gardening gnome newbie spring summer series returns rita slanina
house and home, How To, humor, self-help

Gnome Gardening Newbie Returns

The gnome gardening newbie returns to the scene of the garden for yet another go! THE GARDENING GNOME NEWBIE DITL DECLUTTER REFRESH

GARDENING GNOME NEWBIE DITL DECLUTTER REFRESH

We’re back for another season of the SPRING SUMMER SERIES FOR 2022! Okay, I’m not a gnome, but I sure as heck feel like one as I roll around in the soil, plucking, planting, kicking up my heels in the dirt! It’s declutter, refresh time and It’s my second year to plan the dirt kicking, plant the seeds and somehow I don’t feel like I’m getting much better at this squash sitting thing. I digress. Let’s DITL!

BRUNO

Bruno the puppy has more gnome-like qualities though as he goobers mischief as soon as my back is turned! So, with high humidity, soon-to-be lazy days ahead this fine Summer, and loads of videos and television watching in my future, I thought it was time to hit ya with the first installment of how my garden started this year, how I prepped and planned it!  So… let’s…..

GET SEEDS & GET GROWING!

A FEW LESSONS LEARNED IN R2

Ah… the monsoons are back, and the garden is a’growin’!

  • ITS NEVER TOO LATE! If you haven’t gotten your seeds for your garden and aren’t getting it growing; you are NOT missing out! But, don’t continue to sleep on it, y’all! There is still plenty of time to get outside and throw down some seeds! I was binging some vids the past couple days on what seeds to put out in your garden in July for you slackers that will produce a harvest that you can still rave about to your friends as though your a gardening savant!

CORN, RADISHES, BEETS, BEANS, CAULIFLOWER, SQUASH

  • FIND YOUR ZONE! I find it’s best to check the farmer’s almanac to find out what ZONE you are in first to make sure but the veggies mentioned above should fare well regardless. I’m in zone 8a, which means, I get humid heat & snow in the winter. But I also average a 200 day growing season… what luck!! Woo! However, what works in fall/winter does NOT necessarily work in spring/summer. But it’s fun to just try and see how it goes. That’s literally half the fun of gardening.
  • DON’T TAKE GARDENING TOO SERIOUSLY! It WILL drive you nuts. Just enjoy the journey. For real. Some plants will make it and some won’t. That was probably my biggest hurdle last year. I was so frustrated but this year, I realized, it’s a learning process and until you toss down the seeds and see what happens… just for the fun of seeing what happens… that’s when you will get it.
  • BUY SEEDS FROM YOUR LOCAL FARMGIRL, HOMESTEADER, FARMER’S MARKET. Another lesson I learned from last year is that all the seeds bought commercially are pretty much one size fits all. They come from the same place, no matter where you have bought them. While – in theory – this sounds fantastic, it’s not always practical in application. Sure, you’ll harvest something but when I started buying from the farm girl in my town who literally has been doing this her whole life, my gardening took off! For roses, I did buy from Jacksons & Perkins, and they have fared quite well. My grapevines from Gurney’s, were a 50/50, one made it/one didn’t. I purchased some seeds from Lowe’s online and some are doing great and others were buttkiss.

The upswing in homesteading, growing one’s own food, or learning how to just rock a great herb container in the windowsill has skyrocketed in all our homes. A lot of peeps are now thinking – Holy Poo! – what if this no-grocery store thing – goes down again? How will we eat? An economic collapse bc of a tyrannical government is feeling less conspiracy and more probable these days! How do we handle it if something this cray cray goes down?

*uh oh.. impending tangent ahead?

No lol ..but my interest in this topic is deep.

Circling back… *wink

oh thank goodness.

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PLAN. PLANT. DECLUTTER. REFRESH.

broccoli leaves gardening rita slanina GARDENING GNOME NEWBIE DITL DECLUTTER REFRESH
Broccoli leaves are just as tasty & useful as the florets themselves!

This is my second year gardening and believe me, when I say, I used to believe I could keep a plant alive to save my life  and now I am harvesting my own greens for salads everyday… it’s awesome to know that anyone can learn to do this! ANYONE!

So… show us!

Geesh , so impatient. Check out the fun on my DITL on how I got organized this year, what I planted and my blunders! THE GARDENING GNOME NEWBIE DITL DECLUTTER REFRESH! Hopefully this full 20 minute video on Rumble will inspire you but if you’re short on time cruise down to the shortened version!

FULL 20 MINUTE VIDEO ON RUMBLE BELOW

OR CHECK OUT SHORT VIDEO ON YOUTUBE HERE:

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arts and crafts, house and home, How To, humor, self-help, Writing Stuff

People, Plots & Planners

Without organization…

I. AM. LOST.

I truly admire those who can wander around through life without plans, schedules, organizers, alerts, banners, and alarms to get them through the day. Now don’t get me wrong. My Sundays are pretty unplanned.

FiveStar
click image to shop

However; I must confess, I’ve LITERALLY scheduled burrito Sundays, movie binging, and couch potato-ing into my google calendar. For Sundays.

So… you’re still scheduled.

Uhmmm…. yeah. Ya got me.

giphy-1.gif

It’s possible I do have a problem. You do. Because yes, that may still be in the realm of being scheduled. I guess. *shrugs and shuffles feet against the floor

BAM! BUSTED!

Right. Anyway, moving on to my currently “scheduled” post…

LET’S GET THE BOOKS (AND OUR LIVES) ORGANIZED!

Have you heard of bullet journaling? It’s an overview of your month, followed by a tracker for your daily tasks you want done, followed by a list of other things you may want to do; but may or may not have time to get to. Which, you can push to the next month God-willing. This may sound complicated. But I promise it’s not.

