In Our Cozy Home This Week – No. 71 – Zinnias, Pansies, Creation, Recipes, Updated Products

Happy Wednesday that feels like a Tuesday! I hope you had a good Memorial Day weekend. Ours was spent quietly at home. We worked and did small things around the house. We finally purchased a flag bunting for the front of the house. We’ve been talking about it for years and picked up one while we were recently in Lowe’s. It makes me happy to visibly remember the men and women who have gone before and died to protect us. May we honor them by fighting for the truth.

David planted some zinnias for me. They are hard to find around here in the garden centers as they sell out quickly. So if we don’t look for them right away, we miss out. Fortunately he found pink, orange, and yellow ones to scatter around the different garden areas. We planted pink morning glories for the trellis in front of the house, just outside my laundry room window. We did this last summer and they were gorgeous. We bought a second small trellis to put along the back lower deck and planted blue morning glories there. So now I’m looking forward to my many flowers in the late summer and well into the autumn. He’s currently outside finishing up the mulching around the side and back of the house. He got the front areas done very early in the spring, but hasn’t been able to get back outside to finish up. We have a heat wave coming so he decided to use one of the last really cool mornings to finish up this task.

We have two sets of long planters that sit along the tops of the two decks. The top deck is currently featuring pansies (which you’ve seen before in How to Grow Planters Full of Pansies). Over the weekend, David planted pink, dark pink, and white geraniums in the other set of planters. Those are now on the lower deck and will move up to the top deck when the spring pansies are done. In September we’ll plant the fall pansies for the top deck and the geraniums will go back to the lower deck for as long as they last. This way we get lots of flowers outside our slider windows from early April until November. I believe so strongly in The Importance of Creation and the Impact of Green Space and keeping pretty flowers where we see them all day, every day is part of that.

I know I mentioned this before somewhere, but David has trained one of the squirrels to look for him each morning. I eat an apple for breakfast every day and cut it off the core. We decided to see if any of the squirrels would eat the apple left on the core if we threw it out to where they gather around under the bird feeders. We now have a squirrel Caroline has named Applesauce who looks for David to throw the core. Applesauce grabs it and either takes off up a tree or goes under a tree so he can enjoy it in peace. Yes, we make our own fun wherever and whenever we can!

This morning I went through my growing collection of Sallie’s Favorite Comfort Food Recipes and tagged the ones that work well in the summer. You can now find those at Recipes – Summer. I have many other recipes to add and also have a plug-in to put them into proper recipe format so they are easy to print off. It’s on my to-do list, but I haven’t made it there yet.

David and I are so close to being done with updating all the products in the shop. We’re up to page 6 of Recently Updated Products and this only includes those in the past month or so. We had already been working on this for months when I added that section to the shop. If you’ve purchased printables from me, make sure you download the newest version. There are still a handful of products we hope to finish up this week. I will be SO GLAD to be DONE. LOL! I am interested in making more things for the New This Month in The Shop, but we have to finish this job first.

This morning I went back and read a post I wrote on March 18, 2020 – Cheerfully Adjusting in a Coronavirus World. So interesting in light of what is coming out now. As always, I continue to update the forums with all kinds of information.

That’s all for today. I want to get this out to you and send out a newsletter. What is going on in your home? I hope you’ll leave a comment and share.

Artist: “Mother and son in barnyard feeding chickens” by Albert Anker