Tag: garden

TCB

On By thefunkyfrugalistaIn gardeningLeave a comment

On Donny’s two days off we were taking care of business outside. I started on Wednesday by washing the windows and the house. White siding on a North facing house means washing it every 2-3 months. I found the perfect combination to get it done and it’s whiter than it’s ever been.

I like this Castile soap so much better than Dr. Bronner’s. Look how clean it got the house.

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Since it was such a beautiful day I decided to go ahead and clean out and wash the car.

We consistently have cat paw prints all of the hood every morning.

And just because I love to torture myself, I weeded the enclosed garden. That was a workout in itself, but it looks so much better now.

Thursday we wanted to go get more strawberry plants. I looked online at all of the big box stores and the nurseries around town, but they are apparently out of season. We had some spots in the purple planters that needed filling. We found some bell peppers at Home Depot. We have some bell pepper sprouts going, but we really like bell peppers so hopefully these will grow some.

And because neither one of us had our glasses on, we ended up with three bell peppers and one Jalepeno. Oh well, we like those too.

Oh, and Home Depot did have strawberry plants. They were $15.98 for one medium sized one. Not worth it. We have 3, but next year we want to plant about a dozen. We are getting berries off of them though.

On Friday Donny realized that something, probably a cat, had been digging in the raised bed that didn’t have the fence around it. Our goal that day was to find affordable fencing. I got the black one that’s around the other bed at Dollar Tree. I knew there wouldn’t be any left there so we went’ to Family Dollar to try to find it there. No luck, but they had some great pots on sale and the cutest solar mushroom. We left empty handed and headed to Home Depot. Our plan now was to get small pickets and just build our own little fence. Well, Home Depot doesn’t carry the small pickets so since Lowe’s is right next door we headed there.

We found some! They were a bit more expensive than my Dollar Tree ones, but not too much. Also Lowe’s has THE BEST oops paint selection. I found a gorgeous purple color that had no price tag. I told the worker that I really love their oops paint and I use to to just paint random things and I really needed this paint for a mural I want to do. He came back with a $10.36 price sticker and that was a deal because the other oops paints were over $17.

The fence works perfectly and there has been no more digging.

We had to run to Walmart to pick up some groceries and I found, what Donny calls, my half dead pansies that I think I can revive. Well, I really didn’t have room for pansies anywhere and I really needed to get bigger pots for my cilantro, lavender and rosemary. That meant another trip to Family Dollar. How cute are these pots?

I decided that I DID really want the mushroom light. Of course, I chose yellow.

I just planted the pansies in the old pots. Plus some bachelor button seeds that I had picked up.

Donny made some pickles with some of the cucumbers.

We tried them today and they are so good. We did, however, cheat in how we made them.

The past few days have really felt like summer. It has been so hot, which I don’t mind if I’m dressed to sweat.

If you follow me on instagram then you have already seen this picture, but I found this baby eating the cat food. So cute!

Speaking of cat food, for the last week I’ve been making Mr. Whiskers an egg cooked in coconut oil. The first day he could finish it in one sitting, but he would come back for the rest. He’s now up to two eggs and he will patiently wait outside for me to cook them for him.

This morning I saw that it looked like he got into another fight. This time with a cat, but it opened the wound on his cheek. I slathered it in neosporin and will keep an eye on it.

Sorry this blog is so long. We’ve just been pushing hard these last few days and are worn out.

New Patch

On By thefunkyfrugalistaIn gardeningLeave a comment

The main crop that I want to grow this summer is watermelon. I love watermelon, but I really only like the seeded ones because the seedless ones have become tasteless in my opinion. We planted seeds in both of the baby pool and there are some coming up, just not as many as I would like. I’m still holding out hope that it just hasn’t been hot enough for the seeds to all sprout.

When we were working on the garden on Thursday I had an idea to put another watermelon patch in. So that’s what we started and we actually finished it yesterday.

The plan was to use the boards, that we got for free, as the border and then plant more seeds. We went to Jake’s feed to get seeds but they actually had watermelon plants. They also had this cute chicken bar to mix treats for you chickens.

It was so tempting to not pick up more chicks because our girls are getting older, but we decided to wait until later in the summer.

We then headed to Home Depot to pick out the paint for the border. We knew what color we wanted and Donny made the final decision and it was perfect.

The color is Behr Classic Walz and it is the perfect shade of purple. You didn’t think we were going to get some boring color did you?

