New Orleans
Over Thanksgiving weekend, my mom, sisters, niece, nephew, and I went on a little trip to New Orleans. We had so much fun. We stayed at the Crowne Plaza Hotel on Canal Street, toured the Garden District …
Author: Leslie Kimel
Christmas Decorating 2015
Last Saturday Rob and I put up our Christmas tree. As we “labored” (as Rob likes to say) we drank hot apple cider out of some festive Spode mugs. The mugs were my favorite part of the day; they have handles that look like candy …
By the Breezeway
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I spent Veterans Day gardening, revamping the bed in front of the breezeway. The bed isn’t very big, but it’s in a pretty prominent spot, right near the main entrance to our house—so I’d like it to make a good impression.
The first thing I did was add some fun features—a bird-nest-shaped birdbath and a big blue-glazed planter full of red cyclamen and Bright Lights Swiss chard. Both these items used to sit unnoticed in the backyard, so I moved them up into the spotlight.
Then I started doing some serious cleaning. Before I tackled it, the breezeway bed was a shaggy, messy place, with purple coneflowers, goldenrods, and wild petunias crowding around the big satsuma tree that serves as the bed’s centerpiece. Since I wanted a little tidier look, I dug all the wildflowers out and moved them to my meadow. Then I mulched the bed with leaves and planted eight coonties in the wildflowers’ place.
Coonties are neat little cycads—Florida natives. They form dense evergreen mounds about three feet tall. I chose them because they’re drought tolerant and easy to grow, because they’re a dapper shiny green, and because you never have to prune them.
I know it probably sounds like all I do these days is dig up my wildflowers, but I do appreciate them and I’ll be encouraging them just about everywhere in my yard except for a couple key places—the vegetable garden and this breezeway bed, areas I’d like to keep just a tad less wild and crazy.
I promise I’ll never give up on wildflowers, not just because they’re pretty but because they make such great habitat. My little meadow is the busiest place, full of native insects and lizards. I see box turtles and black racers there too. Hummingbirds visit in spring and summer, searching for nectar, and songbirds come in winter, searching for seeds.
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| Cyclamen |
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| Satsumas |
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| More satsumas. They taste so good this year—extra sweet. |
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| Shi Shi Gashira sasanquas |
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| Mom gave me this birdbath many years ago. Before I moved it to the breezeway bed, it sat under our Chinese chestnut tree. |
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| The breezeway at dusk |
Pumpkin Carving and Other Stuff
This weekend Rob and I spent all day Saturday cleaning up our vegetable garden. The outer beds, where our pomegranates and clown peppers grow, had become jam-packed with wild petunias (Ruellia caroliniensis), so we dug those out. I felt bad removing them because wild petunia …
Halloween Tree Skirt, Vegan Reuben Sandwiches, and More
I just spent two weekends and the week in between working on a skirt for my Halloween tree. I finished it up on Sunday morning, and I’ve got to say I’m pretty happy with it just because I think it’s so funny. It’s decorated with …
September Stuff
I’ve been especially pressed for time this month because my cat Josie has started a special kidney care diet and she’s decided she won’t eat her special food unless she’s sitting on my lap. Josie eats so slowly. She takes a few licks, then stops to consider, it seems, life’s mysteries. Then she has a few more licks. Each meal takes about half an hour, and she eats four meals a day.
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| Josie being cute |
So, yes, mostly this month I’ve been feeding Josie (which, of course, I really love doing). But when she wasn’t eating, I did manage to do a few little house and garden projects and spot some neat things in the yard. Here are some pictures of what’s been going on:
I spied this little fellow (he was small enough to fit in my palm) approaching Bernie’s cat-food bowl last Saturday morning. Rob and I have lots of box turtles in our yard, and we often see them creeping around after a rain shower. I’ve watched them eating wild strawberries in our meadow, and fallen tomatoes and low-hanging cucumbers in our vegetable garden. I read that wild box turtles live an average of 50 years but that they might live as long as a century. I wonder how old this little cat-food fancier is.
On September 6 we harvested 30 pounds of sweet potatoes. Last year our sweet potato crop was pretty much devastated by voles (the cutest pests I’ve ever seen), but this year we didn’t have any damage (except for a few insect holes). We were really proud. We spread the sweet potatoes out to dry for a day on our picnic table and then, for long-term storage, we put them in the potato box Rob built a few years back. The potato box is really just a stack of drawers with screens at the bottoms. It helps preserve our sweet potatoes by keeping them cool, protecting them from light, and allowing for plenty of air circulation (thanks to the screens).
A couple Saturdays ago we took down the gutter around the front porch, and the house looks so much better without it. The gutter wasn’t doing any good because it was constantly clogged with leaves. It was just looking tacky and breeding mosquitoes.
Last Sunday we cleaned the breezeway from top to bottom. It’s our cats’ favorite room, so it tends to be messy. The focal point of the place is an old pie safe whose shelves are generally filled not with pies (sadly) but with lounging cats. The cats leave their fur all over the shelves and push the decorations around when they stretch, so the pie safe always needs a good dusting and rearranging. We did that on Sunday, and then we washed the walls and the floor with bleach.
It’s surprise lily season here in Quincy. Right now you can see these red, leafless beauties all over our small town. Today I noticed two by the door of the pure white little church at the end of my street. Then I spotted another near a tire swing hanging from a big tree. (A surprise lily looks great near a tire swing.) Surprise lilies, members of the amaryllis family, are native to China but have become naturalized in many parts of the South. We have a bunch in our yard, most of them planted by former owners.
Vegan Jam-Filled Oat Bran Muffins
My mom recently took a trip to the Smoky Mountains, and she brought me a jar of Amish Wedding peach-pecan jam as a souvenir. I wanted to do something special with the jam, so on Saturday I used it to make Vegan Jam-Filled Oat Bran …
Vegan Orange Cranberry Muffins
Last weekend I made my first batch of muffins in our new kitchen. I cooked up some Vegan Orange Cranberry Muffins with a nutty, crumbly brown sugar topping. I used this recipe, which was easy to veganize with ground flaxseed (to replace the egg) and …
Peachy Dining Room
Last weekend we spent four days (Friday through Monday) painting the dining room, a project associated with our big kitchen redo. See, there used to be a pass-through from the kitchen to the dining room (it was essentially a big hole in the wall), and we had that filled in. The whole wall had to be rebuilt, and since we needed to paint the new, bare wall on both the kitchen side and the dining room side, we decided to paint the whole kitchen and the whole dining room while we were at it. (We finished painting the kitchen on August 8.)
We had to paint four coats on the dining room walls to get the proper coverage. Then we touched up the trim. We took the room from a dark orange, like the flesh of a winter squash, to a light peachy shade called Gerbera Daisy.
It was a big job, and as we stood on our ladders day after day we kept talking about how we couldn’t wait to stop painting. We also sang songs that were stuck in our heads, so on day two certain songs were declared “illegal.”
On day three we stopped singing and started criticizing one another’s painting skills. On day four I cried a little.
Painting is great, but being done painting is even better.
