What is an “Agriculture Report”? Well I was inspired by @quiteayarnblog‘s ongoing series of posts titled “Agriculture Report” (and this title always cracks me up) that are actually updates of what is going on in her garden. I just had to adopt this same title for updates on what is going on in my garden/my “garden report” (and now @AlissaMakes has joined us in Agriculture reporting on her blog too!)

Oh the Sunflowers!

I love sunflowers, I am actually obsessed with them. When I was in Asheville, North Carolina in May 2025 (see post Concerting in the Carolinas and More), I became obsessed with the menu for the eatery we stopped at for breakfast one morning – Sunny Point Cafe with it’s sunflower art:

And the very kind manager on duty gave me a laminated copy of the front of the menu to take home!

(I have it up on my studio and it always makes me smile when I look at it)

In Spring our friends R and D gave us packages of heirloom seeds from a family collection which included packets of sunflower seeds.

We planted them in the raised bed that John built in the backyard last year (see post John gets “ScrapHappy” too – new raised bed) and they did very well! They are now pretty tall and blooming!

Other Agriculture

In the raised bed with the sunflowers is our “bumper crop” of basil also from the heirloom seeds our friends gave us:

There is going to be some pesto in the future!

Here are some happy flowers around my front and back gardens:

It is a delightful time of year in relation to “Agriculture”!

Lasagna From the Garden

We also have fresh herbs and tomatoes growing on our deck patio garden. Along with the basil in the raise bed and tomatoes from the patio John and I made some lasagna for dinner on Sunday with handmade noodles and sauce from scratch.

We roasted the tomatoes for the sauce with garden herbs, garlic, onions and carrots; and then blended the roasted tomatoes. We combined this blended mix with a large can of San Marzano tomatoes, red wine, pepperoni, beef and bacon (we didn’t have prosciutto handy) and let it simmer for hours (the house smelled yummy).

With John’s handmade thin pasta sheets we were able to make an 8 layer lasagna layering the sauce with a ricotta mixture and mozzarella.

It was delicious and partially made from our garden! We froze the leftovers for a future meal.

We enjoyed eating it outside on the patio on a lovely summer evening with a nice bottle of red wine, caesar salad and garlic bread.

A Crafter Needs to Eat, Agriculture Report

Little More on the “Agriculture Report” and Al Fresco Dining

July 3, 2025 tierneycreates: a fusion of textiles and smiles

A quick follow up to my post Agriculture Report: “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden”.

More flowers have been popping in the garden:

My dahlias that surprisingly come back every year:

Fuchsia colored lilies:

The reliable dayliles which return every year:

Blanket Flowers:

And some light pink roses:

We’ve been enjoying the flowers as we dine “al fresco” as much as we can in the lovely summer weather.

Breakfast on Sunday on the upstairs deck:

And then dinner (Shrimp fried rice made on the grill) on the front porch:

We are trying to enjoy outside dining as much as possible this summer.

If you are in the part of the world where it is summer right now, hope you are enjoying it!

Agriculture Report

Agriculture Report: “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden”

June 23, 2025June 23, 2025 tierneycreates: a fusion of textiles and smiles

Yes if you were in around in 1970 you might remember this song sung by Lynn Anderson – Rose Garden with it’s catchy line: “I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden”:

This song popped into my head as I was snapping some photos for this post on my early summer garden.

We are starting our own “Rose Garden” in the front yard’s raised bed and hope to someday have a large rose garden in the backyard. I love roses and roses are VERY special to my husband John.

John was very close with this paternal grandparents growing up and being at their house was his favorite place to be as a kid. At 14 he even blew off a big school dance to go hang out with his grandparents.

According to John his grandfather had a magnificent rose garden and John would hang out with his grandfather as he tended his roses. It was always his secret dream to have his own rose garden someday. We are working on making that happen.

Slowly, over the past couple years, we’ve been adding roses to the front bed:

Here are some of the other flowers currently in bloom, primarily perennials, that we’ve added in to to keep the roses company:

We’ve run out of space to put roses in the front of the house. So we are planning to change the landscaping of the backyard someday, removing the rocks that border the fence and replace them with garden beds with soil so we can plant a large rose garden in the backyard.