After I made sure the boards would fit, I marked the outline so I would know where to dig the trench and Donny would know how far to lay down the weed barrier. We layered the soil, organic garden soil, sand and then more garden soil on top.

I still need to level some of the outside boards, but I think it’s looking pretty good.

I also painted the outside border that I added. It’s not finished yet because I need to level it out more, but the pick axe I use is super heavy and I can only do so much in one day.

Donny and I were both beat after spending all day in the sun. We decided to go on a little date dinner to a place I saw on my social media that’s in Gilmer.

The special that night was the catfish plate and it did not disappoint.

It was only $9.99 and there was so much food I couldn’t even finish it. They also had free strawberry margaritas and you could BYOB if you didn’t want those. We will definitely be back.

One weird thing about me is that I love rocks. I have since I was a kid and one time when I was about 4 and was camping with my parents in Leakey, I filled our whole trunk up with rocks. My parents had to take most of them out so we would have room for our stuff and I remember being so disappointed. Anyway, anytime I’m at a place that has rocks I always grab a few of them.

Another weird thing is that I can’t just take one. There always has to be at least two because that rock will be lonely without another rock from where they lived.

Another picture of the zinnias because I just love all of the different colors.

In the Zone

On By thefunkyfrugalistaIn gardeningLeave a comment

When I set my mind on something I have to get it done. Yesterday while Donny was treating the ant beds (we are trying baking soda mixed with powdered sugar) I decided that instead of getting the weed eater out I would just dig up the weeds and make a sort of trench around the house and front beds.

I had no idea what these were as I was digging on the side of the house. I did a Google lens search and it turns out that they are Chinese artichokes. You can actually eat them. We planted a couple in an extra pot that we had to see what will pop up.

Our elephant ear bulbs are finally sprouting and growing quickly.

I then moved on to the garden area. It’s so hard to mow around the door to the fenced garden and right up against the barrier. I pulled all of the grass from around the door and laid down some of the wood that we got from a neighbor down the street.

I think it will make mowing so much easier. I also made a little “deck” for the pots that were just kind of sitting Willie nillie around the raised beds.

I’m going to replace the shorter board with one that actually fits, but I needed one there for the time being to make sure the extra boarder I added fit correctly. Those boards are going to be painted red. I wanted to get that done last night but ran out of time.

I removed the wire fencing that I had around the front trellis because it did not deter the cats one bit and my cucumbers in the front all got dug up. We were having to put boards over one of the raised beds because, for some reason, the cats loved to dig there also.

I checked it this morning and no dig holes were found. We still have work to do today because I want to put in a new bed where I dug up a bunch of weeds. It was thundering when we got up but hopefully the rain will hold off.

We finally have some cucumbers to harvest.

I planted two varieties and this is the pickle cucumbers.

On a different note, how beautiful was the sky last night?

I love how our hanging light makes the kitchen glow at night.

Donny and I watched Send Help last night. We thought it was okay. There is one cgi scene that is badly done and it has some really gross gory parts but Rachel McAdams was good in it.

Growing Up Big

On By thefunkyfrugalistaIn gardeningLeave a comment

Last Thursday Donny and I felt it was time to get all of my seedlings planted. We planted tomatoes, bell peppers, rosemary, oregano, marigolds, zinnias and wildflowers.

The purple beds were mostly empty because we were waiting to plant was was in the seed trays. I didn’t realize how many tomato plants I had started. Last year we our tomato plants hardly produced anything. I think we maybe got 5 tomatoes all summer.

This season we have an abundance. We made trellises for them out of the bamboo sticks and some wood I had. I was planning on putting tomatoes in the orange tire, but decided on the zinnias and wildflowers. Having the flowers seems to have helped with the pollination which is what I think was missing last year.

The summer squash is starting to fruit and so are the cucumbers.

So after we finished planting and weeding everything was looking good.

Friday night we got a storm. A big storm. The winds were insane and then it started hailing. All I could think about was our poor plants getting pelted to death. The next morning when I went to check on the damage, this is all I really saw.

My avocado plant that used to have dozens of leaves was now bald. That was the only plant damage (shockingly) so I’ll take it.

I cannot express how relieved I was.

Not only did the garden survive, but we are getting blooms on so many plants.

Started off as seeds and now look at the zinnias.

Our lavender plants are blooming and they smell so good.

I didn’t think the hydrangea was going to live through the winter but it did.

We also though the hostas were dead and even tried to dig them up. Ooops, they are just beautiful.

Now to just keep the bugs off everything.

