Pacific Northwest yard adventures

It is nearly June, and the forecast just keeps looking like this:

Everyone hates it, except the trees (and me, secretly).

 

Before we bought this house, the previous owners logged the whole side yard, which apparently had been full of enormous old-growth Western Red Cedars.  Shortly afterward, our neighborhood imposed a ban on unnecessary tree-cutting, but it was too late for our yard.  We replanted with 50 tiny Douglas firs we bought from the forest service for only $25!  That was money well spent, as they have now grown into an adorable little mini-forest.

There is a secret place underneath our deck stairs that generates baby sword ferns year after year.  I have no clue how sword ferns propagate, but I keep them moving into pots, then into other places in the yard, and they keep sprouting up.  Magic!

Keittiö

We have a small and faulty kitchen, but let's not talk about the faults today.

The table and benches are from my Finnish grandparents' home.

Originally they were painted a typical old-fashioned green, but in my childhood they were bright yellow, and when they came to my own home, that's exactly how I enjoyed them for years and years.

Underneath there are scribbles made by my father and his siblings in their childhood. "En ymmärrä - I don't understand". Ah, the mysteries of life!

An unusually clean and empty counter. I put up badly with mess and I hate washing messy things by hand. In practice this means I often suffer greatly from procrastinating.

The best time to bake bread is when you are truly out of bread.

That way you avoid the guilt concerning the factory bread that is sitting untouched and going stale.

Some under-control mess.

Some day, in some bigger kitchen, I want to have a whole rugged piece of furniture filled with old jars.

I think this was someone's birthday decoration that never got taken down.

This intriguing ecological calendar gives a name for every day in the year. Next to it: my faithful PAL.

Today's name is House Sparrow. (Suomeksi varpunen.)

Pizza night

A few years ago, my brother got me a whole pizza-making get-up for Christmas, including a pizza peel, 8 clay tiles, and most importantly, a two-day lesson on the process.  It's more than a recipe, there's a process.  The most important part is getting your oven as hot as it can go.  My oven technically goes to only 550 degrees, but I can recalibrate it to force it up to about 575 degrees.  The smoke alarms always go off when I make pizza, so nowadays we disconnect them before we even start.

Every bit of counter space gets used, and the whole kitchen becomes a huge mess.  You just have to let it happen!

The peel, which requires a magic touch.

Manly carnivore pizza....

ladylike vegetarian pizza....

and itty-bitty baby pizza.

Niin monta vihreää

I had a miserable week, going from sick to sicker to terrified (overreacting). I visited the doctor twice and on many days didn't make it beyond our back yard. Fortunately it is such a lovely one! What is best about it is that most of it grows wild, and you can really see that it used to be only forest. There is more blueberry than grass, and it looks like there will be plenty of picking to do in July unless nightly frost bites the flowers. We have all three fir trees that grow naturally in Finland: pine (mänty), spruce (kuusi), and juniper (kataja) - and squirrels that come after the abundant cones. I think the tree with the white flowers is cherry, planted by someone who lived here in the past. And yes, we had rhubarb pie this week.

What is best about spring (my spring at least), is that there are so many shades of green. Summertime is much more monotone.

Ensimmäinen kesäpäivä

We moved to this house last November. The yard that was so bare at the time is now beginning to feel like a completely new acquaintance. When things started growing, I wasn't even sure what all of them are. This was one of the mysteries, one first discovered by my older daughter. About a month after it appeared, my mother-in-law said it is rhubarb, and now, a couple more weeks later, I think it's pretty safe to say that there will be pie coming up shortly!

It was the first truly summery day in May. We went from shivering to bare feet in a week, and our Northern skin is not ready for the intensity of this sun. There was a strange crackling kind of sound in the air all afternoon. I kept looking for the origin of it, and (unable to come up with a rational explanation) I finally just decided it's the sound of the leaves bursting out. We spent hours outside, and she ate too many cookies.

Bloggers block....

Instead of a theme, I'll just recap the week for you...

Art night...

boat-making at the creek...

ongoing home construction...

a new computer...

and my new favorite beer on a new chair from the thrift store.

Yes, it really is called 'Simpler Times'.  Maybe beer should be our new blog sign-off?  Maybe just for the summer.

art night!

Tonight I am heading off to art night at a friend's house, and I just can't wait!  I have started a little list of things that are going with me:

Some scrap wood from our remodel to be used for canvases (drying)....

my giant box of treasures for using in collages, which includes yarn scraps, every kind of paper, old books with crazy fonts or quotes, and a 1975 Better Homes and Gardens Handyman's Book, full of great old pictures of really handy men.....

 and homemade Meyer limoncello.

Some of my past art night adventures produced one collage I am not ashamed to say, I really love and am very proud of....

and another bizarre mixed-media post-apocalyptic post-global-warming interpretive map of the entire state of Illinois, which I am mostly sure I like, but I still hold my breath when people walk by and glance at it.

Saaristossa

My husband's boat hibernates at his parents' house in the archipelago. Last Sunday he took it out for the summer, with the help of his father and this adorable tractor. If I were a vehicle, I would be this tractor: down-to-earth, slightly rusty and muddy, but on the other hand petite and feminine! They didn't need my help with the boat, so I supervised a little girl taking a nap in her grandparents' garden, and knit. The cat showed up during the most freezing days of last winter and started hanging out in the yard, so they have been feeding it. There's another one too and he has been around for years. Sometimes he disappears for months on end, but so far he has always returned, and it is always such an occasion! Such is life in the archipelago.