We also have plans (perhaps too ambitious..) to build a greenhouse where the raised bed currently sits and relocate the raised bed. My Pinterest inspiration board is getting full of images of greenhouses!

For now we have plants in pots and a raised bed that John built last year:

I am growing lots of sunflowers from seed in the raised bed (they are doing well so far); and growing a couple other flowers from seed and trying to grow basil from seed, which seems to be working so far.

We bought one rose for the backyard that was on sale and a beautiful red color and for now we have it in a pot until we redo our landscaping (big undertaking) in the future:

I also have my annual tomatoes and herbs growing on my upstairs back deck:

So this concludes my “Agriculture Report” and I just realized I did basically Promise John a Rose Garden – ha!

Agriculture Report, Special Events

Agriculture Report and a Concert

October 25, 2024October 27, 2024 tierneycreates: a fusion of textiles and smiles

AGRICULTURE REPORT

I figured I would get one more “Agriculture Report” in for the year now that the growing season in Colorado’s Front Range where I live. I think this is the only update I am providing since my July 19, 2024 post Agriculture Report: Plantings Gone Wild .

As I mentioned in the July post, the free seeds I got from one of my local libraries really took off! Here is what the plants looked like in the raised bed John built at the end of September:

I’d routinely been getting tomatoes from the upstairs porch tomato plants and I started getting tomatoes AND our first cucumbers from the seed planted crops in the raised bed!

John made a Cucumber Salad with our first cucumbers (which are the first cucumbers I’ve ever grown!):

We recently returned from a trip to the Oregon Coast and the weather at home had changed radically (getting colder and colder at night) and there is rumor of a big freeze and possibly snowstorm at lower elevations (we live at 6000 ft above sea level). It has already snowed at the higher elevations (we have a lot of 14,000+ ft above sea level mountain regions in Colorado). So it was time to shut down the garden for the season. Plus it was time to “blowout” our sprinkler system/winterize it, so the plants wouldn’t be getting any more irrigation and where going to die out.

We harvested a bunch of tomatoes, cucumbers and zucchini (but only a little as the rest did not ripen they were planted too late) from the raised bed:

John made pickles with the cucumbers and so far they taste delicious (they are still aging in their “pickling”):

In addition to the cucumbers from our raised bed, John used a hot pepper (not sure what I planted) and fresh thyme from our garden.

Besides vegetables, we had some luck with free flower seeds we got from the library. It took awhile but the Cosmos flower seeds I planted really took off:

We plan to put in a couple more raised beds next season, and I will be more organized in my free seed plantings (I hope the library hands out free seeds again next year). I did overcrowd the one raised bed, and the carrots, onions and spinach I planted from the free seeds did not grow.

Oh and would you like to see some photos of real harvests? A couple weeks ago we went to the Sunday Farmers’ Market in Parker and the fruits and vegetables were bountiful!

They have one stand at the Farmers’ Market that allows you to fill a large bag for $15 with whatever they have at their stand (and they have a lot of choices). They are very liberal on how the interpret “fill a bag” and they let me balance a very large head of cauliflower at the very top of the bag! They were also giving out free acorn squashes with purchase (I made a nice soup from mine) – I think they had more squash than they knew what to do with.

CONCERT

October 12 we went to see an awesome outdoor concert by our favorite Icelandic band, Kaleo.

We did see them at Red Rocks Amphitheatre this summer, and it was wonderful to get to see them again but at a smaller venue – Breckenridge Brewery’s Littleton Colorado Campus’ Farmhouse Concert Venue.

Here is a little clip from the concert I took:

And here is the full performance of this song that made John fall in love with the band as much I did when I first heard them around 2016:

But our favorite of their songs is not sung in English, it is sung in their native Icelandic language – Vor í Vaglaskógi – and based on Icelandic folklore:

Hope you enjoyed the music! The lead singer, JJ Julius Son (Jökull Júlíusson) has quite the voice/vocal range, and we love the musicianship of the band.

