Green grow the babies, oh!

This is exciting—it's the first year I have so many baby plants growing in the spring. Usually it's only weeds that I get to watch getting bigger every day. This year I've got these little lettuces. After weeks being just bigger than specks, they're finally starting to get visible.

The big clump on the left side is where the bag broke open while I was making the two rows. The front row is supposed to be French lettuces and the back are supposed to be Italians, and on close inspection they do look slightly different. Pretty soon I'll be thinning them out and see how they taste! Mmmm! This is my first ever home-grown lettuce!

My strawberry pots are looking good, leaves are getting bigger and I can see baby flower buds on both my Quinaults from last year, and the TriStars I bought this year. They're both everbearing. This pot is the Quinaults.

The two spinach plants in the center are getting almost covered right now, they're getting more leaves but the leaves aren't getting very big. I'm hoping they'll show a little more vigor soon, but either way I'll be tasting them soon, too. It could be there's only enough room for one plant in there. Live and learn.

I was going to put both sets of strawberries in the bed behind my back door, but I had a traumatic event when I bought a big box of fresh California strawberries a few weeks ago that convinced me to keep them in elevated pots. I was cleaning them and cutting the tops off in my kitchen sink, and after I put the last one on the bowlful, I noticed a piece of leaf I'd left on it. I reached over to pull it off and it turned around and crawled back into the berry! It wasn't a piece of leaf, it was a big old earwig! Bleccchhhh! So I took that one and the tops out and trashed them, and then carefully sliced all the others up without finding any more bugs. I've had ants and pillbugs get berries on the ground, but I have a full complement of earwigs in my garden, and I don't even want to give them a chance at my berries. Anyway, now they're up at elbow height, away from bunny rabbits and ground bugs, and I can just walk out in the morning and do comparison nibbling. Last year I got about 3 berries a week from my Quinaults and they bore ripe ones all the way into October, and I didn't get them planted till late. Two pots means twice as many, I hope!

So with all these dry days—let's see, I think there have been 6 or so, so far this spring—what have I been doing? Just this—

Weeding—weeds, weeds, weeds. This is the second dump load, another 30 pounds (20 gallons) of weeds, mostly little bitter cress, grasses, chickweed, and pigweed. I'm almost caught up, I've pretty much cleared the orchard, there are just a few patches I still really need to get. I do need to get into the veggie garden soon and check on everything in there. We should have a couple dry days next week, so I'll be getting down there then and get some new pictures. I can see things growing!

So exciting!

Trying to picture glass

I never thought of myself as a fan of red or gold, but this is now one of my favorite color combinations—for the glass, at least. I took this photo with the flash against a white background and then photoshopped the background to black, so it's something of a false effect—you'd barely be able to see any of it on against black.

I've been trying to find a way to get better photos of the glass pieces that show off the colors even in a small size, such as the thumbnails that are used on Etsy. The shots of the pieces outside against my trees are what they really look like outside, but depending how much light there is that day, different colors show up better and the piece can look quite variable. Like this one:

Plus, I would like to have a setup for shooting them inside the house, on the days when it's just too cold and foul outside. I can shoot if it's just drizzling, but when there's ice on the patio or the piece is whipping around in the wind, it's really more than I can cope with.

So I tried photographing some against a white background with lights on it to provide a little backlighting.

But although this shows the true colors of the glass, the problem is that the pieces never actually look like this, except in the photo.

When I added the flash, it makes it more as it actually appears, because you almost always see the light reflecting off the front as well as that coming through the glass. And the colors against the plain white background do show up better, even in small images. The hot spots from the flash reflections are a problem, and would never do for real commercial photos, but I can live with them. So I guess I just need to use multiple photos. I'll probably skip the photoshopping—that's just for fun.

Finally, some decent gardening days!

Not all my camellias made it through the winter (or the freezing temps two weeks ago) with their buds intact, so maybe this one is going all out to make up for that. This is an unnamed seedling I bought at Al's five years ago—it was the first camellia I planted here. It has semi-double red and white variegated flowers, and has been growing steadily every since I planted it—unfortunately too close to a main pathway. What was I thinking? I've been trying to figure out how to move it without seriously upsetting it, and I think I've finally found out how. I considered shaping it back, but it has a lovely loose form and as you can see, is certainly bloom-silly some years. So this year will be the year of the move. I was out yesterday afternoon weeding, and looked up and saw the late sun hitting the top of it, and all those beautiful flowers, and had to take a picture of this display. This is why I love camellias, and why I grow them. Mmmmm.

Yesterday morning while it was too cold to go outside I cooked up a new glass piece. I've done two of these diamonds, but this is the first one I'd call successful.

Medium turquoise blue, a bit of lime green, and some intense lemon yellow. Seems like a nice bright color combination, one that might show up well among the greens of the garden. I like how the shape turned out—almost straight on the edges.

So, a great day—glass, murdering weeds, and fifty red & white camellias!

