Tag Archives: pumpkins

The Art of Felting: Warm and Beautiful

Felting, simply put, is matting wool. The art of felting has been around for centuries with many conflicting stories as to its origin. This Wiki article sites:

Sumerian legend claims that the secret of felt-making was discovered by Urnamman of Lagash. The story of Saint Clement and Saint Christopher relates that while fleeing from persecution, the men packed their sandals with wool to prevent blisters. At the end of their journey, the movement and sweat had turned the wool into felt socks.
Felt making is still practiced by nomadic people (Altaic people) in Central Asia and northern parts of East Asia (Mongols), where rugs, tents and clothing are regularly made. Some of these are traditional items, such as the classic yurt (Gers), while others are designed for the tourist market, such as decorated slippers. In the Western world, felt is widely used as a medium for expression in textile art as well as design, where it has significance as an ecological textile.

What I do know is that it’s a lot of fun. Merging the wool fibers creates, a warm, durable and water-proof felt, used for centuries. The artistic possibilities, beyond the basics are endless.

My talented friend Liz held a felt-making workshop for a few friends on a visit home from New Zealand. She’s become quite the expert. We started with a small pile of wool fibers and a few basic tools, and left with a finished piece. Liz is also a gourmet cook, a talented seamstress and a gifted fibre artist. You can see more of her work in the Facebook Album Fibre Art.

I wet-felted pieces in orange and black, then combined them to make a small Halloween hanging. I dry-felted the pumpkins on top,adding the orange felted cord at the end. It’s my new holiday favorite.

Laura joined me that day, and crafted a beautiful multi-layered piece in white and blue. She dry felted and embroidered flowers to the piece, then made it into a purse. A certain gardener turned 50 that year, and unwrapped this stunning purse for the occasion! Getting older has its pluses.

Felted Wool Flowers

Felted Purse

The Process

It can take a bit of finesse to create beautiful pieces of felt, but the basics are simple. GFWSheep offers a tutorial to get you started.

Halloween Countdown

Felted Pumpkins

Smiling in the Garden

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Smiling is good for you. It reduces tension, helps you relax and promotes overall good health. There is always something to smile about in the garden; sometimes I’m lucky enough to catch it with my camera.

I hope these photos put a smile on your face, too.

Sure, the pumpkin is nice, but will you look at that cat I grew!?

He’s a cheeky little fella

Look, Ma!!! I can fly with one wing!

I think there’s a pooch hiding in the tree. Dogwood???

Bottoms up!

Are you smiling yet?

Gifts from the Garden: Late Season Surprises

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I love receiving gifts from the garden, little treasures and discoveries I didn’t expect. Here is what she offered up this week.

Turning Orange After All

This acorn-shaped pumpkin was doing well, when a scar on the skin opened into a small wound. With the fruit exposed to air, I assumed that was the end of it. How disappointing.

To my delight, it continued to turn orange.You can see right through to the inside of the pumpkin, so I’m surprised at this development. It’s a gift!

Raspberry Redux

We devoured raspberries for several weeks this summer, eating them straight off the vine. Eventually they stopped blooming and I cut back the vine. This week, they are at it again. Fresh berries in August. Yum, yum, yum. Thank you berry vine for your generous gift. How sweet of you!

It’s a Whopper!

One of our pumpkin vines produced three large gourds in late July. They’ve put on weight daily, though the pumpkins to follow mostly shriveled and died on the vine. In what seemed like an overnight sensation, we now have a fourth still-yellow but equally large pumpkin on the vine. I hope it stays warm enough for the fruit to turn orange. Occasionally the size of the gift is important.

Unexpected Sunflower

I planted Evening Sun and Mammoth Russian Botanical Interests® sunflowers, so imagine my surprise when a third variety appeared this week. I love the shiny yellow flowers and their perfect little centers. Who doesn’t love a gift out of the blue?

What’s up in your garden this week?

A Taste of Fall: Flower Season Winding Down

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The air feels like early fall today. It really cooled down in the past 24 hours. The crisp breeze foreshadows the season to come.

We’ve enjoyed a week of warm weather, lasting well into the evening, enjoying several meals on the patio. Today it’s 15 degrees cooler than predicted. As our days are shorten the pumpkin leaves are turning a tell-tale brown. Even my beloved cosmos are showing signs of decay. In California, warm weather continues well into October, but the growing season is definitely winding down.

It dawned on me today that the bounty of flowers we’ve enjoyed all summer will soon be a sweet memory. I decided to take pictures of each lusty bloom. Mother Nature is about to pull a blanket over the garden. Summer annuals will finish their cycle as they set seed and wither. Perennials go dormant. The Chinese Pistache treats us to an autumn show, with golden, red and amber leaves drifting to the ground below. The maple out back does a strip tease as well, but often in slow motion. Depending on the wind and the rain, our maple may hang on to the changing leaves for some time.

So to my lovely garden belles, arranged below in rainbow order, won’t you please take a bow?

Blooming Since July, Part of the 4th of July Trio

Carpet Roses at the bottom of the ramp

Garnet Penstemon rustling under the Magnolia

Dusty Pink Hydrangea, spectacular under the living room

Pink Vinca lives in a pot on the back steps

Sunflower: The first of the Season

Yellow Daylily fans out under the Magnolia tree

Yellow Four o’clock Flower re-seeded from last summer adds cheer to a shady side yard

Yellow Snapdragons, a hardy little annual

Male pumpkin flower, hopeful, even at this late date

Purple Bellflowers surround our patio

Dwarf Plumbago sits below the tall grass in a corner of the front yard

This bluish status was part of my red, white and blue display for July 4th.

English Lavender lines the bottom of the front deck and attracts lots of beneficial bees.

