Spring is the time to plant peas out in the garden.  Seeds germinate well in cool soil so plants have a strong start by the time summer hits.  I like to start my peas indoors then move the little vines out when they are strong enough, but you can also buy started pea plants at nurseries and farmers market this time of year.

When you plant your peas they will start to ramble and tangle along the ground and the sweet tips get munched on by just about any vegetable loving creature you can imagine (slugs, snails, the darn dog!) so it’s nice to grow them vertically up a support.  The little vines cling and twine nicely around string, and this simple trellis is perfect to pack a lot of peas into a small area.

Materials:

• Bamboo poles of various lengths
• A spool of garden twine
• A garden helper

Directions:

1. Stick two 6’ or longer bamboo poles into the soil on either side of your pea patch.

2.  Make a frame using two more bamboo poles that measure a few inches longer than the width of your side stakes.  Secure the poles together by tying twine around the poles where they cross in a figure eight pattern.

3. Using twine on a spool, tie one end of the twine to the bottom of one side of the bottom of the frame.  Run the twine up and over the top of the frame, and allow to drop back down.  Let your garden helper wind the twine around the frame over and over until you have reached the other side. Tie the twin in a knot on the end of the frame to secure.

4. Gently lift the tips of the pea plants and tuck their tendrils onto the twine.  The peas will take it from here.

Garden Therapy Handmade pillows are made from fabric designed with photographs from my garden.  Macro imagery of each flower has been carefully giclée-printed on a gorgeous a linen-cotton blend.  The fabric is sturdy and the print is washable making this truly art you can use. For more information, please visit the Garden Therapy Handmade Shop.

The festival runs April 1-30 of any given year and a quick look at the bloom map will tell you which of the fields are in full glory.  Bloom times are always subject to Mother Nature’s schedule, but you can usually find a couple fields of tulips in bloom in the middle of the month, but you best be quick because the blooms don’t last more than 2 weeks before they are cut, bulbs removed, and soil turned for another year.

I have many tulips blooming in my garden right now so I planned to write about them as the April Feature Plant for Garden Blogger’s Bloom Day.  But as I took photos I remembered sensory delights from the Tulip Festival not far from here and decided that those are the photos I’ll share.  How could I not?  Wow. Look at those gorgeous flowers.

How to Grow Tulips

• Tulip bulbs are planted in the fall: in early October before the first frost. Never fear, if you missed planting last fall you can buy potted tulips that are blooming.  Enjoy them in the pot and transplant into the garden when the leaves begin to yellow.
• Most tulips grow best in full sun in loose, rich soil with good drainage.  Make sure to plant bulbs where you have room for them to grow (i.e.:  enough height and space between other plantings).
• Plant bulbs in groups of 5 to 9.  Odd-numbered plantings in groups (as opposed to lines) present a more pleasing and natural display.
• Plant bulbs approximately 6” deep, with the pointy end facing up and the roots down.  Mark the area where you have planted, and cover with a layer of mulch such as leaves, peat moss, or pine needles to protect over winter.

To see the tulips head to the Skagit Valley in Washington state, 60 miles north of Seattle and 70 miles south of Vancouver, BC, Canada. Print off this map of as the fields don’t have addresses.  The location changes every year so this map is your best tool.  If you happen to miss the tulip fields in full bloom, you can also check out the tulip demonstration gardens at Tulip Town.

~

I recently attended the San Francisco Flower & Garden Show that took place on March 21-25, 2012 at the San Mateo California event center.  With over 200 green exhibitors, garden displays, design seminars and cooking demonstrations, this event is one I will remember for years to come.  It was that spectacular!

Considering this was my first garden and flower show I’ve ever attended I had no idea what to expect.  As I stepped into the show entrance I was immediately overwhelmed with beauty, color and serenity, not only in the garden displays, but in the attendees faces. The mood of the show was calm, the lighting was perfect and the setting was relaxing.  One attendee described having a horticultural hangover after a day strolling through all the exhibits and I agree.