Ice Rainbow Garden Jewelry in two beautiful nearby gardens

If you live near Estacada or Wilsonville, you can now see my glass pieces hanging in two beautiful gardens. Matthew and Darin of Laurel Hedge are garden designers who sell antiques and art pieces as well as select plants at their shop and gardens just NE of Estacada on Currin Road. They are open every Saturday now through mid-October, or by appointment. Hughes Water Garden is on Stafford Road south of I-205 just NE of Wilsonville. They have a wide selection of water plants and hardy plants and garden and pond art of all kinds, and are open most days through September. Both places are truly inspiring places to visit if you're looking for ideas for plantings or designs. Links to both photo-filled websites are in the sidebar.

A little moonlight

I finished this painting a month ago, but I've been too distracted with the beginning of gardening season to get it outside to take a photo of it. It's my second attempt to use my wet-surface ink technique on a canvas panel, and I feel like this one is a lot more successful because I was able to retain almost all of the textures created in the wet surface inking process. I did almost ruin it trying to use acrylic paints to enhance the textures, but I was able to stop myself in time and remove them, then continue using the inks. The difference in results is attributable to the transparency of the inks.

 I would like it a bit better if the colors had been lighter, but this one just came out dark and I don't yet have a way to fix that. Maybe in the future.

In like a lion, out like a wet, grumpy lion

 First rainbow of 2011

March in the Pacific North West—well, the trees love it. And if they're happy, then I'm happy. So far this season I've measured over 13 more inches of rain than we got by the end of March last year. Pretty wet. But at least we're finally getting some sunbreaks when the temperature is over 45º and I'm getting outside to get a few things done. Been working in my veggie garden, and today I planted a brand new Darrow blueberry I just bought. A terrible thing happened to my Bluecrop plants—all 5 of them—when I went out to look at their flower buds early this month, I noticed they didn't have any! I'm thinking that the big freeze we had right before Thanksgiving killed their buds right as they were forming. Only one Bluecrop has two flower buds, on a really low branch that is semi-sheltered in the branches of the blueberry next to it. My other two blueberries, a Legacy and a Darrow, both set a nice crop of buds. The Darrows are particularly fun because they're quite large, so I bought another one this morning. Lesson: don't put all your eggs in one kind of berry bush—diversify!

Dig a hole, find a rock

Typically, there was a nice big rock right where I wanted to plant it, but at least this rock was loose and came out easily. Isn't that lovely soil? Nice wet, brown clay. Mmmmm.

Last summer I was visiting a friend who lives nearby and on her back deck she had a beautiful big round bowl right at elbow height on a simple wrought iron stand, overflowing with leaf lettuces just ready to pick. I really wanted one just like hers, but pricing wrought iron stands turned out to be pretty discouraging. And forget about finding a big, good-looking shallow bowl like hers. Still haven't seen one like it. But this winter while Goodwill hunting I did find a very strange but fairly tall and sturdy vinyl-covered steel stand and a low rectangular purple plastic tub that actually fit it—sort of—so now I have a lettuce tub on my patio!

The latest style: Shabby Cheap

I filled and planted it yesterday in between showers, and laid the fir branchlets over the top as disguise. If you were a hungry finch, would you be able to tell there's tasty lettuce seed sitting right there for the taking?

 On my way down to the veggie garden this morning I found what my neighbor calls a "widowmaker" right next to one of my heavily traveled paths.

A sign from above

This one's only a little over an inch thick, but it got driven in pretty good into the dirt. This is why I don't work outside when the wind's blowing more than a medium breeze. You never know when or where one of these air-to-ground missiles is going to launch itself.

Lots of great plants are showing up in the nurseries now, and I've been out there getting my share. Got some great deals on heucheras, including my favorite Amethyst Mist. The plants are starting to pile up on my patio now.

The waiting room

Got a nice Choisya Sundance that will look really great with the Amethyst Mist, Tiramisu heucheras and more hellebores. The soil is warm enough to plant now at 42º, all I'm waiting for now is for it to be a bit less soggy (too much to ask?) and the air to be a bit warmer. There's no sign of 60º yet, not up here in the toes of the foothills of the Cascades. The weatherman said last week that we'll usually see it around April 11th, and that's only a couple weeks away.

Hellebore Heaven—at last!

I love hellebores! I'm so hungry for flowers this time of year, and here they show up with their great colors and keep blooming till the next garden players are ready to take over the performance. When a late afternoon sunbeam backlit this young, dark red beauty, I grabbed my camera and ran outside to get a picture. In the shade it looks like dark mahogany, but when the sun hit it, it really looked this red. Ahhhhh.

Both the red and this pink are unnamed seedlings. I think it will be many years before I have enough hellebores. Tough, evergreen, drought tolerant, need only a little bit of sun, love bare clay devoid of humus, bloom for weeks and weeks—and some make babies for you!