So I’m putting together the blocks for my sunset quilt, sewing them into strips.  As I work I elate.  This section is SO pretty!  I get a sections done and I say “Oh!  This one’s the prettiest yet!”.  <sigh>  I’m addicted to color.

Cordwaining is the art of making shoes.  I am seeking to embrace this art form.  How’s that for pretentious?  <LOL>

I have a bit of a problem with shoes as I wear an impossible size.  Friends say my wide little feet require boxes with laces, and they aren’t far off.  I can’t tell you where I got these ridiculously small feet.  My mother and father both had normal sized feet.  All my brothers and sisters . . . okay, I lie.  My sister has the same size feet, but for some reason I cannot fathom she’s able to wedge her feet into production shoes.  Baffles the heck out of me.  I can’t.  Well, I can, I just can’t walk comfortably when I do!  Ugh!

My 10th Century shoes

So I’m seeking to make shoes for myself.  I’m in the middle of a shoemaking workshop put on by Trackers NW.  It’s a good workshop, though I know I’m driving the instructor mad (I cannot deny my nature).  By the end of this coming weekend I should have a pair of shoes that fit to show for my effort.  Tenth century shoes, but shoes never-the-less.

I sneaked a peek below the gravel and my chives are sprouting.

I’ve been eating lettuce out of the bed for over a week now.  Nummy stuff.  I chop some red and green peppers, some green onions (stuck one in the bed to let it go to seed so I have seeds to sow – I’ll let you know how that turns out), toss in some ripe raspberries and a bit of chopped tomato and splash on a little Lighthouse Blue Cheese vinagrette and I’m in heaven.

I’m working on a new quilt.  You can follow the progress on the Sunset Quilt page (right menu).

I picked up a seed pack of chives last week.

Lorr (most esteemable son) gave me a coco coir planter liner which I sliced and diced to get a 4″x2″ rectangle to use as a chive seed sprouting plate for my growbed.  I soaked the coco coir rectangle in the fish tank for a few minutes, dug a hole in the grow bed until I was looking at damp rocks, placed the coco coir rectangle therein, sprinkled some chive seeds atop it and backfilled with gravel.

I’ll let you know what happens.  Hopefully greeny things will emerge.

click to enlarge

Here’s a better picture of the current growbed growth.

The fill/drain assembly is dead center of the bed totally hidden from this angle by the foliage.

I don’t know what the big leafy thing is.  It was in the mixed lettuce seed pack I got.  LouAnn got some of it as well and says it’s hard on her stomach so I’ll try cooking it.  It might be a chard of some kind or a hardy spinach.  If cooking doesn’t improve its digestibility I’ll yank it and plant something else.

The tomato on the right is a variety of roma.  I have no idea what kind the one on the left is.  It’s got blossoms and is just starting to set fruit.

In the front left corner is a pepper.  It hasn’t got blossoms yet.  Only two of the six I have in soil have a blossom starting, so the race is on.   I planted three or four varieties of pepper, so we’ll see what we get.

The greenery you see in the foreground is the tops of the water iris and corkscrew reed also being fed by the fish.

I had intended to go to a plastics place in Portland (1½ hrs away) to scope out the right backer board for my next vertical garden as soon as my budget would allow but fortuitous events have changed my plans.

Our Guild is having it’s every-other-year fund raiser quilt show, one of those dual purpose things.  It gives our Guild and local area quilters a place to show their work and it raises funds for our Guild.  Our Guild President is making sandwich board signs for directing traffic to the show.

I tell you all this because our Pres’s husband works for the state in the printing department where they press-cut the envelopes out of big sheets of paper using a thick plastic sheet as the punch base.  He brought two of these to use for cutting out sandwhich boards for the quilt show.

Each sheet is used three or four times on each side in the press before it’s pulled to be recycled.  These sheets are about 3′ x 4′ x ½”  and appear to be the PERFECT backing for a vertical garden wall.  I don’t know if they are LDPE or PVC, but I think they are going to be great!  The state will not part with these readily, other than the donation to our Guild, as they get money for them at recycle.  I will have to do more research into this to determine exactly what the sheet is, where I can get them pre-recycle and how much they cost in that condition.  I certainly don’t need new for something that’s covered by felt and periodically flooded with water.

Click to enlarge

I have goldies in my vertical garden wall water!  I will no longer be dumping the bucket when it gets low, though I will continue to add water from Wadly’s fish tank.

Wadly picked these up for me last week.  They’ve been in the wall water about five days and all five fish (one is hiding) are alive and well . . . so far so good!

My tiny growbed has finally kicked off! Things are growing greatly and I have tomatoes!

A couple weeks ago Wad and I moved this bed to his mature tank for four days.  We used the tractor to carry the bed back and forth.  Due to the unique construction only two short 4x4s were required to support it and protect the protrusion on the bottom during the move.

The bacteria it picked up in the four days it resided on Wad’s tank made the difference, I think, to this bed’s kickoff.  His tank is at least 3 years old and has about a dozen fairly large fish and a well developed array of bacteria.  My tank is fairly new and was cleaned out for the move to the new location.

The left roma type tomato plant has tomatoes already!  How cool is that?