Archive

Adventures in Container Gardening: Quick Update

Published by Annika Barranti on June 17, 2008 in In the Garden. 3 Comments

I am still without my camera cord, but I did finally manage to upload some pictures from last week of my lovely little garden.

Remember the jalapeno flower? This is what it looked like last week:

It is easily two inches long now (it was about half an inch at the time of the photo). Further updates to come soon–there is another pepper now!

I replaced the two sage plants that didn’t survive my toddler with parsley and thyme. (All I need is rosemary and I have a Simon & Garfunkle song growing on my porch!)

What’s growing in your garden this year?

Today’s Homemaker Flickr Pool

Published by Annika Barranti on June 13, 2008 in Site Updates. 2 Comments

Hey, folks! I want to apologize for the lack of content this week. I’ve been hard at work finishing a book proposal and between that and my toddler I have had almost no time for blogging–and I’ve misplaced my camera cord so I can’t cop out by just posting a photo. Next week I hope to introduce a Tip of the Day, with ideas for simplifying and beautifying our homes, which I am very excited about.

I would also like to start drawing from our lovely Flickr pool, so please join the group if you have not already! I will never publish any of the shared photos without permission, but I will certainly look to it for inspiration! And once a week or so I will feature a photo on the site (if you use a creative commons license, I may employ it, and if not I will always ask first).

Today’s Homemaker Flickr Pool

I can’t wait to see what you are doing in your homes.

Reader Call: Delphineums

Published by Annika Barranti on June 9, 2008 in In the Garden and Reader Call. 2 Comments

Reader Yvie is looking for advice on some delphiniums she was given. I am absolutely clueless about flower gardening, so I am opening up the floor.

In her letter she says:


I received a gift from a friend, these are delphiniums (the cherryblossom ones and they’re small compared to the normal delphinium).

I’m wondering how do I start cultivating these kinds of flowers? The weather here is like spring all the time. June is the start of our rainy season. So far it rained yesterday. I have only a few more months before these seeds expire. I have also researched about this but I don’t know how to start. Any idea?

Any readers with suggestions? Tried and true tips preferred, but links to good gardening sites would help too.

Image from the Wikipedia page.

Yesterday’s Homemaker

Published by Annika Barranti on June 6, 2008 in Everything Else. 2 Comments

My husband and I are both a bit obsessed with the old west and frontier times. Yesterday he read this passage aloud to me and I have been thinking about it non-stop since:

Even allowing for nostalgia, women still remembered their first frontier homes with affection and proudly recalled their accomplishments in making them more homelike. Despite the scarcity of materials, women found ways to “make do” with what they had and added little touches to brighten their homes. One girl recalled how her mother made mirrors by “taking an old black shawl and tacking it smoothly over a board” and placing a pane of “some of the presious [sic] window glass” in front of the shawl. Another woman, “longing for a change from the look of the grey sage brush,” set up a small willow branch outside her front door and “used artificial flowers I happened to have to make blooms on the little tree.” Mary Hallock Foote used her husband’s geological survey maps to decorate her cabin, much to the amusement of the other engineers who “thought it peculiarly feminine…to stick up old Sirulian and the Tertiary deposits for the sake of their pretty colors!” Other women made curtains for the windows (often of paper when cloth was unavailable), whitewashed the walls or covered them with muslin, canvas, or newspapers, braided rag carpets for the floors, and stretched clean canvas across the ceilings. As one Oklahoma woman described the homemaking process:

I had 58 yards of new rag carpet and we used that to put up around the walls on the inside of the house to make it more comfortable in the wintertime; we also sewed sheets together & tacked up to the joists as a ceiling for the house…We used dry goods boxes for a cupboard & for a bureau, and used newspapers for window curtains.

Making a new house more “homelike” was only one of the many jobs with which frontier women had to contend. Whether they lived in tents or cabins, temporary shelters, soddies, or dugouts or had fairly comfortable houses, there were still meals to be cooked, the washing to be done, clothes to be made and mended, children to be cared for, and a myriad of other chores which had to be done and done under new and unfamiliar circumstances. Housekeeping on the frontier, like housekeeping on the trail, required a good deal of ingenuity. Just as men struggled to learn new farming techniques and modified existing economic institutions to meet new conditions, women had to devise new domestic techniques to meet the challenges of frontier living. Moreover, they had to do this with few of the basic tools and conveniences to which they were accustomed.