Thankfully I brought my camera and out of the hundreds of photos I took I’d like to show you some of my favorite parts of the show.  Enjoy!

Can’t you just picture yourself here enjoying a glass of wine?  I love the use of old windows in this cozy setting.

It’s not a fantasy…any garden can be green.  Do you have some rusty shovels or garden tools?  Hang them on a garden shed as shown here at the Hillbilly Hilton garden display…

I love the use of materials and design of this stacked stone wall.  Gorgeous.

How amazing is this vertical succulent garden?! This display was so popular I had to wait in line to snap a photo.

I had a blast and made some fun purchases at the NW Glass Gardens Booths. It was a complete joy to meet the fabulous owner and artist, Barbara Sanderson.  Here’s some of her work.

I love this concrete path filled with pebbles and the raised planter.

For more show information and inspiration check out North Coast Gardening.  Genevieve Schmidt has a wonderful blog post on Stone Work at the 2012 San Francisco Flower & Garden Show and she also lists several links to other blogs and articles that feature highlights and photos from the show.

Next year if you have the chance to attend The San Francisco Flower & Garden show it is scheduled to take place March 20-24, 2013.  Maybe I’ll get to see you there!

~ Nicky from Dirt and Martinis

You don’t have to spend a lot of money to have unique and colorful art in your garden. Colorful beaded tennis rackets can really catch the light.  Here’s how to make them:

 Materials:

• Scissors
• Tennis or badminton racket
• Tweezers or needle-nose pliers (optional)
• Ribbon, yarn, wire or string
• Beads and/or trinkets

Instructions:

1. Using scissors, cut the strings out of the racket. Remove all the strings. (You might want to use some tweezers or needle-nose pliers to get at those hard-to-reach spots.)

2. Measure and cut your ribbon or string to the desired lengths. These will hang down from the top of your racket, so measure twice and cut once.

3. Tie knots at one end of your ribbon. Then string with decorations like colorful beads or wood trinkets.

4. Once you’ve strung the ribbons, pull them through the holes of the tennis racket and secure with knots. You can leave the beads hanging freely or tie them from one side to another to create a web.

5. Push the racket handle into the ground, and enjoy!

Thanks to Stacy for shaing this fabulous project from the book.  Look for Project Garden to get more garden fun for the entire family.

After reading the book cover to cover, I was so inspired to try some projects I have all but put my seed starting on hold and transformed my corner window grow-op into a terrarium building site.  Air plants, succulents, shells, rock and found objects abound as terrariums are a nature lover’s doll house.  For my first project I fashioned a woodland-inspired terrarium out of a salad bowl, moss, Aeonium, Sedum, Bromeliad and a tiny felted owl.

Materials:

• Glass salad bowl
• Indoor cactus soil
• Polished river stones
• Branches, lichen, found objects

Plants:

• Aeonium
• Sedum
• Bromeliad
• Spanish Moss (epiphyte)
• True Moss (bryophyte)

Instructions:

1. Fill the bottom 1/3 with cactus soil (note: the book suggests using sand or moss balls to plant your terrarium, but I don’t mind the look of soil and I’m not worried about drainage because I’ll carefully. The book’s projects do look cleaner with the sand so it’s all personal preference).

2. Place true moss around one side of the bowl.  Shake soil gently off the root ball of the aeonium, sedum and bromilad.  Dig little holes in the cactus soil and place plants.  Back fill with soil and place moss around plants on the moss side.  Add some river stones to the other half to cover the soil up to the moss level.

3. Add fun personal elements that will add personality to your “mixed salad”.  Shown here are Spanish moss (which is a type of Tillandsia or air plant so it should float above the soil), a twig with bird’s nest mushrooms I collected back in the mushroom foraging days of autumn, and a felted pocket owl that I bought from Etsy which has it’s own story.

The final result is a quirky terrarium that reminds me of days waking thought the woods with the dogs, hoping to spot a real owl like these, and collecting gems from the forest floor.

