Green Rascal Design

Be sure to stop and smell the roses!

Enjoy the sun!

Take in the view!

Spend time with the kids!

Go outdoors!

Find hidden treasures!

Witness the miracle of life!

Find something to wonder about!

Get curious!

Climb new heights!

Then chill out and be awesome.

See you next week!

I was going to say red is my favorite color when I thought about it yesterday while picking the first real bunch of strawberries of the season. They are beautiful, and we're so happy the excess rain hasn't destroyed every single strawberry in the patch already. I did have to toss out just as many rotting strawberries as these perfect little jewels here.

Then, of course, I remembered how awesome green is when I made the salad with our home-grown lettuce. This is the Amish deer-tongue lettuce (with a little spinach) that we planted quite a while back. It's the type of lettuce that you can pick individual leaves from instead of killing the whole plant to harvest some salad. These leaves were miraculously saved from the onslaught of leaf-eating slugs which are attacking just about everything. Luckily the chickens LOVE to eat slugs, so all we have to do is find the little buggers and introduce them to the birds.

Speaking of birds, I love orange/gold/brown... and white, and black... They're such sweeties lately. Here are the big fluffs with some new straw.

And here are the mini fluffs in the FUV. Pumpkin is SO PRETTY, and I LOVE the peachy color that Clover is developing.

I really like yellow too. In the birds' eyes it is really striking. Yellow is also the color of the sunshine and our kale flowers. I wish I had more yellow shirts to wear with my awesome new yellow and navy shoes.

Speaking of blue, I love these little blue flowers. This is a picture of the flax plants from last year, and I've used it before but it's so pretty! We have a small amount of new flax growing randomly around the yard this year, but not so many cute blue flowers. Blue is also the color of water and the sky, and who doesn't love a nice blue sky and the life-giving power of water?

Speaking of water, I love the water in this painting. Now, I'm not really a painter, but I enjoy trying to make pretty pictures like this for around the house. There's even a little purple in this painting, which I forgot to mention.

These are some little purple flowers growing in the yard. I'm not sure what they are, but they're so cute and a nice welcome change from the boring grass. I love it when nature leaves little surprises around.

Here is another nice surprise. A female cardinal was on the deck railing yesterday. She's so pretty. Some people might think she is drab, but I really love that tan/grey color. It is clean and calming. Her partner comes around often to gather food, and he is a very striking red. With that, I suppose we are back to where we started.

The topic for the blog off this week is color, and what is your favorite color. Clearly I cannot pick just one. I love all colors. It is a little-known fact that I have a large collection of shirts and a bit of a freaky habit of wearing the same color all week. This week is blue week. I'll be wearing blue every day until Monday, when purple week starts. Then it will be pink week, and peach week, and white, grey, black, brown, red, orange, yellow, green, teal, and back to blue again. Actually, I skipped orange and yellow recently and added teal - so it does change over time. And I am trying to wear more black to seem more like an "architect." But I love colors. Bright colors, soft colors - they're all wonderful. I'll never be that person who wears all black every day, or any one color every day. I have to change it up, but in an organized and regimented way. hahaha

It will be really interesting to read about the other bloggers' favorite colors and their deeper thoughts about colors and/or color theory. Check them out with me!

I went to go see the Canstruction projects in Philly today. They will be taken down tomorrow, and a dear friend was involved with one this year. The event supports a good cause, and it's always nice to see what people can make with everyday items. In this case, cans of food are used to build whatever - kinda like a sand sculpting competition - then they are donated to Philabundance, "the region's major food bank."

Here's a picture from the second floor there. My friend's project is the camera on the left hand side.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to next year's Canstruction event. Who knows, maybe we'll get involved!

Huzzah! Looking at my old plans from back in the day somehow brings new life. All at once I know there is going to be a lot of work involved, but it's also going to be tons of fun. How I love these clients. They have great ideas, and it's going to be beautiful!

Also, I was looking around at some other power lunch project members' facebook pages, and I had a great idea for a new service! I'm really excited by this but I can't tell anyone what it is just yet. Some more thought has to happen before we roll it out.

This is also in part due to a message I saw in my inbox this morning regarding somebody who needs some help deciding what to do about grass. No, it's not the grass part! What is exciting is the realization that there are people out there who could use some green help in a way that we can provide it!

Time to dig out the drafting board!

Today's blogoff discusses the difference, if there is any, between truth and fact, and what these things are.

I took some philosophy in college, and it was not for me. There. One fact and one truth. That wasn't so hard! The study of philosophy was fascinating. I liked reading it. Although I didn't like reading it multiple times in one week to gain any kind of understanding. The philosophy lectures were great. I really liked my teachers. Discussion classes were decidedly not great. They were the pits because for some reason, while I thoroughly enjoyed reading and listening to philosophy, I did not like discussing it at all. I got poor grades for participation. The other students were all philosophy majors, and they had LOTS of practice defining their terms and discussing rhetoric, etc. This is all the truth for me.

My teachers might have experienced a different truth, however. They had one architecture major in their classes, and that was a nice challenge for them. They got to enlighten somebody new. With a clean slate, they could introduce readings that other students already knew and disliked. They got to practice lecturing to a novice. Then they could hand me off to their teaching assistants for the real work. The teaching assistants got quite an experience trying to impart their wisdom to somebody who had no practice for a change. And they got to learn a little bit about architecture, which they knew nothing about previously.

