Garden Creative: Lucky for you, no poetry!

Ha. So I stated that this day I wanted to be creative, and the plan was to do poetry, because I usually have a million nature inspired words to write upon that could be considered poetic, but then I realize hours later is pure... well, compost.

LUCKY FOR YOU, I instead have been creative in other garden crafty-useful and fun ways.

I keep my gardening boots in my sunroom, which is not airtight, but a relatively safe place to set plants away from too much sun or wind and other elements that can be problematic if I need to neglect them for a while.  In the process, I have introduced all sorts of flora and fauna into the sunroom, namely spiders which I am in constant battle with to keep their webs and children at bay.  I really need to institute a weekly clean up and purge of that area to make things saner in there...  Plus this might encourage the spiders to just MOVE OUT and not continuously making homes in my baskets, under the table, in the corners of stands and etc.

The biggest problem I have, that I can't ignore are spiders in my boots.  I get very bad reactions to spider bites, when, depending on the spider the bites can grow to the size of a grapefruit, or the itching is so intense that its take a month for it to stop and then months or a year for the bite bruise to heal.  So, I keep a good eye out for spiders.  I'm not scared of spiders, I'm just nervous about being bitten by them.

To combat accidental boot biting I've taken to stuffing rags into my boots so that I can foil the crawlers from nesting inside them and then surprising both of us when I put the boots on.  Sadly I have found the rags to ineffective in completely keeping spiders out as the rags tend to slide down, exposing the top part of the boot, allowing for some space to exist between the top of the boot and the slipped stuffed rag.

I also wanted to be sure that my boots could stay upright and keep their shape, so, in deference to fancier boot devices, I thought and thought and decided that I need to make some sort of stuffed/filled boot shape keeper/spider obstacle.  It needed to not be able to rot or mold (so the easy cloth tube sock wouldn't do it), and not attract pests/feel like a waste of food (so no beans or rice as filling).

I remembered that I saved an old heavy plastic duty rice bag:

and had some extra sand sitting around for random acts of soil mixing.  So I began winging my little spider preventer.

Measuring? What measuring?  Mostly I just halved, then quarter this plastic rice bag, retaining the stitched part to my use.  I then halved that to form each "boot bag" that I'll fill with sand.

Essentially I restitch the already loosely stitched part to reinforce it, and made a bag with an opening to fill with sand.

After filling with sand I stitch up the top and tada...! It doesn't fit the boot, properly (too big down the bottom) because I don't measure.

Brill.  So I squish some of the sand up and adjust the bottom half to be a little smaller and tighter with some cursory stitching and FINALLY it works! woohoo.

Round 2 worked out a lot better (do things in pairs, and finish the first one before going onto the next half of the set so you can learn from your mistakes I say!)

Hurray, now my boots will stay in shape and the spiders won't dare to build webs at the mouth of my boots and can't get inside!

One final bit of creativity:

I've been getting these beautiful multicolored cage free eggs from my farmer's market.  The egg shells themselves are too pretty, so I decided to make something with them as a gift to the vendor people who I get my eggs from (since one of the them is unfortunately having to deal with bad luck left and right as of late).  Plus, they're "pay what you can" eggs and the concept of this is so wonderful to me I think they deserved a little gift:

On the back of one for the lady who's been having issues in life I also wrote: "So things stop clucking up!"  The metal chickens shown are also a slightly modified version of what I made for her originally (this is a round 2).  The originals had the phrase written on the chickens, here I decided I liked using extra soda can metal to make small signs to say it.

Pretty much free little garden craft for me: stolen borrowed recycling soda/beer cans from neighbors, dired lawn clippings, wood glue on hand, eggs shells after contents had been used, bottle caps from already drunk beer, and special "Dark Dancer" red clover that I've been growing and has spread that insures 4 leaf clovers for true luck ;)

Happy Wednesday and hope any of this helped or was interesting!

Halloween decorating with a little help from my garden friends

I'm not much into holiday decorating. Just this thing I have about keeping stuff around that you only take out once a year.

I have a few Christmas things I have been given that I like to take out here and there because of sentimental reasons, but as I : 1) have no children who care about that stuff and 2) no one visits during those times to see it, yeah, I'm kind of boring in that regards.

I do have a soft place for Halloween though because I loved it as a child and I decorate a bit then because pumpkins can be bought, eaten and used/composted each year, so there's nothing left to store/put away once it's over!

This year however I have some little (well, not so little depending on your definition) friends to help me with some extra special decorating!


I was surprised too by their enthusiasm! On a recent rain I only noticed this :
(pardon some bad pics, it was rainy and some angles were difficult and shot from inside my sunroom grainy screens)
(over 3 ft in diameter! ...and near the hummingbird feeder, hmmmm...)

(This is web is unfortunately by the back door, however built intelligently out of the way of human traffic!)


(Once again, I keep tilting the camera video feature the wrong way. My apologies, but I think it's still worth it when you tilt your head right a bit. The rain and wind make this so beautiful I think. Ah spiderwebs, lightness and strength.)

(Hi-five for effort!)(ooh! Click on this one above! The hairy detail is great! I had to get really close to this, it was in the huge web and the background was cloud white, thus the brightness)

So, yeah, Halloween decorating? Me and my little friends have got it down.

Now if only I could convince them that the front door would be an excellent place to catch introduce children to the joys of spiders.

(N.B. The golden orb spider traversed to my next door neighbor's backyard, and spun a huge web outside her kitchen window.  My neighbor hates spiders, dubbed it Bruinhilde and then called me and asked me if I might want the spider back.  So I brought it back, let it loose and the next day it ate the spider in the last pic :(

My dog doesn't use gloves

I am not a fan of gloves. Granted I do live in snake/spider country and a terrible nail biter, but I cannot stand wearing gloves when I garden unless it's for something particularly gross.

Digging holes? Gloveless! Poking holes in the ground for seeds! No extra skin on these digits. Spiky thorny weeds? Yep, no gloves there too, (just grab really low at the base of the weed and there are no spikes there). Spreading bags of wet grass clippings taken from the neighbors yard? YES, I will wear gloves then. (Dude, dogs do their business there.)

Perhaps I should be nervous about the potential for black widows and brown recluses and the like. I try to remind myself of their potential bitey nastiness by looking at terrible infection laden pictures of people's limbs which were bitten, but still, I find myself chucking the gloves off sooner or later because I like to feel my dirt. I just feel so awkward in gloves, partially because my hands tend to be too tiny for most gloves around that my hands are overblown and awkwardly clown-like when I do wear them. When I talk about feeling my dirt, I mean I like to dig deep into the soil and be able to note the density and moisture content it holds. Easily pluck out grubs from earthwarms and pull the tiniest weed out with ease.

True, my hands are almost ever pervasive with specks of dirt here and there, my nails would make a manicurist cringe (Did I mentioned that I bite them too? "Ewwwww," I can hear it already from here). When I am really digging around and having to wash up a lot my hands seem to be more related to fish than humans with all the dried up scaley skin I have flaking off. Oddly enough though, my hands recover quickly, being used to such abuse and rarely do I ever find myself in enough dermal pain that I have to slather on the lotion.

Lotion! Speaking of which, if I wore gloves all the time they would make me feel so Hannibal Lector/Buffalo Bill-esque. (Sorry, twisted I know.)

(I know that there are non-leather work gloves out there, but I find those to even weirder to me, it would be so... hygienic. I'm working with dirt here, not a patient!)