Weekend at Fairbanks

 Today is a cold and rainy day, so this is a good day to finally post again.  I wanted to do this sooner, but after we got back from Fairbanks, I had a lot of work to do.  This weather gives me a break from my outdoor work and gives me a chance to focus on what I've been neglecting inside the house.

We had a great time in Fairbanks.  Every now and then I love to get in the car and just go for a long drive. Maybe I'm weird, but I love road trips.

On the way up, after you get through the Denali Park, there is a little place called Healy.  We stopped there to get some coffee from this little gift shop.

Lately, Chuck has been talking about moving to Healy after he retires, but I take it in stride because he does this often and will name all kinds of remote places.  I know he just talks like that out of frustration - he just wants to get away from people in general.

We were making really good time and didn't want to get there too early cuz Steph didn't get off work until 4:00, so to kill some time, we stopped in Nanana, which is a tiny little town right off the highway.  We just drove around in there for 5 or 10 minutes, which is enough time to pass things twice - that place is so small - and it was interesting just to see how people live there.  Most places were run down and the yards full of junk and the whole place looked abandoned cuz we didn't see anyone at all outside.  Of course, Chuck made a comment about moving there when he saw that the gift shop was closed up and was also up for sale.  I just ignored him.

So we still got to Fairbanks a little early, so we went to a couple little novelty stores that Steph recommended.  And then we finally got to Steph's house.

I couldn't believe how big Pumpkin got!  She was such a tiny little thing last time I saw her.  I always said she looks like a stuffed animal.  Now she looks like a BIG stuffed animal.

Both Pumpkin and Koda know that they have to sit for their treats.

And poor poor Shadow - always just in the shadows.....

She just quietly puts up with everything.  You hardly even know she's there.  Most of the time she's a recluse and you never see her, but every once in a blue moon you get this big blob of fuzz coming out of nowhere getting cozy on your lap and kneading biscuits.

We got there on Thursday afternoon; Friday Steph had to work, so me and Chuck did some stuff for her around the house.  Chuck fixed stuff, and I tilled her garden for her, and helped Chuck with stuff when he needed help.

And I was finally able to present to Steph the quilt I made for her.  This is the one that I ended up doing Quilt-As-You-Go for the first time, and I ended up doing it all by hand!  Ugh.  Oh well, I learned a lot.  I am proud of it, but I'm glad that one's over.

On Saturday, we went to the greenhouse in North Pole and I bought more plants that I didn't need.  I can't help it.  Actually, I did "need" some of them, but I also found and bought some that I really didn't need.  And now that I'm trying to get everything in my garden beds, I sorta ran into a problem with how much room I have available.

After we got our shopping done, we went kayaking in the Chena River.  

During the first half of the day, I questioned if I would go because the day started out cold and drizzly.  But by the time we got done shopping, the weather got better - good enough for kayaking anyway.  It was still a little bit chilly, but when the sun peeked out of the clouds, it was glorious!

I hate going under the bridges cuz I know I wouldn't wanna look up.

Hoping the spiders don't dangle down far enough to reach me.

On Sunday (after church, of course!) we went hiking at Angel Rock, which is close to Chena Hot Springs, about an hour away from Fairbanks.  

Angel Rock is a really pretty place, but a very steep climb.  It's the kind of hike that tells you how out of shape you are (kind of like how the corona virus tells you how healthy you are).  Steph and Chuck had to keep stopping to wait for me to catch up.  I never wanted to be one of "those people", but this is the price I pay for being sedentary most of the time.

The trail is a couple miles long and loops back around, or you can continue on to Chena Hot Springs.  Steph said some people hike all the way to Chena Hot Springs and then hitch a ride back to their car.

(sorry I forgot to rotate that picture before I uploaded it)

We took the doggies with us, but I let Chuck and Steph hold their leashes cuz they were too excited to walk at my pace.  I couldn't keep up with their pulling, and I didn't want them to make me trip and fall.  There were lots of rocks and tree roots on the trail to watch out for, and if you're as tired as I was, you don't want or need the extra help from an excited dog to slam you down into that involuntary horizontal position.

Anyway, there was lots of gorgeous scenery to behold!

The first part of the trail follows the Chena River (or a branch of it)

At the top of the trail you come to this "cave".

Here is where we stopped to eat our sandwiches and give the doggies a drink of water.

It sure is nice to have the perfect weather for hiking!  The sun was shining, and it wasn't too hot or too cold.  Absolutely perfect!

On Monday, Steph had to go back to work, so we left early in the morning.  It was a beautiful drive home!

