The first moments off the plane in Maine on Friday night were indeed blustery, cold and a little bit of a shock to our systems. Which made us all the more happy to wake up to sunshine on Saturday. Warm weather that stayed all weekend long, and made us feel most definitely that spring is upon us. Hooray for that! We spent the weekend puttering around the garden. Puttering, cleaning up, and getting ready for the season ahead. First up was clearing off the table in my garden shed, which was covered in molding birdhouse gourds, having left them to winter there for just that reason. A craft project is just the right distraction and welcome home, I'd say, so we got right to it. We scraped the mold off the gourd with a wire brush and used sandpaper to clean it up a bit. We poked holes with a hammer and nail to create the opening, then emptied the dried contents out. And last, we put a few coats of a natural coating on the outside to make it last (and shine) just a little bit longer. I had thought we'd make some fun paintings on the sides of the gourds, but in the end, I loved how they looked naturally and left them as is. One cracked in the process of creating it, and well, since I couldn't bear to toss it on the compost pile just yet, that one just became a bowl for the always-overflowing nature table in the library....and a hat, of course. For the gourd-wearing-garden-girl. Spring silliness....
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Greetings! I'm Amanda Blake Soule - mother of five, author of four books on family creativity, editor & owner of Taproot Magazine. I live with my family in an old farmhouse in Western Maine where we raise animals, grow vegetables and make lots of things. I write about it all here on the blog. Thank you for visiting!
