Keeping Busy
This is always my busiest time of the year in the garden. While I’m cleaning up weeds and tall grasses that came up in February, and then dried out in our first hot week, I’m also harvesting spring and early summer fruit.
I’ve been picking luscious strawberries all month. The plants are doing much better this year than last year, possibly because we have been alternating a warm week, then a cool week in March and April. They are doing so well that on the Holiday Monday, I spent a chunk of time freezing berries to enjoy next winter.
I’ve been doing this for many years. I rinse the berries, cut them into bite size pieces and place them on a wax paper lined cookie sheet. This goes into the freezer in the kitchen for an hour or two, after which I scoop the frozen pieces into freezer containers and place them in my larger freezer. With this method, they don’t stick together. I can take out just enough for my breakfast granola each morning.
I also have what I call black berries, but are probably black raspberries, which started ripening last week. We are scheduled to have three days of 100+ heat starting Tuesday, so they will ripen quickly.
The apricot tree in the very back of my yard was loaded with fruit which began ripening two weeks ago. Fortunately, they are not all ripening at once. There were so many apricots on the tree, I invited my neighbors across the street to come and pick some about a week ago.
I usually have to fight the squirrels for the cots, but this year I’m not seeing as many of those rascals. They must have relocated across the street because my neighbor said he has a lot of them in his yard.
Those tomato plants I wrote about last time need to be planted in the ground, but I’m having a sprinkler problem, which hopefully will be resolved by the time you read this, and I didn’t want to transplant them right before the hot weather this week.
With all this going on outdoors, I’ve spent very little time making art. Crystal Neubauer had a second online collage workshop which included journaling. It ran from the end of April to the middle of May. We had assignments between the classes and we were also given “Prompts” to generate ideas for collages.
The prompt that I think came out the best was “Fifty Shades of White.” I have a lot of old paper: a few sheets from various reams of old typing and computer paper, old stationary, receipts, doilies, wallpaper samples, and old books. I glued them to a black substrate.
After the workshop, I cleaned up the work tables in my studio and set up one area so I could do a quick 5” x 5” collage each day. Ha! Haven’t gotten to it yet. The yard work and fruit processing are taking all my time and energy.
On Memorial Day, I made apricot cobbler and ate dinner outside on the patio with Robert, who was grilling burgers, just like normal. I hope you are all doing well and enjoying creative activities.