Agriculture Report

Agriculture Report: Plantings Gone Wild

July 19, 2024July 21, 2024 tierneycreates: a fusion of textiles and smiles

Some of my US based blogging buddies who are of a “certain age” might remember a series of awful late night infomercials selling videos of female college students making curious college and Spring-Break partying decisions called “Girls Gone Wild“.

I haven’t thought about these informercials for years and then it popped into my head when I was checking on my garden the other day because I have PLANTINGS GONE WILD!

Tomatoes, Tomatoes

I am on my 4th summer of growing tomatoes on my upstairs deck in Colorado. This year my tomato plants have GONE WILD and are the biggest they’ve ever been! I didn’t do anything different this season than previous seasons but the tomato plants are growing like crazy.

I hope I have a large enough tomato harvest this year to make a pasta sauce as well as salsa with my tomatoes!

Free Seeds Out of Control

In my April 2024 post Explored a new library, tried a new group I shared that a local was giving out free packets of seeds (vegetables and flowers) – 3 packets per library patron per day.

Well after John built me a raised bed (see post John gets “ScrapHappy” too – new raised bed) in June, I planted most of the vegetable seeds in the raised bed to include cucumber, squash, carrots, spinach and onion. However I thought it was too late in the season in Colorado to get a decent harvest so I thought the seeds would help “seed” my new raised bed with organic material as a base for next year’s garden.

So I haphazardly planted my seeds and did not label what was planted in the different areas of the bed.

And now I am dealing with SEEDS GONE WILD! Every seed seems to have sprouted and some plants are exploding everywhere…and I don’t know what they are as they are crops I’ve never planted before!

Yikes! At least I recognize the marigolds I planted for pest control! We put netting over the bed to help keep birds and squirrels out of the garden and so far it appears to be working.

I tried early on to thin the bed once I realized the seeds were sprouting and growing like crazy but the new sprouts were too delicate and some did not survive the replanting. So I just left most of it as a “hot mess”.

I guess I will have to wait until it is time to harvest the vegetables to find out what some of them are! Oh how sloppy my raised bed garden looks!

In Other Agricultural News

Although it looks a bit crowded, my herb container gardens seem to be flourishing this year and I am continually enjoying fresh herbs for cooking this season. For example I’ve harvested all the parsley and basil twice and it keeps growing back!

I love when a recipe calls for “fresh parsley” and I can go grab it from my deck garden!

I’ll close out my Agriculture Report with this inspirational quote I found in a magazine that I put up in my studio:

Agriculture Report, Knit and Crochet Away!, Sunflowers!

Update on Sunflower Granny Squares and an Agriculture Report

June 27, 2024 tierneycreates: a fusion of textiles and smiles

Here is an update to the post Another Hat, Sunflower GS, “Agriculture Report”, and some Pickles.

I’ve made some progress on the sunflower inspired granny square blocks (which someday will be a blanket) that I’ve been working on, primarily while riding in the car as a passenger.

Here is what my first one looked like that I shared in the post I linked:

I decided to add some green to represent newly opening sunflowers and with the rust, yellow and green yarn in play here is how the blocks are progressing:

A couple close up of the various blocks in progress:

I am making the centers to the first 20 – 21 blocks and then I will be adding the oatmeal colored border yarn to complete the granny square blocks. I’ll share an update when I get the first 20 – 21 done.

I also thought I would share an “Agriculture Report” (inspired by @quiteayarnblog‘s ongoing series of posts titled “Agriculture Report”) and the tomatoes on my upper deck keep getting taller and taller and will end up taller plants than previous years by the time they fruit:

We were also able to harvest ONE strawberry so far (we shared it and savored each bite) from the first strawberry plant I am growing in Colorado:

Also the FREE seeds I planted courtesy of the local library (see post Explored a new library, tried a new group) are doing really well in the new raised bed John built from leftovers from our rebuild of the back deck (see posts John gets “ScrapHappy” too – new raised bed and Guest Blogger Post: Managing Humans Demolishing and Rebuilding a Deck):

We put netting on the raised bed to try to prevent the naughty squirrels and other critters feasting on our growing vegetables.

