Green Gardens on my mind

Inspiration. We all need it, and sometimes we cannot find it. But when we do find it, inspiration can lead to marvelous things.

Lately, I have been working on my garden. Yes, I own a business. Yes, I should be focused on business things, bit I have been leaving early (er) and coming in late (again, er) to play in the garden. Now before you get any grand ideas (see photo of Lingering Garden), I have a garden the size of a postage stamp ( one of those big, oversize ones) and more of a chartreuse thumb. However, after doing some work on the outside of my house last year, I found I had a horseshoe shaped patio and the perfect beginnings of a small L-shaped garden.

So this year has been spent building walls (luckily, I had a lot of practice at my brother's house when his sewer pipe collapsed last year and we had to tear down & then rebuild his front yard and garden), ammending soil and adding plants. Those are the real, live, green things with pretty flowers & heady smells. I promise pictures will follow, but for now my inspiration has lead me to planning a Plant Swap & Sale here at the shop.

Join us Saturday, June 28th from 10am-6pm for fun, flowers & food. We'll have lots of starts, veggies, and other blooming goodies to trade & sell. Have seeds, bring 'em. We'll meet in the back garden and have a planting party! If you have any questions, just contact the shop, 360.405.4341.

Wednesday Hump Day

Yup, another Wednesday. A local radio station back in Maine (where I grew up) always called it Hump Day, and I always thought they were being a bit naughty until someone filled me in about it being the middle of the week hump that we needed to get over to start the slide toward the weekend. Huh, guess you can tell where my mind was (actually it was my brother who gave the erroneous info). But it is indeed another hump day and I am finding this particular Wednesday to be quite an uphill slog. You see, I've been working on our website. Yes, fun & games for some, but a bit like a trip to the dentist for me. I just haven't mastered this whole html thing. Here's the problem...when I was in high school computers were just beginning to be used by average folks (and actually, it wasn't average folks because even the little computer we got from TIME cost a bundle and all it did was run baseball). We didn't have computer classes per se, we had glorified typing. Yes, we "wrote programs" but they consisted of pick a number between 1 and 10. RUN. Exciting, I know. Mostly what we did was turn up the sound on our monitors and annoy the teacher with the metallic hum (sorta like teasing the substitute, but I was in high school after all). When I got to college computers were starting to be standard, but again all you got was word processing and Tetris. But I do remember the "internet". Now in those days the internet was a dark screen with writing on, BUT, writing from someone on Spain! My friend Ruey & I would stay up late and practice our Spanish with guys from Spain or Guatemala. The internet was cool, but no interactive websites with real time video feeds and dancing babies. So, I missed the learning curve. By the time I was a year out of school, the internet had exploded and I knew nothing about how it worked, or how to use it, or how the relate at all. Sure I could make a mean spreadsheet and graph (remember cricket?!) but I was lost with all this html language. I took spanish in college to be worldly and able to relate to the growing global-ness of the planet, no one said I needed to learn hypertext markup language. So that's my dilemma. Soon I will have the new site up complete with online e-commerce and all that jazz, but I need a few more days of hair pulling and cussing...I'll keep you posted.