Friends, I would like to take a moment to recognize Mr. Gardener.

Not only is he a steller husband. (And in my opinion, hot like a muffin straight out of the oven - you need not feel inclined to agree with me there. ;) He is spoken for, after all.)

But he has spent a good deal (several Saturdays, most of the Fourth, he had the 5th of July off, etc.) of time working on our backyard (as I mentioned previously).

He tore out the posts from the old, hazard-to-humanity deck, including the concrete. 

He pulled up all the pavers. (These just don't work with our lovely, heavily rooted cherry tree.) They are going to live at my parent's house.

He took out the little dogwood tree. Let me explain. We are not tree killers. I am a Virginian, so I do appreciate my dogwood. But the previous owners planted it pretty much underneath the gargantuan cherry tree. And it was just struggling there. It couldn't get the light it needed, nor the space, so it had started growing in a crazy configuration and it just wasn't going to thrive there.

So here's some of the before (above).

And the after (below - 2 pictures).

It looks similar, but look at the gone pavers. The gone weird built-in bed thing they had going on (lower right hand corner). Random trash they left behind (under the hazardous deck) gone.

He also repaired, powerwashed, and stained the fence.

Gold star, Mr. Gardener!

Lots of hours of manpower in the heat and numerous-I-lost-count trips to Lowe's later, we're getting closer to Backyard Bliss.

The deck people start on our deck today, too!

Wood for the deck. They delivered on Friday. Fortunately, our neighbor is nice and let us use her extra parking spot in the meantime.

For additional perspective, I will show you a bit of what our front yard used to look like:

Yeah...tree stump.

Weeds.

Oh and a mess of mint in our yard.

I love mint. 

But, let me tell you, for you aspiring gardeners out there. Mint is supremely aggressive. And invasive. It grows and grows and grows, like nobody's business.

It's great if you can't grow anything else. I can almost guarantee, you, too, can grow mint. 

However, that being said, grow it in a pot. And don't let the growth touch the ground or it will root there and spread like wildfire and kill off anything in its way. Grass included. And your neighbor's grass.

So, just don't do it. Don't plant it in your yard. Contain it. 

(That goes for bamboo, too. Fair warning.)

So...old yard (and a local bunny - fewer of those around now - the fox population has increased. Circle of life, people.)

New yard. 

I think it looks leaps and bounds better.

Grass is a little brown because the "nurse" grass (seasonal and intended to help the perennial grass get started) is starting to grow.

Mr. Gardener LOVES his grass. It is like his child. I could write a whole post just describing his love for the grass.

Hence part of the reason I started calling him Mr. Gardener here. ;)

Finish it Up Friday 3

Hello there bloggy friends!

I have not fallen off the face of the earth.

There are probably a few disappointed folks out there in the world. ;)

It's just been a  busy busy week here!

I've been working crazy hours (it's a good and temporary thing) and trying to squeeze my life in, in between. So, this week the blog was neglected.

Plus a lot of rain made it difficult to take pictures. (Not that I'm complaining. Please say a prayer for those out west experiencing wildfires and that crazy heatwave.)

Nonetheless, I am back to finish out the week. 

I hope that my American friends had a lovely Independence day. If you are/were a service member, military brat, or military spouse, I would like to thank you for your service and sacrifices. (Family members give up a lot, too.)

If you are not an American, I hope that your July 4th was a nice day. ;)

So.....onto the FINISH!

Yay!!  That baby quilt is finally done!

About time, too. I got her first birthday invite in the mail last week.

Whoops!  

At least she's not 18, right? ;)

It did give me a lot of time to pray for baby and family, which is kind of the point.

So, while y'all have really only seen pictures of this quilt coming along for about a month (and I'm sure y'all were saying to yourselves, is she going to do anything else already?), this quilt was a good year (?) or so in the making.

Yes. I know. Ridiculous.

Let me explain a little.

I am a super newbie quilter.

This is my SECOND QUILT EVER (huzzah!).  (First one can be seen here.)