I’ve come up with a simplistic version that has proven to work well for me. I don’t spend too much time creating the BUJO (short acronym thats super cute for bullet journal!), I keep it’s design simple, page count to a few pages (never more than FOUR), and I color code each task and check mark for easy eye-catching satisfaction!

200.gifSo, grab your markers, crayons, and stickers!

Mine are all items I already have on-hand. I don’t buy anything new except maybe the stickers. Which, if you know my obsession with Dollar Tree, you’ll completely understand… I find all my cute stickers and die-cut designs from, YEP. You guessed it!

DOLLAR TREE!

*insert bells and whistles here. **with streamers, sound makers and celebratory cheers

If I can get it at Dollar Tree, I do. She totally does.

I do not feel the need to hit the stationary store or the big box retailers of

click image to shop now

office confectionary to over spend. NO THANKS. Additionally, with the over saturation of “how much can we buy” instead of saving what we have and using a limited financially ambitious creative resource to accomplish the same thing someone else wasted their money on…. Why would you want to over pay?!

Seriously. Anyone?

Of course not!

So, here we go! Let’s plan. Let’s get organized. Let’s save moula. Let’s BUJO.

I hope you enjoyed the tutorial on planning your own bullet journal to plot your month.

Speaking of plotting. I’ve barely mentioned it. But, I imagine that with

need a journal to start your bujo? click image to shop!

planning comes plotting and therefore; plotting is planning…? Or planning is a plot?

What the hell are you saying?

Who knows.

And so, the plot thickens.

healthy and beauty, house and home, humor, self-help, Uncategorized

Special Delivery! Or not…

What is it with two-day Prime delivery now available, that when we actually do have to wait a bit longer for something we are impatiently throwing stones at our mailboxes.

You don’t do that? Hm-mm… Just me then.

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I’m always about keeping money in my pocket as opposed to spending it. I have not always been that way; but as I get older, I get pinching those pennies to a whole new level.

I constantly find new ways to DIY it which almost ALWAYS saves me a fraction of what I’m paying someone else to do and more often than not, upon figuring it out myself, I tend to do a better job of it and no one is the wiser.

don’t mean to brag; but…

Unless you brag about it.

Yeah, I do that.

Anyway, I ordered some really cute spring nail polish (gel) in January.

It’s March.

Exactly, and it’s still not freaking here.

It would be one thing if I ordered it off the Wish App. Girls, you feel me on that one?

shop til you drop, baby!

If you’re not familiar, the Wish app is a shopping app where you buy direct from overseas – for waaaaayyyyy cheaper than we can buy in the states. While this is a pretty cool app and from time to time I have had to delete the damn thing to control my impulse shopping; I have generally not had any issues with it.

Friends, family and the like that I have passed along this sweet app to have not always had the same experience as I have had. The clothes don’t fit right, the packages never arrived, customer service never responded to me, etc. You get the idea. Yeah, don’t download the app? No. That’s not what I’m saying, pay attention.

Shop MissMaryofSweden.com now!

I, on the other hand, have had good experiences with the clothes (they run two times smaller than American sizes), most of my packages arrived safe and sound (and even earlier than expected), and when there was a customer service issue, they responded quickly and in some cases returned my money for a damaged item, or non-received item, etc.

delivery status update, please.

Great experiences! Like you said. Right.

Now, I tell you the background story on the Wish App because if I was waiting for over two months for an item, it is to be expected. My expectations are in line with how the Wish App works.

Well, I ordered nail polish (gel) from the Wish App, and it NEVER arrived. Customer service was great, they refunded my moula and so I decided to buy from Amazon. I LOVE Amazon. By the way. LOVE!! Plus, I figured it’d get to me within a reasonable amount of time. Compared to… you know, never.

So when I ordered a set of cute trendy spring colors gel nail polish, I didn’t anticipate waiting longer than a week, maybe even two! IWhich is why I chose to order from our beloved Prime account in the first place. I wasn’t going to leave it to chance. Heaven forbid I get a letter from customs thinking I’m trying to smuggle in contraband beauty products!

I’ve been waiting for months. Literally.

Let Me Break It Down…

tik-tok… just a waitin’ fool

JAN 30TH: I’m waiting, so I swipe a nude/glitter polish on my nails and I lay in loathing.

JAN 31ST: I hate this color.

FEB 13TH: Still waiting…. I pop off my nails a few weeks. Do some outdoorsy hiking crap, get dirty. No worry on the nails even though they look like all holy hell and my girlfriends frown when they see I’ve still NOT re-polished and primed.

FEB 20TH: Still waning. I mean, waiting. No… waning. I’m definitely waning, or maybe it’s whining.

FEB 21ST: Either way, I’m still waiting. And now nail biting.

Simpli-Home.com

MAR 7TH: Focus on my 2-a-day’s at the gym, catch up on some reading, cleaning and organizing my space.

MAR 14TH: Decide to give my short, natural nails a swipe of white polish. I feel cute, trendy and rockin’. For about a day. Re-organizing my space. Again.

Put it here. Move that there…. la-di-dah

MAR 25TH: St. Paddy’s Day has come and gone. Still waiting. Peeled off that white-off, paper mate, look which was no longer working for me. Decide to check the delivery tracking. APRIL 9TH?!! Delivery expected by April – freaking – 9th!

APR 2ND: Stares out the window, looking for the stork to bring newborn nail polish colors to my doorstep. Wonders if they had to make the formulas from scratch upon receiving my order. And also, why didn’t I notice the delivery expectation date when ordering?

So, as of this post, it still has not arrived. And, since the delivery expected date said the ninth, it’s likely I won’t see these little bottles of nail beauty for another week.

MORAL OF THE STORY

CHECK THE DELIVERY DATE WHEN ORDERING.

*hence, read the fine print!

EVEN on AMAZON.

EVEN when it’s TWO. DAY. PRIME.