Evolution of a Country Burn

Bill and I both get spiritually rejuvenated when we sit together, drink in hand, in front of a roaring fire.  It's why we built an outdoor kitchen and fireplace at our last home.  We spent hours out there, enjoying the fresh air, the smell of burning wood... and the simple peace of being home together.  When you both have careers that take you far away for days at a time, these moments are precious.  When we moved down to the farmhouse we figured it would take a while to find that spot again. 

We started with the practical - a burn barrel, where we burned the branches that were forever falling down on our property, or trees that we were cutting and needed to dispose of.  We had the barrel too far away from the house, so Bill found a spot that made sense behind the house - in the center of a circle of trees.  Near the burn barrel he placed a few chairs to sit in while we were waiting for the trash to burn down enough to feed the fire.

As you know from the previous blog, we ended up tossing the barrel, and making a fire pit.  We found stones from around the property to encircle the fire.  Then Bill decided we should put all the chairs around the pit to make a great spot for social distancing gathering.  One night, he decided that he needed to hang lights around the circle so our area could have mood lighting.  It looks like a little fairy grove and makes my heart happy every time I see it lit up.

One night he mentioned that we should get stones, place another circle around the chairs and put gravel in the secondary circle so we wouldn't have to remove the chairs when our gardener came.  I told the story of moving those 77 stones in the last blog...  We ordered weed blocker and the egg rock last week - it was delivered today.  Two cubic yards.  At 2 pm and 83'.  I told Bill that my kids will love the fire pit because we were gonna die moving all that stone in this humid heat.

We spent three hours, but we did it.  This project is done.  So are our backs... but we're excited how it turned out.  The next two projects are inside.  Thank God for air conditioning in Georgia... but we'll be back out here later to enjoy the fruit of our labors...  MoonCrest is open for visitors around the fire... just holla out y'all!  The more the merrier any day. 

It's All Fun and Games Until a Tick Bites Your Ass and Other Gardening Stories

Corona time this week has meant a lot of work in the garden for both Bill and I.  One project is seasonal - our mulberry trees and our blackberry patch are in full bloom and producing faster than I can harvest.  So far I've picked:

*  18 cups of mulberries.  We've made a pie, muffins, scones and 4 jars of jam.

*  18 cups of blackberries.  We've made two pies, 8 jars of jam and maybe ate another cup as we've been picking.

To put the amount that I've picked and we've used into perspective... 3-4 cups of berries is a pound...  So I've harvested approximately 9 pounds of berries this week.  The mulberries are still raining down from the trees and the blackberry patch is filled with red berries starting to ripen.  I'm about to start freezing berries to use when summer cravings hit.  It's truly a bumper crop this year, and I'm totally grateful that I bit the bullet and bought my Pampered Chef Deluxe Cooking Blender.  That thing is a rock star!  I drop berries, water, pectin and sugar in it and 30 minutes later I've got jam.  I've always fought making jam because I remembered the time and labor intensive process it was for my mother.  This makes it a BREEZE!!!  I even made orange marmalade and applesauce this week in that baby!  If this makes you think "I totally need to look into that", hit me up... I started selling Pampered Chef a month ago as a side gig until I can start flying again.

One of the funny things about Corona life is I'm not showering as much... don't judge... y'all know you're in your pajamas as much as I am.  Yesterday I spent most of my time shaking the mulberry trees to get the fruit and making jam...  today, after I worked in our vegetable garden, I decided it was time to shower.  As I was showering, I looked down at my feet and there was a full mulberry just sitting there...  I'm not sure if it landed on me as I walked through the garden today or if I actually... SLEPT with it in my hair last night...  I know I should show some amount of shame here but I just cant bring myself to do anything other than laugh at that.

I mentioned the vegetable garden... it's coming along beautifully.  The tomatoes are getting big enough that they needed to be staked.  I had Bill cut us 50 stakes out of leftover scrap from our old hardwood floors.  Each of the stakes in the garden are pieces of original hardwood that broke as he pulled them up.  They couldn't be reused but he put them to the side to somehow be recycled at a future date... and ta da!!!

Cherie and I have learned a wee bit about gardening from our Master Gardener class two years ago, and from working in the charity garden in Fayetteville.  She recently even learned a trick on how to do the twine without bending over.... attaching the twine box to your belt, working the twine through a piece of pvc pipe and then making the pvc pipe do all the lower work.  It went by quickly.  When we were done with the twine we laid down hay mulch that our fabulous neighbor, Tiny, dropped off a couple of days ago.  It actually LOOKS like we know what we're doing... and LOOKS like a vegetable garden.  We're pretty excited about our progress.

