Living Room Lettuce

It just can't be much more convenient than having home grown lettuce right in your living room except of course if you have  room for it in your dining room or kitchen (I don't).

Yes, the tall, bright green plant in the planter is one from the living room planter.

This seemed like a good time to experiment with finishing hydroponic plant in regular garden soil.

Home Bound Diversions, Garden and Mail Art

One of the really important things to do when you're stuck at home is to at least pretend to go somewhere else once in a while.

On a recent day when I had company I pulled up a background ASMR of a nice tea room and arranged our own elegant snacks on my favorite 3 tier plate which as you can see blends nicely with the background I'd chosen and was much nicer to look at than the medical equipment around the room here.

I'm still hoping to get enough donations for a wheelchair van.

http://www.gofundme.com/wheelchairandwheelchairvan 

In the mean time my mail is my lifeline so I stay in contact with everyone and practice my drawing and painting all at the same time.

Here's a selection of recent envelopes and cards that I did this weekend.

I'm also working on finding the best ways to use pencils and markers to get the look that I want.

I've also got some gardening going on here. Hydroponic mini tomato plants.

Over the weekend we made ourselves a self watering planter from an old juce bottle and a cotton rag.

First you cut the juice bottle in half with a sharp razor knife, then pull the rag through the neck of the top bottle half. (this will be the wicking planter) and then you set into the bottom of the bottle.
the water is put in the lower half.

This one is planted with leftover green onions.

Feb.24,2020  As you can see those onions are making a quick come back . I really enjoyed clipping a little over my scrambled eggs this morning. How's that for a way to chase the winter blues?

I was also wondering if there would be a different rate of growth so I started one green onion in the hydroponic grower and was surprised to find it has doubled in height only 2 days later.

Speaking of the hydroponic grower. The other things in there are one mini tomato waiting to get ripe and one mini tomato plant that I'm allowing to regenerate. All of the leaves and buds on it are new since I picked the tomatoes and cut the plant back.

Growing Flowers Indoors, Capturing them in Ink and Watercolor

This red daisy was left to me when my Mother passed away last summer and it has continued to bloom at regular intervals ever since then.

It spent the summer out in the garden with some violets and lily of the valley in a big, old galvanized watering can by the tea table.

It's spent the fall and winter here in the house with me.

This time as it blooms I started with a drawing in markers, and followed with watercolors.

Next, I tried drawing on top of the watercolors.

With a little bit of effort and a few supplies you can enjoy parts of your garden all year around.

Wednesday

It's day 2 working with this flower. I'll be using watercolor and gouache today, maybe a bit of pen and ink along the way.

I set up in my mini studio(just a long, wide shelf I use as a workbench) in front of the window today. It's my favorite place to work and has the best lighting in the house.

Here's the inside of the card sitting next to the flower. It's the way I decide how well I'm doing with the drawing or painting.

It's not an exact likeness but i think I've got the main look and feel of it.

Here you're seeing the envelope compared to the flower.

And here's the envelope against the inside of the card.

After that I couldn't resist doing a bit of outlining on the envelope to sharpen the image.

 Next you're seeing the finished envelope along with the front of the card. I concentrated this time on learning to get the contours on the leaves which as you can see still more or less eludes me.

You can see how nice the deckle edge from the inside of the card frames the front of the card.

Here you catch me in the process of outlining and get a chance to compare the outlined areas with the rest of the image.

Last but not least, here's a photo of the finished and outlined card and envelope set.

I'm saving this set for a special occasion.

Feb. 5, 2020

Here's an envelope and inside of the card. the lower edge of the card will stick out with a deckle edge behind the front of the card and has the effect of framing it.

I'm taking a different approach with the front and trying to create a design that would work well for fabric as well.

The major roadblock to this is that the leaves are an unusual shape and I haven't figured out how to paint them yet.

That's O.K. practice is a good thing and I'll just keep doing it until I can come up with the right look and feel for them.

Outlining them seemed to help and gave me a chance to take a closer look at the leaves.

Here you see the envelope and the front of the card together.

Winter Lettuce

I've wrapped things up in the garden outside and just have a bit of celery, lettuce and strawberries in the house for the winter.

I'd have loved to leave the strawberries outside but they are the wrong zone for my part of the country and I'd have lost them.

It's fun to just reach across the table when I want a finishing touch for a meal. The baby celery leaves make a nice garnish and the tiny stalks are just the right size to cut up in ham salad, egg salad or soups.

In this little plastic cup is a small amount of water and the base of a head of lettuce we'd had from the grocery store. The dark green leaves on the top are the beginnings of a new head of lettuce from scraps that most people throw away. Also recycled and re-used is the plastic jello cup that I'm growing it in.

I'm also growing some lettuce from seed. Instead of waiting for it to mature I clip it and use it for sprouts. Kind of my little idea for growing micro greens indoors.

I still don't have any grow lights so the plants aren't doing quite as well as they could be but it cheers me up with snow forecast in my part of the country by the end of the week. 

Indoor pants

 It rained off and on today so I thought it would be a good time to give some of my houseplants and fairy gardens some attention.

The other nice thing about spending the day indoors is that it gave me a chance to make some pretty cards, do some watercolors and write a few letters.

Starting Plants Indoors

 This time of year they're really stretching for the sun and need to be turned several times a day to keep them growing up straight. it won't be long before a lot of them are ready to go outside. I'm in the process of beginning to harden them off now.

I'm planning on keeping a lot of my things in pots this year to make sure I can always find a sunny spot for them. (difficult because I've got 3 very large trees in my yard) It will also make meal prep easy if I can just take a pot of lettuce to the kitchen when I'm making salads.

So far this is the part of the garden that lives in my Dining room:

Sunflowers

purple bunching onions

purple carrots

red carrots

mixed lettuces

A bit of indoor gardening

After months and months of snow I was in the mood for something other than staring out the window at dirty snowbanks and half buried lawn furniture so I took a look at the 2 tiny citrus trees in the house and noticed that they weren't looking too good either.
My solution was to put BOTH the lemon and the orange in the same pot so that they could share the sunny window. I have no idea whether this will help or work but I figured that it couldn't hurt to try.

Sometimes all you can do when it comes to gardening is keep moving things around until you find the right spot and your plants begin to thrive.

Orange you glad?

I just couldn't resist using a silly title on this post today because it's probably silly of me to be excited about 4 little oranges. It's actually more like the possibility of 4 little oranges, but it's raining outside today and I've been waiting to see fruit on the  tiny orange tree in my dining room for almost 3 years.

Winters are so long here that I thought having a few things growing in my dining room might cheer us up.

 I think the heat and moisture from that restaurant coffee maker seems to help.

Here are a few photos that I took last night (so that I wouldn't have to worry about the light from the window causing problems with my camera).