Will It Never End?

Pretty but Cold

Will It Never End?

The answer is yes!

Glorious  April

Sometime in April the first daffodils and tulips will rear up, reaching for the source of all life: the sun.

December Craft Show

December Craft Show

Meanwhile, the winter drags on. We had our last craft show in December and then wrapped up the 2016 year with all its bookkeeping duties. Since then, I have spent my days getting ready for our next two events, which will be held here. Invitations have been sent:

You are invited to the…

2017 Spring Debut of NEW Products!

Bechard’s Botanicals

Soap Kitchen at 146 15^th Ave~~Rockford, Il 61104

Questions? 815-965-1988

Parking in vacant Eagles Club lot two doors west

Call in advance and we’ll provide valet parking!

*New Products: Lemongrass Body Butter, ‘Honeydew” (anti-aging stick)“Gentle Showers” (Anti-Fungal Body Wash) and Aroma Therapy Roll-ons*

************Sweetheart Sale************

Make this Valentine’s Day special by giving your loved ones pure, natural gifts!

Saturday, February 11, 2017

9:30-12:00 PM

RANDOM SALE SCAVENGER HUNT

Find Super Savings on Random Items Throughout Store!

Free Valentine Soap Cupcake for Each Attendee

11:00 Door Prize Drawing

(must be present to win)

************Spring Festival************

Saturday, April Fool’s Day

9:00-12:00 PM

Super Sale

No joke! Bring yourself and a friend to enjoy coffee, conversation and perhaps tulips!

Live Soap Making Demonstration at 9:15 (call ahead to reserve a seat)

11:00 Door Prize Drawing

(must be present to win)

An Appreciation Gift for Each Attendee

*Handmade soap and other pure and natural personal care products

*Jams, Jellies, Preserves

*Tinctures *Natural Remedies

What does getting ready mean?

Making Body Butter

 Making and restocking loads of soap, body butter, tooth powder, lip balm, salves etc, etc and then cleaning and re-arranging like a maniac. Sandwiched in the middle of March, I’ll attend a small craft show just for fun.

Soap Loaf

About then, it will be time to get the bedding plants started and put some thought into the 2017 garden! Is this what they call retirement?

Watching Nature Fall Asleep

Front Porch

It's on fire!

 The trees are bare now and winter is here. A few weeks ago I enjoyed the maple tree as it got a colorful drowsy and finally fell to sleep, dreaming of Spring, I hope.

I even went across to the park and took photos.

From the park

 It’s not this red every year, so I couldn’t resist pressing some leaves in the most gigantic book I own, “Scientific Encyclopedia”. I hope to find the time to make some faerie houses this winter and those leaves will lend character.

Pressing Leaves

 These are a few of the kids’ soaps I made. The little lambs are adorable and the goldfish in glycerin soap are cute as can be. One more craft show and I’ll wrap up off-site vending for the year and concentrate on keeping customers supplied and soap making for next season.

Lambs and Goldfish Soaps

Happy Thanksgiving!

Sammie’s Early Morning Company

Autumn Garden

Sammie had a visitor the other morning. The problem was that he soon became a porch-bound marsupial. Our kitty has a rather complicated entrance to the house, which has been modified through the years in an attempt to limit her visitors and cold winter winds.

She knows to enter under the deck, squeeze through a narrow opening in the wooden box (just big enough for her narrow Russian Blue body) and nudge the casement window open to skitter down the step ladder. This method has eliminated most adult cats, all dogs, raccoons and woodchucks. But not adolescent opossums.

Sammie's Entrance

The little guy got into the wooden box and didn’t know how to open the inside door. Sammie came and “told” me in her own unique language that she had a problem in the basement. I followed her down and saw this:

Stuck!

Sorry the photo is blurred, but it was the best of 20 pics!

Kayaks and Butterflies

 

Houseplants going crazy

 What happened to the last three months? Well, making my creations for two farmer’s markets every week, drying herbs, canning produce, weeding, making salves and tinctures and jams and jellies and I won’t bore you with the rest! Every day was a fun adventure. Okay, not all of it was fun, but most of it was. That’s good enough for me.

July Garden

Mammoth Onions and Small Pumpkins

Our “vacation” was the morning we slipped down the Rock River in the kayak.

