It was VERY hot, and it still is dry!

Goodafternoon everybody!

Well, we surely had some tropical weather for a few days, and that even in our area close to the sea and such.
A few days temps were up to 30-32 C already here, so it was very warm, yes! We don;t have airco in our house,normally we don;t need it (and I don;t like it either, doesn;t become me very well), but I think we could have done with a little one those days LOL.
The big heat however is gone already, we are having two days of a bit of change, and some lower temperatures, but the weather still stays warm, temperatures will stay around 25-26 overhere.
We even had some short rainshowers, quite heavy ones, but only lasting a few minutes each, so it was nice for the garden, a bit, but no-way enough water to really have an effect. So we still have a very dry period.
We could do with some steady rainshowers that last for several hours(no those heavy bursts out of a cloud, but just a normal shower if you know what I mean) and best would be during the night.
It would be very nice for a lot of farmers, they really need some serious watering here and there!

As it was really very warm this last week you can imagine that I didn;t do a lot of things. Just the most necessary(and that in a slower speed), and for the rest I did stay a lot in the house(it was still much cooler there than in the garden at some point!!), watched some tv, or did read a book, and if I had to go out for some grocery shopping or something needed, I tried to do it in the earlier morning, when it still wasn;t all too hot.
I also did't do a lot of designing, not ebough to finish a new kit, so I really have to do something about it this week.

We did taste a few of our own tomatoes, for now only the Tiny Tim. and they taste real good. Pity is that on another species of tomatoe there seems to be an illness, the tomatoes do grow, but in the heart at the bottom there is a black spot, that becomes slowly bigger and when you pick it and cut it open it is almoast all nasty black inside. So, our harvest will be a little smaller I guess. Not all of the tomatoes have it, thank God, we also have some plants with rather big tomatoes and they seem to do well.
Something strange too I have with my Cosmos plants. they still don;t bloom. We did grow them from seed, they did grow well, they are huge by now, all with leaf, but i still don;t see any buds. Just one, smaller one, did bloom with two flowers. May be I am not patient enough and they still will give some flower next month??

I did go to the market yesterdday, it was much less warm, so in the mornbing good time to do so. I needed some fruit and veggies(and it is much cheaper there than in the supermarket and in a vegetable shop(which we dont have near), some cheese and close to the market is a very nice butcher, where I buy some larger portions and then I put it in the freezer.
So i did, but during my walk over the market there were two or three real heavy rainshowers, wow! Lucky that the stalls have some little roofs, so we could take shelter. It wasn;t bad, the showers only lasted for a couple of minutes and by the time I had to take the walk home, it was dry and sunny again.

Not a very interesting post, I know, but that's how it is at the moment. And I hope it will last for much longer, this more or less eventless life LOL.(always something is happening that needs attention, mostly it are not the nice things, e.g. financial business, bills you need to make phonecalls about, or things like that. Best to try to handle them quickly and in the best way you can and then you can go on with life as it should be ROFL.
End of this week my friend Heidi will return from her holiday. And hopefully the week after we will be able to meet and have a liltte chat again to catch up.

Can you believe it that mid-next week we already have the month of August arriving? Gosh, the year is passing so quickly now. Before you know it we will already have to think about sending parcels for Christmas etc. But....................no, I don;t want to think about that yet too much. let's first enjoy summer time, even if we have some days that are too warm, we still need the sunshine and warmth for our öld"bones, hahaha.
I only have some clusters from Arlene for you this time, but they are lovely. They are made with the Unexpected kit.
Have a lovely week, stay cool(and some of you warm LOL)and safe.

Download   HERE

Tropical days arriving in Holland!

 Somehow this post seems not to be published on the blog.
So, two days later I am publishing again and hoping all goes well.



Goodafternoon everybody!

I am a bit late today, but I did try to catch a bit of extra sleep this morning and then I first prepared the dinner for this evening and started the washing machine.
That will about all I do today, LOL!
The weather has been fantastic, only minus on it is that we didn;t have any rain and there isn;t some to come either in the next week. May be here and there a little shower in the south or east part, but even that isn;t sure.
And next week they say we will have even much warmer weather, unto 30-32C! And that is tropical weather overhere!
Now i do like summer weather but perhaps that will even be a bit too much for me. However, I will not complain, never know how quick it can be over with again.
Still it is a good thing for the people who have their vacation now, specially the ones that stay into this country.

I wasn;t all too busy this week, I tend to get rather lazy lately. I wonder if that has to do something with the warmer weather for longer time?? Perhaps, or it just could be me, not willing to spend too much energy at the moment, or something like that.