Progress

On By thefunkyfrugalistaIn gardeningLeave a comment

It seems lately I’ve only been posting about our garden, but truthfully, that’s what we’ve been working on the most. We’ve gotten some decent rain lately, like today it’s been raining all day, so the plants have really taken off.

The squash and radishes are getting so big. I had to use Google Lens to see what one of the plants was because there seemed to be several popping up and they didn’t look like the traditional weeds I see normally. Turns out it’s Morning Glory which can be very invasive, but if it’s grown on the perimeter where no other climbing plant is, is is a great pollinator.

The tomatoes, zinnias and basil are still doing well. Donny went in and pruned all of the sucker stems off of the tomatoes so that should help them grow taller.

We decided it was time to build the trellis for the tire cucumbers since they have gotten so much bigger.

We also added bamboo stick so the potted cucumbers will have something to adhere to.

The cats have started digging in the raised beds so, even though it’s not pretty, we put some of the reclaimed wood across until the plants get bigger because they don’t seem to dig where there are larger plants. There is a lot of unplanted areas in the purple beds because I still need to plant my seedlings and we needed a space to do that once they get to the stage where they can live in a larger bed.

How do we know that the warm weather is here to stay? We have a seasonal cat. Monkey stays inside as soon as it starts getting cold. When the weather starts warming up she will only go back outside once there is no chance of cold weather. Every. Single. Year.

And I don’t know if I have mentioned it on here, but I despised my watering can. It is supposed to sprinkle water out, but it sprinkled out of the top holes and poured out of the bottom ones. Drove me crazy!

I found a different one at Walmart and it’s works perfectly. Just the right amount of sprinkle that doesn’t drown my plants. It’s also in my favorite color.

I also wanted to add that I have NEVER been able to grow cilantro from seed. I now have two plants that are actually looking like cilantro finally.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Relax

On By thefunkyfrugalistaIn Home StuffLeave a comment

Yesterday when I went out to check on the garden I saw that cats had been digging up my potted cucumber sprouts and flower sprouts that were also in pots. The little rascals had not been digging in the front bed with the cucumbers because I saw the opening where they were getting in and I strategically placed some flower pots in front of the opening. I, however, did not know what to do about the pots that were in front of the enclosed garden until I remembered seeing some wood that a neighbor down the street had put on the curb for the bulk pickup.

This was the first load I picked up. The woman who lives in the house came out and told me to take as much as I wanted. It was stacked up like a Jenga game so it was a bit difficult to not knock down the whole pile that came up to my chin and was longer than my car. I think it was from a deck they removed.

I stacked some of the pieces under the pots to see how that would work to deter the cats.

I sent Donny these pictures and asked him if he thought I should go pick up some more because they would be a good barrier border around the chicken coop. We have had some problems with possums getting in. He was all in so I went for a second trip.

It was hard sweaty work to load and unload all of this wood, but luckily I decided that this was enough. There were screws in most of the boards. It took me a while to figure out it was the star bit that I needed. I worked on getting the screws out.

When I come outside to do some yard work, I always have a helper. She can hear me come outside and jumps over her fence to hang out with me.

I did catch her standing in the middle of one of my raised beds, so we are working on leaving the garden alone. When I go back inside she runs home and bounds back over her fence.

After all the hot back breaking work I decided to take a little rest in the backyard. When the shade hits the back part of our yard is feels so cool and breezy. I grabbed a blanket, cushion, cold drink and my book and headed out.

Can we just say it was a gorgeous gorgeous day?

O’malley likes it when I chill with him in the yard.

And a big thanks to our chickens who are finally laying again. We are pretty sure it’s because we have been adding the pepper flakes to their feed.

Estate Sales + Catch Up

On By thefunkyfrugalistaIn Home StuffLeave a comment

On Thursdays Donny and I like to go to estate sales. Today he asked me if there were any that looked interesting. The two from our favorite company didn’t really look all that interesting. There was one about 30 minutes away in Gilmer. We decided to take a little drive and go to that one. The last 4 miles of the trip was a 1 1/2 lane road that had drop offs on both sides. It was beautiful though.

It was unfortunate that the sale itself was not very good. Everything was way overpriced. The company that held it was one we had never been to before and I don’t think we’ll ever go back to one of theirs again.

Last Thursday, however, there was a sale in my very favorite neighborhood in Longview. Nugget Hill is one of the oldest, if not oldest, neighborhoods with the most amazing houses.