Okay now I need to start catching up on my blogging buddies’ posts, I’ve fallen behind again as it’s been a busy summer so far 🙂

Agriculture Report, From the Woodshop, ScrapHappy

John gets “ScrapHappy” too – new raised bed

June 17, 2024 tierneycreates: a fusion of textiles and smiles

This might be part 2 to my 6/15/24 monthly ScrapHappy post (see post ScrapHappy June 2024)…

My husband John worked on a “scrappy” project in June also: he built a raised bed with the scraps of pressure treated lumber from our deck rebuilding project in May (see post Guest Blogger Post: Managing Humans Demolishing and Rebuilding a Deck).

Here are photos of him building the raised bed in our backyard and setting up the automatic irrigation:

We originally had our backyard swing in this spot and John relocated the pavers and the swing to under the two large Aspen trees in our backyard:

Here’s the raised bed with the netting we added to hopefully protect our planting from the critters (animal and bug) that live in the open space behind our house:

I am pretty excited about the raised bed as now I can (perhaps) grow things like squash and greens where I needed a larger and deeper space than my upstairs deck garden allows.

Speaking of the upstairs deck garden, my container garden pots are filling out nice with foliage from the tomatoes, peppers, and herbs I am growing. I also added a pot of strawberries using a macrame hanger that my friend K made me.

We also added to planters that rest on the deck railings to the mix and for now I have seed starts there which I will transfer eventually to the raised bed. Then I will put some type of trailing flowers in those planters.

John set up automatic irrigation (watering) for all the pots and planters on the deck so it we are out of town they will get watered!

Agriculture Report, Sunflowers!

Agriculture Report

October 24, 2023October 25, 2023 tierneycreates: a fusion of textiles and smiles

I know it is late in the season to be reporting on my garden but better late than never. My part of Colorado seems to have a short growing season and we’ve already had a freeze at night so my garden is done for the season but here is the story of what happened during the 2023 growing season.

THE PATIO GARDEN

In August I shared some photos from my patio garden where I was growing tomatoes, peppers, and herbs (I use Marigolds as natural pest control):

Well I ended up having a sort of decent harvest of tomatoes and for the first time I was able to grow FULL SIZE tomatoes instead of just cherry tomatoes. I also grew a couple Anaheim peppers. John even roasted one. I also grew a lot of basil and made pesto.

I felt like a FARMER (ha!) with my imaginarily large harvest (yes it was a little bit more than in the photo above, but not that much more). And as I mentioned John actually roasted the first large pepper I grew and added it to a salsa.

GIANT SUNFLOWER (YUP ONLY ONE)

In 2022 I grew bunch of sunflowers including a GIANT SUNFLOWER. I harvested the seeds from the giant sunflower with plans to plant as many as I could to have a mini field of giant sunflowers in 2023 (see post The Sunflowers!)

I felt so “rich” in giant sunflower seeds from this harvest I even shared some with friends.

So I planted a lot of these seeds (probably 1/2 the jar that was left from sharing with friends) and guess what:

I GOT ONE GIANT SUNFLOWER from all the seeds I planted:

And then when I went to harvest the seeds, I pull the head off the sunflower too soon and the seeds did not appear to be mature. I ended up putting the sunflower head in a paper bag upside after googling what to do when you screw up like I did, to let them mature more and dry out.

I don’t think it helped but I did go ahead and harvest what I had a couple weeks later:

So next year I’ll try and plant them and see what happens. I suspect nothing as the seeds are pretty thin and I do not think they will germinate. But I will try.

