Yesterday we planted the white picket fence border out front and I’m so happy with the way it turned out!!

It was tough to dig up all that beautiful hydroseeded grass that had grown in. But I always knew we’d plant a little border of flowers and yesterday was such a beautiful day that we decided it was finally time to get started.

From seed and pulp to lawn in 6 weeks… If you’re thinking about hydroseeding, the HH can’t say enough good things about our experience about it. 

Way cheaper than sod, less frustrating then spreading seed yourself and hoping for the best. The hydroseed came in thick and strong and we’d totally do it again.

But we had to remove the grass in front of the fence because we know from experience that if you live in a spot with a sidewalk out front and 200 dogs walk past your lawn every day, the lawn is not going to stay green for long.

Bye bye pee pee zone.

Hello perennial chives.

And perennial pin cushion flowers that last all summer.

I chose chives because not only are they cheap and easy to grow from seed, but they are one of the first plants up in the spring and they will stay green until the first hard frost. 

Originally I was just going to have a border of chives out front.

But then I spied the pin cushion flowers {on sale for $5 each!} and they were so wonky, happy and fun looking {and in my color scheme} that I decided to add in some of those too.

Bird Cottage looks so happy, doesn’t it? The gate should be installed this week. Then I’ll add a little something special for the fourth of July and we’ll be all set for summer. 

Gardening. And garden projects. I sure do love them. 

~Mavis

OTHER

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Get Back To The Basics + Learning to Unplug

The weather has been pretty good lately so we’ve been able to get a ton of stuff done in the yard. It’s almost like winter didn’t happen. 

We managed to go for a ride along the beach, but mostly we stayed close to home and worked on house projects and getting plants in the ground.

In The Kitchen

When it’s in the mid 70’s and you’ve been working outside all day, the last thing you want to do is cook anything elaborate. 

For date day we went out for weenies and chips. But mostly quick meals like sandwiches and tuna bowls seem to be the norm these days. 

One of these days I’m going to make the pear frangipane tart. Just not anytime soon. We did have beans and toast for dinner one night, but that’s probably the most exciting thing we made in the kitchen last week.

Kitchen Goals For This Year

• Master the pear frangipane tart from Standard Baking Company. 
• Put my Weck jars to use.
• Use two bins of beans {working on it}

Rug Hooking

I am SO CLOSE to finishing my giant whale rug. I haven’t had a lot of extra time to hook lately but I’m confident I’ll have this one finished by flag day. 

I can’t wait to show it to you when it’s all done. It might just be my all time favorite rug I’ve hooked yet.

Rug Hooking Goals For This Year

• Finish drawing out all my patterns, making kits, dyeing wool by March 31st. 
• Release 10 new rug hooking patterns/kits.  {3 down 7 to go}
• Hook 27 of the patterns from the “someday I’ll hook these” bin. {4 down 23 to go}

Go New Places – See New Things

We didn’t go anywhere new or exciting but I did pull up a bunch of weeds that were in the hydroseeded lawn. 

How is it possible to have weeds already? The lawn is only 5 weeks old! The HH says I should just leave them alone and that he will spread some weed and feed {fertilizer/weed killer?} on the lawn. 

But wouldn’t it make more sense to spend an hour and pull up the weeds NOW before they get giant taproots?

Travel Goals For This Year

• Travel someplace {internationally} that I’ve never been before.
• Travel somewhere in Maine {overnight} that I haven’t been before.

Places I’ve Been So Far This Year

• Boston {Birthday getaway}
• NYC {Girls getaway}

Walk And Stretch More

We did a couple of walks around the neighborhood but mostly we’ve been getting our steps in from working in the yard.

I love this time of year in the garden!! Have I told you that 10 million times already? Today I’m going to transplant my {hopefully soon to be} 10 foot tall sunflower seedlings to the side yard.

It’s been a few years since I’ve grown giant sunflowers so I’m pretty excited.

Walking/Stretching Goals For This Year

• Get into some sort of stretching routine
• Fast walk a 5K, 10K, and Half Marathon 

Garden

The peony border is coming in nicely! I can’t remember how many peonies we planted alongside the house right after we moved in… 17? 18? All creamy whites and pale pinks. 

There are thrice as many buds this year as there were last year so I figure by this time next year my little border should mature into a hedge and I’ll be able to have enough for a couple of really nice bouquets.

Garden Goals For This Year

• Rework the driveway and garden areas {in progress}
• Go crazy and plant a ridiculous amount of flowers {working on it}
• Step out of my comfort zone and plant some flowers I’ve never planted before

Paint

The HH went to Home Depot to pick up some stain for the fence and came home with a 5 gallon bucket of the stuff. 

I thought for sure he bought too much but I’ve already gone through about 2 gallons of stain and I am nowhere near being close to finished. 

I don’t even know if I am 10% of the way done. Yikes! We thought about spraying it on but so much gets wasted and I just think the coverage is better when you stain a fence by hand with a paint brush.

Tedious yes, but a better result, that’s for sure. I feel like it’s going to take me all summer. It’s a good thing I like painting.

How about YOU? How are YOUR goals coming along? 

~Mavis

Painting Goals For This Year

• The Van Gogh wall
• The gallery wall down stairs
• The captains wall in the hall
• Trim and walls 

OTHER

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The weather in Maine has been AWESOME the past few days! Today the temps are supposed to be in the mid 70’s and that’s fine by me. The rest of the fence was installed yesterday. Yee-Haw! They’ll come back and install the gates next week.