I do have finished a couple of other quilt tops that are just patiently waiting for some other items to be completed first.

So....about a year ago (yeah, since she's almost one), I started this quilt. Buying the fabric, deciding on how the pattern would go, so on and so forth.

I learned how to do a half square triangle (HST).

Let me stop there. 

HSTs really aren't so hard. But they do require some degree of precision. And, well, I didn't really have that then (for a lot of reasons...crappy sewing machine, impatience, and I now own a quarter inch foot, which is a-MAH-zing).

So, I sewed a bunch of HSTs and they looked like crap.

This is not my usual...oh, I wish they looked better.

No, these would have looked terrible in the quilt. Quite literally (and that is not the figurative use of the word literal, which is kind of a weird phenomenon in our culture, but I digress...).

So, I set them aside and worked on some other items. Many of which are still WiPs.

Someday. Someday.

And I broke up with my sewing machine.

The backside of the quilt. It's just a preference thing, but I like the backside to look complete, too, and not haphazard.  If you like haphazard backsides, more power to you. :)

 So after I finished the first baby quilt, I looked at these HSTs again and started ripping them apart.

Which took this side of forever.

 (By the way, I think these two babies already have an arranged marriage. Just kidding, kind of. Their moms would LOVE that. ;) )

Then, I re-sewed them, squared them up and just kept going.

Mr. Gardener helped me with the placement of all of the blocks. He's a sweetie, isn't he? (I learned some good lessons about value in this quilt, but I think I will save that for another day because this post is getting kind of long. Thanks for hanging in there!)

Here's some of the quilting, which happily improved as I went along (yay for skills progress!). I just did a very simple cross-hatch, but I think it works well with the design.

As a result of this ripping, squaring up, etc. business, the blocks were much smaller than I originally intended. In fact, I originally intended for the pinwheels to be the whole quilt!

So, I pulled my Michael Miller Dinky Dots in Grey from my stash (I LOVE this print. Why? I don't know. Just do.) and made a big ol' border. And I quite like it.

I also made a square quilt instead of a rectangular one. (Well, technically a square is a rectangle - though not all rectangles are squares - but you know what I mean.) 

More quilting. You can see a little meandering and so on, but I'm pretty proud of myself overall.

 But, I must say, that by happy accident, I think I like how it came out better than the original design.

The binding is a scrappy mixture of fabrics left from the pinwheels.

Mr. Gardener helped take pictures.

Then he got weird and said I couldn't take pictures of him.

So, naturally, I just had to. Muahahaha.

Isn't he cute?  

I think so.

************

So...Quilty Stats!!

Fabric: 

-Stained Glass in Light Pink by Dear Stella

-Savannah in Blossom from the Karavan Collection by Valori Wells

-Jenean Morrison Silent Cinema Iris in Pink for Free Spirit Fabrics

-Vintage Ironwork in Khaki from Secret Garden by Sandi Henderson

-Garden Pindot Blossom by Michael Miller Fabrics

-Mod Vine in Rose from Modernology by Art Gallery Fabrics

-Art Gallery Hyperreal Garden Radient Bouquet in Ruby

-Art Gallery Coquette Flirt in Power Grey

-Too Muchery Damask in Steel by Helen Dardik

-Circles in Light Greys from Downtown by P&B Textiles

-Nancy Mims Pick a Bunch Organic Flower Burst in Orchid

-Mingle Polka Dot in Hot Pink 

-Michael Miller Dinky Dots in Grey

-Random Pinks from Joann's

Pause: I will never use just random fabric ever again. It turned out okay, but it just didn't play as nice as the other fabrics. Turns out there is a significant quality difference. Unpause.

Quilting:

-Grey Guttermann thread

Binding:

Scrappy leftovers of the above-mentioned fabrics

Size:

I think it's 55" by 55", but I need to measure to make sure.

Then it will be wash, iron, and off to the postman!

Thanks for sticking through that long post!! :)

Linking up with Finish it up Friday with Crazy Mom Quilts.

Also linking up with Molly and Carly.