Sweet Little Smartie

When you drive a Smart car you get a lot of questions from strangers. They range from "How many miles a gallon do you get?" to "It's so small, don't you feel unsafe?"  First off, if I felt unsafe I wouldn't drive it, and I certainly wouldn't put my child in it. Now that's cleared up, here's how small it is.

A few months ago I bought an apple tree, pomegranate tree, 3 gallon blueberry bush, and a grape vine. The top photo was taken over my shoulder at a stop light. They're kind of shoved in there, but they fit with no damage.

Yesterday a friend sent me a note on Facebook that she'd spotted a slide on the side of the road, waiting for trash pick up.This was my view all the way home, granted I had to leave the back window open, but I got the slide home safely. It's clean and in perfect shape. Points for me and points for my sweet little hard-working Smartie, The Sippy Cup.

The Wu Tang clan of gardening

 I spent most of the day yesterday working on a piece for a show with Little Paper Planes for the book launch party in June. Although I took a few breaks to change up the pace, most of the day was spent sitting in front of the computer working in Photoshop. A brief conversation in Facebook about how to deter slugs from strawberries compelled me to illustrate my advice: use eggshells.

Let's drive the point home, shall we? Egg shells are the Wu Tang clan of gardening.

Laissez Faire Food

I'm planning on an outdoorsy kind of weekend, finally getting some seeds in the ground. It's nice to look back at an area that was once English ivy and a boxwood to see it growing into an area of abundant food.

 

The strawberries sent out runners galore last year. This year I'm letting the runners root and will move them to another garden bed later in the season. The rhubarb has disappeared, but it might've been moved without my permission. Funnily enough I've been wondering where a purple anemone came from that popped up in the backyard near the pond. Looks like a squirrel stole the tubers from the front and transplanted them to the back. The kiwi vines seem happy enough, as does a fall planted blueberry.

The rain barrel stand is an old iron frame from a wicker chair a room mate left behind about 8 years ago. It works perfectly! The stepping stones are actually insulated glass samples we get from window reps at work. I'm mulching with old, broken terra cotta pots. I just give the pieces a smack with the shovel every once in a while to make the pieces smaller. They'll disappear soon enough.

Here's a little timeline for those of you without the patience to sit through the slide show. After ripping out the ivy I put the compost bin in the area for a few rotations. The worms moved in and tilled up the soil and I started getting to work adding plants. Somewhere along the way my focus shifted from pretty flowers to tasty foods and it became a designated perennial edible bed. 

Souls and Soles

It's been a while since we did a little compare and contrast. Today we'll look at TOMS shoes vs Skechers' brand BOBS. Since the picture I put together explains most of the details I won't touch on those, except to say the curly brown haired guy on the left is Blake Mycoskie, founder of TOMS; the curly haired dude on the right is, as far as I can tell, just some dude they found to put on the website for BOBS.  Perhaps the obviously profit-minded Skechers could adopt a new slogan: Soulless Shoemaker.

Redneck Hot or Urban Haute?

I've been bothering Charlie for one of these for oh....say...2 years now? See The Brick House's vision? Search "stock tank pool" or "livestock tank pool" and you'll find pages of drool worth examples. The idea of pool upkeep isn't so fantastic so the popularity of living pools makes for an equally tempting option, albeit one that might leave you with little fish nibbles every time you swim. But as far as a plain ol' stock tank with water? In one context it's a whole lotta hillbilly, but in another it's modern, simple design.

I love Jay Sauceda's images of the pool at El Cosmico in Texas; the built up stone edging, the way the water calls for a dip. Check out the Lundberg Design sophistication going on--zero redneck there.

Steve and Glen's Joshua Tree abode as seen on Apartment Therapy.  bigBANG studio's pictures of the same.

Who's ready for a dip? What do you think? Redneck hot tub or modern with a bit of twang?