Sweet Alyssum completes the trio of red, white and blue 4th of July plants.

White Magnolia cradles a bee

Anemone run along the back rock wall. They’ve taken over that corner of the garden.

Wild Onion
A garden surprise this summer

Begonia always remind me of my mother

Are you curious what these blooms look like before they flower? Find out on Flower Buds: The Shape of Things to Come.
If you linked back for answers to the quiz: Who’s who or what’s what? the answers are:
a. 4 Hydrangea
b. 1 Allium Stellatum
c. 2 anemone
d. 3 Four o’clock
e. 5 Snapdragon

Staking Tomatoes

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Not “steak and tomatoes” but tomato stakes, those wonderful supports you place around your cute little tomato plants. It takes planning and a healthy dose of optimism to set them up early. While you’re waiting around for the perfect day to do that chore, your tiny plants morph into shrubs.

I have a few choice words for the lazy gardener who puts off this task.

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Okay, now that I’m done telling myself off, I’m happy to report that I did manage to wrangle a couple of folding plant stakes around the prolific tomatoes. I’m glad that’s done!

Staked Tomatoes

While I was at it, I tied a couple of old wooden trellises together into an A-frame for the pumpkin vines. Hopefully, [insert optimism here] the elevated fruit deters the midnight foragers. Time will tell.

Pumpkin Trellis

Happy Friday!

The Science Of Tasty Tomatoes (gizmodo.com.au)
10 Tomatoes to Grow in Your Container Garden (treehugger.com)
City Pickers Update: Week Three (gardeningnirvana.wordpress.com)
Tomato – Fruit or Vegetable? The US Supreme Court rules it to be a … (librarianbrain.wordpress.com)

Blooming Thursday: Kinder + Garden

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According to Merriam-Webster, bloom can mean “to produce or yield flowers.” It also means “to mature into achievement of one’s potential.”

Last night my soon-to-be 12 year-old asked if I liked HTML. I said that I did. He wanted to create this beautiful lettering for my blog using one of his favorite sites. He was also careful to point out that it wasn’t completely original, giving credit where credit was due. I love it!

• • • • • Gardening Nirvana • • • • •

His integrity, thoughtfulness, creativity and wonderful imagination bring me such joy. It occurred to me today as I was photographing the blooms in my garden, that my children are blooming as well, blossoming really into two terrific young men.

That’s a lot of blooming on Thursday!

Oh yeah…the garden blooms:

I can’t get enough of the view: Blue Hydrangea

Close-up

I think the cosmos grew another foot!

Happy pollinator wearing a purple party hat

Pumpkin flower hiding in the cosmos

Pumpkin Nirvana: The Crop Runs Away!

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Yahoo! We have a small but viable pumpkin crop. Last year’s one volunteer re-seeded in the upper box. I had to amend the soil and top off the box before replanting it in the lower box. Not only did it survive, it thrived. Look at that baby grow! Our ‘Big Max‘ has a companion as well, cosmos from another season. For whatever reason, that tiny four by four-inch spot in the lower box has the perfect combination of soil, shelter, sun and moisture to make things grow.

A few of this seasons indoor seedling transplants survived so we have two or three varieties at different states of growth.

I spotted a few male flowers last week and the requisite bees in the vicinity. Yesterday the first female bud emerged, a tiny, yellow orb with magnificent potential.

Here is our pumpkin crop so far:

The Vine’s Curling Tendrils

Morning Sun Streams Through

Budding Female Flower

Pumpkin Plant Close-up

Planter Pumpkins: The Long View

Garden Guests and Pests and…Anarchists?

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I respect all creatures, even the garden pests so I’ve learned to garden around them. Our garden is free of pesticides, baits and traps. That doesn’t mean I’m not annoyed when I round the corner as I did last week and find the squirrel feasting on our pumpkin plant. Grumble, grumble, grumble. As a society, we’ve encroached so much on nature. Who am I to refuse a bit of my garden bounty in return?

Garden pest…

Slippery Snail

Garden guest…

Relocating to denser shrubs for safe keeping

Garden guest and occasional pest…

Neighbor Kitty, Everybody’s Best Friend

Garden guest, pest and anarchist…

Please, help yourself

Who drops by your garden uninvited? Have you discovered humane solutions to keep them at bay?

True Leaves: Seedlings Ready to Go

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Pushing Up Seed Casings

I learned the expression “true leaves” on a gardening forum called I Dig My Garden. True leaves are the second pair of leaves on an emerging plant indicating all systems are go for transplanting outdoors. I like that expression, and find it far more interesting than my heretofore “second set of leaves” terminology.

Our Burpee Growing System delivered in spades. We have over 72 pumpkin seedlings ready to go. I prepped the garden beds a few weeks ago anticipating this day. The stars have aligned, which is to say dry, warm inviting conditions to launch our pumpkin crop. Here we go!

“The love of gardening is a seed that once sown never dies.”
- Gertrude Jekyll
☼☼☼

April 11th: Planted seeds indoors in a Burpee Seed Starting System.

April 18th: Will you look at these adorable sprouts? What personality!

April 29th: True Leaves! So excited…

Kitchen Counter Pumpkin Crops

In the Garden: Give your Seedlings Room to Grow (mgnv.org)
Organictivity #4 Transplanting Seedlings (organictivity.com)
Progress and my other ‘kills’ (unpetitjardin.wordpress.com)

Thanksgiving Centerpiece: Hollowed Pumpkin Bouquet

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I’ve always wanted to try this…and finally did this year.

We grew this beautiful white “Cotton Candy” pumpkin last summer. It created the perfect color compliment to the orange flowers and its moderate size didn’t over-power the table.