Starting Seeds...

One of my favorite things about spring and summer is gardening. I recently started a few herbs - chives, oregano, basil, lavender, and spearmint. The past two years, I've started all my seeds in our kitchen in our apartment. As you can imagine, this could be quite messy. So it was great to be able to be outside and not worry about getting dirt on the floor or on our kitchen table. I picked up one of those plastic domed "greenhouse" that are available everywhere now to give a try. I usually use the small peat pots, but was tired of how fast they would get mold on. The greenhouse I got has 4 different cell packs, each with 9 seed spots. I planted the oregano, basil, lavender, and spearmint in this. So far, so good. It makes watering easy. I bottom water so I don't distrubing the seed, so I just pour some in the bottom of the tray and have the plants soak it up. The chives I planted in these newspaper pots I made. My mother gave me a small kit that makes pots for starting seeds without tape or glue, just newpaper.


Here's my seed starting set up.



I've never tried lavender before. I thought it would be good to try growing and that I could dry the flowers to use in the soaps I started to make. However, I found out that new lavender plants don't get flowers until the second year. So I'll have a little bit of a wait.



Here's 4 out of my 5 herbs all planted and ready to grow.

Trees....

I was going through some of the ever growing collection of photos I have on my computer, and came across some great close up pictures of trees. I actually forgot about almost all of these. We're pretty bad at actually going and getting them printed off, so they just kind of grow into massive folders on our computer. These made me want to find a few minutes this coming weekend to print them out.

The first one was taken in the fall in the town where we live. I love the ivy climbing up the bark.



This one was taken also taken at the same time and around the same area.


This one I believe was taken our on of our camping trips in Shenandoah Valley National Park.


And this one was taken by a creek close to where we live.

Our new cards....

Yesterday, two little boxes arrived from Moo with our new business cards in. I ordered 200 of the mini cards and love them! I like how you can customize the image on the back of every card if you'd like. I kept it pretty simple and just chose two different images of my art/fabric collages for the back. Here's what the backs look like:



Here's the front of the card. I was a little unsure about how the orange would look for the background, but it turned out to be really nice. I choose one of my new fabric/embroidery girl series for the front.





Just in time for spring crafts show!