Friday Favorite: Old Photos
Whenever I find an envelope that contains a few photos I scan them, put them in my photo organization software and throw away the actual photo. In the software I use I tag everything well and organize it into folders. That way I know exactly where everything is. It’s fun to come across a few oldies like these:
My indoor soccer team when I was in college.
I mentioned last week that I’ve been trying to minimize, minimize, minimize. You have to stay on top of these things so they don’t get away from you. At least nowadays most photos are taken digitally so they don’t clutter up your living space. It’s nice to digitize all these images, they’re much easier to find when categorized and tags. I find myself looking through them more often now that they’re on my computer!
Do you have a lot of old photos laying around?
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In My Library: the Edible Garden Edition
I realized that I haven’t featured books from my library recently. This time around, I settled on part of my edible gardening shelf.
We’ll start off with the newest addition to my shelf The Complete Kitchen Garden. This book is fantastic if you are wanting to set up a traditional pottage. It’s filled with layouts and ideas for including a small potager in your landscape.
In the French Kitchen Garden: The Joys of Cultivating a Potager is a sweet little book filled with beautiful watercolors of vegetables and garden layouts. I love watercolor art, so this book is a joy to look through.
Gardens of Plenty: The Art of the Potager Garden is a fantastic book for those of us that love to look at photos of grand edible gardens. Even though the gardens in this book are mostly large and very involved, there are lots of ideas that can be incorporated into the small home garden. This book is one of my favorites to flip through on a cold winter evening.
Next up is The Art of French Vegetable Gardening, an older book. Even though the photos are older and not as artistic as we’re used to with newer books, there are still lots of beautiful things to see inside.
My all time favorite edible gardening book is Creative Vegetable Gardening. This is the one book I would keep if I could only have one book on my shelf in the edible gardening section. If you want your edible garden to be pretty this is the book for you. This book is filled with loads of creative ideas, from the more classic to the more laid back garden styles. There’s definitely something for everyone in this book!
Classic cottage gardens are among the things I love, especially those that include vegetables, herbs and fruit. Naturally, I LOVE The Cottage Garden. This book made it’s way into my library many years ago, in fact it was one of the first books I purchased when I fell in love with edible gardening. There’s something captivating about traditional cottage gardens. This book is filled with beautiful imaged and wonderful ideas on how to make your garden like the stunning cottage gardens of England. I love pulling this book out on cold winter evenings and dreaming of my future cottage garden!
Do you have a favorite edible gardening book?
The Series:
In My Library – part 1
In My Library – part 2
In My Library – Part 3
In My Library – Birding Books
If you do want to purchase any of these books or anything else from Amazon, use my Amazon Link, I’ll earn a few pennies to help pay for my now outrageous hosting bill for this blog!
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The Daily Walk
Lately, I’ve been taking The Brown Chiots on a morning walk. We head down the driveway and then we come back up again, nothing too exciting, but it gives us a cleared place to walk. We have a longer driveway, around 1/3 of a mile in length. It’s downhill all the way down and uphill all the way back. This is the perfect walk for Lucy, especially the uphill part. It helps keep her old joints a little less stiff.
When we’re proactive about taking her on a short walk every day she definitely gets around much better. Not to mention, she simply loves to be out and about. I also must say, it’s good for me as well! Having her around makes me get out and walk, I probably wouldn’t be doing this in the morning if it weren’t for her. It’s nice to breathe the crisp morning air, look for animals tracks through the woods and to watch the birds about their work. I’d get physical exercise even if it wasn’t for this walk, but this walk is good for more than just my body!
Do you have a daily activity that’s physical to help keep you active?
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The First Indoor Project
Well, we have finally started working a little on the interior of this place. Eventually the entire thing will be redone, but for now we at least want to paint and redo a few things to make it easier to clean. It’s not as simple as just throwing a coat of paint on the walls. There’s also a debate going on about whether we just want to paint the floors as well, they’re currently painted subfloor or if we want to put down flooring while we’re at it.
There is electric baseboard heat that needs removed, new floor moulding to put in, along with sanding the ceilings & walls because the previous paint job was less than stellar and there are lots of roller nap marks. All the moulding needs a good sanding as well, it wasn’t sanded after the finish was applied so the grain of the wood makes dusting/cleaning impossible. All of this is why we’ve been putting it off, we needed time when we could dedicate a good amount of time to this project, and this is only the beginning…
Do you have any home improvement projects in progress?
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Cultivate Simple 62: Guilty Pleasures
Finding a balance can be tough nowadays, we’re constantly bombarded with information and advertising a lot of which is not true.
Also, people are very polarized. You have to be 100% in or out about absolutely everything. You can always find a blog, website, podcast, or person that will reinforce your position. Identifying with one ‘thing’ can also be dangerous because it can become an obsession.
Our society is also flash in the pan, things change rapidly so there’s always something new and exciting to do/see/buy.
Today we talk about having a balance in your life and come of the things we do that don’t necessarily fit into the ideal of ‘simple living’.
Brian’s Geeky Corner
Use shortcut keys for performing various tasks within programs to save time. You can also use a program to assign shortcut keys for common tasks.
Books of the Week
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:30:09 — 62.6MB)
