Garden Party Hospice Fundraiser

Last Saturday I had the privilege to participate in a hospice fundraiser! Despite threatening clouds and downpours the night before, the day turned out to be pleasant and the attendance was good!

This was my first time as a vendor at a larger event like this, and it was so fun! The fundraiser was held at the beautiful Fieldstone Gardens, and although many of the flowers were not in bloom yet, the ground were still lovely and well kept.

My cousin and I set up a canopy to share and both were vendors: she sold Pampered Chef, and I sold items from So Sew Organized!

This was my first time setting up a whole booth, and I was a little unsure what to expect. But I was pleased with the number of people interested in my product and the number of sales I made. Hopefully I'll be able to be a part of another event soon!

Psst! You can find all these items in my shop and grab your favourites!


Linked up to Weekend Wind Down Party

How Does Your {2013} Garden Grow?

 I shared all of our garden planning, planting, and harvesting last year, pretty much from start to finish. {Click those links to see the pictures of last year's garden!} We were blessed with huge bumper crops of everything last year...almost to the point of having no place to put it all! Picture us begging people to take beans off our hands - yup, that really happened. Even our church people were sick of beans!

I'm not going to rehash our entire gardening process this year, since you can just go read about it in the archives, but I thought I'd share a bit of how our garden is doing this year and what is and isn't working in this part of the country. Any other Nova Scotians out there that can relate?

Oh and I should mention that my mom is the main gardener in these parts, so all the beauty of these pictures goes to her. We do help with the planting, weeding, harvesting, and definitely the eating...but she is the mastermind behind the whole shebang.

The first area to show you is our peas....look at those beautiful fences of vines!

If you look up close, the view is even more exciting...

Yep, they are nearly ready! The pods are all grown, and just need to fill out. Just like last year, we use mostly Veseys Seeds in our garden, because we find them to be great quality and work well in this climate! What you see in these pea rows are Dakota, Knight and Sabre.

Here is a shot of some rows of beans, carrots, and weeds...we didn't plant those last ones....

We alternate between a row of beans, and a row of carrots, row of beans, row of carrots, etc. Honestly I'm not sure why...ask my mom. :) Oh, and you may notice if you look at last year's picts...we swap ends of the garden. This year the corn end is where the peas were last year, and visa versa. That is so one area of the garden doesn't get sapped of any one nutrient by planting the same thing there year after year. It seems to work!

Here are beets, radishes, and in the bottom right corner some spinach that has already been cut once.

Here is a shot of the corn...coming along nicely!

We planted three rows of Quickie Corn, three rows of Montauk, and about 8 rows of Bon Appetit. By planting three different kinds, they are not all ready at the same time, so we can enjoy fresh corn on the cob longer!

We also have cukes, squash, pumpkins, and other vine-y things planted, but I'll wait to show you more of those when they are up more. Vine-y things did not do well all over this area this year (too much rain?) and a lot of people had to replant, including us. They seem to be doing well now, however!

Here is a shot of the whole garden:

That is a lot of on-your-knees time, right there!

So let's chat gardens...what have you planted this year? How are things doing in your region? We had so much rain in May and June that a lot of produce that is normally prevalent in our area - like strawberries - aren't doing too well. Do you plant a large garden, or just a small bed? Share below!


Just FYI - Veseys Seeds has no clue who I am, or that I'm writing this post. We use Veseys because us and others have had great results with their seeds for years! Check them out and see if they are available in your area!

Gifts and Goals for the Week

Things are moving around here...and I mean literally:

This little feller (who turns 9 months old tomorrow!!!!) has figured out how to go backwards. His shirt says "Here comes trouble." Isn't that the truth! :)

And because we were talking about cabbage (???) here is the one lone plant that came up in our garden:

I held my shoe up to it for reference...if its as big as my foot, that baby is HUGE! :) It was the biggest head of cabbage I've ever seen. It did have a lot of bad or rotten spots in it when we picked it, but there was lots of good parts, too...probably enough for us to have a couple meals out of it!

And now, on to my 1,000 gifts list from the past week....which is really what this post is about. Partly. Its not really about cabbages.

387. Pretty fog
388. New ideas
389. Hummingbirds outside my window
390. Visit from friends
391. Car seat we needed
392. Bulk Etsy order
393. Baptism in the ocean





My goals from last week:

Complete Pinterest project - done! Deets coming soon!

Make 2 bags - finished one

Read 10 chapters of “Music in the Air” - read 6

Read 2 chapters of “When Life is Hard” - read 1

List 4 items on Kijiji - listed 2

Mending - done

Write one letter to a friend - did this

Walk 3x - walked 4 times!