We stopped in Healy again for a cuppa joe.

After we got home I had a lot to do.  I had left all my plant babies under Justin's care and mercy and I was worried about them.  Before we left, I planted seeds in the garden beds for starting my beets, carrots, and peas.  I told Justin to keep them moist.  They were bone dry.  I wondered if they were toast. The other plants that I was hardening off, were completely drenched and soaking in two inches of water.  I fished them all out of their wading pools hoping they weren't sitting in water long enough to get root rot.

I spent the entire week re-watering the seeds in the garden (still hoping they would germinate) while drying out the plants that were soaked.  (What was he doing?!?)

Thankfully,  just a couple days ago, I noticed tiny little carrot leaves emerging, and my peas are coming up, and some of the beets are coming up too.  Whew!

Yesterday I spent most of the day transplanting everything into the beds, except for the pumpkins, Brussels sprouts, kale, and bean seeds.  I ran out of room for those, but Chuck is in the process of building more beds, so I just have to wait until he's done.  We're also supposed to get more dirt delivered soon.

Wood is really expensive right now, but thankfully, a guy we know had a tree that he took to the mill, and he put our name on it.  All we have to do is call them and tell them how we want it cut.  Free wood for us!  All we have to do is pay them to cut it for us.  For the garden beds, it doesn't have to be fancy; we are just using rough cut wood, but even rough cut wood is expensive right now, so we appreciate that this guy did this for us.

We had this visitor come to our yard.  I'm glad he came before I had my garden planted.  Even if my garden was already planted, nothing would've been ready for him to eat anyway, I suppose.  Maybe we'll see him again in August........

Also, we had a pretty good earthquake the other night.  We were both sitting in bed reading, about 11:00, and we heard a rumble and then everything was shaking.  We're used to getting these earthquakes, but this one was weird because it seemed to go on for a really long time.  First they said it was a 5.8, and now they're saying it was a 6.1.

Anyhoo, that's about all for now.  The rest of my summer will be spent just watering the gardens and watching my kitties enjoy the sunshine.

Spring is Sprouting

 This will be a boring post because I really don't have anything to write about.  I just like to check in once in a while.    Isn't it wonderful that May is here?  Now Spring is truly here (in my opinion).

I haven't seen any flowers yet, but my garden seeds are really taking off!

Well, the important ones are anyway (tomatoes and celery).  I gave up on my strawberries; I will probably have to buy some strawberry plants from a nursery.  Also most of my sage plants didn't germinate, and none of my lavender or catnip came up.  My bell peppers - I don't know what's wrong with them.  I think I got only one bell pepper and one hot pepper.  My banana peppers seem to be doing okay though.  I've never grown any kind of pepper before so this is all a new experiment for me.

Our temperatures have been fluctuating so I am always shifting my plants around according to temperature and light.  When the sunroom gets close to 60, I will put my broccoli and celery in there, as well as some of the germinating seeds.

If it gets close to 60 outside, then I put my celery and broccoli outside.  They prefer cooler temps so if the outdoor temps get that warm, it gets too hot in the sunroom for them. If it's not warm enough outside for them, then I have to keep them inside the house in front of a window.

When the sunroom gets in the upper 60s, I move my tomato plants out there, and take my celery and broccoli out of there if the temps get in the upper 70s.  If it's warmed up enough outside, I can put them outside, otherwise I have to move them back onto the kitchen counter.  A lot of times the sunroom gets up in the 80s and close to 100.  Then I don't even use it cuz that is just way too hot for anything.

 Last week when the temps got in the mid to upper 60s (pushing 70) it was nice because I was able to move ALL of my plants outside.  It was perfect because it was really warm out (I felt HOT), they were getting full sun, and they also had the perfect little breeze to help strengthen their stems.  I think I have a pretty good head start on hardening them off already.

In the mornings I move some of my plants in front of the sliding door where the sun comes shining through.  It's a nice option when the sunroom isn't warmed up enough yet.  By the time the sun moves out of that position, it's usually warm enough to move my plants into the sunroom.  I just have to be careful not to trip over them because in the mornings is usually when I do my laundry and in this spot, they are sitting right in my path.

Chuck still works from home most of the time, but he went in to work on Thursday and came home with this plant that someone gave him.  It's a scented geranium.  I'm not familiar with geraniums, so I had to "google it" and find out what they are and how to take care of them.  This one is lemon scented.  You can't smell it just by sniffing; you have to rub the leaves.  And boy, oh boy, do you get a strong lemony-lime scent on your hands!  It smells so good!  I'm thinking I might experiment and rub some on me when I want to repel mosquitoes.  I don't know if it will work, but it's worth a try.  I haven't been bitten yet, but I have seen how big they are this year!  Last Sunday when we were leaving for church, they were swarming all over the car like we were in a freak mosquito attack movie, and they were ginormous!

