Thursday, May 30, 2013

A Quilted Garden?

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I missed WiP Wednesday because I have been busy outdoors getting my garden ready.  Here are some spring-time photos of my "Secret Garden", the back-drop you may recognize as the setting for my quilting patterns!



 Several years ago, as I was pregnant with my third child and struggling to keep up with life, I was blessed to find a BYU-TV education program on Mel Bartholomew's "Square Foot Gardening" technique.  As I watched the program, Mel said, "Square-foot gardening is like a patchwork quilt of plants."  (Or something to that effect.)  That's all it took for me to be hooked, my poor husband to roll his eyes and give in to yet another, uh "quilting?" project!  My poor husband and I built the boxes from leftover lumber from our basement construction projects, trellises and planted it all before my son's May birth.  It grew like a miracle with very few weeds, and so in my seventh (I can hardly believe it!) year...here's some photos I would like to share.

According to the SFG technique, you should plant one 4 foot by 4 foot box per person in your household, so here's some photos of my planting from last Saturday.  I didn't get the entire garden in one photo as the fence is in the way and the plants are too tiny.  Yes, those tiny things are tomatoes and bell peppers.  Nothing else has sprouted yet--this photo planting total time is 24 hours!






In addition, I experimented this year with "shocking" my Washington Navel Orange tree and my Tangerine tree. Yes, they don't grow in northern Utah so I move them indoors as house plants. Because they're indoors, they don't experience enough chilling hours to produce fruit so this April I took them outside (cold hardiness to 40 Fahrenheit). I thought I almost killed them, but the trick worked. They're now leafing out new growth with beautiful white blossoms budding on them. When they really bloom, I'll add another picture.





I've also trellised my grape vines and pruned and thinned my peach tree. Hopefully my two peach trees produce like they did last year (so far...so good).









2012's Garnet Beauty Peach Tree's Crop:


Yes, I did finish a customer's quilt, and here are some photos. If you look closely you can read the words "Monkey See, Monkey Do" on the vines.



BTW, enter to win a free charm pack in my give-away page! Click here to get more details:
http://moderntraditionquilts.blogspot.com/2013/04/a-customers-quilt-to-share.html

Until later, happy quilting!