It was cool on Tuesday and when evening came the heavens opened and it rained all night! We woke up yesterday to an emerald green world. My mom and I threw on shoes and went out to play in the garden in our pyjamas. Weeding, cleaning up and looking in amazement at all the beauty that seemed to spring forth from the dirt in a single night.
We had so much fun over the Easter weekend, I don’t know where the time went? I made a batch of The Pioneer Woman’s “Refrigerator Dinner Rolls” out of her Dinnertime cookbook to go along with our Easter meal. It’s a marvellous recipe. The dough can stay refrigerated for up to five days, so you can have freshly made rolls anytime you want. Let’s just say that a hot roll, oozing with French salted butter makes me very happy!
Easter Morning was also our first day of “Springing Forward”. We’re three days in and I’m still thrown off. Funny how jet lag doesn’t get me, but change the time by one little hour and I’m a walking zombie.
We’ve had peeks here and there of sunshine, but it keeps eluding us. It’s been very windy here of late and I keep checking on my pots outside to make sure they haven’t blown away. Mr. Michie helped me stabilise our little olive tree yesterday, as he kept taking a nose dive with the storm gales. I’m ready to replenish our pots and baskets with some colour here and there, but as the weather hasn’t been so nice, we are waiting to head out to the nursery to pick new flowers. Hopefully that’s a job we can accomplish this week.
I love the school breaks when we just get to march to our own beat. Well, for the most part anyway, as there is always school work to still be done either at home or at school itself. But, I’m always grateful for the time that we have together. Where we just roll along, going with the day where it takes us.
We played in our dollhouse size garden yesterday. Planting a few new things here and there. Mr. Michie chose the most dazzling yellow dahlia that I have ever seen, it is almost neon. We also separated and repotted some aloe. I have a gorgeous aloe plant given to me by a friend of mine, it is from a cutting of a plant that belonged to her grandmother. It’s appears to be very happy on the windowsill and is growing at Jurassic proportions. A very dear work colleague, has traded me some Danish marigold seeds for a cutting of my aloe. So yesterday I set to work repotting some clippings so in a few weeks time, when they take root, I can uphold my half of the bargain.
We have the most beautiful nursery not far from where we live, so we spent a good hour there yesterday, traipsing around, trying to decide on what we were going to pick. I love that smell of wet earth and the explosion of color that exists all around you. I love the feeling of soil on my fingers. Gardening soothes my soul. As we went inside to pay we passed the cactus stand. I fell in love with this guy and so Mr. Michie bought him for me as a treat. He is sitting very proudly on the windowsill now. I love the pop of coral that splashes out at you.
I love orchids. I have the perfect windowsill for them in the cottage and they are incredibly happy there. I have a gorgeous snow white one and a deep purple velvet one. My snow white orchid has just finished blooming. We had big snowflake colored blooms all through Christmas.
Mr. Michie gave me another orchid for Valentine’s Day. It is a sunny yellow with a sprinkle and speckle of deep aubergine inside. It is definitely the sunshine on my windowsill with all the rainy days we have been having.
Mums say “Fall” to me. I got my first mum of the season last weekend and it has just started to bloom.
It has been rainy the past two days here and coming home tonight and seeing that golden orange sunset burst of color from the mum’s blossoms on our front stoop, made me smile.
A cup of tea and a nice biscuit, just go hand in hand in England. It seems wrong to have one without the other.
However, I quite often have one without the other and I drink my tea all wrong as I am mostly a black tea drinker and not a milk or milk and sugar tea drinker.One of the local coffee shops has started creating giant versions of some of England’s best loved biscuits to have with your hot beverage of choice. One of these biscuits being a custard cream. This homemade custard cream is absolutely divine and the perfect thing for a Monday morning breakfast!
I definitely needed a pick-me-up this morning as we have been up since just before 3am with Mr. Michie getting sick and I have left him at home and in bed today. I spent a good hour of early yesterday morning getting rid of ants that had invaded my kitchen over night. We discovered that their nest was in one of the pots by our front door that contained my climbing rose.
Unfortunately the entire pot had to go as the hive was just too large to contain, they started to spill out of the pot and they were inside some of the dead areas of my rose that were clipped down at the bottom. I am always sad to lose plants as I am attached to them. They bring me such happiness. But, there are more flowers by my door now, and that tub will really fill out in a week or so.
