Tag: nature

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.

Galveston Day 3

On By thefunkyfrugalistaIn VacationLeave a comment

Today was beach day! We got up early to catch the ferry to Bolivar Peninsula. We got in line around 9:15. I had heard the wait could be long but I figured on a Thursday, not at a peak time, it wouldn’t be too bad. After waiting an hour we decided to back out and leave.

Unfortunately this was our view from the backup camera. We decided to just ride it out and about 15 minutes later we started loading. We actually did see a school of dolphins.

They were right where this picture was taken but those suckers are very fast swimmers. The weather had predicted overcast yesterday which was why it was history day and not beach day. It turned out to be sunny and today started out very overcast.

I had heard that the best place to look for shells was to make a right at Stingeree Rd. We didn’t want to go to Crystal Beach because we weren’t planning on staying on the peninsula for very long.

As you can see there was quite a bit of seaweed. Didn’t bother us though. I think the high tide brought a lot of it in because we had no problems walking along the shoreline.

We walked for quite a ways picking up any cool looking shell we saw. We wanted to head back to the ferry before it got too busy. We also had planned to visit some pocket beaches on the East side.

It was easy peasy coming back. There was only about a 10 minute wait. It was sprinkling so we just stayed in the car for the duration of the ride back to Galveston.

The first beach we wanted to go to was the one by the Tipsy Turtle.

It was a nice uncrowded beach. There were, however, a lot of man o’ war there.

The breeze and the weather turned out to be so nice so we walked both ways down the beach.

Our plan was to have lunch at the Tipsy Turtle, but I wanted to go see the hurricane statue that was on the seawall.

It’s such a poignant piece of art.

By this time it was getting late in the afternoon and we were starving. Instead of driving back to the Tipsy Turtle we decided to go to our favorite place.

Of course, The Spot. This time we chose to eat in the Tiki Hut. I ordered the shrimp diablo tacos and Donny got a burger. Both were so good! The drink of the day was a creamcicle margarita. Yes, I had two. That makes the grand total of drinks I had on the trip seven. I didn’t have anymore after that. They were quite delicious though.

We needed to get back to the Airbnb because we both needed showers. We wanted to go drive around and find the carved trees that are in the historic district. When Hurricane Ike hit the island in 2008, it destroyed a lot of trees. Instead of having them just be stumps, artists carved different statues out of them.

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This one was called Venus on the Half shell. We saw a few more but I didn’t take anymore pictures because they are in people’s yards . We also were awed by the gorgeous homes all over the island. Just beautiful.

The one on the left is called The Easter Cottage.

We really didn’t know where we wanted to have dinner on our last night here. Katie’s Seafood was recommended to us, but that was on the water, by the Strand, where all of the construction was. As we were driving through the Eastside Historic District we saw this.

It’s the oldest Mexican Food Restaurant in Texas established in 1916. We absolutely had to try this gem that was right in the middle of a neighborhood.

I got the cheese enchiladas, my normal order anytime we go to a Mexican restaurant. Donny got the fajitas. It was all wonderful and you just know the restaurant is truly good when their salsa kicks ass.

We actually closed them down being one of two tables left in the restaurant.

It was the perfect ending meal to our time here.

After our nightly walk on the seawall where we almost got run over by two undercover police cars who ran the red light as we were crossing, we returned to our humble abode.

Donny and I both love Galveston so much. He doesn’t really care for beaches, well, it’s actually the sand he doesn’t like. Here though you are surrounded by water but you don’t necessarily have to walk on the actual beach. We like it here so much that we were actually driving around seeing houses for sale and looking them up on Zillow. Maybe one day. Now we had to go in and start packing because we were heading out in the morning.

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.

Crazy Storm

On By thefunkyfrugalistaIn gardeningLeave a comment

I check the weather every day. Several times a day on 3 different weather sites. Yesterday there was 20% chance late in the afternoon. Nothing crazy. At 4:45 we got alerts on our phones of a tornado warning. Donny called right after that and said they were closing down early because the weather was supposed to get bad. As I headed up there it started raining. Big heavy raindrops. The wind was also whipping around. When I got to Donny’s work it was pouring so instead of me getting out and going to the passenger side he just jumped in and we left. By the time I pulled out of the parking lot I couldn’t see, even with the windshield wipers on full speed. Then the hail started. We were inching along with all of the other cars. We all had our hazards on because you couldn’t see the road ahead of you. I started panicking. I was in the middle lane with hail, cars and rain I couldn’t even see through. Donny told me to get over and turn into this big parking lot because it had an overhang. Another car was already parked underneath and then another car joined us. Just as quickly as it hit, it went away. This was a crazy fast moving storm.

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Luckily there didn’t seem to be too much damage in the garden.

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The wind was so bad! There were things just flying around. It was a mess.

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We lost power right at 5:00. We didn’t even get hit the hardest. White Oak had thousands without power. I think we had around 800. Luckily we have my candle tray. It came in really handy.

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We finally got power back around 11. The wind was still gusting like crazy. It ended up blowing our backyard swing over which has never happened in all the years we’ve had it.

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It was still going strong this morning. The whirlie gigs were whirling.

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The electric company is replacing the power poles in our neighborhood. We have a transformer on ours so that meant that we were not going to have power for most of the day while they replaced it. I did have fun watching them put the new pole in. It’s fascinating.

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We live in the gardening zone 8. That means that we should have already had our last frost and plants can safely be planted.