The garden is still doing well, despite the shortage on water. We do water the garden, but only 2-3 times a week with the hose and yes, we have to water the pots by hand every day, but it isn;t a bad job.
Tomatoes are growing, we have already ONE tomatoe, a small one, that is almost ready to be picked, yeah!!! And I saw that on another plant(a different species) there is a rather big one starting to get some color. WOW! Never mind how many we will have, as long as we can harvest some it will be nice, it is all about the fun to succeed in growing some food.

Last week I went to center of town, just to look around and had one or two things I had to buy there. Walking in one of the streets I suddenly heard a lovely sound.............. and it was a street musician, a younger girl, playing a ..... harp! That isn;t an instrument you see often with street musicians. I stopped for a moment to listen to her and she played very well and with lots of feeling. It really brightened my day!

Time for me now to see about the laundry and then have a sandwich or something and then sit down in the garden for a while.
I have a new kit for you, named  Close to the Seaside
Have a wonderful week!

Download  HERE

Still real summer around here

Goodmorning everybody!

yes, I am a day late, sorry for that. yesterday I started already late, took a longer sleep, then only got into moveing around very slowly.
After I had a little breakfast, I first took care of the dinner. I wanted to make a kind of stew, so that needed time on the stove.
Well, I did that, then there was a laundry waiting for me to be hanged out, and then I thought it might be good to take a break with a cup of coffee in the garden.
with all the good weather we have now, we should take advantage of it, even if we could do with some rain every now and then. But okay, let's not complain, in winter we long for warmer weather and now that we finally have some real summer we should take it as it comes.
After the coffee break I first did some other little jobs and then it was a bit late in the afternoon and to be honest I had no energy to start up the computer.
So here i am a day later.

it is no big deal, and there isn;t much to tell, we have a rather quiet life at the moment, which I am thankful for!
I do my things around the house, and try to make an outing every day. We have to keep moving and taking a walk is good for your health and muscles too.

All is growing as it should do in the garden(well, more or less) and I am trying to get an idea what we will plant next year. As I said last week, we certainly will sow lots of cornflowers for one, also have some poppies around and I like them too. And I think I will try some more cottage garden like flowers, so we will have more blooms and colour in the garden. That's only the idea, now the execution, LOL!

I have managed to finish a kit for you, now  will have to do some designing this week, because I don;t have any kits in stock anymore!
Perhaps I will make a few smaller ones, and then in between I can be busy on some larger ones, We'll see how the week will devellop.

P.S. I wanted to post the preview of the kit and what did I notice! I uploaded the kit to Mediafire, but I didn;t make a preview of the kit ! Oh, what a dombo. So now i am going to make quicky a preview,

For now I wish everyone a wonderful week.

Download   HERE

I am counting my tomatoes, LOL!

Goodafternoon everybody!

Wow, you really can say we have summer at the moment. Every day nice temperatures of around 22-24C, with sometimes a little high cloud, that's all. No rain, and that isn;t too good. Would be nice if in the evenings or nights some rain would fall, but this week there isn;t a big chance to it. Well, we will have to be a little careful with the water, if everybody does so, there shouldn't be a problem.
I try to water the garden twice, may be 3 times a week, not more and I only do the pots almost every day. The birdies are happy with a little bird bath I created of a not to deep bowl, the tits really take their bath in it, so funny and other birds come to drink of it too.

I am afraid there isn;t really much news to tell, time just passes by in wonderful weather and it is such a joy to be able to open in the morning the garden doors and leave them open till somewhere in the evening.
We still are watching the football and the Belgian team reached the semi-finals!  They had a fantastic match against Brazil!
Now they only have to manage to win the match from France and they will have reached the final! It will be a difficult match against the French,but I give them a good chance.

During the week I did a little bit of normal household stuff, nothing to bragg about, spend quite some time in the garden, sitting or just doing little jobs there. Yesterday I went to buy some birdseed,  I still give them some, although they can find their own food rather easily now. t still is nice for them to have some extra and it is good for the mother birds who still have to feed the youngsters.
On the way to that shop I came along a kind of 'recycle"shop, you can find there sometimes real nice things for little money, and I found two flowerpots for inside, in a dark red color frok which we have already a few. I took them with me, they only were  € 0,50 a piece!
And looking around in some other shops on the way I found a really nice Christmaspresent. Cannot say anything about it, for obvious reasons.
The best buys are most of the time the ones you stumble upon, and not the ones you are going to buy intentionally!

This morning I took the bother to count my tomatoes LOL! I came to 63 smaller and bigger ones already and there are much more flowers on the plants that could become also tomatoes. best is to have about 3 or may four groups of flowers on them and if there are coming more you better pich them out. Otherwise they will not get enough time to ripen. I have 2 links  for you where you can see how to handle tomatoes, if you may have them. If not, perhaps nice to try out for next year?
 https://bonnieplants.com/library/grow-tomatoes-pots/

http://www.growfruitandveg.co.uk/blog/a-beginners-guide-to-pinching-out-tomatoes
Here one photo I took from one of my tomatoe plants, with one of the biggest tomatoe till thus far

And I have a few more photos of the garden.

