a peek inside the fishbowl

Over the past few weeks I’ve raked multiple lawns and moved what might possibly be a metric ton of leaves from one place to another. I raked the small forest around my mother’s place on two occasions this fall (picture full-size maple and oak trees, so many leaves they can’t be bagged), my in-laws small suburban front […]

In a recent post about our garden, I mentioned that squirrels have been digging into my containers. It’s really frustrating. It’s not like I’ve been stashing peanuts in there or anything. It’s not like those plants are EDIBLE, but they’re dug up and disturbed and don’t get a chance to grow. So I decided to […]

As I wrote about previously, we’ve been busy planting/weeding/chopping stuff down in our backyard. Mark trimmed some trees and took out a whole bunch of branches recently, which is great until you have to clean up/bundle up the aforementioned branches. Sigh. In these cases, it’s helpful to have an end game in mind. Which is: […]

Am I a gardener? I asked myself that as I poked around the back yard this morning, thinking about what’s coming up, what needs more attention, how much work it all is to maintain. Honestly, Mark and I can barely keep up for the most part. My inner dialogue about the garden is the same every […]

I’m continuing my exploration of gift ideas here on the blog because I think that everyone needs a little bit of help in the gift-giving department. If you’d like to read part one and two, this link will display the list so far. I believe it’s time to reconsider the idea of Houseplant As Christmas […]