Locked and Loaded

Pre-Launch Countdown

Bliss

My Equipment

Much of the harvesting is done and it’s time to party. The Harvest Celebration Open House is October 8^th this year. I anticipate a house full of wise women sharing their stories, smiling and laughing. I have made so many new friends this year. Here is but one:

 

Meredith in Wonder

 Meredith came over to can with me and I noticed a newly hatched butterfly on the front porch who was struggling under a flat that contained milkweed pods. I lifted the flat and took the Black Swallowtail butterfly outside where we released it. We then got to watch the newly hatched fledgling dry its wings in preparation to fly away. Oh, the wonder of it!

Black Swallowtail

A Beauty!

Sammie’s Bad Behavior and Sweet Husband’s Folly

Mr Frog

I just had to share these two little stories. The first is about Mr. Frog.

Samantha, our (mostly) Russian gray cat, has a bad habit. And I mean BAD! She has a kitty door to come and go at will. That eliminates the litter box, which Sweet Husband cannot stand the smell of and the narrow opening allows her to slide through without being followed. We got that straight after we entertained and fed her numerous feline (and other) friends. However, it does not block anything she’s carrying in her mouth.

You see, we have always played with her in the living room. Her favorite toy is a doodad on the end of a string connected to a pole. We call it kitty casting. We always “catch” a kitty! Anyway, she considers that room her play area. Thus, it makes sense she would bring her outdoor “toys” there to play with them.

What are her outdoor toys? Why, birds and garter snakes and mice and yes, frogs. This is the first year for frogs. Except for the mice, I make every attempt to save the lives of her poor toys. She is separated from her prey and the visitor is coaxed out a window or carried back out to its natural habitat.

One day, after I had just vacuumed, I was standing in the kitchen looking down the hall towards the bedroom. I saw a heap of dark on the wood floor, which without my glasses looked suspiciously like poop. Sammie has always confined her bathroom habits to the outdoors, so I was very dismayed. I grabbed my glasses off the counter and looked again. Lordy-mercy, it was this little guy.

He sat as if dead. In farm vernacular we call that “playing possum”. I sprang into action, grabbed a paper towel and gently picked him up while Sammie watched. I took him out beside the pond and left him there, still frozen in fear. On the way back to the house I remembered the camera. When I turned it on I discovered it needed new batteries. Surely he would be gone by the time I got back out there. But no, there he was, in the exact same place. I snapped away, worried he was fatally injured. He did hop away a few minutes later. I know he was okay, because he came calling again this morning. Sammie is not necessarily interested in killing, just playing. I wish she would stop this bad behavior.

Second story:

I went to a plant exchange party at a friend’s house and won the door prize, which was a lovely wooden box full of garden stuff. In that box was a resin red cardinal. I promptly took it out to the tree stump (home of the future fairy garden) and placed it there in full view of the patio door.

A few days later, Sweet Husband confessed to seeing it and excitingly snapping photos using the zoom from the deck. When it didn’t move after several minutes, he walked closer and discovered his folly.

Garden Update

The Farmer’s Markets have begun, the garden is shooting up and out and it’s strawberry time. So far, it’s sort of under control. I’m so glad I feel so good or I wouldn’t be able to keep up the pace. I still make time for quiet contemplation in the garden, always giving thanks for the abundance of this little plot.

A Taste of Spring!

The comfrey root I plopped in the ground this spring (thank you Mary Jane!) is blooming, along with its two compatriots. It’s just a little different from the one I started here from seed a few years ago. I know this baby will yield its miraculous cure in profusion. Its salve healed sweet husband’s bad knee that has bothered him for years, not to mention all the other people who have benefited from its root.

Comfrey Taking Root

I have many valerian plants, but this big mother on the hugel is the only one ready for harvesting this fall. Needless to say, it has greatly benefited from the goodies we buried underneath here. (See article “Hugelkultur” on this blog). The valerian tincture made from valerian root tastes terrible, but always brings relaxation for those infrequent sleepless nights. It’s a must for the herbal medicine chest.

Valerian

 I put one tomato plant in a pot for those early BLTs and it has tomatoes setting on already.

Potted Tomato

This geranium was over-wintered in the south windows in the attic. I didn’t realize I mixed a red and a pink, but it’s beautiful in form and color.

Pink and Red Geranium

 The iris is gone for another year, but the calendula is beginning to bloom.

Yellow Iris

Calendula Blooming

Here’s our new “fire pit,” sweet husband’s idea. It works great and now it has its own special place where we never have to move it again. It’s the bottom of an antique cast iron woodstove and weighs a ton. I hope to find a metal lid for rain protection. I get hungry for marshmallows and may have to get some, just once. We all need a little poison now and then!

