Friday Favorite: Keyless Entry
A couple weeks ago our front door lock broke. When I say it broke I mean it fell apart into a bunch of little pieces, there was no fixing it. For a week or two the door was held closed by a lawn mower tire, classy I know! We debated on which type of lock to replace it with, a cheap keyed lock just like the one that was there or a slightly more expensive one with a keypad. After a little research we decided keyless was the way to go and we settled on this one from Schlage. A long time ago when we had first moved into our house in Ohio, Mr Chiots locked himself out. Since we were going to replace the basement windows he broke one of those to get in.
I’ve actually been locking our front door now that we have this lock, something I rarely did before. You can also set multiple codes, which is nice, especially in cases like this coming weekend when we have a house sitter coming. We programmed a code for her and can easily delete it when we get home. There is an emergency key that you can use if the battery goes dead, but it gives you enough warning to replace the battery when it’s getting low. We’ve only had this for a week but it’s already a Friday favorite!
Have you ever forgotten or lost your keys and had to break into your house?
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Finally Finished
This weekend I finally found the time to finish up my travel patch quilt and it’s FANTASTIC!!!!! If you were reading last year you might remember me talking about it.
I didn’t want the back to be boring, so I chose colors of corduroy from one of my favorite patches. The fabric was cut in 5 inch strips and sewn together to form horizontal striped across the back.
I quilted it using the string that comes off of the feed bags in big winding lines. It seemed fitting to make them look like lines on a map or lines in the road.
Two weekends ago we visited a few Maine lighthouse and purchased a new patch to add to the quilt. It’s pretty exciting to see these patches finally being displayed, we’ve been collecting them for 16 years now. Each of these patches brings back memories of long drives, camping in beautiful places and seeing amazing places around the country. We can’t wait to hitch up our tiny teardrop and hit the road to collect a few more.
Any great recommendations of place to visit in this beautiful country?
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Beautiful Combination
I was sitting by the potager last night and realized all the colors in this space work in perfect harmony. It was a rather fortunate thing since it wasn’t planned. Some of the flowers were planted, many self seeded and came up of their volition in the spot of their choosing.
The colors range from purple to light pink with varying shades of white and chartreuse mixed in. Overall they combine beautifully. This garden is filled with dill, carrots left to bloom, onion blossoms, ‘Limelight’ hydrangeas, various colors of hollyhocks, bee balm, catmint, Italian pink flowering oregano, thyme, purple cabbage, red lettuces bolting to bloom, tarragon and a few other colorful beauties.
It’s a happy accident indeed, I couldn’t have achieved a better combination if I had tried. Sometimes not trying and allowing the garden to do what it wants ends up being the best in the end.
What’s your favorite color combination in the garden?
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Soggy, but Productive
Working from home provides many benefits, one of those being the ability to work during the hours of your choosing. There are times when I have specific deadlines and I must do certain things on specific days, but for the most part I make my own schedule. I have a list of tasks that need done each week and I can pretty much do them whenever I want to during that week. Since I am a gardener, that means I work in the office when it rains and when it is dark outside. There are lots of early mornings and late evenings spent in front of a computer around here. If we don’t have rainy days my office work will pile up sometimes, because I will, on occasion, go a week without doing any work. The rainy days always seem to come just frequently enough. In the last two days we have received five and a half inches of rain – it’s soggy in the garden, but I have been able to catch up on all my work. I have managed to do an entire week of work in two days, two LONG days, but two days nonetheless.
For me, rainy days mean bookkeeping, numbers, invoices, receipts, printing, stuffing envelopes, red pens, checkbooks, e-mails, fundraising, donor relations, organizing events and so much more. They also means writing articles along with editing and organizing photos. Rainy days are never wasted, they are spent madly working as efficiently as I can to maximize my every single minute so I can spend every warm, sunny day working in the garden. I read this article a few month ago about a four day work week and how people are just as productive when they work four days as they are when they work five. This idea rings true for me. If motivated with an extra day to spend in the garden, I can get almost a week of work finished a few rainy day.
Even though I always think about the words of that Karen Carpenter song when it rains, I’m happy to get all caught up on my day job. Rainy days are the days that pay for my sunny days after all, so I can’t be too down on a rainy day. Perhaps if you haven’t been reading here for long you’re not quite certain what my day job is. I manage a charity that my parents started over 40 years ago and I also write articles and sell garden related images to various magazines.
What do rainy days mean to you: rest, housecleaning, working, feeling down?
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More Pets – Well, Sort Of
Last week I received a package from Robin from Robin’s Outdoors. She’s a fellow Maine blogger and writer and was kind enough to send me a few worms from her worm bin. I set them up in a container with shredded paper and some of the bolted lettuce from the garden. The method I’m using came from this post from Cornell.
I’m hoping to have a few worms throughout the winter to feed to the chickens. I’m interested to see how they compare to my meal worm farm, which is producing a nice bounty that the turkey poults are enjoying.
It seems like it should be quite easy – we shall see. I’d like to get a more permanent worm bin set up, but for the moment this plastic tote will do. It will be nice to have the worms converting winter compost into valuable worm casting and extra worms to feed the the chickens. Here in Maine the outdoor compost pile seems to slow way down in winter, this should help m produce more compost all year long.
Have you ever had a worm bin for composting or have you grown any other kind of insect?
