Choice Morsels

The Mama Kat prompt today is about my... Everyone dreams. It's how the brain rests.  Dreams occur during the the initial stage of sleep called REM stage (Rapid Eye Movement) and last only a few minutes. The average person moves up and down between REM and deep dreamless sleep at least 3 or 4 times a night. But to recall a dream requires either waking up in the middle of it or right afterward and to retain memory of the details, one must either tell someone about it or write it down---something so it gets rehearsed into memory. Otherwise, dreams are fleeting things, fading quickly away. For me, my dreams are generally adventurous. I'm also what you would call a "lucid dreamer." That means I have an awareness of what I'm dreaming and frequently take conscious control of what's happening. Recently, I've had 2 fun, very vivid dreams: one from last week ago and one from this morning: The setting of the first was a large airplane hanger wher...

For me, here in northwest Florida, mid-February to the end of March is my window for edging and mulching all my beds while my grass hasn't fully awakened from it's winter sleep.  I say this because I have southern creeping grass, like Centipede & St. Augustine, that is relatively easy to move while it's brown, but horrible to adjust once it's fully greened in and a thick mat. Edging it now makes edging stray grass runners is easier later. Usually, I use mowings for mulch, but it helps to put down a base of pine bark mulch every couple years, then layer the mowings on top of that. This year, I'm laying down the pine bark mulch again.  Finished End of New Block Retaining Wall: I added these red scallop edged blocks on the outer edge to separate the dirt around the tree from the blocks forming the pad for the trash bin.   This, of course, involved moving those blocks over two inches! Then I added Liriope (pronounced la-rye-a-pee). It blooms purple flowe...

Today's featured Good Eating recipe is "Orange Dream Cake." This a great cake for your Holiday Entertaining! You'll need candied orange peels & an orange cake mix and the recipe comes from the back of the Paradise label. Candied orange peels are available with other candied fruit used for fruitcakes during the Holiday season at your grocery or can be ordered directly from the company @  Paradise .  Candied fruit can be stored easily in the freezer. I recommend using a bundt cake or tube pan for this, if you have one. It looks so pretty and tastes wonderful! It's a great alternative if you don't like tradtional fruitcake! Orange Dream Cake: Cake Ingredients: 1 package Orange Cake Mix (no substitutions!) 1 package (3.4oz) Vanilla Instant Pudding 1 8 oz container Candied Orange Peel (or substitute one 15oz can drained mandarin oranges & some orange zest if peel is unavailable.) 4 eggs, beaten 1 cup sour cream  1/3 cup oil (or s...

First a couple of useful garden ideas from Pinterest to do with Cinnamon & Aspirin: #1)  Shake cinnamon over seedlings to prevent damping off diseases, mold and fungus! I have a seed tray I'm sprouting seedlings in for my herb, veggie & flower garden right now and having seedlings die from mold on the damp dirt is a common problem---so I'm trying the cinnamon cure.   My friend,  Megan, says she always has mold/mildew problems in anything she pots and I said, "why not mix a little cinnamon into the soil mix?" #2)  Two Aspirin in a spray bottle of water will prevent various mildew and fungus diseases common in the veggie and flower garden. But it must be used before the problem sets in as a preventive. But that is true even with commercial mildew treatments, too. Once a mildew is established, it can't really be stopped. I used this last year. I treat my Japanese Sky Pencils shrubs with it regularly because they can develop certain ...

The Mama Kat prompt for this week is: "Something that made you smile this week." Finally, today I smiled with satisfaction. In late 2013,with a starry-eyed visions of enjoying feathery visitors, I bought an Audubon-rated squirrel proof bird-feeder to hang in my yard. Only smaller birds, like finches, sparrows and wrens can access it. In the early spring of 2013, I filled the feeder with thistle seed, that is allegedly supposed to allure finches & chickadees. I was quickly disappointed. It didn't attract the business I'd hoped. In fact, I ended up taking it down within a couple months because I'd hung it on a hook attached to a pine tree, which made it accessible to a baby squirrel small enough to slide through the grill. So much for that. I'm not interested in feeding nuisance squirrels. Then later in the fall, we purchased a nice tall shepherd hook to hang the feeder on, which I placed away from the trees ,  yet in a spot still easily visible ...

Greetings! Another fine Wednesday for gardening here in the south! One of the good things about flowers and plants is if you don't like where they are, they can be moved. We've decided the Cedar tree out front isn't looking healthy and it's too big to decorate for Christmas anymore. (A big section on one side is brown and dead looking--why I don't know. Either too much sun or some type of fungus.) However, it's not so big we can't cut it down with a simple bow-saw ourselves. The stem is maybe 4 inches across. I want to replace it with one of the evergreen trees such as I see used in the landscape at our local Walmart. They're already trained into a conical Christmas tree shape and have pretty red berries. Perhaps a type of needle-less holly; I'm not sure.  I'd like to get 2: one to replace the cedar in front and one for in back where an Azalea died. Their denseness would make them attractive to birds for nesting. Today's Garden ...

Today's Mama Kat prompt topic is: "A Valentine inspired craft!" I don't often do anything for Valentines--years working in a flower shop really burnt me out on it. Still---once in a blue moon---a mood to do something creative will come over me. This was one of those blue moon years. Because I used to make Christmas pin ornaments, I have literally tons of assorted sequins of all shapes and sizes that I've had for years,  just sitting in my craft drawer doing nothing.  I also love blank card stock. I keep a box of multi-color card stock & envelopes on hand, because I like to recycle cards I receive for birthdays and anniversary's into "new" refurbished cards. I don't know why it hasn't occurred to me before--but it suddenly came to me this week that with sequins plus card stock I could make some home-made Valentine magic!  So I promptly out the rubber cement and got busy. Below is photo example of one such card: a heart...