I might have to just start over again with some store bought giant sunflower seeds…

Agriculture Report, What's on the Design Wall

What’s on the Design Wall & “Agriculture Report”

August 2, 2023October 25, 2023 tierneycreates: a fusion of textiles and smiles

I was going to blog more about my recent Oregon Coast trip but there are so many photos to sort through so I thought I’d just post about a new wall hanging I am working on and my “Agriculture Report”. (What is an “Agriculture Report”? Well One of my blogging buddies @quiteayarnblog has an ongoing series of posts called “Agriculture Report” whose title always cracks me up because it is an update of what is going on in her garden. So I had to adopt that term for my garden report)

WHAT’S ON THE DESIGN WALL

I have so many projects in queue – unfinished projects and new project with imaginary and actual deadlines – but I was having a “squirrel” moment and cleaning out old quilting magazines and came across this pattern, String Attached, in an old issue of AmericanQuilter Magazine – and had to make it!

I am not sure why I fell in love with it but I did. I’ve done very little “string piecing” in the past but I thought it would be a great way to work down my collection of solid color fabric scraps:

I dumped them out and selected fabric scraps for the little quilt. I decided to stay away from dark or medium purple but to have red-violet and pink instead. I also tried to select fabrics similar to the sample one in the pattern.

The pattern calls string piecing on foundation paper but I decided to use muslin instead.

And here is the beginning of the center star on my design wall:

I am hopeful so far but I have some Y-seam type piecing to do when I get all 8 points to the center star done – yikes!

AGRICULTURE REPORT

My little upstairs patio garden is doing well this year, probably due to the ridiculous amount of rain we’ve been getting in the Denver Metro area. John and I joke we are now living in “Den-attle” or “Sea-enver” (Denver + Seattle).

I have tomatoes, peppers, and various herbs growing along with some Marigolds for pest control.

I was excited the other day to harvest my first tomatoes of the season!

Yes there were three cherry (small) tomatoes, but it was still exciting (smile).

A Crafter Needs to Eat, A Crafter's Life, Agriculture Report, Fabric Scraps Obsession, What's on the Design Wall

Bunch of Random Updates

June 27, 2023October 25, 2023 tierneycreates: a fusion of textiles and smiles

I had a couple brief updates and I thought I would spread them out into a bunch of brief blog posts but I am lumping them all together.

GO BOLDLY

An update on the quilt (which might end up more wallhanging size) that I mentioned in the post What I’ve Been Up To and What’s on the Design Wall, which I named “Go Boldly“:
I am now sewing the blocks together. There are 64 blocks and each need to be sewing into blocks of 4 to make them into 16 blocks to then sew together.

I am currently debating whether to make the quilt larger (I have enough leftover blocks to make 1 – 2 additional quilts or wallhangings) or leave as it is. I think I am going to just sew the 16 blocks (4 mini sections to make a block) together and then decide.

OH SCRAP – IT’S NOT JUST BLACK AND WHITE

A little update on the freeform (or wonky as some say) log cabin quilt I discussed in this post – ScrapHappy June 2023: “Oh Scrap – It’s Not Just Black and White!” :

The longarm machine quilter (Sew Colorado Quilting) has finished quilting it and sent me some photos, here is one of them.

I actually picked up the quilt today from her and will do a post on it with more photos once I get the extra backing and binding trimmed (I like to do my own trimming) and decide on a binding. I am thinking about doing a “facing” on it (like you would do with an art quilt) as I plan to hang it on the wall.

COLOUR WHEEL

A quick follow up on this post The Colour Wheel Quilt is Done, about the color wheel quilt I made to use as a teaching aid when I give a workshop next year (September 2024).

By the way I will share more information about that workshop including the venue once that venue gets ready to publish its online catalogue listing the workshop. If that doesn’t happen before October 2023, then I’ll go ahead and share as I’ve shared it with the Quiltfolk article writer for Issue 28 that comes out in October so it will be publicly revealed then anyway!

I had put the quilt away until next year for the workshop but then I decided to find a place for it in my studio so I could enjoy it before then – here it is now on a wall in my studio that I rearranged to make room for it:

VARIOUS RANDOM INFORMATION

John who loves to cook, tried making Ramen for the first time the other night and it came out pretty good!

My yellow rose bush in my front garden is finally taking off and here is one of its lovely roses:

And finally, here is Mike and his “cousin” Goose both trying to via for John’s laps (Goose won) when John was visiting his Dad the other day.

