Winter is Over!

Well ... at least where we are, that is. We had two sunny days in row in 70' (!), so of course i am getting into gardening mood. I know, it is still too early to go outside, so all i have for now is the potted greenery. I was glad to find out that my kind of neglected orchids survived all the last year construction mess just fine (except they did not bloom) and they started flowering again, at least some of them.


And I am so very proud about my Hawaiian acquisitions ;)


the stick with miniature leaves pushing on the top is a plumeria and the little creature behind it is Kauai coffee plant. Hmm ... actually, it is of the Kona variety when i think about it, we bought them both right before we left the island (Kauai) in the little store at the airport. They are understandably very restrictive about what you can take or bring in plant-wise over there, so everything living has to be specially certified before leaving. Anyhow, i am still sorry i did not pick some real Kauai raw beans to sow when we went to see the coffee plantation there, the "fruits" were just ripe, oh well silly me. Plumeria produces those very sweet smelling white flowers which are traditionally used for leis. For me it is the best fragrance ever, it always will remind me of my most favorite place in the world ... the trees were blooming under our windows when we went for our honeymoon:). I am so happy about these little guys :) I was worried they will not survive the winter, we brought them in the middle of November last year, after squishing them for eleven or so hours in plane. Yet, the coffee one revived quickly, but i had no hopes for the stick. Well, fortunately, the nature is an almighty sorceress :)


(this one is from my lunch time walk, just happy about the blue skies and green...uhmm...spring chimera?)

Long Time No See ...

Somehow, it is almost end of July ... Oh well, I skipped two months of life reports not because of lack of happenings but because of too much of it.

R. finished the basement reconstruction, just in time for my rounded birthday party :). We are still getting used to so many of the new spaces, sometimes one can get lost there :). Mom came to visit for a month and my friend M. came for the long weekend. With my mom, we quarreled a bit, than we made peace. We managed to go to see ocean in the beautiful Lewes park (but water was just toooo cold for me to swim, only M. the seal went in), we went to Sky Meadows in Virginia and to the Fredrick in Maryland for the 4th July fireworks, we visited inner harbor in Baltimore, Mike's crab place on the river in Annapolis, we ate raw oysters in old Ebitt grill and Thai dumplings in Georgetown... Mom went back home on the 7th, i already miss her ...

This summer is very hot and humid, we have long periods with temperatures around 100 F, and some heavy stormy rains too, (too much water, we are actually loosing the gutters one after another). Garden is very jungly by now, we ate the pees in early June and some leftover sour cherries (we discovered our cherry tree is of that variety), now i am collecting first tomatoes and string beans.



I successfully fighted back the black spot mold on my rose bushes, so we are getting continuous rounds of new blossoms, only they are a bit smaller than those first spring ones. All the last year morning glories, marigolds and zinnias came back, i did not have to use any new seeds this year ...

As well, now is the peak time for gladiolas, we have so many blooms from the last year bulbs which were supposed to be just annuals, i guess all that snow was good winter protection against frost.

M(a)y Garden

It was raining most of the last week and The garden liked it :) The terraces are soaked with water and since it is very warm as well, all is ready to "jungle up". Even the new rose on the bottom corner is shooting fresh leaves, poor one. I have not given her too high survival chances after she was completely destroyed by "salami" (our unruly Zoe dog, who was told she will become a sausage if she does not stop doing such a baaaaad things, but somehow she does not take me seriously, she tried to dig it out and crushed the the rose so badly that only the bare sticks were left).


Of course I bought more tomato and pepper plants (even though we will have some from the seeds I started directly to ground) and one squash and one zucchini since they were such success last year. To accommodate all of them, I expanded a bit both of ours "uphill" and "downhill" vegetable patches. The borders will be done more properly next year (as we have seen it at our neighbor's and as I am promised)



While weeding the the rows, I found this


It is remnant of the wild "walnut" tree we cut down last spring - we are not really sure which nut it actually was, just looked little bit like wallnuts but had no edible core. This seedling looked like from some botanists collection :)

Our cherry tree is getting ready for my mom to have some fresh cherries


so far unnoticed by birds:). May be they get enough of mulberries from the old tree growing on our front edge