I have a bulk Etsy order to complete in the next couple of weeks, so most of my time will be devoted to that. I did list out a few regular goals for this week, but anything else is being put on hold for now!

Read 6 chapters of “Music in the Air”

Read 1 chapter of “When Life is Hard”

Make 7 bags

Walk 4x

List 2 items on Kijiji

Write one letter to a friend

Anyone else find yourself busy as summer winds down? Anyone want to come over for cabbage? :)

Goals for the Week

What a fantastically busy week we've had! I updated you a little bit last week on how the week was going, and I'm happy to report that VBS was a complete success! I had a total of 13 enrolled throughout the week, with Wednesday being the biggest night, 10 in attendance! The other classes had a great turnout as well, and 4 young people trusted Christ as Savior on Friday night!

My attendance chart at the end of the week. Love seeing all the stars!

We were able to take an offering throughout the week to raise money for a nearby camp that is working towards a new building. We did a penny competition between the two teams, and saw lots and lots of pennies come in!

It was a great, tiring, week!

I was MIA yesterday, and this is what I was doing....

Yes, those are all beans from our garden. We picked a few and canned them one day in the middle of VBS, but we didn't have the time to really get 'er done as much as we should have. No worries...the beans were still there waiting for us when VBS was over!

We had some guests here yesterday, and even they got in on the action!

Everyone has been snapping beans like crazy! Now we just have to get them all canned. Here is where we are so far...

We've used all of the 89 canning jars we own, and are headed out to purchase some more! I'm pretty sure we'll end up with well over 100 quarts before we get these done, and that is just from one day of picking! Yikes!

Besides beans and other gardening, I am anxious to get back in the swing of things and get some  "normal" things done around here! I almost don't know where to start, after spending so many weeks working on VBS prep! Here are my goals for this week. I totally didn't take the time to write them in my to-do list like I normally do, but here they are anyway!

1. Finish some mending

2. Start curtains

3. Start 1 bag

4. Walk 3 times

5. Read 2 chapters of "When Life is Hard" and 6 chapters of "Music in the Air"

6. Write one email

7. Visit with my grandparents, aunt and uncle, who are coming in on Friday! Yippee!

What are you working on this week? Anyone else have an exceptional garden this year?

It rained...and our garden is taking over!

Our garden was doing really well. Then it rained.

And now its doing really, really well!

In the last update I gave you all, I whipped up this lovely piece of art so you could visualize where everything is planted:

I tried to take more shots from that POV for ya, so hopefully everything makes more sense!

Here are the rows of beans and carrots on the left:

The beans are blossoming! So excited for them to be ready, I love string beans fresh from the garden!

Here is the row of turnip. I had no idea their leaves would be so big and beautiful! (Butting right up to the broccoli, which I'll show you in a moment.)

We'll soon be eating turnip and broccoli. Here are just a couple of the heads that are about ready:

We had a little bit of broccoli the other night, and boy was it tasty! Nothing compares to fresh produce!

The girls enjoy growing large sunflowers, just for the fun of it and to feed the birds. Here is our biggest one so far...

These are planted on the front edge of the garden to the left, by the beans.

Speaking of beans, here is a pretty shot:

Someone gave my sisters a few ornamental bean seeds, but they forgot what they were. They just planted them in with the rest of the beans! This week they blossomed, and they have such pretty orange flowers!

The peas are starting to go by, but boy have we had a plentiful crop! Here is a picture I shared on my Facebook page last week:

We picked at least this many peas three times last week! Talk about a lot of peas! This same day we also picked these:

We enjoy eating the beets and the greens, so all these beets lasted us quite a while!

Our vine plants (cukes, pumpkins, and squash) are growing as fast as the vines we saw in North Carolina!

And our corn is getting up there, too.

Hopefully things continue to grow so well! We had enough rain to last a little while, and now the sun is shining again, so things should perk up even more. Can't wait until we can be sampling all the rest of this produce!

How are gardens in your area? Are you eating things like beans or cukes yet? Anyone else watching the vines grow before your eyes?

Garden update

Before I left for Maine, I took pictures of the garden with the intention of updating you all on its progress! And well, here they are, two and a half weeks later! :\

I last left you with a little visual of how big the plot is and what we were planting. That was a loooong time ago, when the peas were just starting to poke through the ground! Well, now they are looking like this:

Getting better, are they not? But there is a whole lot more going on in this big plot than just the peas! Here is a picture of how my mom maps it all out (she keeps records in a notebook to remember from year to year what worked and what didn't!)