Hmm, I just realized that technically Goose is Mike’s “uncle” not his cousin – ha!

A Crafter's Life, Agriculture Report, Sunflowers!

The Sunflowers!

October 14, 2022October 25, 2023 tierneycreates: a fusion of textiles and smiles

We’ll continue with stories from the tierneycreates Beastie on our trip to Ireland (see post Guest Blog Post: Beasties Return to Ireland!) but I’d like to pepper in some posts that I as drafts before I went to Ireland, planning to schedule them for posting while I was overseas, but forgot about them (distracted by Ireland!).

I love sunflowers, so much that I have a category on my blog on posts about them – Sunflowers!.

Summer is over and we are now deep into Autumn but I wanted to share some of the sunflowers in my garden this season that made me smile. Also I learned how to properly harvest sunflower seeds (thank you YouTube).

Here some of my favorite sunflowers from my garden (to me they are glorious…to you you might wonder: “why is Tierney using up some of her blog’s image limit on these pictures”, ha!):

This year I successfully grew a giant sunflower. Yes ONE giant sunflower, but when it finished blooming and go to the seed maturing phase of its existence, I figured out how to harvest the seeds for next year:

I am pretty excited as I think there are over 100 sunflower seeds in that jar. Just think if every seed became a giant sunflower and then I harvest each of those – I could have a “Sunflower Empire” at my house! (No worries of this happening, I do not have the garden space to achieve this…unless my neighbors let me use their front lawns also….)

MY FANTASY:

Okay I will be happy with 5 instead of just 1 giant sunflower next year.

Speaking of fields of sunflowers, I do have a wonderful memory of actually sitting in a field of sunflowers. I did this in 1998 during my first visit to Italy. Here is a photo I took of a photo in an old scrapbook:

I wonder if my partner John will mind if I pull up the grass in our backyard and turn it into a field of sunflowers…

I love sunflowers so much I have them around my house. Here is my upstairs guest bathroom which is decorated in a sunflower theme:

Recently I brought home a new enamel tea pot and cups from Ireland and I had my first pot of tea with them and used my sunflower tea cozy!

By now you are likely tired of sunflowers so it’s good it is the end of this post (smile).

A Crafter's Life, Agriculture Report, Studio, Sunflowers!

Update on Memory Quilt

August 1, 2022October 25, 2023 tierneycreates: a fusion of textiles and smiles

Thought I would give a little update on the memory quilt I am making for a grieving friend who lost her mother, with her mother’s favorite clothes. Here is a link to the previous post if you’d like some additional background – Update on “The Challenge” .

Here is the quilt top completed that I shared in that previous post:

Originally I was thinking of sending it out for professional long-arm quilting and my friend was going to pay for the professional quilting. Then I got concerned with there being issues over the unusual fabrics I had used in the quilt (acrylic sweater, polyester scarf, velour robe, etc) with the long arm quilting machine.

I discussed it with my friend and she was good with me quilting it myself (though it would not be nearly as lovely quilting as a professional long-arm) and she would give me money for the cost of the batting, etc. She is not a quilter and does not have expectations of super high quality machine quilting on my part – whew!

Last week I was trying to figure out the logistics of domestic machine quilting and thought I better hand stitch some of the blocks that have special logos, embroidery, etc. to secure them instead of trying to machine quilt around the logos. I found some heavy embroidery thread from my stash of thread of Sashiko* stitching and did some lap quilting (in the middle of the hot summer):

(*but wait a minute Tierney: I’ve followed your blog a long time and I do not remember any posts about Sashiko stitching…Why yes, I have the supplies and started a piece like 10 – 12 years ago…but someday I am really going to pick the piece up again and then blog about it..)

It was fun and for a moment (yes only a wee moment), I actually considered hand quilting the entire quilt. But I came to my senses as that would not be very fun in the hot summer and I would like to get this quilt to my friend, who is facing some other life challenges right now, sooner than in 6 months to a year! (Exhibit A – “Seattle Scrappy” which took me over a year to hand quilt – Seattle Scrappy is Done!)