I had big plans to try jam or even wine, but we are so very busy this year that I will just make some pie for time being, they are about ready for that.
...
I got some moderately bad news about the little feet project, but may be there is still hope, we shall see ... Fortunately we did not have time to worry about it too much, we are getting closer to the end of all the building downstairs, now there is lot of painting ahead of us (saying us even though so far it was mostly W. who did all the work) and we had to go get some closet furniture ...
Somewhere between the shelwes in Ikea I got inspired and made this very Czech piece for dinner. We call it "smazak", it is breaded and pan fired piece of cheese (with optional slice of ham between), served with fries - we had a good chippotle red potato ones from WHF freezer section, baked in oven.


I know, not exactly healthy choice, but it was good (and we have it just once in a blue moon) :)... Oh, and we won the world championships in ice hockey, we beat the RUSSIANS!!!!

Bloom Time

This time of year is my almost favorite, not too hot and so many colors everywhere (unfortunately they come with pollen in one package, so that is the catch). I cannot get enough the roses we have in garden, we may end up with no grass and forest of roses one day, I drag home new bush almost every week now :)








I always thought that roses are too fussy to be beautiful in regular gardens, that one has to pamper them to see some blooms, but it is pleasant surprise that the ones we have are doing fine with no extra attention requirements at all (I did prune them little in the early spring to remove dead branches and I am using granulated Miracle Grow plant food for roses sporadically).
And these girls are making me happy too, although the red ones are not going to bloom this year, I have to replant them in the fall and make sure they are not sitting too deep.



. . .
We were on the way to Lowes on Sunday, to get some garden stuff and look for more door slabs e.t.c., but fate had for us something else ...


we found there our new seating! As W. have put it - "we will know when we see it" - and indeed we did. The only problem was we had to take it home the same day, so that was pretty much our afternoon/evening entertainment (we had to make 2 trips there). Cannot wait to see it in the new space !

Sheep and Wool

we have seen in overwhelming quantities of both when we visited The Maryland S&W Festival on Sunday.


We found out about it quite accidentally when I saw a message on the closed doors of the Alexandria yarn store saying everybody went there. We got curious and went too:)


it was fun, even though it was one of those 90-in-shade-jungle-wet days.


I was very reasonable though, I dragged home with me only one skein of juicy red incredibly soft hand dyed alpaca yarn,


I think I just have seen too many nice things to be really sure what I absolutely have to have ;). My catch of the day is destined to be a cardigan I am planning to make for my mom (again).
. . .
On the way home we stopped in the antique stuffed Ellicot city,


to choose nicely restored potential candidate for W's old books library for upstairs living room and to buy heavily discounted leather sitting cube for the downstairs new space


it was so cheap that it must have been an early gift from one of these gentleman (who probably had a secret convention there).
. . .
It was otherwise very work-busy week, but I somehow managed to finish my Stained Glass cardigan,


which was originally intended for mom, but it ended up being too big for her (she apparently does not like wide sleeves). I am happy to keep it for myself, as souvenir from the day we spent in Laramie last June just day before we got married (I got the blue-green merino silk yarn there).
My fingers were itching to start something from the beautiful yarn I got in Kauai, so the Hanalei Dream pullover just mysteriously appeared on my needles on Tuesday and it keeps growing fast since.


It is my own design, but I am planning to use EZ calculations for raglan construction and it will definitely be the v-neck.
. . .
Oh and our climbing rose is blooming now !


And so is the maroon clematis in the front yard,



peonies are just about to open, azaleas are behind the peek I think, but since we have them in relative shade, they will last for couple more days.

Out We Went

It was eventful week (at least for our standards). On Friday we were invited to the concert given by Lithuanian pianist Edvinas Minkstimas.