New "Fire Pit"

 I’ll leave you with the ornamental strawberry path up front. They have taken over almost all the path and doesn't mind a little foot traffic.

Ornamental Strawberry Path

Update on Vegetable Gardening with Woodchips

Main Garden Plot

On December 7, 2013, I posted about all kinds of edibles I intended to plant in woodchips. If you are interested, go back and read that entry. I believed I had seen the error of my gardening ways and was ready for a change. Really, the essence of that entry dealt with my belief paradigm. Would I be able to change the way I gardened? The answer is a resounding, YES! I had already taken baby steps, now it was time to go all in. Oh my, have I been rewarded. I’m able to grow more than twice the amount of fruits and vegetables on my tiny plot. Here’s what I did:

Sweet husband and I always take our little trailer over to the city yard where free woodchips from local trees are available. For fifteen years we have mulched our trees, shrubs and flowers. I had been mulching the strawberries and they bore a ton of fruit. The apple tree was loaded. I had inter-planted occasional vegetables into the landscape with good results. Now it was time to dump the “free nutrients” on the veggies. We hauled countless loads in the spring and fall of 2014 and then again in the spring of 2015. The fall of last year was a very busy time for us, so we fell down on the proverbial job and added nothing. I harvested broken down woodchips from areas where we had been adding chips for years, moved that to the veggie garden and then we applied fresh chips to those stripped areas. Yes, it was labor intensive, a sacrifice we all tend to make when we’re planning for the future. My old body got whipped into shape and I felt great.

Quince in Flower

I planted in those broken down woodchips in the garden proper and put new chips around plants to retain water and suppress weeds. The results were surprising. Even in 2014 the yields were amazing. I also did second and third plantings of carrots and beets and potatoes. We covered with leaves the few carrots I had left in the ground and harvested them until they ran out in December of 2014. I was determined to have more in “storage” for 2015. I must have re-planted at exactly the right time, as this last winter we harvested over 40 pounds of beautiful, sweet carrots until March, when I dug the rest and put them in cold storage. It’s a wonderful feeling when you remove the snow and leaves and discover orange gold. Some of them weighed up to 10 ounces! They were so tasty and fresh. I experimented with a few beets and next winter we will have fresh, organic beets until spring.

 

Beautiful and Medicinal Violets

Other bonuses to gardening this way:

*NO watering: even after a month last summer with no rain, the ground held rainwater.

*Few weeds: how nice is it when, at the peak of your busy time, weeding takes five minutes?

*No cultivation: yes, my second year of no backbreaking turning-over-of-the-rye. That was a bear, getting ready to plant. This year, as every year, I mail ordered any seeds I was unable to save from 2015. I also ordered onion plants instead of sets. They sent my order and informed me that the onion plants would come when it was time to plant. Yikes! There they were on March 16^th. The weather was wet, cold and dreary and the instructions said “Plant ASAP”. I took the box out to the potting shed and grabbed the hoe. Surely it would be a bog out there. To my surprise, the soil was not muddy but instead well drained. I made my trenches and quickly planted three long rows of red, yellow and white onions. Way too easy. No-till gardening means you are ready to plant whenever. The soil retains its natural integrity; no cultivation means preserving the structure that encourages natural biological activity and fertility.

*Heavy yields: close plantings and successive plantings means food pouring in. Pull a beet, plant a seed in its place. Of course, this doesn’t work for every vegetable at least I haven’t found a way. Maybe, for example, starting cabbage seedlings in pots for late transplant? The woodchips generate warmth as they break down, which jumpstarts the season, but some things are harvested only once.

*Constant fertilization: trees are our best source for fertilizer. Trees harvest the energy that can later be transferred into food. Yes, I compost, but leaves and woodchips mixed in with kitchen waste (banana, citrus, potato peels, coffee grounds etc.) heat up and speed the breaking down process. Really, it’s just easier to find a bare spot and dig a small hole and bury the kitchen waste right in the garden; the same with leaves in the spring. If it goes on the pile, it has to be moved into the garden at some point. I’m not getting any younger.

In December of 2013, I made a commitment to grow vegetables in woodchips. I overcame the bare-soil belief paradigm. I protected the tender skin of Mother Earth and she has rewarded me beyond my expectations. I’m able to grow more than twice the amount of fruits, vegetables and herbs on my little urban plot.

Sammie on Top

 

Fig Tree Overwintered in Front Porch

Tulips Pretending to be Roses