This house was across the street from the home where the sale was. It’s always been one of our favorites. I looked it up online and even though it’s not for sale anymore realtor.com still has the photos up. The address is 814 Charlotte if you’re interested.

This was the house of the sale.

I cannot tell you the love I have for old houses. The house seemed like a maze and had some very cool items for sale. Since I have pretty much finished the inside of our home I wasn’t really looking for anything in particular and just actually came to see the house. I did find some flower pots outside in the garage area that I picked up for $2 a piece.

I also picked up this Himalayan salt tea light holder.

The rest of Donny’s time off last week was spent buying some plants, cleaning off the patio and working on the coop.

Planted some lavender and repotted my avocado tree whose pot was broken in the storm.

My little cilantro seedlings and some rosemary have new homes.

I used some of my propagated pothos to plant in the wall pots.

The bird feeder that I had in the garden area was not being used by the birds as they preferred their hanging feeder. I decided to turn it into a bee watering bowl instead.

Wiping down the patio was my baby. Pollen is heavy and the dirt that blew in with the storm was making everything a real mess.

This is what was covering EVERYTHING. It took several hours to get all of the fabric and rugs washed and pollen gunk cleaned off. I found the lemon sage castile soap at Drug Emporium. It got an excellent rating on Yuka and was 1/3 the price of Dr. Bronner’s. Plus the smell is so yummy.

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It was so worth all of the hard work.

We have a trunk on the patio that we picked up at an estate sale several years ago and had never really paid attention to what was inside.

We soaked everything in vinegar and cleaned them up.

I feel like I’ve been burning the candle at both ends so today after we got home I watched a lifetime(ish) movie, complete with a unbelievable plot and bad acting, and took a nice long nap complete with Milo and Baby Ruth.

This ‘n That

On By thefunkyfrugalistaIn Home lifeLeave a comment

First I want to start by saying we had a scare last night. Hannah and I went to workout and got home about midnight. I was checking on everything when I heard the neighborhood dogs barking like crazy. I looked up and there were two huge coyotes just walking down the middle of our street. If the dogs hadn’t alerted me I wouldn’t have even known they were there because they were ninja quiet. I start yelling at them to go away because our two male cats were outside. Donny heard me and came out to see what in the world was going on at that late hour. We hopped in the car and started chasing them around the neighborhood to get them to leave. They did not want to leave and kept circling back to our street. We had the windows down yelling at them and honking. They finally left but I’m sure they will be back. We have a feral cat colony across the street and it breaks my heart when there is a missing cat.

Fridays are like every normal person’s Sunday for us. It’s like the end of the weekend because Donny has Thursdays and Fridays off. Since we did all of our running around yesterday today was home day. While he was cleaning out and fortifying the chicken coop (we had a possum sneak in the other night in the wee hours) I was painting one of the old tires that we had in the backyard. Donny had used it for planning potatoes a few seasons ago and I wanted to spruce it up and use it for cucumbers.

My cucumbers are almost ready to be planted. I don’t know how well they will do in the front because it is just so dang shady. I’m going to plant some in the full sun and some in the shad and see how it goes.

That’s some of my tomato plants in the round containers next to the cucumbers.

I may have overdone it with the tomatoes, but who knows if they’ll all live.

I have 3 that I cheated and bought at home Depot. They are still living so that’s a plus.

My watermelon is finally sprouting. Those are my babies because I love watermelon and buy so many during the summer. I would just love to be able to pick them from my garden.

So far everything is going well. Fingers crossed it stays that way.

As soon as the compost is ready I’ll be spreading that all over. For some reason Making compost has always intimidated me. We made it all the time at our house in Bryan. I have no idea why I felt this way. I decided that if I don’t do it right, that’s okay, but so far it’s been really easy. I also found that using the weed weasel thing to mix it up is so much better than the hoe and stick I was using.

Sorry about all of the garden talk it’s just that I am trying to record everything so I’ll have the records for next time and it’s also what took up the majority of our day today.

But, that’s not the only thing. Hannah and I went to Crunch to workout. I absolutely love this gym. No one cares what you wear. Everyone is so nice and helpful. We have started doing the circuit workout and then cardio. Tonight we found the holy grail of working out. It’s the sauna! We sat in that beautiful hot room and when we got out it felt like we had taken a sedative. That will definitely be our ending every time we go. I just can’t even explain how wonderful I feel after sitting on those cedar benches for 15 minutes.

Because Sprouts is in the same parking lot I had to run in and get some lotion. I am almost out of the patchouli buritti and decided to go with a new scent.