There are a few other projects that I’d like to try from the book, like suspending plant roots in a moss ball inside the terrarium, but for now I best get on my seed starting or I’ll be very sad and/or broke come heirloom tomato season.

If you have tried a terrarium, or plan to try one, please let me know.  I would love to see photos of this very personal art form.

On the jacket, it describes Kelly Wilkinson as a “craft designer and journalist” with projects appearing in many stylish blogs like Apartment Therapy and Design*Sponge.  Since the title and cover reminded me of the Weekend Project that I post here each week, I was pretty jazzed to dig in.

The project tutorials look clearly written with all photos staged with professional models.  I thought the photography was beautiful and engaging.  The use of models, however, didn’t allow me to get much of a sense of who the author is beyond the crafts projects she has created.

The 40 projects are divided into three sections: Make (crafting, sewing), Grow (garden, skincare), and Gather (repurposing items).  All three sections seem to be right up my alley but as I read through the book I found that I was really only interested in one project, partially because many of them I have already done like making marmalade and pillows.  From my count there are only 30 or projects to choose from, the rest are ideas like “make sun tea” and “forage for supplies”.

A couple of projects that I thought looked good but it wasn’t the right timing for was making clay plant stakes & the painted pot shown on the cover for gifts (I may do this when I need to give a gift in the future, maybe Mother’s Day) and pressed flower candle lanterns called luminaria (would better in summer).  There were also a few projects that I didn’t like such as the paint chip postcards and foot pocket picnic blanket.  In the end, I chose to try the Winter Marsh Trivet given the beautiful photos of the completed project and my past enjoyment with concrete projects.

Now, despite my huge success in working with concrete last year, this project, sadly, was a fail.  I followed the directions: mix concrete, pour into greased plant saucers, press branches into concrete to imprint twig, let dry, cut a felt circle and glue to bottom = trivet.

The type of concrete was not specified in the materials list, so unfortunately I just bought what I used for the planters, standard concrete, which has various sizes of gravel in it.  Since I don’t use concrete often, I didn’t realize there were other kinds with less stones, and that’s what was needed for this project.

In the end, I couldn’t really press a twig, pinecone, or leaf into the rocky concrete so I did my best and let it dry.  Here is how they turned out.

The back sides look a bit better, but not much.

So I’ve stored them away to use as garden stepping stones when I need some.

I did end up pressing some river stones into one of the moulds and while they all didn’t stick, I don’t mind the look.   I thought that it would look pretty nice with some moss growing on it so I set it into the garden bed to await inoculation.

It can keep the big leaf hosta stepping stone company until then.

I’m sorry that I don’t have dazzling project to show for you from Weekend Handmade, but that’s life, not every project is a winner.  And it’s from our failures that we learn to be great.  The next book is Terrarium Craft which I have been super jazzed about since it arrived.  Please grab a copy from your library or bookstore and join me in a project or two.

My husband is a hobbyist woodworker.  Lucky me, right?  And since we were talking about setting up some nesting boxes for our chickadees, he found some plans online, bought some wood, and then a few hours later we had this beautiful little birdhouse.

Gorgeous and perfectly made, with vent holes for the bird family’s air circulation, and the rough wood facing in so the fledglings can crawl up to the perfectly-sized hole for their first venture out into the world.  Oh, and it has a hinged roof so that you can peek in on them <ahem> clean the birdhouse at the end of the season.

Me: “Great birdhouse, Honey. Let’s make a green roof for the birdies.”

Husband:  “Um, ok, well….but if we put a green roof on it we won’t be able to lift it up to look clean inside.”

Me: “There has to be a way.  We can figure it out, right?”

Husband: “Um, yeah…”

If you speak husband like I do then you know that basically means, “I don’t know what you’re up to, Crazy Woman, but I’m not touching that birdhouse”.  So I waited for him to go to work and I got busy building this fabulous removable plant tray that acts as a green roof.  Want to make one too?  Here’s how:  (If you don’t see the tutorial, please click ‘continue reading’.)

