...3.10...Over the Weekend...

...we got up early and did some garden/yardwork...it's still pretty chilly here...but we've passed our last frost date...so we planted the peas we'd started inside a few weeks ago...this is the section where I pulled up all of the tendergreens...

...I planted the Hubbard squash...and put jars over them to protect them a little bit...

...and some okra plants that had sprouted...

...then I went back and added some strings for the peas to climb on...

...and walking past the sidewalk lined with lillies I thought I should probably pull away all of the dead leaves...

...so I sat down on the sidewalk and did that...

...then we came in for breakfast...a quick tofu scramble...

...topping and overfilling a homemade english muffin...

...and there was one english muffin left so I toasted it and we each ate half of it with some jam...

...then we did the weekly shopping...

...nothing of note...except that Stuff Mart had up their 'we baked too much' sign...and the loaf of italian bread was only 42¢...

...I put the cilantro into a cup of water to let it revive a bit...and it's so warm that we've got the kitchen window open for a while... and you can smell the tea olive that's blooming right under the window...if you've never smelled tea olive in bloom you've missed a real treat...it's heavenly...

...and I picked up another of the natural sodas to try...this one is the grape Ollipop...$1.99...still pretty expensive for a pop...but we were listening to NPR the other day and they were talking about this up and coming market and even Coke and Pepsi are planning on marketing these natural pre-biotic sodas...

...then back to the garden for a little bit of weeding...

...and I picked a basket full of lettuce...

...and a few radishes...

...we're still getting a lot of salads from our little winter garden...I'll be leaving the lettuce until it starts to bolt...

...later in the afternoon I added some shade for the baby plants because then I thought that the sun was too strong for them and they were looking a little bit wilty...

...Sunday morning...the third stalk of flowers on our Christmas Amarylis is blooming now...

...and then it was time for some food prep for the week...this is the last bag of beans that we'd bought during the pandemic...so they're over two years old...

...but still seem to be fine...we're going to just cook them slowly in a pot on the induction cooker because I want the instant pot for the greens...

...and to go with the beans...I'm going to harvest the mustard greens from the winter garden...

...I pulled up all of the mustard greens...

...like with the tendergreens...I'm pulling up the whole plant and then snipping off the roots...

...which I'm leaving in the plot to be tilled under later...

...it'll put some nutrients back in the soil...

...and I got a huge amount of greens...and a few weeds that I won't be tilling back into the soil...haha...

...the mountain of greens...there were two varities...Old Fashioned and 'Giant'...guess which ones are larger...right the old fashioned ones...

...into the sink for a few baths...

...then I put on a pot of rice in the rice cooker...and I poured the rice rinsing water into a watering pitcher to pour on the plants outside...not sure where I saw that this was a good fertilizer...but again...free nutrients...

...then I started cramming all those greens into the instant pot...we know that they cook down tremendously so I'm not worried about overfilling it...

...then I scooped the rinse water out of the sink and used that to water some plants as well...

...I started cooking the greens on the back porch...just to keep the smell out of the house...mustard greens are kinda stinky when they're cooking...

...I started on sauté mode until they'd shrunk a bit...

...and then I put the lid on and used the steam cycle...

...and see...that mountain of greens cooked down to just half a pot...

...and into my biggest container with a lid...as we'll be having beans and greens and cornbread for dinner later this week...

~Wishing you a lovely start to your week!

...3.8...Dinner and a Movie...

...starting with some Blogger comments...because my blog continues to limp along...I have had good luck posting photos the last few days though...

...to my sweet sissie Karen who blogs from her boat at McCraw Sails...Hey K...too bad about the plane wreck...neat closeup...and I'm so glad you're with Mom this week...Love, T...

...to karen from Pumpkin Sunrise...Hi Karen...you've really ade a lot of progress on both your sweater and the blanket...Holly looks so sweet curled up like that...

...to Éphée from L'éphémère quotidienneté des repas et autres trucs de magie...Hi Éphée...your version of onion soup looks delicious...I'll have to try adding dumplings...

...to Penny from Snap That Penny...Hi Penny...your blue spring skies are so pretty...we've had some really warm spring days and the daffodils and bradford pears are blooming now...

...to Beth from BLD IN MT : LIVING A SIMPLE LIFE IN THIS INTERCONNECTED WORLD...Hi Beth...I loved reading your travel journal...it's so fun to read what we wrote as our younger selves...I need to get out my journal from France...

...on the reading front...I just started the Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon...it's the last of the books that Mom loaned me at Christmas...

...we had homemade veggie burgers for dinner...

...and homemade fries in the air fryer...

...lots of pickles, pickled red onion, tomatoes and lettuce for the toppings...

...so delicious...and it's daylight at suppertime now...

...what have you been watching lately?...

~Have a lovely day!

...3.7...Friday Update...

...the guest room is finally finished...

...this is about the last state you saw it in though...

...but once the doors and all of the trim and cutting in were done...it was a pretty quick process to paint the ceiling...

...which is also honeydew...for color drenching...

...and then the walls...

...got two coats of honeydew as well...

...it's really difficult to photograph just a painted wall and show the true colour...

...every paintable surface in the room is the same colour...just different sheens of the same colour...

...all of the outlets got covered with honeydew as well...

...and the Man changed out the flip/switch light control for the old fashioned push button kind...and the plate for it sort of matches the dark brown of both the furniture and the metal elk...

...and finally it was time to start putting things back in the room...

...moving out of the little bedroom...which is next up in the to-be-painted queue...

...I actually could have showed you this earlier...but I forgot...while the boxspring was overturned in storage...I took an old sheet and stapled it to the underside...which was necessary because when Kitten was living with us she tore into the underside of the mattress for some reason and used to nap there...

...I just left the old torn material...some sort of thin felt...and stapled the sheet over it...just turning under the edges...I'm really happy with it and now as you come up the stairs and can see into the guest room...you won't see bits of fabric hanging down under the bed...not a nice look at all...

...we finally hung up the artwork that had been in the closet since we moved...it's a stylized map of Paris...streets I recognize and have walked on...

...and then we used a fancy system of post-it notes to show where to put the two pink window frames for wall decoration here...

...the cut metal elk the kiddos had given us for Christmas...

...the bed all made up and the nightstands and lamps back in place...

...and the antique dresser snugged back into it's alcove...

...the bright pink is a complementary colour for the light green...

...and the pink shows up in the window frames as well...just for a pop of colour...

...and they're reflected in the antique mirror as well...

...and then we moved everything out of the little bedroom to get it ready to be painted...a nice creamy yellow...Benjamin Moore Lemon Sorbet...

...so where did everything from that bedroom go...you ask...well...we immediately junked up the new guest room with everything from the little bedroom...

...everything all covered up and ready to move on to the little bedroom...

~Have a lovely day!