 This is the second clamtis I have on the rosebow, at the moment it is full of blossoms, fantastic.

This isn´t the best photo of my conrflowers, but oh wow, i do love them. They have such a wonderful blue color and I will try to get seed of them later, and if no enough I will buy some for next year. They grow rather easily, so not too much work for lots of result! ove to have two or three large groups of them next year and you can mix them great with other flowers.
I have too 2 photos of a parakeet having a yummie meal of the seeds in the bowl hanging on the rosebow.

Well, that is about it all. I must confess I didn´t do much of designing again this week, a little excuse is that the weather is far too nice to be inside a lot and in the evening I watch tv and do a bit of knitting at the same time.
So I should finish a kit I started long ago, otherwise I will not have something for you next week. They said on the weather program that next week we will have one or may be two days of lesser weather with lower temperatures of only 19 or 20C and cloudy, so may be that will be a good time to spend an hour or so on the designing.
For now I have the clusters from Arlene, she made with the Dreaming of Summer kit.
Have a wonderful week and stay safe!

Download   HERE

Summer has come to visit us!

Goodmorning everybody!

Yeah, we do have summer now! All week long we had lovely weather, starting at around 20-22C beginning this week and from about wednesday on temps only got higher and we reached around 25-27C.
Only a bit disappointing that there is a LOT of wind today, but .... you cannot have it all. Tomorrow there will be already less hard wind, and temps will still be high. One thing that is less good is that it is very dry lately. I cannot remember when we had some rain. And when it did it was(in our area) very light. Not enough for the ground and plnats to have a good drink.
So we have to water our graden every other day or so and the pots every day, of course. We are not quick in watershortage, but they already ask and advise us on tv to be careful with wateruse.
Lots of farmers now have some trouble with the shortage of rain now so for them already it would be good if at night there was some rainfall.
But I am afraid this week there is no sign of it.

I cannot really remember everything i did this week, cannot be all too much, LOL or interesting. I know i didn;t do anything on the computer, it was far too warm for it and a pity to stay inside if not really necessary. Yes, we watched the football games, but they were most of the time late afternoon and then one again in the evening(yes, 2 a day, otherwise the tournement would last far too long).
Naturally there are the ordinary household jobs, but aside of that.............hmmmmmm, shortage of memory I guess.
I do know I did some jobgs in the garden, like the other day, when I made two bigger pots with a fern and some other plant that do well in the shade. And I have a hortensia("made"myself by taking a cutting couple of years ago) it placed with it and two little pots with some groundcover plants. And this little arrangement I placed in front of the shed wall at the back of the garden. It was such a sad spot there, and it is hard to grow there anything, because of the big, big tree that is giving the shade(tree is from the nieghbour, it is the one that had the big treebranch broken by a stork, earlier this year) .
But I think that the ferns should do well there, giving some extra attention every now and then.
And it looks already much happier, that spot.
so yesterday, believe it or not, I tackled the shed a bit. First I washed the window there, in and outside!!!, took along the door too, and all looks suddenly a lot better already.
Then I tackled some of the inside. We have lots of things inthere, but large part of it is taken in by a pretty big table. On it there are all the
mini greenhouses and pots we use in winter and spring to grow our seeds. lots of pots of all sizes, all kind of stuff you might need for the plants(like binding thread, and such), but it all was a big mess. So it took it all from the table, cleaned that first and organized it all. Oh my , how proud I was of myself, LOL! But it really looks good again  and you can find all you need very easy now.
At the same time I tackled a bit the potting table we have in the garden near the kitchen, that has more room on it again too, so hoorray, we can work on it again.

As usual we have the visits of our parakeets. At the moment I am awake very early morning, around 6.00, (much too early to my liking, but i take another snooze at around 7.oo again till may be 09.00), but I take a cup of tea then and of course peep out of the kitchen window and yes, there is ALWAYS waiting one parakeet at least, most of the time two(and always the two same ones< yes i can recognise them) waiting for their morning piece of apple, hahaha. And yes, I am so good to go outside and hand two or three little pieces of apple for them on the rosebow. Well, now it isn't too bad to do, with the good weather, but it will be different when the weather turns a lot colder again. Although I remember, that also in winter I got outside, with my winterjacket on, may be a bit later in the morning, but still, I was there to give them some food. I am such a sucker and too tender hearted in those cases I think. ROFL.

Well, time now to finish this post, may be I will have a few photos next week again, I'll try to make them.
For now I have a kit for you, named........ Dreaming of Summer!
Have a wonderful week.

Download    HERE