The book is Westering Women and the Frontier Experience 1800-1915 by Sandra L. Myres (link goes to Amazon; if you buy through this link I receive a small percentage, which I will put back into the site).

Adventures in Container Gardening: First Tomato!

Published by Annika Barranti on June 5, 2008 in In the Garden. 3 Comments

Isn’t it beautiful? It’s about the size of my fingertip right now.

Adventures in Container Gardening (Part 1)

Published by Annika Barranti on June 4, 2008 in In the Garden. 3 Comments

I live in a small apartment on the third (and top) floor. We have a rooftop patio with a lovely view of our neighbors’ rooftop patios and, in the distance, the Griffith Park Observatory. On a clear day, we can see the Hollywood sign…if we stand on our tippy-toes. It’s a wonderful porch, and nearly every evening finds us cooking supper on the grill and eating at our rickety table. Most recently, it’s also my garden.

April 21st
My little garden’s humble beginnings, April 21, 2008

When we first moved in we had a glass table top but no table. (How does that happen?) We looked around and bought a half-barrel for $19.99 at Home Depot. It made a good table. Eventually the glass broke, and we discussed various possible futures for the barrel. None of them seemed quite right until this spring, when I was bitten by the tomato bug. My friend Mike’s blog was my downfall, and one Sunday at the Hollywood Farmer’s Market I found myself heading straight to the plant guy.

I bought a Roma, three sage plants, and three jalapeños. Now, I know that once sage starts growing you really only need one plant, and I think the same is true of peppers, but I am cursed with black thumbs. I have killed everything I’ve ever tried to grow in this apartment, and I was nervous. We went to the garden center at a local hardware store (Anawalt) and bought soil, and I set about planting my garden. The jalapeños went into a long planter I picked up somewhere-or-other, and everything else went into the half-barrel. Incidentally, I noticed when I was shopping around for the planter that no one sells real half-barrels anymore; everyone has plastic imitations instead, and often for more than I paid for the real thing!

jalapeno flowers
A blossoming Jalapeño, June 3, 2008

It’s been nearly two months and though two of the sage plants have died, everything else is thriving! (And the dead plants are most likely the result of being uprooted by my toddler, not of anything I did wrong.) I will keep you posted as my garden grows, and welcome any tips you may have.

Meet Annika

Published by Sarah Bray on June 3, 2008 in Site Updates. 3 Comments

Meet Annika (isn’t that a glorious name?). You may remember her for that fabulous diapering post that was featured in the Carnival of Modern Home Dwelling. She is quite fabulous. Quite. I love her sense of humor and original style. She blogs over at Through the Looking Glass where she utterly amazes us all with her crafty, witty self. I asked her to give us a little blurb about herself, and here’s what she sent:

I’m a pioneer girl in the big city. I live in a three room apartment in Los Angeles where I cook, bake, knit, sew, and container garden while raising my toddler son and dreaming of building a ranch in the high desert. I am married to the love of my life who is also my writing partner and the father of my child. When we are not planning the ranch we write screenplays and pulp fiction.

Doesn’t she absolutely rock? And I’ll let you in on a secret. Annika is an incredible visionary, and she has come up with a load of fabulous ideas for Today’s Homemaker. Her passion for all things cool and domestic is a perfect fit for what I originally intended this place to be, and I know you’ll love her. We haven’t made any solid decisions yet, but we will be sure to keep you posted when we do. In the meantime, she’s going to be blogging here, and she has some wonderful plans lined up.

And the first cool thing? She has created a flickr group just for us! (Wait a minute…I don’t know if I was supposed to spill the beans yet. But I just thought you’d be as excited as I am!) So head on over and post and chat and do whatever people do in flickr groups! You see, because I am not quite cool enough to know exactly what goes on in such places. But she totally is.

You’ll be hearing more from Annika in the next couple of days, so be sure to give her a warm welcome! (You see, we’re both southern at heart and we like that sort of thing.)

Don’t go just yet…

Published by Sarah Bray on June 3, 2008 in Site Updates. 0 Comments

There are some discussions in the works about how we can keep Today’s Homemaker from ceasing its online existence. I’ll share more as things develop!

