Spring Gardening

Biden & Portulaca

We have a very short Spring season and seem to have a never-ending summer. Our Spring is weeks of blooming trees and shrubs, displaying their beautiful blossoms, week after week. It is my best time in the entire year to take photos and videos. I walk through neighborhoods and find old and new dogwood trees and native azaleas with breathtaking colors.

Spring is also when I plan my garden, buy potting soil for flower pots, and arrange them in the shade or sun based on what I have growing in the pot. I can’t tell you how different this year has been for my planning process. Garden centers have the same flowers and plants but prices have increased drastically. A fact that we all face and didn’t expect it. Working on creating a flower or vegetable garden is time-consuming, physically demanding, and expensive, but I can’t even imagine not having a garden. Watering, pulling weeds, cutting flowers for the breakfast table, is what I look forward to all the way through the first freeze 👩🏻‍🌾

Snapdragon late spring, summer
Petunia, early spring & summer
Blue phlox, late spring
Blue creeping Phlox
Primrose
I can’t do it without My sweet advisor “Princessreykitty”

Natural Easter Egg Dyes

Easter Eggs in blue, yellow, green, red, purple

it is very simple to use natural dyes to color Easter eggs. This year I included turmeric and red cabbage to dye Easter eggs for the Easter egg hunt, for the Easter basket, and just to have it on the lunch table as a little gift that everyone can take home.

The process was very easy. First boiling eggs, then boiling cabbage, mixing turmeric to warm water, boiling red onion skin, and beet juice using canned beets. One thing that I learned from this whole process is to keep the eggs in the dyes for different periods to get different shades. Different greens, different blues, different reds. Mix different color eggs putting them in different dyes to get greens and deep Purple eggs. This was an easy family project that we all enjoyed, and our Easter eggs are unique, natural, and beautiful. Please watch the entire video on how to use nature dyes to color eggs👇

Serving tea after a tough Easter Egg hunt
Chocolate half shell Eggs
Easter Eggs in a platter for the lunch table

Not My Favorite Day☹️

Taking down my Christmas decorations

I put up our Christmas decorations, with Nat King Cole singing to me, and a glass of eggnog waiting for me on the kitchen counter. I take Every ornament in my hand and memories rush to my head, and I smile and sometimes have tears in my eyes, remembering the days we sat at the breakfast table, glueing and sprinkling sparkles on our new creations. Our house gets filled with color. Red, green, and gold. Poinsettia plants tucked in every corner, and the smell of our new fraser fir Christmas tree fills our home. Bowls of candy, and cake pedestals filled with homemade cookies, ready to be gift wrapped for friends, and neighbors decorate my house like a Christmas card. I love sliding every heavy box filled with decorations out off the attic, and I am never surprised to hear my husband growl, when he finds a broken string of light. Even the rush drive, to buy more lights is memorable.

Today, I am collecting my Christmas decorations, and putting them back in boxes for next year. This is not one of my favorite days !! There is no music, no eggnog, only the frustration of how the same decorations refuse to fit in their original boxes?!! Christmas always seems to come too fast, and go by too fast, and I never seem to feel, I had enough time to enjoy all the memories I had pulled out of my Christmas boxes. But I am sure, I have collected more memories, with my fast growing “older” family, and I am positive I have gained few more pounds from baking Christmas cookies. For now looking forward to next year, and the hope of another Christmas, with Nat King Cole Singing to me, as I decorate my house, and drink my eggnog with a dash of tears.

Handmade sparkly bell & ginger men 💕