I thought they’d be installed when the fence was installed but apparently they wait to make the gates until after the fence is in place so they can get the measurements for the gates right. 

Which totally makes sense.

Oh well. That will give me enough time to get the front fence painted and the pin cushion flower border installed on the outside {street side} of the fence.

Part of me really wanted to keep the fence the natural color that it was. But adore white picket fences, they’re so inviting. Plus the studio is white and you know me, I love the color white and I like things to match. 

While the fence guys were installing the fence in the front yesterday I was busy painting a portion of the side fence.

My working theory was that if I painted the fence in the morning, the stain would be dry and the HH could get started on planting the arborvitaes once the fence guys left.

It was a fantastic plan! He was able to get 6 of them installed before calling packing it in for the afternoon. 

We bought the arborvitae trees from Costco about a month ago and ever since they’ve been sitting in our yard waiting for the fence to be installed so we could get them in the ground.

Everyday {that it hasn’t rained} we’ve been out there watering them and it has been such a pain in the keister making sure they didn’t dry out while in the nursery pots. 

Normally arborvitae isn’t on my go-to list of plants but I wanted a fast growing evergreen that would create a nice privacy screen between our place and the neighbors.

We bought 12 trees but it looks like we’ll only be able to get 11 in the ground because we have a bird’s nest snuggled in one of the trees!!! How sweet is that? 

Bird babies in the tree. A bird’s nest {and more babies on the way??} in the flower pot and twig garland above the door. 

The color we chose {last fall} for the colonial door – bird’s egg blue. 

Umm… I think we’re going to have to stop calling it “the studio” and instead call it “bird cottage”. I mean, I don’t know how many more signs we need. 

Other things I’ll be doing this weekend… Planting zinnia seeds. The packet somehow slipped under the canning cupboard and I just found it yesterday. Whoops!

I also started listening to Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardener so I’ll be listening to that while I work on my giant whale rug. 

Well, those are my plans for this weekend – painting, planting and hooking. How about YOU? Do you have anything exciting planned? Anyone going clubbing? Curious minds want to know. 

I hope you have a great weekend, 

~Mavis

OTHER

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The fence panels and posts arrived yesterday morning. I was so excited when I saw the truck! The HH was even more excited because he knew he didn’t have to install them.

We ended up going with a 4 foot high Nantucket style {cedar} fence. Four feet seemed like the perfect height to us. Not too tall, not too short. It will probably take me all summer to get the whole fence stained on both sides but that’s okay.

I do love staining fences. Especially outside in the warm sunshine. It’s so relaxing to me.

Once the fence is fully installed I’ll be able to get all the perennials I’ve been collecting planted and Lucy will be able to hang out in the vegetable garden with me.

Look how much bigger the backyard looks now with the fence installed. It’s crazy!! I told the HH we totally have room for a few more raised garden beds and he just shook his head at me. HA HA HA. 

Today they’ll work on the front fence and then the gates and with a little luck the whole thing will be done by the weekend. I love fences. And I love defined spaces. 

And you know what else I love?

Delphiniums! I picked up a few pots at Market Basket and I absolutely LOVE the purpley blue color of the flowers. 

These will be the first delphiniums I’ve ever planted in a garden before and I’d love to have more. Have you ever grown delphiniums from seed before? Are they easy to grow? 

I’m sure it’s too late to start seeds this year, but if they’re easy to grow I think I’d like to grow a patch of them next year. Planting and painting. That’s what I’ll be doing all summer. And that’s fine by me. 

Here’s hoping today is another productive day here in Maine.

Peace Out. 

~Mavis

OTHER

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I don’t know about you, but I feel like a day doesn’t go by lately that I am not working in the garden. 

If I’m not planting seeds then I’m repotting seedlings or digging holes to plant something in the ground. It’s crazy I tell you. Just crazy. 

The latest area I’ve been working on is the little area between the driveway and the house. Previously I had a line of  bloomstruck hydrangeas planted in that spot. It was nice, but kind of boring. 

So when the HH mentioned he liked how the perennial garden up front looked, I decided to dig up the hydrangea border when the landscape crew was here putting in the seashell driveway and move the hydrangeas next door to create a border over there. 

You know what else I did when the landscaped guys were here moving stuff around?

I hid a time capsule under the steps. In a canning jar! How fun is that!? I’m totally not telling you what I put in there either.

Anyway, back to the new garden bed. {And yes, that’s Jeraimah the bull frog on the steps. I found him in a free pile on one of my recent walks}. 

I’m hoping I’ll come across the right size terra cotta pots this summer to set on steps alongside him. I found a bunch alongside the road last summer and grabbed them but they aren’t the right size.

I can’t remember how long the bed is. Maybe 20 feet by 3 feet wide? That sounds about right. The plan was simple. Fill it with perennials. 

Perennials are all I’m planting from here on out.

Banana cream shasta daisy.

Phlox.

Autumn joy sedum. {The bees LOVE this plant!}

Purple pink hibiscus. 

And a few pincushion flowers to round out the garden bed. I might add a few chive plants. I haven’t decided yet.

I know it doesn’t look that exciting now, but I suspect in another month or so {and after a round or two of Miracle Grow} the plants will start to fill out a bit more and the bed will look nice and colorful. By next summer everything will have filled out even more.

Come fall I’ll load the space with spring bulbs so there will be something to look at while we wait for the summer blooms. 

I LOVE gardening! Have I told you that lately? And I especially love creating new garden beds. Perennial ones especially. 

Well I’m off… To play in the dirt. I hope you have a great day. 

~Mavis

OTHER

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