Farewell, and hello

Published by Sarah Bray on June 2, 2008 in Site Updates. 8 Comments

Finding my voice out here in the blog world has been a difficult thing. A really, really difficult thing. I’ve had a lot of success with this blog over the past year, and I’ve both delighted in it and despised it at different times.

Delighted because I get to write, which is truly what I love to do and will be doing forever and ever. Despised because at times, I feel like such a hypocrite. Who am I to write about homemaking when my own time is filled up with so many other things that I enjoy so much more?

When I first started this blog, I did love my home and aspired to share with you my journey from the bottom up. But then I got bitten by the bug that is “the business.” More recently, I’ve been bitten by the homeschooling bug. So my house is not exactly the first thing I think about when I get up in the morning.

I finally realized that my home comes in about number 50 on the “Things I think about when I get up in the morning” list. More importantly, it comes in about the same on the “Things I WANT to think about when I get up in the morning” list. So what do I do?

I’ve been praying about it ever since the day after I posted about the second carnival I was planning (and by the way, the winners should be receiving their prize packages in about two weeks.) For the first time I was struck by the thought, “My home isn’t a meaningful subject for me anymore.” At first, it startled me. I didn’t want to think it at all. And then I realized that it has been in the back of my mind for so long, and I just refused to acknowledge it.

After all, I finally have YOU to write for! What more could I want? It took me a year to build this blog up to what it is now, and it is so incredibly difficult to consider parting from it. I have been getting exciting opportunities thrown my way lately, and I’ve made a handful of very good friends. Every day, more than 500 people stop by just to read what I have to say. I am so honored and floored by all of the support. How could I possibly stop this ride?

But friends, I am. I really really am. I know it may come as a shock, and if you’ve read this far, then I am so grateful that you let me get all of that out without screaming, “Get to the POINT already!”

I KNOW I’ve barely even begun with all of the projects and plans I’ve had. I know there is so much more to be said about the home, so much more inspiration I could draw from and send your way. But I am not the one to say it. Whew. I cannot even believe that I am saying that.

But.

(There is always a “But.”)

I still must write. There is no denying that. So I have been brainstorming what to do. There has always been this tiny voice inside of me that has wanted to write fiction. In fact, I often write about characters and stories in the quiet corner of my bedroom after everyone is asleep. Places, people, and events that I have yet to show to a single soul. And now I’m going to share them with you.

Mary Lee Owens

It is such a scary thing to do — it takes a level of vulnerability that I’m not quite comfortable with yet. But I have recently decided to stop pouring myself into so many different vessels. I need to choose one outlet for my writing, and it needs to be something I can put my heart and soul into. And I think (I hope!) this is it. I hope you’ll come visit Mary Lee Owens, a character who is not much like me, but who I adore nonetheless. And I hope you’ll keep in touch with me. You can now contact me at sarahjbray AT gmail DOT com.

In case you’re wondering, I am not going to be blogging for our web design studio anymore (still designing of course…just not blogging about it.) I am also not going to be blogging on the local restaurant blog that I began. Mary Lee Owens is now the sole beneficiary of my writing attention, and I think it will be that much better for it.

Farewell, and hello!
Sarah Bray

In the Garden: Ten Things I’ve Learned about Vegetable Gardening

Published by Sarah Bray on May 29, 2008 in In the Garden. 7 Comments

  1. Never give your tomatoes a half-hour watering after they’ve been dry as toast for several days. They will crack open and look monstrously ugly. However, they will still taste good.
  2. A weeding hoe is your friend. Your very best friend.
  3. Even a weed-infested garden is better than no garden at all.
  4. Broccoli is a waste of time unless you plant a lot of it. Even then, it’s probably a waste of time.
  5. Putting straw under your yellow squash helps keep your veggies from getting brown spots where they’ve been resting on the ground.
  6. Harvest okra when it’s small. Huge okra may impress your friends, but feels unpleasantly chewy in the mouth.
  7. It is not as easy to give away vegetables as you think. Even people that profess to like them often do not. Or maybe that’s just my friends.
  8. Even people who are terrible at container gardening can have a fabulous outdoor garden. The earth is very forgiving.
  9. For a family of four, you only need one zucchini plant.
  10. For a family of ten, you only need one zucchini plant.