Our Tiny Garden

Andy and I went to the Farmers' Market today, for the first market of the year. One good thing about having such a terrible winter is that it really makes you appreciate it when spring rolls around! The first few Farmers' Markets usually just have plants and early spring veggies (peas, salad greens, swiss chard). It was a nice, partly sunny day so it was a perfect time to plant.

I took the above picture after I finished planting all of our new spouts. As you can see, the chives survived the winter beautifully! The people who live on the floor below us were nice and raked the whole yard, so all I had to do was dig a few holes for my plants. You can see where I planted all of the salad greens, a daisy plant, and in the background is the basil. (I can already taste the basil mayo and the chive omelets.)

The salad greens are so tiny and cute! I don't eat salads on a regular basis, but when I do it will be pretty cool to just go get some from out back. Maybe I'll plant another tomato plant.

Our yard is pretty nice, but unfortunately since the houses are so packed in, the garden only gets part sun. Most plants that I plant require full sun, but I just plant whatever I like and hope that it will grow. Last summer, we had great luck with the calendulas (which practically took over the garden), the chives, and the golden cherry tomatoes, but unfortunately nothing happened with our melon plant, even though we watered the hell out of it. Lesson learned. I have high hopes for the salad greens and everything else we planted, but we'll see.

I also planted some creeping thyme and candy-striped flox this year. This year, we didn't participate in a CSA because we have no idea about when we're moving to Boston this year (if that ever happens), which means more regular trips to the local markets and maybe planting more stuff in my garden. I have no idea what else I want to plant so far, but we'll see what next week's market has to offer.

Projects: Somewhat-Restored Farm Table

We bought this table just a couple months ago from a little antiques shop across the street that was going out of business. It only cost $35! I don't have a Before picture to show, but the table looks pretty much as it did when we bought it. Except we had to buy all new screws and hinges, replace some rotten pieces of wood on the underside, and remove the polyurethane coating and restore the old finish of the top piece of wood.

The table is made of oak (I think), and the legs are painted with this really striking retro-seafoam green color. I fell in love with this table when I first saw it, and it was fun for me to spend a few weekends redoing the fine details

Here's a shot of the table with the polyurethane coating still intact. I just did a quick-and-dirty sanding of the table to get off the topcoat, and we disassembled the rest of the table to see which screws could be replaced.

This was my favorite part: after I sanded the coating off, I wiped the table down with water to remove the dust, then I rubbed in some Restore-A-Finish. I didn't sand enough to remove all of the old finish, so the wood still retained most of its lovely color.

Then I rubber on some orange-scented beeswax stuff and let it soak into the wood for about 30 minutes before buffing it off.

We were able to replace all of the old screws on the table, but we had a little bit of a challenge with the hinges. I couldn't find any hinges at the hardware store that were the same size as the old hinges, which was bad news because the hinges had been chiseled into the table. However, Andy chiseled out a few more chunks (which was easier than I thought it would be), and we screwed in the new hinges without many incidents (note for the future: don't invest in cheap screws!).

The table is in the kitchen right now, which gives me extra counter space for food prep. I just love finding cheap furniture at yard sales/antiques stores/street corners and restoring it! (Except since I don't have a garage, all the dust from sanding gets everywhere!)