Father's Day garden rock

Gifts for the grandpa's are always tough for me.  Men in general are always harder to buy/make for, and it seems most grandpa's are at the point in their lives where they have everything they need/want and a lot of what we could give them are just going add to the clutter.  So I try to think of things that are thoughtful and useful.

Pete's dad (and mom) loves to spend time in the yard, so we decided to make a rock that could be put in the garden.  We collected rocks to spell out "PAPA ROCKS" (our kids call him Papa John).  Kind of cheesy, I know.  In hind sight I may have just had the kids make a cool design with the rocks.  Oh well.

I used concrete mix (only costs a few bucks) and used a flat rate shipping box as my mold (because we'll be shipping it... talk about getting your money's worth, this thing is heavy!)  I simply put the box together, sprayed it with cooking spray, then poured in the mix.  Then I wrote the letters with a stick and had the kids place all the little rocks.

Once it dried, I painted over the rocks with mod podge a couple times to make them stand out a little more.  And that's it!  I'm crossing my fingers that it can get to him without cracking :)

From wheat to grass

The first day of Spring is quickly approaching.  Normally I would be more excited, but winter here seems to be dragging on and on.  No real "spring" is on the horizon.  Temperatures here are in the 30's and below all week, but we're surviving.  We're planning on more sewing, crafts, and lazy afternoons!

At the beginning of March we started our wheat grass in hopes that it would be ready to go for Easter.  9 days later, the blades were more than a couple inches long!  

We used Delia's method for soil-less wheat grass.  It was a bit high maintenance the first few days, having to rinse the wheat a few times a day.  But fun to watch.  This is the wheat on day 5, just after it came out of the jars.

And by day 8, here's what we had!  Beautiful long blades of green grass.

The roots of the grass had grown right into the paper towels, so all I had to do was cut the rugs of grass into circles and place them in our pots.  I found these pots at Ikea for $1 each, then filled them each half way with rocks.



You can still see the wheat berries down by the roots.



I thought the grass would look good under our Easter egg garland.  We come up with a new method to decorate eggs every year then string them all together for display.  I'm still trying to decide what to do this year...

So now I have something beautiful and green to look at when I look out the window!  Although we won't see the real stuff for some time now.  Until then, this will have to do.

And I just found out that my pictures that I linked from Flickr are not working with Pinterest.  Grrrr.  So I'm going to try to load them right onto blogger and hope that that works.  Sorry for the inconvenience!

**Update: Unfortunately, about a week after we had this beautiful green grass, it all died from mold.  And I'm not quite sure how we could have avoided it.  So no green grass for Easter.  Although the process of growing the grass from wheat was fun to watch, next year we might just go with plain old grass seeds planted in soil.

Our humble harvest

Last Fall we saved a lot of seeds from our pumpkins and squash in hopes to use them in the spring.  Not wanting large plants to overtake our small garden, we decided to plant them in some flower beds in the backyard.  I don't think they got enough sun (or maybe we neglected them a little bit), so this was all that became of them.  But I'll be honest, I was excited to see anything growing at all.  They may be too small to eat, but at least they can give me something nice to look at while I wash the dishes.