Possibly Immortal

We inherited a lot of plants from the people who sold us our home; the lady of the house liked to garden. Unfortunately she tried to grow a lot of things that don't fare well in this region. She also put in some invasive plants like this Mexican Petunia, which is a Category 1 troublemaker that displaces native flowers, and is a real pain to eradicate.

Since the petunia patch happens to be contained in a spot where it can't spread we decided to leave it alone and just cut it out when it died during the winter. Which we did, down to two-inch stalks we planned to till into the ground in spring. Only it grew back within a couple weeks. That started a cycle of cutting it again or watching it freeze during frost nights, and then seeing it grow back again.

Since then we've tried everything we can think of short of setting it on fire to discourage it from growing, and it still grows and flowers beautifully. It's hard to kill something that determined to live. It's still going strong -- which is likely why it's a Category 1 invasive -- but we really need to get rid of it. So, next spring I'm going to persuade my guy to dig it all out and replace it with a native plant.

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Stuff

After finding this Caron one pound skein of lovely peach yarn in my thrifted lot I raided my stash for two cakes of Mandala in Pegasus, which matches it perfectly. For practice and hand therapy I'm going to make another Worth Street Afghan with this free pattern , but this time I'll use the yarn that was recommended for it plus the one pound skein. I'm not quite ready to do the vintage/recycled linen quilt I had planned (still a bit too nervous about the idea), so I'm going to use some color therapy and make a quilt from these thrifted green fat quarters. I considered doing another Yellow Brick road patchwork pattern, but I might go with a split rail fence like this one.

Better than Fried

I cut some chives from the kitchen garden to make garlic-chive baked fries for dinner. This is a great side dish for veggie burgers. Click here for the recipe from Taste of Home.com.

In the Kitchen Garden

Our strawberries are taking over the kitchen garden, but I don't mind. This week I want to make some strawberry banana nice cream (a vegan version of ice cream) and maybe a chocolate cake with berries and cream for the topping. There's thyme in the garden now, too, which I'll dry and jar for cooking along with the chives and the oregano. Next we'll plant cucumbers, as I use a ton of those in our salads and for snacks.

Rayen

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