Junque Yard & Junque Food

Hot and muggy. Wow what a change from the cold, rainy spring. I'm giving all kinds of props to DaHubster, who fixed our AC this past week. The man is a mechanical genius.  I can sweat it outside for a bit while I write this on my laptop (any spelling errors are due to the fact that I can't see the monitor outside), and then go inside and cool off. Then sweat some more as I start cleaning.

The veggies are finally starting to grow. The poor tomatoes have finally started to leaf out and I spy a few blossoms! The pepper plants all have blossoms or teeny tiny little baby peppers on them. It always cracks me up, the first little peppers on a plant that never looks big I  enough to support any weight. But the more you pick, and the hotter it gets, the more it grows. I love growing peppers.

The pumpkin "patch," a laughable term, as the pumpkins are squeezed into the corner of one raised bed. They are supposed to take up a huge amount of room, but I don't have the space, but I wanted my own sugar pumpkins for baking this year. I put them next to a fence, and will encourage them to grow up by adding a trellis. You can net the fruit so that it will grow supported and not drag down the vine. Keep your fingers crossed that that little experiment succeeds. These little guys have grown about 4 inches in the last week.

The potatoes have also grown. DaMan lobbed several inches of straw on top of them last weekend, and we feared that we over did it, and the straw would smother them. NOPE! They are growing up fine through the straw.

The strawberries are in the middle of their productive period. I've picked two bowls of these wonderful berries, and we've been eating them straight out of the garden. I've never enough to make my own jams. Instead I buy quarts from the farmer's garden to make jams. Occasionally, I get enough to make a strawberry shortcake, though I mainly just like them for picking and eating. Honestly, if there's nothing more perfect than an exactly ripe strawberry, I don't know what it is.

The raspberries continue on their journey. Staking them up was the idea I'd had in ages. it's going to be so much easier to pick them this year than last.

The loofa experiment is progressing slowly. The seeds have sprouted, and there are close to a dozen or so seedlings popping up in their container. I need to trellis them as I will the pumpkins. Scrubbies here we come!

The sugar snap peas are nearing their end. I'll plant another round in August for a fall crop. Love me some sugar snaps! BTW, I made 2 pints of that pickled sugar snap pea recipe that I talked about last week. AND THE ARE FABULOUS!!! I added a touch more red pepper flakes than the recipe called for, and they are wicked spicy, tangy with with the vinegar and other spices. So very good. You should try them.

I noticed that we do have peaches this year. Last year we had a bumper crop, and made peach preserves until we were sick of it. I'm told that peaches don't produce heavy quantities every year. I guess they are a lazy tree.  This is also an older tree, how old, I have no idea, it came with the house. But we've lived here for four years, and have only had 2 big years. I counted 6 peaches other night. They are slightly larger than olives at this point. We'll see how many others are hiding in there.

OK, its getting too hot out here, I'm going back inside...  :)

Junque Jewelry or Junque-ology...you decide.

Necklace Organizer...round one.

I make and have a lot of necklaces. I have a jewelry box that I don't love. It doesn't organize well, and the spot to hang necklaces is down the back, so you can't see them unless you stand over the box, peering in. It's just not convenient.

I've been toying with the idea for a way to hang my necklaces so that they are all visible, and yet compact. Here's what I did.

I had an old framed cork-board & some tiny J hooks (or coffee cup hooks). Viola!

Yes, it's another crappy cell phone pic, but I'll take a better one at a later date. I promise!

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, but I need to jazz it up a bit. I want to paint the frame and paper the cork-board with some pretty paper.  I'm waiting until after I re-paint my bedroom, though, so I can match it to the new wall color.  Then I will post an update here!

Why would I post an unfinished project here, you might ask? Well, I think I have a good reason. One, I put making this necklace board for months, even though I really needed it. My brain was swirling with the "I can't-s"  as in, "I can't do that because I haven't picked out the pretty paper," and "I can't pick out the paper until I paint the walls in the room,"  and so on. I'm a master of procrastination for this very reason.  So I stopped, did the what I needed to get the quick fix, and the pretty comes when it comes.