Speaking of hot summer, I recently got my first full sized tomato (as opposed to the grape or cherry tomatoes I have successfully grown) in my little container garden on my upper back deck and I was so happy!

As I joked on my @tierneycreates Instagram account, I wanted to frame it! As of this writing, I now have two full sized tomatoes. Right now both tomatoes are sitting as decoration on my kitchen counter and I better use them before they go bad!

I am also celebrating the appearance of the first sunflower in my garden. I love love love sunflowers and I’ve blogged about them several times in the past especially when I lived in my house in Oregon where I grew sunflowers every year.

Postscript

We are at that point in summer (August), where for me I am OVER summer and the heat, longing for Fall/Autumn.

I was so longing for Fall that I made one of my favorite colder weather dishes – chicken pot pie:

I made two because we help feed John’s recently widowed father (John’s stepmother suddenly passed at the end of 2021) who lives nearby and he loves my chicken pot pie!

Yes it was lovely (not) having the hot oven, in the heated up kitchen due to the hot oven, in the hot weather outside. Brilliant, eh?

Also just sitting around one evening with that memory quilt on my lap hand quilting it made me yearn for cooler weather.

But then I reminded myself that come early March, I am only dreaming of warm weather! I have to always remember to just embrace the current season I am in.

So back to relishing in my 2 full sized tomatoes and my sunflowers (smile).

A Crafter's Life, Agriculture Report

Awesome Surprise Treats in the Mail!

August 21, 2021October 25, 2023 tierneycreates: a fusion of textiles and smiles

Usually my blog post stories are running a couple weeks behind (at least) in what is currently going on in my life. My @tierneycreates Instagram is more up to date. Well this blog post is actually current with my life like my Instagram.

I returned home from nearly a week in Wilmington, North Carolina with my partner John (who was on a business trip) and guess what I had in the mail?

A YUMMY surprise all the way from South Africa!

My longtime blogging buddy Mariss (@fabrications) back in June sent me the goodies pictured above which included two of her handmade pin cushions, and 2 months later they arrived!

In addition to the pin cushions, I was surprised with some amazing Nelson Mandela fabric!

Bet you do not see this everyday!

Of course it is too precious to use, so maybe I will just frame it. Okay, okay, maybe I will use it in a project some day…maybe…

I’ve been blogging for nearly 8 years and I’ve met some pretty incredible and talented people from all over the world. Several of those people have been so generous in sending me treats in mail over the years. I’ve sent out treats also of course. You all know who you are and I so appreciate you!

And I am going to be putting together some special treats for Mariss in the near future (for their 2 months+ journey to South Africa)!

Postscripts

One of my blogging buddies @quiteayarnblog has an ongoing series called “Agriculture Report” whose title always cracks me up because it is an update of what is going on in her garden.

In the same vein, I thought I would share my own “Agriculture Report” and share what to me is some exciting news:

I was able to grow enough basil to make Pesto
I was able to grow enough tomatoes to make ONE dish

You might be wondering: “why is this exciting” or “why is this news”?!?!?

Well after living many years in places such as Seattle and Central Oregon where growing “crops” was not that challenging (especially not in Seattle where it seemed like you could just throw seeds on the ground in passing and you’d have a bumper crop of whatever), I’ve been living in Denver, Colorado where growing things is challenging. We have a short growing season.

Last year I tried my first patio garden on the upper deck with meager results. This year, and perhaps it was because we had an unseasonably large amount of rain, I had good (well for Denver) results!

Here is my “bumper crop” of basil (enough for ONE batch of Pesto):

And here is my “bumper crop” of Roma and Cherry tomatoes (enough to make ONE dish):

Now it could just be me because when I first moved to the Denver area I took Mike the Miniature Schnauzer to a groomer near Boulder, Colorado and she had an amazing garden. I might just need to learn how to garden here!

Then I can provide better “Agriculture Reports” in the future (smile).

Agriculture Report, Sunflowers!