Materials:

• Chickadee and nuthatch nesting box (made from these project plans, thank you 50 birds.com)
• Hand saw
• 2 ½” x ½” cedar board
• 1 ½” x ½” cedar board
• Drill / screwdriver & wood screws
• Plastic container, scissors
• Drought-tolerant, shallow-rooted plants like Sedum album.

Directions:

1. Measure out the ledge which will sit at the front of the roof and hold the plant tray.  Cut the 2 ½” cedar board to the exact dimensions of the front of the roof.  Affix the ledge onto the roof edge with wood screws as shown.

2. Cut a plastic container to the height of your wood boards, in this case it is 1½”.

3. Measure and cut the smaller cedar board so that they fit in between the roof ledge and the back of the feeder.  Affix the two cut boards to the plastic container with shorter wood screws.

4. Drill a few drainage holes in the front corners of the plant tray.  This will ensure the water will drain off the roof corners and keep birdies dry.

5. Add some container potting mix to the plant tray and fill with plants that work with the conditions the house will be set in.   The bird house shouldn’t be somewhere too sunny or too high traffic which is why we placed it under the shade of a lilac.  You won’t want to disturb the little bird family by watering so choose drought-tolerant plants that have shallow roots. This Sedum albumis very winter hardy, has a solid net of shallow roots, and those rubbery little leaves hold onto lots of water so it will naturalize there nicely.  It will also start to grow long tendrils in the summer that will hang down the sides, get a mess of yellow (or white) flowers in the summer, and turn reddish in the fall and winter.

6. Give the plants a good water to get them started and slide the planting tray to the roof.  You are now ready for the birds to move in.

6 b. If you are like me and feel that while the Sedum album is growing in it need a little je ne sais quoi, then add a few garden decorations.  I used some blooming crocus and some balls of moss.  Snowdrops would also be really nice as well with a selection of hens and chicks or other sedum, mosses, or creeping plants.

On a final note, please make sure there is some food and water in your garden for the birds when the move in as they don’t like to travel far to forage when nesting.  Also, I really was kidding about looking in at the birds.  If you don’t want to stress them and have them abandon the nest, no peeking!  Just admire the little guys from afar.

Thanks for visiting for the weekend project.  Also check out this project and the other great features on Common Ground’s Vintage Inspiration Fridays.

1. Garden Therapy Handmade Shop Opens!  

Opening the new Etsy shop to sell a hand crafted line of floral throw pillows was by far the most exciting thing that happened this year.   The Studio Blooms line of throw pillows started from flowers grown in my gardens which were then photographed in macro, blown up to mammoth proportions, and printed on fabric using the giclée technique.  Each pillow represents a piece of artwork for your home,  yet  artwork you can cuddle up to and read a book on.  Every step was carefully (obsessively?) planned out and executed, so the final cushions are truly show-stopping.

A labour of love that took well over a year and a half to launch, it’s been a great success so far and I have very high hopes for 2012.  Look for new designs, new products, and new locations where you can buy Garden Therapy Handmade in the coming year.  And remember, each design is a limited edition so please snap them up before they are all gone.

2. Free Printable Canning Labels  

It seems a shame to put so much love into a a jam, jelly, or pickle to then just label the lid with a sharpie.  These printable canning labels are also meant for the canning jar’s snap lid so it get’s recycled when the lid does with no sticky glue to soak off the glass jar.  Oh, and did I mention they are free?  Yup, just download and print ‘em on label paper.  You’re welcome.

3. The Natural Skincare Series

While making bath and body care products isn’t technically gardening, these projects all honour nature by using only natural essential oils, colourings, and other ingredients.  Tutorials for handmade cold process soap, bath bombs, sugar scrub, bath salts, and lip balm were incredibly popular and made amazing holiday gifts.  Good news, there will be more recipes and tutorials to come in 2012!

