If you needed to decorate your house for just two days with some kind of flower theme, how would you do it? If you wanted to involve your children in the project, how could you make it fun?
Here’s some quick ideas:
- Buy some beautiful (but expensive) flowers at the florist.
- Go to the supermarket and buy some OK flowers.
- Do tissue paper flowers (do you use pipe cleaners and twist around the middle and trim the tissue paper?).
- Draw pictures of flowers and plants and hang those up.
- Go pillaging through your garden and find something or another that might possibly last for two days.
Ideas welcome.
The holiday of Shavuot is coming, and it is customary to decorate one’s house with flowers. The origin of the custom may be a tradition of vegetation sprouting up around the mountain of Sinai when the Torah was given, or it may be connected to the agricultural roots of this holiday, which is also called Hag HaKatzir, the holiday of the harvest. Whether you celebrate this holiday or not, I am sure you can come up with at least one idea of how we could floralize our house.
After a busy Sunday (see the parade) and a Monday of work, here’s a simple post.
A snapdragon from my front yard.
Found this article Eating Nuts Greatly Reduces Your Risk of Heart Attack and Cancer so I thought, good time to talk nuts! (more on thyme and nuts under the photo).
According to the article, nuts won’t make you fat:
Nuts contain lots of fat, and many people are still operating under the food industry induced belief that fat makes you fat, so nuts are often shunned. But research does not support this conclusion. In the Nurses’ Health Study, the frequent nut consumers were actually a little thinner on average than those who almost never consumed nuts, and daily supplements of almonds or peanuts for six months resulted in little or no increase in body weight. Nuts apparently satisfy hunger and provide a wealth of nutrients, creating a feeling of satiety and comfort. This results in an overall lessening of food consumption.
I eat raw almonds as a snack throughout the day. I leave them in my refrigerator and just grab a few when I am rushing to get my kids or to an appointment, especially when I’ve forgotten to eat a decent lunch.
One topic the article mentions is soaking nuts before eating them. I’ve never heard of this, so I did a little more research. I couldn’t find any evidence of an actual study that said one needs to soak nuts. To me, I like nuts as a fast food, so the soaking would be really annoying, if it were a requirement. Do you think all the people in the nut studies quoted in the Natural News article soaked their nuts? I found one source that said the soaking isn’t necessary. But I have no idea what her background is that she is able to make this claim.
Enough for now on trying to weed out useful information on the internet.
Above are my raw almonds, which I decided to photograph in a bed of my thyme. I grow thyme in front of the house. It makes a great grass substitute. The thyme spreads itself all over (sometimes it needs a haircut) and produces pretty little lavender flowers for a few weeks in the summer.
Do like salads? Do you like elegant salads? Do you like the idea of being able to go to your backyard (or a container for plants, if you don’t have a backyard) and pick a pretty flower and round, green, tangy leaves to put in your salad?
In order to present to you nasturtium, the flower pictured in this watercolor, I wanted to show you a picture of this edible plant. Instead of showing a photograph, I decided to do a watercolor. When you paint, unlike in a photograph, you can choose what you want to present. So I decided to emphasize the flowers (which will become pretty petals of orange, yellow or red in your salad) and the round-shaped leaves.
The nasturtium seed looks like a shriveled chickpea. It grows easily: all you need to do is poke it with your finger into the ground. Don’t plant nasturtium where you have precious grass; the nasturtium plant will take over, and come frost time you’ll have a bare spot where you used to have grass. But I find it fairly easy to grow. The first summer I tried there was a drought in New Jersey, and these plants did not do well. But recently we’ve had a lot of rain, and my little germinated nasturtium plants are already sticking two round little leaves out of the ground.
More about nasturtium here.
The ground hog ate away at my peas. They were beginning to form, the little pea pods, and the big, bad ground hog chomped on them. I sprinkled the leaves with hot sauce, in the hopes that he won’t like it. My neighbor down the block has a ground hog trap; I think the idea is you capture the ground hog, and then you have to drive somewhere to the woods so then he (or she) can come scurrying back to your garden? What joy. Like I have nothing better to do.
I actually saw him in my backyard, and if I hadn’t been in a rush yesterday, I might have been able to capture him on my camera. But I don’t want to post villains on my blog, anyway. Instead, here’s a photo of a tulip that did not get eaten by a deer:
Why is it I call the ground hog a villain, and I have sympathy for the deer? Is it just because deer are prettier animals?
Here are the flowers on my neighbor’s dogwood tree.
Here’s the whole dogwood tree.
I learned from Gail that the cherry trees bloom first, and then the dogwoods show their flowers.
See my dogwood painting.
Name the only country in the world that has more trees in 2008 than in 2007. To find the answer, go here.
My daughter and I went for a walk on a lovely spring day this week. This is what we found:
Can anyone identify this tree?
It has to be a fruit tree, because on the tree we found this:
This is the bracha for a fruit tree. So my daughter and I said the bracha (blessing):
Transliteration: Boruch A-toh Ado-noi E-lo-hei-nu Me-lech Ho-olom She-lo Chi-seir Be-o-lo-mo Ke-lum U-va-rah Vo Be-ri-yos To-vos Ve-i-lo-nos To-vos Le-ha-nos ba-hem Be-nei A-dam.
Translation: Blessed are You, L-rd our G-d, King of the universe, Who has made nothing lacking in His world and created in it goodly creatures and goodly trees to give mankind pleasure. (This transliteration and translation is the Chabad version.)
and we went on our merry way.
If you are in Highland Park/Edison area, this tree is located on North 8th in Edison, near the Shabbos park.
It is relaxing to start one’s day with a garden photo. In front are grape hyacinth, a bulb that one plants in the fall. Directly behind are dianthus plants, perennials that will soon bloom. Toward the back is a promising beginning of a black-eyed susan (Rudbeckia), a perennial native to New Jersey that may show its yellow flowers in August. The background is creeping phlox.
Who ate my tulips? Was it you? Or you?
Here are my tulips one week ago:
And here are the unhappy remnants today:
Most probably it was a deer. The deer live a few blocks away. Families that live close to RPRY on the Edison/Highland Park border report having a difficult time growing tulips. The deer gobble them up. In the past few years, gardeners in my neighborhood have also had to contend with the deer liking the taste of tulips. My neighbor down the block already knows of two ground hogs, but they nibble the ground plants. Like broccoli and canteloupe. Almost impossible to grow those here unless you grow them in a cage.