Savoring the Sunflowers

October 1, 2019October 25, 2023 tierneycreates: a fusion of textiles and smiles

I love sunflowers so much I have a series of posts about them – Sunflowers!.

In late summer 2019, I added some sunflowers to my new life for two reasons: 1) in honor of the beauty of my previous life; and 2) in gratitude that I have been able to experience beauty in my life again despite my ongoing grieving of the loss of my husband last December.

In April this year I left my life in Central Oregon behind and moved to the greater Denver metropolitan area (see series of posts Colorado Bound). My house sold in May and for the first time in my life I lived alone in an apartment.

As I shared in my post 08/18/19 post Morning Walk in Black and White, my dog Mike and I moved this summer from my apartment into a house. Living in a house now gave me access to a garden again.

I have been careful not to try and recreate the life I previously had in Central Oregon while my husband was alive, but I did want to bring a little special beauty into it and I planted sunflower seeds early in the summer in the front and back yards.

And they grew.

And they made my smile and brought some joy into my life.

We decided to harvest the seeds (the sunflowers are all done flowering now) and replant them next Spring – they are currently drying in the garage:

I hope next summer to enjoy sunflowers from these seeds. These sunflowers were special because they reminded me that I can still enjoy beauty in my life.

Postscript

Fall is here in the greater Denver metro area and the summer flowers are dying off but there is still so much beauty all around.

I went for a walk this weekend on the hiking trails behind where I live and had a lovely walk through marshlands:

And visited with a butterfly:

A Crafter Needs to Eat, Agriculture Report

Apple Rescue and Pre-Fall Cooking

September 16, 2018October 25, 2023 tierneycreates: a fusion of textiles and smiles

Apple Rescue

In 2016 I did a series of posts about “rescuing” neglected fruit from fruit trees in my neighborhood in these posts:

The Fruits of My Neighborhood

The Fruits of My Neighborhood, Part II

The Fruits of My Neighborhood, Part III

Several readers expressed concerns that even though the trees were neglected, technically I did not have permission from the home owners (even if some of the houses were empty) to pick the fruit from their trees. Although the fruit was falling to the ground and rotting and no one was picking it, I put these comments in the back of my mind and skipped “fruit rescuing” in 2017.

But recently I’ve noticed several apple trees in front of a business at the edge of my neighborhood where the apples are ripe and are just being allowed to fall to the ground and rot. I couldn’t take it anymore and decided it was time for APPLE RESCUE!

Terry the Quilting Husband (TTQH) felt like an intervention was needed also and helped me pick apples from the trees:

Until we had a bag full of apples:

Saved from just being left to rot on the ground

We took the home and washed them and ended up with a nice haul of apples:

2018-09-15_12-03-38_871 — Getting a bath

2018-09-15_17-37-16_644 — Freshly rescued apples all safe and cozy in a bowl

What to do with out apple haul? Make an apple pie of course!

I used this online recipe from Taste of Home: tasteofhome.com/recipes/apple-pie/

And TTQH helped peel the apples while watching Sunday football games:

His hard work peeling 6 cups worth of sliced apples and my pie assembly skills resulted in this yummy pie:

We used so many apples for the pie, we only have a little left (maybe it is time to return to those trees for more “apple rescuing”!):

These apples might need more of their friends rescued

Pre-Fall Cooking

In Fall I start making soups and stews and I have a couple favorites which include (recipes are linked):

Bean and Chicken Sausage Stew

Winter Vegetable Soup

Beer Stew with Beer and Paprika

But as the tierneycreates Beastie mentioned in yesterday’s guest blogger post,Guest Blogger: A Monster Needs Her Sweater, the weather has dipped from late summer weather to early Fall weather.

The cool weather makes me want to start making stews now!

So using the last of the kale and tomato harvest from my garden, I made Bean and Chicken Sausage Stew !

Oh just a note on the linked recipe I provided – the original recipe calls for cannellini beans but I used black beans instead. Also I like to sauté the kale first in the already sautéed sausage and garlic; and if I am using fresh tomatoes as I did this time – I sauté the tomatoes also, before adding the beans (and their liquid) and the broth.