That's my new Junque-ology rule to live by.  I hope you like it.

Junque-ology & Junque-yard

This scary image is one that's going to give me nightmares to years to come. Our house, built in the 1950's came with a 50 foot TV antenna in the backyard. Over the winter, one of the legs broke away from the in ground cement block and is now swaying dangerously toward our roof. As a temp fix, Da Hubster anchored it with rope to a fencepost at the back of the property, but the antenna needs to come down.

I have no problem with this. It's an eyesore. I have, however, in years past, planted morning glories around the base to pretty it up, and I would have missed being able to do that, so I asked if Da Hubster could possibly leave some of it at the base for me. He said he'd try.

This is a pic of the antenna and the start of the morning glories

I love my morning glories:

Anyway, we've been waiting for the rain to stop, and the wind to die down, so that Da Hubster can make the climb up and start hacking, or buzz-sawing his way back down. Easter Sunday appears to be the day. We will see how it goes. If you don't hear from me, it's because I had a heart attack watching him do this. *nods*

Upcoming Junqueology projects...

I'm having trouble with my motivationals this weekend. My original plan was to come home Friday night and clean house so that I'd have the weekend to putter around with the myriad of projects we have lined up for this spring. However, it's been a really trying week, and I just was not feeling the cleaning mode, other than to take a few swipes at the bathroom and kitchen before playing on the computer and going to bed.

Martha Stewart, I am not.

So, I figured in the time honored tradition of all full time workers out there, I'd not be able to sleep in on a Saturday, get up, and start my homage to Mr. Clean in the bright and shiny morning. HA. Yeah. I actually did sleep in, until 9-ish (this is unheard of for me), and when I did, I woke up to the beginnings of a head cold/sinus & ear infection.

So I am not motivated today to much else other than keep myself from whining and whimpering.

I will, however, tell you some of the upcoming Junque projects I've got in mind for this spring and summer. Please disregard the excess tissues on the floor. And you might want to put on a mask, just in case.

This poor piece of un-luv-ed furniture was left for dead in our garage when we bought the place. The previous owner used it, and used it well. Then the mice used it, and they used it well, too. Now, it's all mine! First, though, I gotta fix it. Give it a good loving. The picture above was taken last summer after we dug it out of the garage. I liked the height of the desktop, and thought it would make a great potter's bench, if it wasn't too rotted. If I could get it waterproofed. As you can see this desk is in rough shape, made even rougher after being outside all winter (I wasn't smart enough to put it back in the garage before the first snow last year).

After it dries out, I will strip the (ugh-ly) green paint off, sand it until it's smooth as a baby's bottom, and weather proof it. I'm stuck on colors though. Not sure if I want to stain it or paint it. And what colors??? Black would be easy enough, but there has to be a snazzier color - if only my brain would pick one! Or maybe I should just go white??? Ah well...first things first - clean it up, repair it, then decide. If I have the pocket change AND the where-with-all, I plan on creating a mosaic tile topper. We'll have to see if the top sands flat, or if I need to rip it off and put a ply-wood topper on it. *rubs hands at the thought of digging out the power tools*

This potter bench will be a mid-summer project, when I can count on the day's being warm, and all my veggies are in the ground, doing their thangs. But I promis to keep you all posted. :)

I have 2 Junque-yard projects slated for before this one, though. I'll write about both here breifly, then detail later with pix and everything.

The first is to whip up one, two, possibly three more raised beds in the back yard for veggie growing. Da Hubster's out there right now, marking off where we are going to build a bed along the back fence for our berry bushes. Our goal is to make them with scrap wood we have on-hand. They won't be pretty, but they will get the job done. Pretty will come later, if I can talk the budget into a few cans of paint. :)

The second project is a re-do of a walkway in the backyard. Originally it was made of cement pavers about 100 years ago. It's completely overgrown, totally not level and as it goes downhill anyway, it's pretty much a hazard for walking. I've been buttering up Da Hubster into helping me fix it. It won't take much, other than muscles and time. He's got Da Muscles (hubba Hubba), and I got the time. I will do a detail of this project later, but for now, I think I need to whip out some cookies for bribery.