Speaking of progress, we've been working on our fire pit area.  A place where we can hang with friends and family... or just the two of us, and enjoy the outdoors like we're camping but have a big bed to go sleep in.  A couple weeks ago we upgraded from a burn barrel to an actual pit... it was a big stretch... we removed the barrel and started burning on the ground...  I grabbed a few stones from around the property and Bill finished the pit's circle.  He then grabbed all of our outdoor chairs and put them around the pit.  A few days later he strung white fairy lights in the trees around that circle.  The one thing he complained about was having to move the chairs when our lawn guy came, so that he could mow the area.  We talked about getting more stone, putting another circle around the chairs and filling the area with pea gravel.  I put it in my mental to-do list and figured it would take a minute to feel financially secure enough to put money into an outdoor space.  Then Bill went away for two days.  One of those days I was outside and I looked at this... planter?  old fountain?... something that was a big square of stacked stone filled with dirt right behind our house.  I stared at that stone and had an epiphany.  This area has to be demolished when we start our addition... here was the stones we needed to do the outer circle... all that it would take would be a sledge hammer, and a chisel to remove the cement from the stones... if it's free it's for me...  

Bill came back and I pointed out the brilliance of my discovery and waxed poetic on the beauty of the plan.  He put it on his "Heather's list of 1000 things to do yesterday"... and walked away.  I went into his shed and grabbed a crowbar.... when he saw what I was doing he handed me a sledgehammer and a mallet of sorts...  and I went to town.  By mid day I knew why he'd walked away and let me do this.  It's not sooooo easy to deconstruct stacked stone.  I did it.  Nearly killed myself with my stubbornness, but I banged those stones out, chipped off that cement, shoved them in the wheelbarrow and plunked them down around the chairs.  Ladies and gentlemen how many stones do you think I needed to do that project???  Seventy freaking seven.  With my dying breath I counted those bloody tons of torture.  When the last stone was placed I marched my middle aged butt into the house, tossed off my clothes and crawled into the claw-foot tub with a Grapefruit White Claw...  I might have been crying "mommy"...  This project still has a chance to kill me though... as my weed block fabric comes Thursday and I'm scheduling 60 cubic feet of pea gravel to arrive the same day...  Pray for me y'all....

Pray for my hub while you're at it...  While I was whining about moving a gazillion tons of stone, he was in the back spraying the kudzu. It's coming back... we're on year 3 of fighting this battle.  It's an insidious plant that will kill everything in it's path if you let it be.  We can see grass now where it used to be in our back 'cut'... it'll take a couple more years of spraying before we can see it gone for good.   Anyway, spraying a poison seems to be relatively easy right?  Unless you're on top of a slope and you make a misstep... and you find yourself on your knees mid slope staring at the rear end of a copperhead.  Bill ran like a 10 year old, went to grab a shovel to kill it but it disappeared... Don't know who was more scared.  Bill went back to spraying 30 minutes later and saw a scurrying by his feet... he thought 'here we go again'... and then realized he was staring at a lizard.  He came over to me and asked what lizard has a pink head???  Funny enough we found that answer out later that day when someone posted this picture in Facebook asking what it was....  Apparently skink males heads turn pinkish orange during mating season.  Good to know lol.

This morning I woke up, went to use the restroom - this isn't too much information, y'all know it's the ONLY thing that gets you out of bed on a lazy morning...  anyway, when I was done, I stood up and stretched and scratched my ass... yes... y'all do that too... don't lie... and when I scratched I felt a bug bite...  but it felt like there was a scab... and I thought "Lord please no"... I can't see my ass... I went into the other bathroom to find my big magnifying mirror... I still couldn't quite turn around enough to see so I walked dejectedly into the bedroom with my underwear half down, walked up to Bill and asked "Do I have a tick on my ass".  

I am here to tell you, it's not really what any woman wants to have to ask a man.... and I'm pretty sure most men don't want to have to answer that question... but my hub looks from across the bed and replies calmly... "It looks like you've been bitten by something"....

"I feel something there.  I think there's a tick."  Next thing I know, I'm hanging over my claw-foot tub with my ass is in the air.  My hub has put his headlight on his head to see better.  He's verified that there is indeed a seed tick hanging onto my ass.  He gently takes it off with tweezers then says in his deep southern drawl "make sure you put peroxide on that baby..."

So yes... ladies and gentlemen... the moral of this whole blog is working in the garden is all fun and games until a tick bites your ass.

