Holly is one of my favorite Christmas plants. It’s beautiful in the winter outdoor garden, and it also adds some beautiful red and green color to indoor decorations this time of year. I love holly’s waxy green leaves and beautiful red berries.

Legend says holly helps to ward of bad spirits, that’s where the tradition to add holly to holiday decorations began. Many believed that a sprig or two of holly added to the door, or entryway would help keep evil out of the house. So add a couple sprigs of holly to a wreath, a vase, or a table centerpiece for beautiful red and green holiday cheer (and to keep the dark side away).

Holly berry bushes are easy to grow, and can provide you with several snips of holly this time of year without anyone even noticing there are branches missing. I have my holly planted along the sunny side of the house, and they seem to do fairly well there. If you plant holly it’s a good practice to plant more than one. Holly berry has male and female plants, and only the females produce berries.

So how do you tell the difference between male and female holly? You can only reliably tell the difference in the spring when they’re blooming. A male holly plant produces flowers with yellow stamens in the center. The female holly has flowers with a fat green center. Planting several holly bushes will increase the chances that you have both male and female plants for the beautiful winter berries.

I love my holly berry bush:-)

Image(c) L Gerlach

I took a photo of the hay bales in our pasture this summer and shared it here: Round Hay Bales. Today I have another photo to share, this one was from just a couple weeks ago when they cut the hay down and baled it for the last time this fall. I love the fall colors, and the contrast to the photos last summer.

I took this photo early in the morning, so it’s a little hazy, but they were taking the hay away, so I had to snap quick! Usually they let the bales sit for a couple days, but this time they baled late in the evening, then came and picked them up bright and early the next day!

It’s been a little chilly and rainy here this week, so it put me in the mood for soup! I love this time of year when I can walk out to my garden and pick supper! Well, maybe not this year… My garden hasn’t produced much this year because of the dry weather, so I’ve had to hit the local farmer’s market to make up the difference. One of my favorite early fall meals is garden vegetable soup. I just walk out to the garden, and whatever vegetables I have on hand, I throw them in the soup.

Don’t worry if you don’t have much left in your garden this time of year, use what you have and supplement it with some frozen veggies, or fresh vegetables from a local farmer. This isn’t really a recipe, just a list of suggestions, I don’t measure I just throw them in!

Here’s what mine looked like before I threw in the tomatoes and cabbage.

Garden Vegetable Soup

Ingredients:
(all of these are just suggestions, use what you have)

• Green beans snapped in two
• New Potatoes
• Onions
• Carrots
• Peas
• Lima beans
• Corn
• Cabbage
• Yellow or Zucchini squash
• Fresh tomatoes, blanched peeled and chopped
• Vegetable or beef stock
• Garlic to taste
• Salt and pepper to taste

Chop all the vegetables together in a large stock pot, and simmer until all the vegetables are cooked through. YUM! Extra yummy on  a cool day!

I was a slacker over the holiday weekend, so today I have some fun arts and crafts reading to share with you. Let me tell you these girls are so creative! You’ve got to check out some of the fun ideas they came up with just this week! Check out this teal garden sculpture Cherie made, then click the link below the photo to see how she made it! I want one for my garden!

Teal Garden Sculpture Finished
Cherie shows the finished glass totem she started last week.

Teal Garden Sculpture Finished
Cherie shows the finished glass totem she started last week.

Beading Arts
Cyndi shares the work of some amazing bead embroidery artists!

Creative Dreamer
Check out the adorable little bluebird of happiness! So cute!

Eileen – The Artful Crafter
Check out Eileen’s crafty solution to an accident waiting to happen.

I hope you enjoy checking out all these great reads as much as I did! Have a great week!

An enterprising mother coon decided to move her babies into our barn a couple weeks ago. At first we didn’t know what was wreaking nightly havoc on the dog food and chicken food cans. They chewed the lids to the plastic garbage cans we hold our animal food in, and dumped the whole thing over at least twice. We finally figured out what was causing the problem (but we did already suspect a coon) when our dog treed one of the babies one night. He looks sweet and innocent doesn’t he?

They definitely weren’t! Besides making a mess of the animal food, they also drug around the plants on my front porch, helped themselves to my garden and dug holes everywhere!

Our dog Emily got one of the babies on another night, and it didn’t make it to a tree!  The mother must have decided it was time to move on after that! I haven’t seen any of them, or any signs of them for a couple weeks.

We have a large woods behind our house. Hopefully they’ve gone back there to stay!

We used to bale our own hay, back when we had a couple steers in the pasture to feed it to. We haven’t had any steers for a few years, so our neighbor has been baling the hay for his own animals. He usually does the large round bales, then lets them sit in the field for a couple days. I love the way our field looks when the round hay bales are sitting in it. I’m always sad when he hauls them away.

Here’s what I see from the front of the house looking out the driveway.

Another shot of the front field.

I don’t know why hay bales can fascinate me so much, maybe I’ve just lived too long in the country and I’m easily entertained? Here’s one last shot of the round hay bales in the back field.

At least I’m easy to entertain, right?

We got some baby chicks the first part of June. They were so cute when I opened up the box.  All fuzzy, soft and tiny. We started out with 16 all mixed up breeds.

They came through the mail overnight in the box above. We kept them in a much larger cardboard box on our closed in front porch for the first week or so.

Aren’t they so cute!

We lost one the first couple days we had them, she just wasn’t right and never ate any food. We put the rest out into an old dog kennel we have, and even closed in the top. We still had 3 more of them disappear mysteriously one night, so we had to close up every nook and cranny.

They’re even bigger than the photo above now, and have most of their feathers grown in. I really need to get out there and get another picture soon.

All of the breeds we got were egg layers. I get way too attached to them to eat ‘em.

One of my absolute favorite springtime bloom is the lilac bush outside my bedroom window. I’m partial to the color purple, and I absolutely love lilacs.

It’s starting to look a lot like spring in my little corner of Ohio. The grass is getting greener, things are blooming, and the honeybees are even out gathering up some pollen. It was 80`F here on Sunday and sunny, then of course back down in the 50′s on Monday and raining, but that’s Ohio weather for you!

I’ve been enjoying the sunshine today, and I took the camera along so I have some spring photos to share.

First up here’s our dog Emily soaking up the sun and watching to make sure no cats or other little critters get too close to her territory. She can’t stand to be inside once the temperatures go above freezing, if she’s inside she bugs me until I let her out so she can guard the yard.

This robin didn’t seem to care she was there. He posed, so I snapped his pic.

Then this guy was yelling at me from the top of the tree, so I snapped his pic too. I think it’s a blue jay, but I’m not sure?

The bees were busy in any blooms they could find. It was soothing to hear them buzzing!

The daffodils are blooming! I love daffodil blooms! They make me sooooo happy! Here are a couple of my faves. This white one is beautiful.

And I think these double ones are just crazy fun!

I love this time of year!

All images (c) L Gerlach all rights reserved.

We’ve been working on building some new raised garden beds this fall. It’s an ongoing project, I’m sure we’ll still be working on them in the spring.

The first couple are going to be for perennials, you can see some strawberries peeking out of one above. I also have some asparagus, horseradish, red raspberries (maybe), and rhubarb to be relocated into the beds from other places on our property.

I already have a couple raised beds next to the house for my kitchen herb garden. Since they’ve worked out so well I’ve decided to add more for vegetables and edible perennials.

I’ve been adding compost, a partially composted mixture of cow, pig and horse manure, fall leaves and some top soil someone gave us. I plan to layer in more through the winter.

I’ll be back with progress updates as we go.