Anyway, our snow is all gone and our kitties are so happy now.  They are spending a lot of time outdoors now.  Sometimes we catch Peeka burying her pee (or something) in a pile of dirt by the trees.  Hopefully, she won't get any bright ideas like that in my garden beds, which might look like giant litterboxes to her.

Sometimes Peeka is content to just find a sunny spot and sprawl out.

So that's pretty much it.  I know this is boring, but I just haven't really been doing anything out of the ordinary.  Most of the time just babysitting and nurturing my plant babies.

We won't be going to the cabin any time soon.  Spring is the worst time to go because it's too muddy.  Not enough snow for a snow machine, but too muddy, even for a 4-wheeler.  So we usually don't bother until the end of May.  But this year it'll probably be June because we are planning a trip to Fairbanks the third week of May, and the weekend after that I will be busy establishing my garden beds.  So there's another boring post for you to look forward to.

I hope you all are enjoying your Spring weather!

Spring is Here!

 Spring is here, but Peeka agrees with me that it still seems like winter, especially since we got covered with a new thick blanket of the white stuff.  No, I'm not talking about Oreos! 

I don't mind the snow.  I love it when we get dumped on!  Usually when a snow storm comes, Anchorage hogs most of it.  With this storm we actually got quite a bit, and Anchorage got even more.  No surprise there. 

Every day Peeka wants to check to see if winter is over yet.

She was disappointed this day.

But snow, or no snow, here in Alaska we MUST start our garden seeds early and not let the snow affect our judgment.  June 1 is my designated (outdoors) transplanting day, so it is crucial to get things started!  My celery and parsley have sprouted, which is very exciting!  It seems kinda weird to be sprouting these little green things when we still have 2 feet of snow on the ground, but to me, the little green things tell me that Spring is here, even if the snow says otherwise.

Two of my parsleys didn't germinate (yet) for some reason.  I will give them another week or two.  If they still don't show up, then I'll reuse those pellets for something else.  I don't wanna let those go to waste.  And I will just have to make do with 4 parsley plants instead of 6.  But this is why I always plant one or two extras.

Today I started seeds for spearmint, strawberries, broccoli, banana peppers, lavender, peppermint, sage, rosemary, Polar Beauty tomatoes, and Sub-Arctic tomatoes.  It was 80 degrees in the sunroom today, so I put them out there so I could still have my kitchen counter available to make supper.  I will have to move them all back in when the temps cool down.

The are already getting steamy under the lid.

Every two weeks I will be starting more seeds, as per the directions on the packages, so by the end of May, this table is going to be FULL!  Especially since a lot of these seedlings will be transplanted to little pots, which will take a lot more room.

I found a fun way to plan my garden beds!

These are only 4 of them, but since I have 8 beds (for now), I came up with the idea to make a visual aid to help me plan out my beds.  Since I've been collecting scrap booking tools for the last upteen years, I have quite the collection of various sizes of circle punches, so I put them to use.  I used the recommended "thinning space" on the seed packets to determine the size of the circles - 

one inch = one foot.

I used 1" squares for patches of veggies like carrots and peas.  I was NOT gonna punch out tiny period-sized dots to represent each carrot!  So there is probably some elbow room left in the patches because I may not even have enough pea, bean, and carrot seeds to fill up the patches that I planned for. (I could always buy more, I suppose.) This helped me figure out how much room I had and how many of each veggie I could plan for.  And then I cut out flower shapes for some specific flowers that I want to plant in the garden beds, and I wanted to make sure I planned out some room for them.

It took me a LONG time to punch them all out and label them, but I had a lot of fun putting the "puzzle" together, especially when referring to my "companion planting" notes.  I had to move things around after I discovered I had some things together that really shouldn't have been.

Anyhoo, I am on my way to gardening!

And that's pretty much all I've been up to (in my spare time).

Maybe in two weeks I'll fill you in on the next 6 veggies that I will be adding to my windowsill.

Sorry if this is boring.....

p.s.  Last weekend we went to the cabin, and I wanted to share some pictures, but I unintentionally left my camera in the truck.  So I took some pictures with Chuck's phone, but he is terrible about getting them transferred to the computer, and I refuse to keep asking him until I sound like a broken record.  So you will just have to use your imagination.  It was BEAUTIFUL.