I also re-potted my orchids, so hopefully they will be happy with fresh bark and new pots, we will just have to wait and see. We made homemade pizzas last night with crumbled sausage, fennel and sauteed rapini. It was a really nice combination, It was light and tasted of Spring.
Mr. Michie also took me on a Saturday date and we saw “Iron Man 3”. We both really liked it. There is nothing better then watching a good movie, munching on popcorn and holding hands with your sweetie!
We tried a new pizza place down the street on Friday night, it was delicious! A great date night treat! Stone baked pizzas, that were fresh, with homemade, locally sourced and organic ingredients and some items imported directly from Italy.
The dough was so thin and crispy, it was the perfect size! It was so good that after a full day on Saturday, getting up before 6am and running around all day and doing some serious gardening we went back for dinner. Mr. Michie picked up a pizza for himself and some lasagna and a salad for me.
We planted flowers this weekend, washed the outside windows and cleaned everything up. I am trying to fight off a bad sinus infection, so Mr. Michie took care of me for the better part of the weekend. We made a pot roast with lots of veggies and served it over a saffron infused risotto for Sunday dinner, it was heavenly.
We also made some snickerdoodles to snack on. Happiness is a snickerdoodle!
The weekend is finally here! We have made it! I have a few errands to run tomorrow morning and then Mr. Michie is taking me to the nursery to pick up a few things for our little garden.
I have a terracotta pot that didn’t survive a pedestrian and now needs to be replaced and my other little flower boxes are truly ready for a punch of color!
So, this weekend, we are going to enjoy every moment we have together and remember to take time and stop to smell the roses.
Have a great weekend!
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We had a very busy two days this past weekend. We worked on redoing some of our flower pots in our little street garden. We lost our 4 year old rosemary in the last frost and so we replaced it with a brand new very happy looking little pot of rosemary that sits near our door. I love to run my hands through its delicate branches and smell the sweet smell of rosemary on my fingertips.
On Saturday we went out to run errands. I did a bit of shopping and picked up some things for school and home, while Mr. Michie went to the Library to work on a paper. I picked him up when I was done and the smell of the library just took me back.
This is a very beautiful library. It is fairly new, but they have paid attention to detail and used their spaces wisely. They have two gorgeously lit stained glass windows in the entrance way and display cabinets here and there with small exhibitions inside or pieces of local history and lore.
I have to say, I truly love libraries! What is it about a library? Card catalogues and the dewey decimal system and books bound in plastic wrappers that crinkle when you open their spines, the smell of age rippling out from the pages as you flip through, it all just makes me happy.
So, as Mr. Michie finished up, I stole his phone and did a little photographing of my own. I found a vintage wallpaper book and fell in love with the Kate Greenaway wallpaper page. I have an original piece of hers that Mr. Michie gave me as a Birthday present the year before we were married.
It hangs in our room and is one of the things that greets me “Hello!” in the morning. It is from an alphabet book of hers’, with a pink “J” edged in gold and a little girl who stands on the “J” and holds a windmill in her hand. It is beautiful and delicate and makes me very happy, every time I see it!
After he was packed up and ready to go, we gathered our things and headed to the movies for a date. He took me to see, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. It was delightful. A lovely way to spend a rainy afternoon, watching a sweet movie, eating popcorn and holding hands.
We grabbed some dinner after the movie and headed home and just as we were about to walk in the door, Mr. Michie spied this:
Our first olive! It might not look like much, but we have had that olive tree almost as long as we have been married and I am happy to see the fruits of our labors before us, it was a nice gift from Mother Nature on the eve of Earth Day.
This weekend has been very cool. The leaves are starting to change, the sunlight is moving, evening is drawing in sooner and all of these little things add up to signs that we are welcoming Fall in.
So today we got up early and placed two beautiful fat little butternut squash into a roasting pan and placed them in the oven. As they began to roast to house filled with the smell of squash, its fleshy inside getting softer as its skin began to brown and caramalize in the pan.
As it roasted, we worked together outside. Pruning back a few plants and I had the chance to plant the golden mum Mr. Michie bought me as a surprise as well as the orange ornamental pepper plant by the front door, I just need a pumpkin now, but it is too soon for them to be ready!
Once the squash was finished, we scooped out its orange pulp and began to create a warming soup that is now simmering away on the stove, filling the house with the smells of autumn.