Using examples such as these is the best way I know to talk about fact versus truth. In both cases above the fact was basically the same: that I took philosophy in college, and I was the only architecture student in those classes at that time. Whether I stated the fact completely in both stories is another matter - one left to the philosophy students I dare say. The truth is much harder to pin down because I believe everybody has their own truth based on their own histories and perspectives. I stated a true story in the beginning as seen from my perspective, and surmised what could have been a true story from the perspective of my philosophy professors. Whether the second story is actually true or not is up for debate. One can argue the relative possibility of story 2 to be true, or parts of it to be true. Nobody can debate my truth, though.

I believe it is true that this discussion is healthy at times like these. There are lots of good discussions to follow with respect to knowledge sharing and business models. However, I also think that too much of a good thing can be harmful. The fact is we seem to be having more and more philosophical discussions lately. I believe it to be true that at some point we need to take a break and get back to work. Well, at least I personally need to get back to work on something.

One might say that this time could be another period of enlightenment for those of us pondering what it means to practice design and/or how best to go about it given recent world events, but that's only true in my opinion. Who is with me?

The young chickens are getting to the age where they aren't growing as quickly, or at least in pictures you can't tell easily. But we still need to build them a bigger box before moving them outside with the adults. I put them in the FUV (fluffy utility vehicle), and let the others take a look at them, and I don't think it's going to be an easy transition.

There they are, doing their thing. It is so much fun to watch the young ones jumping and running around chasing flies and being startled by robins. No matter how many 'yearbook' style pictures I take of them, these natural shots are always better. They're so cute.

In other news, we have wasps building a nest right next to where we go in and out of the house on the deck. I am looking for a way to move them safely to another part of the garden where they'll be less likely to freak out and sting us.

Back to the birds... Sugar developed a limp a couple days ago and I'm a little concerned. Every morning she seems fine, and then by the end of the day she's screaming to be held. I can't find anything wrong with her though. As a consequence, her eggs seem to have thin shells right now. Hopefully with some healthy treats she will feel better and heal up.

I think that's about all that's going on in the back yard this week. Enjoy the weekend. It's going to be good weather here in Philly, so I plan to stop and smell the roses as much as possible to celebrate Mother's Day!

It looks like all the plants are gettin' it on out there. Here we have purple kale on the left (going on 3 years old now), and dinosaur kale on the right (standing at approximately 6 feet tall).

This is our black currant bush (stick) blooming. The flowers smell exactly like cloves. They're only the size of dimes, but the fragrance is pretty strong!

Our red currant is not quite in blooming mode yet, but it is doing well.

Some of our newer berry bushes (sticks) have a long way to go yet also. But we're not worried about that. These plants are more for the future than they are for now, and there will be plenty of fruit to go around when the time comes. Those squirrels don't scare me! (muahahahaha)

Here are the raspberries and blackberries in full effect. They are large and in charge so much so that we had to weed-whack some down because they were jumping under the nice belgian block border into the grass. I may not like grass, but I would like to keep the raspberries inside their patch.

Also, I put all these little picket fences in there as support. They're so cute.

The strawberry patch came back better than before without ANY work! These little babies are even spreading out into the grass, but oh well. At least these plants are short and we won't get into trouble for this.

They are flowering profusely as well, and we should be getting strawberries by our anniversary at the end of this month!

This is our massive rhubarb returned from last year along with some new additions we planted a little while ago. The big leaves are about 2 feet across right now!

Also, some of the old bushes that the hubby cut down are making a comeback. These were the first we attempted to kill, before we started chopping the roots out of the ground.
Dang Buckthorn!

These are the peas. Since we failed so completely at peas last year, we expected to have little luck this year. So we planted TONS of them in the hopes of getting a few survivors. Well, this year is much better for peas somehow, and now we have about 70 pea plants thriving. I suppose this will be a good opportunity to perfect my authentic London mushy pea recipe.

This is mostly Amish Deer-Tongue Lettuce with a few shallots in the back. In the front are the plants that we planted directly in the ground with cold frames over them. The rest of the lettuce hubby started in the seed starting tray in the basement. Now there is very little difference between the plants, and we've concluded that if we use more cold frames next year it will turn out to be much less work!

This is our returning Swiss Chard. Last year this plant was the runt of the bunch, and this year it is the only one back after the winter. We don't know why the bigger plants last year got burnt out and didn't come back. But we have a couple little baby ones also, so we should have a good amount of chard this year. That is, as long as the bunny rabbit stays away long enough for us to get some!

And here we have some nice little white clover plants competing with the grass. We threw out a pound of white clover seeds with our hands a while back, and every bare patch sprang with life a couple weeks later. You can tell our clover from the wild kind because it has that little white ring on each leaf. This plant stays relatively short, and it also spreads well and competes successfully with grass!

Lastly, I want to talk about the Lingonberries. They're a small bushy ground cover that likes acidic soil. So when the neighbor's tree came crashing down in a storm last year, we used it as fertilizer for our then future lingonberry patch. The dark green leaves are what we received from the nursery, and the light green is all the growth since we planted them! We've had lingonberry preserves from Ikea, and it'll be interesting to get them fresh.

Also, hubby is currently writing an article about all our gardening techniques for the Dragonflyer, Drexel University's student periodical! I'll mention it when the paper comes out in a couple weeks!