WOW, has it really been almost two months since I've posted?  I'm sure no one out there missed me, but I am going to just "check in" for now.

I have to say that I am so glad that the holidays are over!  I have been free to busy myself with normal things like sewing and scrap booking.  I finally finished Stephanie's quilt, but I don't want to show it to you until after I give it to her.  It was a lot of work and I'm so glad that one is over!

So I started another quilt.  This time it's for PW.  She loves cats and owns 4 of them, so I thought I would make her a "kitty quilt".  About a year ago I started looking for different kitty patterns and thought I might make a kitty sampler quilt by using all kinds of different designs.  But then I found a cute pattern on the "Shiny Happy World" website and decided to go with that one.

I started with one sample block to practice with, just to get a feel for how to make it and to find out if I wanted to make any kind of adjustments for the quilt itself.  I thought it turned out super cute...

But what was bothering me about the pattern is that they look more like bears or dogs because of the way they have the mouth shaped. 

But I was pleased with the practice block, so went ahead and made the first block for PW's quilt.  This one represents her cat "Peanut", who is black, big, and fat.

Instead of a "bear" mouth, I gave him a little kitty mouth, which I think really gave him the right expression, and made him look more like a CAT.  I didn't do very well on the bow tie - I need more practice with my applique skills.

Anyhoo, the next one I made represents "Raptor".

PW says that Raptor is a biter, so I added some fangs.

PW's four kitties are going to be on colored backgrounds to make them stand out from the rest of the kitties on the quilt, which will be on neutral backgrounds.  So to add a few more splashes of color, I made some "MEOW" blocks, one in each color to match the backgrounds of the 4 kitties.

Then I finished making her other two kitties, "Ash" and "Galadriel".

Every time I make one, I snicker at them because they always turn out so cute!  But I still need to figure out a way to make the noses smaller - they just don't look right being that size.  It is next to impossible to applique pieces that small, especially if you're "turning them under".  I don't want to just fuse it on because it might fall off after several washings.  And I would prefer to turn them under so they don't fray on the edges, so I am still trying to find a solution to this problem, or I just to need to keep practicing with smaller pieces.  Anyway I think I am getting better with each one I make.

Here are two more that I finished.  The rest of them that I make will go on these neutral backgrounds.

The kitties themselves are wooly flannel; I wanted them to feel soft and cuddly.

I am using buttons for the eyes for the same reason I am having problems with the noses - they are just way to small to applique.  Anyway, I think the buttons give them more character.

The quilt will be really cute when it's done.  There are 12 different cat patterns to play with.  I'm not sure yet if I'm doing 6x6 array or a 7x7 array, so I will be making 3 or 4 sets of each of them.  It's also going to be "Quilt As You Go" because the blocks are 10", so I am letting the applique be the quilting, and that would be hard to do if the whole quilt was put together.  I am still very new at QAYG quilts, but after learning how to do it the HARD way with Stephanie's quilt, this one should seem pretty easy.

I think I might even want to make a quilt like it for myself, because I think it's going to be too cute.

Anyhoo, off that subject, we still get our neighbor visitor "Einstein" coming by once in a while.

Usually he shows up on the weekends.  He comes over and scratches on our door and whines, so we let him in.  He's all excited to get a snack from us, and then he leaves.  Sometimes he hangs around for awhile, but after we quit giving him snacks, that's when he decides he wants to go back out.  Some days he is out luck when I don't really have anything for him, but today I had some leftover turkey to give him, then he cleaned out the cat dish (he's never done that before!), and now he's eating a doggie snack - we bought a bag of doggie snacks from the commissary just for him, but usually he doesn't eat them - he would rather first see what I got in the fridge.  He must be really hungry today!  I feel so sorry for him when it's really cold outside.  I don't know if his owners boot him out all day, or what, but he often roams around in the neighborhood as if he has no home.  I suppose he's just making his rounds, seeing what other kinds of snacks he can mooch off of people.  I would really like to give him a bath because he always stinks, but I don't do it because I don't wanna send him back out in the freezing weather if he's still wet - and I don't wanna keep him in the house long enough to thoroughly dry.  So - me thinks his owners need to take better care of him.

So that's pretty much it, just back to my normal activities and waiting for Spring to come!  I already received all the seeds that I ordered, so I am impatiently waiting for March 9 because that is the earliest day that I can start planting seeds.  Celery and parsley will be the first ones that I start.  I can't wait!

I hope you are ready to read all my boring posts about my garden.

If your February is as cold as ours, I hope you are staying warm!