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And then Mother Nature said, “hold my beer”. It’s supposed to be 32 degrees the next two nights before we hit the 90’s on Friday. Yeah, that’s not weird or anything. So, I got to cover all of the plants.

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The patio plants went to their cold weather home in the laundry room. The other plants that are just now sprouting and our flowers are all inside along with the seed trays.

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Now to just keep Baby Ruth, our kitten, out of them.

So Much Better

On By thefunkyfrugalistaIn gardeningLeave a comment

Ever since the fenced garden was built and we had the two baby pools plopped beside it drove me crazy. Then add the gargantuan grill that was so heavy I could never quite get all of the weeds pulled from behind it and it made me even crazier. I knew there had to be something better we could do with it. I started watch Tia Weston and her $1 house on Youtube. It is a great series of amazing DIY that her and her father did. Anyway, I loved what she did to her backyard and it sparked an idea in my head.

First of all I wanted to buy as little as possible and just use what we already had. When I took apart the wooden trellis I saved the boards. The fit perfectly as the garden edge and I decided to paint them red to match the bottom of the fenced garden. I already had the red paint so no extra money spent there.

While those were drying I finished pulling the rest of the weeds and digging the trench for the border.

I knew we had some weed barrier out in the shed so after I laid the border down I went to get the barrier. I think the garden gods were smiling down on me because the barrier was the exact width and length that I needed.

I figured out where I wanted the planters to go. I know the baby pools are not the prettiest things, but they work so well and since we already had them they didn’t cost a thing.

I used the two bags of mulch that I already had but I needed some more so Jackson and I ran to Home Depot. I picked up mulch, soil and some pansies that were on sale. I cut up cardboard that we had been saving to lay in the purple planters. I also finished the mulch. I knew I wanted solar lights, but Walmart didn’t have the same ones I have in the front. I almost bought some that just looked to industrial. I ended up with the glass crackled solar lights.

It turned out so good.

I found a box of the solar string lights that I had gotten when Big Lots was going out of business. I put those around the fenced garden. I haven’t done much work on that yet. Hopefully tomorrow.

I covered the pools with screens for nighttime because the cats will dig in them.

I love how bright the lights are. I now want to get these for the front. The string lights didn’t get a chance to charge.

This week I’m going to fill the purple planters with dirt and work on the fenced garden. I need to get some seeds in the ground by the weekend.

I picked up a pot that was out by the shed. It had ants in it and then got all over my hands and started biting me. I remembered that if you chew up purple nettle and put it on the bites it takes the sting out. It sure does! It’s classified as a weed, but there are so many benefits that it provides. I’m just glad I remembered that one.

Walkie Talkie

On By thefunkyfrugalistaIn Day Date, Longview, txLeave a comment

Hannah was feeling overwhelmed when I picked her up from college on Thursday. When this happens we go for walks. We decided to start at The Green, our favorite park. It’s so much easier to talk about problems and life goals when you are surrounded by nature, I think.

The trees were in bloom so that led us to Google Lens to try to find out what kind of trees we were seeing.

We always say hi to Shelldon because he is just so cute.

We always stop to play the xylophones. The one Hannah is playing is like experiencing a sound bath. The notes are so clear and beautiful.

And of course we had to admire our favorite tree. It is just so symmetrical and stands out against all of the other trees.

After a few loops around the park, we decided to go walk on the trail in our neighborhood. On the way there we passed beginning of the Boorman Trail that we had never started from. I always see this statue and wonder what this trail is like and where it actually goes. So we decided to pull in and find out.

The trail was beautiful. It’s more up kept than our more rustic trail near our home.

We still walk over the creek that runs through all of the trails.

We had walked quite a ways when Hannah spotted a park up ahead. As we got closer we realized that this is the park that we normally start with when we walk this particular trail. Since the first time we came here almost 6 years ago, I noticed the racquetball courts. They are a little run down, but I still want to bring our racquets and hot a few balls.

We don’t know what exactly this is but we thought it was funny.

We found another little library that we want to bring some books to.

This was a productive walk because we decided that we want to have a table at the next Art Walk downtown. We’ll see how that pans out. We decided to head back to the car and go to our next trail.

I am so happy that our neighborhood trail is finally open. As we were walking we found out why it had been closed for so long.

Apartments are going in. This makes me so sad. We still have the rest of the trail that is still heavily wooded, but it’s just not the same.

I am very happy that one of the bridges is open again. The city did such a good job rebuilding it and it means that we don’t have to drive to the entrance, but can pick up the trail from our neighborhood.

I don’t know how many miles we walked, but it was a few. I wore my Brooks which I never do for walking the trails. I normally wear my Merrills or Sauconys. This meant that I had a very painful blister on my toe. Hannah wanted to go to the gym later that evening so the next morning I was even more sore and my feet were hurting.

On Friday Donny and I were in Kilgore just puttering around. We went to an estate sale and on the way back he wanted to go see what there was at Synergy Park. We found Lake Elder, which lucky for me, had a 1 mile walking trail around it. That was sarcasm because yes, I do love water, but I was wearing my footbed clogs. Being the trooper I am I walked that blister screaming mile.

It was absolutely beautiful though.

My reward was getting spring rolls from our favorite Thai place.

So worth the pain and if you haven’t ever tried a Thai iced coffee you are missing out. In fact, I think I may go get another one today.

We need to run to Gladewater today so, who knows, we might just go take a walk around the lake there. I’ll be sure to wear appropriate shoes this time.