I cannot even remember when I attended a piano concert last time, and I have to say, after surviving the first half hour of Schumann without move (not problem of the performance but rather of the hardwood benches, with emphasis on "hard"), I quite enjoyed the rest (shorter pieces by Chopin, Debussy, Piazzola and Liszt). The concert took place in giant rich St. Luke catholic church in McLean in VA (judging by the reception afterward). They have a very unusually looking organ there,

I never saw horizontal pipes before, we may come back here to hear it one day. I was driving on G.Washington Parkway to get there, I do not think I ever been there,

I stopped at one of the overlooks just when the sun was going down, it was before the storm and light was almost like in the old masters paintings.
The weather was sunny again on Saturday morning, so I took dogs to Wheaton, it was suddenly very bright green there;

the leaves here always appears mysteriously overnight, one day there are naked sticks and the next day everything is green :). And the azaleas are in full bloom now, it is very pretty in our little suburb neighborhoods, looks like every house has at least one of them in the garden.


I got an office baseball tickets for yesterdays game of Nationals and Rookies (we lost), but it was nice warm evening and the seats were quite good so I could actually see the players faces, and they served a good draft beer so it was overall pleasant event - and I finally started the sleeves for my mom's stained-glass cardigan.


When I was driving to work today and they said it is April 21, I had a feeling that somebody I know has birthday today, and when I got to talk to my mom she said grandma would have been 90 today. I am thinking about you often, babi, and I am so thankful for all the crafty things you taught me. Speaking about which, I finished blanket for my friend E. baby girl who was born just last Tuesday.
It is made of Malabrigo lace merino, yellow and greenish (knit in two strands), about 4 skeins, in simple fir cone pattern with crochet scallops on edges. Hope the baby is not allergic to wool:)

Garden/Life Journal

I planted some new additions to our very bare terrace garden this weekend - orange yellow tea rose and couple of strawberries, pink bleeding heart, columbines, dianthus and ground covering blue and white blooming little patches.


This part of garden is very shady (only 2 hrs of sun at closest-to-the-house spots) and moreover the soil there is bare clay (I try to improve that with bags and bags of compost every year), it was quite difficult to find anything which would tolerate such bad conditions - so far, the survivors include only the hellebore, astilbes, hostas and ferns (and there is as well rose, yarrow and sedum in the sunny corners), well we shall see how successful I was this time. These are leftovers of cheerful orange tulips, big white lilies (bloom time in June) and white clematis living in the happier sunny backyard corner.


And of course I got too inpatient to wait for tomatoes seedlings to grow so I got two little of Big Girl(s) early fruiting variety,


just in case the seeds never start (shall the frost come again, I will make small plastic greenhouses around them). Than, just because I had no more space anywhere else, I made a new row for gladiolas and shady flowery mix


I got it in WHF, even though these mixes never quite grew for me before, but I remain an optimist, the new place is nice flat spot with good soil). On the "house" end of it, there are the peonies; I thought they died, but they surprised me and came back, even the red one I planted from bulb last spring and which never even sprouted. I got the other one, the whitish pink one, in the pot late last summer and than it got some white mold all over and leaves died out. I love peonies, my grandma used to have big pink bushes in her garden, I can still remember the nice smell ... The white one is ready to bloom soon.

The new flower bed mirrors the tulip stripe on the other side of front yard; to replace the spring bulbs, I sewed in the sunny summer flowers mix (from the same source as the one above) and poked in some ranunculus here and there, may be I will add gladiolas too, just to keep the symmetry going :).


Our little cherry is all blooms this year (planted in February 2009). I am curious how many cherries will birds actually leave for us (last year we shared with W. literally just 1 fruit).


I am ready to cover it with the net if I see them wingy creatures getting too close to it :)

We had some in the seventies-eighties warm evenings recently, I just love to sit in the front porch after the dusk, with glass of wine, with the neighborhood quieted down, with only the birdies chirping the love songs, and imagine how beautiful it all will be six weeks from now,:)

Oh, and on Friday I had amazing opportunity to see DC from, at least for me, very unusual perspective, we had small grilling party with my office friends at one of the Pentagon city roof tops right above the famous shopping mall. And I think I found where did they got the NCIS opening picture from (before the collage that is).



. . .
A tragedy happened on Saturday, polish president and 95 other people died in the plane crash on the way to the peace making ceremony in Katyn. I do not know anything about politics in Poland, but I can imagine what would be the reaction of Czechs if something like that happened to us (well, omitting the basic human feeling of sadness for the lost lives of course). Hm, it is somehow strange it happened there, of all places, like the insurance that past shall never be forgotten ...