Put Down That Paint Brush

Let me start this blog by saying, we are not all going to agree on the end result... but I think we can all agree that the chairs I had were a mess.  A catastrophe of another DIYer.  I can't believe a woman would let her husband paint these chairs puke boring beige.  So for my soul to not be deeply wounded, I'm going to have to believe it was one of two things... 1)  a man that had spare beige paint and wanted to update his chairs at no cost... or 2)  this horrid color was a primer and the couple meant to put a color on it but never did.  I truly have to believe that it's one of those two things, because otherwise I have to question humanity. 

When I purchased the chairs in an estate sale they had a 'matching' hideous beige table.  I love vintage 50's metal lawn chairs.  I can't pass up these when I'm junking.  Especially when they're rusty or had a previous owner that was color blind.  I've had these for a year or two now.  Waited for the time and color to come to me.  Last week I tackled the table.  Sanded it then painted it Robin's Egg blue.  Came out adorable!  You'd think I'd go to the chairs and immediately make them the same color right?  Nope.  I'm not the matchy matchy furniture person.  Plus this furniture is all over my property.  So I waited until I was inspired.

Last night after everyone left, I stared at those chairs and decided today was the day I'd get them done.  I went into Bill's paint cabinet and chose the color they'd become.  Fire Orange... deep red with a orange tint.  They'd pop in the garden.  This morning I grabbed the sander, the paint and got down to business.  As the beige chipped off, I started to see remnants of the color's they'd been in their lives and the chippy aged look started to grow on me. 

For the record, I've never managed to allow myself to paint one of these chairs.  I don't know why I thought I'd be able to do it today.  I went from "They're all going to be Fire Orange", to "maybe I'll just paint the seats" to "Bill!!!!  What do you think?"

"You're gonna need some matte enamel sealer... at least two cans..."

He get's me.  Somehow that chippy aged look just pulls at my heartstrings every time.  I like to SEE the history.  Covering it is a shame.  Add to that, we've moved to the country... to an old home we're renovating.  Some stuff, that is age appropriate, just shouldn't look TOO new.  I just love how they came out.  I know, there's gonna be a few of you reading this that wish I'd just sprayed the Robin's Egg Blue... or the Fire Orange... and I understand you... these though, are going back to the fire circle and I'll smile every time I look at them.

Some Things Just Need to Be Blogged

Somewhere around three years ago Bill and I bought an antique portrait at an estate sale.  We loved the oval tiger maple frame with convex glass.  It's hard to find a frame like this with the original glass still intact.  The portrait was torn at the top but it was the frame we were sure someone would want.  It went into our booth and was still in our booth when we closed it.  I hung onto the picture for the last two years.  I couldn't bring myself to Goodwill it.  I've been staring at it trying to figure out what to do.  Last week I decided I'd try to sell it on Facebook Marketplace.  There were no nibbles.  I kept looking at the frame thinking it was a darn shame to get rid of it.  Yesterday I removed the listing on Facebook.  I'd decided we'd use it ourselves.

We have no wedding pictures of us in our house.  I've been meaning to frame one, I just didn't have the time or the right frame.  Funny how quarantine cleaning works... You have time and you find the right frame.  I grabbed a picture, added a warm sepia tone to it and then ordered a 16x20 poster from Walgreens for next day pick up.  The picture was ready in an hour so I grabbed it last night.  End of story right?  Nope.

While I knew Bill wouldn't be able to do the project last night I wanted to see how the picture would work in the frame.  So I took out the original portrait to have a look see.  That's when I found the writing on the back.  I now knew the woman I was looking at.  I couldn't just toss this piece of history that one of her family members had sold.  I needed to record it.  I've been big into genealogy the last couple of years.  I know how amazing it is to find an ancestor that has a portrait that another distant relative has uploaded into the internet.  So for her kin, I sat down and looked for her.

Sallie Boyd was born June 11, 1868, in Upson, Georgia.  She married William Oscar Kelly on November 5, 1888.  She had nine children - John (1889), James (1891), Emmet (1894), Mozell Coulter (1897), Bessie (1898), Jeanette Pate (1901), Robert (1903), Connie Goff (1907) and Hattie Marlow (1908).  Hattie, the youngest, lived until May 21, 1992.  I can only assume that whoever wrote this information on the back of the picture wanted to insure the family would know who the portrait was of, since the last living child of Sallie's had just died two days before (inscription is May 23, 1992).  With research completed, I uploaded a photo of the portrait into her files.  Hopefully a family member will find it in the future and be glad to have access.

In the meantime, Bill's project is done.  I just have to hang it tonight.  I'm glad I kept the frame.  The whole piece is simply beautiful.  Sallie, your photo is out there in perpetuity for your ancestors to find, and your frame will be lovingly hung in our home for years to come.