This is my favorite scent. It says floral in the description (I’m not a floral girly at all) but I’m not getting that from it. All of the scents that I have tried are really good, but the lotion itself is outstanding. Non greasy, soaks in and keeps my skin soft all day long. Highly recommend. Natural Grocers, Vitamins Plus and Drug Emporium also carry this brand.

Now I’m going to talk my cat Malley off the ledge because he is wanting to go outside. He can’t meow so it’s the grunting sound. Poor thing. He always settles down when he realizes he has lost the battle of wills.

Impatient

On By thefunkyfrugalistaIn gardeningLeave a comment

Yesterday I had to run to Home Depot to get the rest of the soil I needed to finish up filling the raised beds. The front garden is so shady that it takes forever for something to grow. I found out that Impatiens and Vincas do well in shade so I looked for some there. No luck so I headed to Walmart where, online, it said the flowers were available. I could not find any of those flowers inside or out. I did find some tomato plants. I do not like the beefsteak or any of the large variety tomatoes. I prefer Roma but the smaller tomatoes are so hard to find for some reason. I picked up the last two that they had. Even Home Depot only had the large variety. While I was there I also picked up some strawberry plants.

Strawberries in.

I really dislike buying plants and prefer to start them myself with seeds, but I was very impatient to see something growing the the gardens. I am nurturing my seed trays and making sure they get enough sun. I keep the lids on at night but I have to leave them outside just because we don’t have the space inside.

I added a few more seed trays to the bunch.

My celery is starting to grow. I just plant the bottom part that I cut off.

I don’t know how my green onions are still alive. I just left them outside during all of the freezing weather.

Since I have planted seeds in the raised bed where I normally keep the seed trays at night I decided to just line them up outside the border and hope no animal gets into them.

Two things really irritated me today.

I went to move the weed sacks and the bottom dropped out of the bigger one.

This is the biggest one that I just don’t know what to think about it.

The city is putting in new electric poles and changing out the street lights. The light across the street has been burned out for a few months. At first it seemed so dark but I got used to it and actually started liking it because we could really see the stars so clearly

The light that was there before gave off a wonderful amber glow like this one down the street.

Did they put that kind of light back in? Oh, heavens no. We got a blinding LED light that is turned the wrong way so it looks like aliens are trying to beam up my neighbors house.

I guess I need to be careful what I wish for because I did call the city to let them know the light was out. Why Longview why?!?

More Garden Progress

On By thefunkyfrugalistaIn gardeningLeave a comment

We have had the fenced garden for a couple of years now. It’s been okay, but always seemed a little messy. The dirt was always piled up in mounds. The stepping stones would end up buried. Part of the wood is rotting, but it will make it through at least one more season.

I was going to go get bricks to put up an inside border. It would have cost about 15 dollars which really isn’t bad, but since we are trying to use what we have I decided to cut some boards and use those instead. I didn’t like the plain concrete stepping stones so I painted them red. While those were drying I tilled up the soil and started spreading it out. After I dug the trenches for the boards and put them in I filled the space with mulch and laid the stones back down.

It looks so much neater now. The door used to close. For a while now we have used the rake to hold it closed. I bought some garden hooks at Dollar Tree. You get 4 per package.

Just looking at this picture I’m pretty sure I’ll be repainting the boards.

I used the other two to hang up the onions and the lantern.

Now I needed to get some seeds in the ground. I have tried all different kinds of plant markers. No matter what kind I get, they never seems to work. They either get moved, washed away or are just missing. I decided to make a diagram (poorly) .

The big blank space on the side is where the tomatoes will go.

I started filling in the planters with dirt from my really big pot and some others I’m not using right now.

I’m so excited because my seeds are starting to sprout finally. It’s a fine line between watering them too much and not enough. We got a new hose and sprayer. It’s still very stiff and hard to maneuver. I was looking online for a hose holder. The one that I really liked was, unfortunately $80 so that was a no go. I saw some free standing holders, but the reviews were not so great. There are baskets and pots that hold the hose also, but I just didn’t feel like paying what they were asking. Then I remembered that we have a huge pot that we have had trouble growing things in. My Jasmine died. My begonias died. So I thought this would be the perfect solution and it was.

I didn’t realize that you need to soak parsley and broccoli seeds overnight. So hopefully I will get those in the planters tomorrow.

The sun was out all day with not a cloud in the sky so that meant that my solar lights were getting all the charge they needed.

The lights make all the difference at night. I can’t believe how far this side yard has come.