4. Candles in Many Shapes and Forms

The first candles to be posted were these Citronella CAN-dles.  And while no bugs bit me while they were alight, I was bitten by the candle-making bug!  Soy and beeswax jar candles followed which were beautiful in their simplicity.  The real star of the show, however, was the beeswax flower jar candles, where a 3-dimensional beeswax surprise hides under the lid of these.  A perfect holiday gift, although so far, those who have them have not wanted to burn them and watch the flower melt away.  To that I say, light away and make more…and here’s how.

5. The Grinch Tree, Whoville Party and & Holiday Decorations

Speaking of the holidays, the Grinch tree was the singing Who’s that warmed up my Grinchy demeanour this holiday season.  Feeling a little blue and growly before the holidays, I didn’t want to put up a Christmas tree this year.  The compromise was to decorate a tree that mirrored the feelings, and the Grinch tree was born.  And just like the movie, my spirits warmed up and the true meaning of Christmas was revealed: to make festive holiday planters and decorate the house and throw a Whoville-themed party!  Thanks, Grinchy.

6. Wreath Making

There is always a wreath on the Garden Therapy front door, and maybe another few scattered around the garden.  Tutorials for Making an Evergreen Wreath, Lavender Wreath, and Halloween Hop Wreath were easy and fun projects that didn’t cost a penny.  Love!

7. Halloween Planters, Jack-o-Planterns, & Rock Spiders

Now that Hop Wreath wasn’t the only Halloween decoration this year.  Scaaary planters with severed hands, witch’s brooms, and kale (OK, not too scary) were unique natural decorations.  But nothing was as fun as the Jack-o-planterns and DIY Rock Spiders (sorry, Elisabeth, I know they freak you out).

8. Concrete Garden Projects

Being lucky enough to receive a review copy of Concrete Garden Projects: Easy & Inexpensive Containers, Furniture, Water Features & More meant a fun afternoon making modern planters and leaf-print stepping stones.  I’m totally addicted now!

9. Jammin’ Recipes

Not as much canning happened as normally does, but there were still some fantastic recipes this year: Winter Marmalade, Black & Blue Berry Jam, and Bourbon Cranberry Sauce topped the list.

10. Tangerine Tango

The final highlight of 2011 was the announcement of Pantone’s 2012 colour of the year, Tangerine Tango which will undoubtedly be a popular colour in fashion and home décor (already seeing it everywhere!) but there are also some pretty cool plants that can spice up your garden.  Also cool, a set of Studio Blooms pillows rocks out in Tangerine Tango.  Hmmm.  That is a really great way to start of 2012.

Thank you to everyone who has visited in 2011 and I so very much hope that you will be back this year.  Happy gardening!

You’re a rotter, Mr. Grinch / You’re the king of sinful sots / Your heart’s a dead tomato splotched with moldy purple spots / Mr. Gri-inch! / You’re a three-decker sauerkraut and toadstool sandwich with arsenic sauce! 

But then and idea hit me.  Like a vision appearing before me it was suddenly clear as day: a Grinch Tree.  A tree design that celebrates not just the joy and wonder of the season, but celebrates the difficulties and challenges as well.

If those little Who’s could sing their hearts out in tough times, then so can I.  I bought a potted cedar and rigged it up by pruning and re-attaching some branches so that the ball on the top would hang over just right.  The perfect green ball and ribbon were easy to find.

The decorations are a combination of simple white lights, wooden ornaments, felted acorns, and kitchy silver disco balls.  And the base is wrapped simply in burlap with a big green bow.

Then the darnedest thing happened.  As I designed and decorated the Grinch Tree, I felt a little more festive.  I got to work on my Christmas presents, decorated the front entryway, made wreaths with the neighbourhood gals, and whipped up some festive holiday planters.  Heck, we even put up some lights outside for the first time EVER.

Humph.  Who knew that just one little cedar shrub, rigged to mimic the iconic cartoon, would bring such holiday cheer?

Perhaps the dog knew.  He seems to embody Mr. Grinch, at least in appearance.  Maybe I should ask him.