But since you can't read that, I tried to make heads or tails of it and drew up a poorly-illustrated version for you to see what we are planting and where...

After I made this, I realized I made it backwards from all the pictures I took. So in that first picture of the pea plants, I was standing about where the word "peas" is on the chart. Make sense?

Here are some shots of the rest of the garden:

This is the corn end. There is a lot more corn than my chart shows!

This is the middle part with the cukes. See the peas to the right?

And this is the other end with a while bunch of stuff.

Looking nice and leafy!

We kept noticing these teeny black bugs while we were working. They resembled a flea in the way they jumped, and they were no bigger than the head of a pin. In asking around, we found out they ARE a flea...a garden flea that eats plants just as they come up out of the ground! we could see evidence that they had been hard at work, so unfortunately we had to treat almost the entire garden for them.

We don't like using chemicals on our plants, but it took care of the flea problem, and we didn't know what else to use. You can see the white powder clearest in this shot of the corn plants:

No one knows where those little buggers come from or really what can prevent them...so we're hoping next year they decide to invade someone else's space!

We did make our garden slightly bigger this year, and it shows in the quality of the ground. The new ground is very hard and rocky, which makes it hard to pull weeds or grow produce. This far end of the pea plants shows the difference.

See how anemic those plants look? That is the new ground. They've grown more since I took this picture, and hopefully next year the ground will all be a little more balanced.

Well, that updates you a little on the progress of our garden. I will soon (very soon, promise!) update you some more, since our peas now look like this:

Yeah, its time for an update to my update.

Do you have a lot planted this year? How is it coming?

How Does Your Garden Grow?

Since we are talking about veggies this week, lets take a post and talk about gardening.

For some of you, planting has long come and gone, but for us Northerners, we're just getting started. In the last 3 weeks we started planting some of our early things, so here are a few pictures and details of what we've been doing.

Here is our garden plot:

Yeah, it is pretty big, but there are a lot of us to feed! Dad borrowed a tractor from a man in our church to till it all up good. After living in North Carolina for 5 years, I still can't get over the beautiful brown soil!

The first thing to go in were peas.

We planted three rows. Here you can see our little pink seeds, dropped in a pattern of 4, 3, 4, 3, etc. all down the row. That is so we can put a fence down the middle of each row.

Peas are a nice, easy seed to plant. I like 'em.

We also planted radishes, broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, turnip, onion, brusselsprouts and spinach so far. Just a little bit of each of these. Here are the peas already coming up! (After maybe 2 weeks? Not sure exactly)

And some radishes are up, too! No, we don't live in a desert...there was obviously standing water here after the last rain storm!

That is where we are so far in that garden. When we get back next week we'll have to do a lot more planting. We'll be putting in lots of beans, cucumbers, some corn, pumpkin, and I'm not sure what all else Mom has planned. :)

We are also branching out and trying something new this year...a Strawberry patch! 

This picture makes it look a lot bigger than it is! It is really just big enough for 4 rows of strawberry plants and a little half row of some asparagus we started. It takes 3 years before we can eat the asparagus, so for now we're just putting it in the ground.

We got 90 strawberry plants, and can you believe they all came in this teeny box?

We were expecting plants but really they just came as a little bit of growth and a whole lotta roots. So really, we ordered 90 strawberry root systems, haha!

Here is what one looks like, all planted on its little hill:

Each of the dark spots is a plant, which we watered after they were all planted. And actually, the "instructions" said that they needed to be planted on a cloudy day, so the little tiny plants wouldn't be shocked by the sun. But by the time we were finished, the sun had come out. Oops. They seemed to do ok anyway. Oh, hello shadow!

As to the kind of strawberries, ours are called "Everbearing." We should get some this year, but next year will be a really big year. They will have one big crop in June, and then they are supposed to be mowed down. (Yikes!) Then they should produce another big crop that same year, and continue to produce until frost. This first year we won't get two big crops like that, but we should get plenty for our own use throughout the summer. I for one am looking forward to it!

All of our seeds and strawberry plants we ordered from Vessey's seeds, a company based out of PEI. For any local Nova Scotia peeps, it is a great place to order seeds from. This will be our second year using exclusively their seeds, and so far we are happy with them! (I also see that they do ship to the US, so you can look into that if you are interested!)

So far things aren't looking too awfully exciting in the gardening department, but before long plants and weeds will be in full swing! I'll be sure to post updates as well as other gardening tips and tricks we dig up along the way. (Dig up...get it?)

Who else is planting a garden? When do you plant? What things are already sprouting for you?