Busy days!

May is coming to a close and the season is starting to pick up! Nothing heralds "Work, Get your Work here!" like the first truly warm time of the year. No, not the "point and laugh, thought it was goinig to warm up didn't you...fooled ya." warm, the nice "okay, summer is coming" warm. Yes, there's a difference.

Winter brings a lot of things, snow, crackling fires, crackling hands and an increase in coffee consumption. Of course, with that increase the coffee can population in the house sky rockets. There's nothing like a coffee can, a good tin coffee can. Their uses are endless and usually so is the supply. This year, however, either we drank more coffee or there are no more small tidbits to be stored in a trusty, rusty coffee can. It's possible they bred, the laundry and dirty dishes do, maybe they decided to join in the fun. In any case, my waiting to be used coffee can storage was bursting at the seams by the time Spring arrived. Hmmmm.......

I hate to throw them out, so there they sat, multiplying by the week. Well with Spring comes flowers, with flowers comes a need to plant them in something (can you see where I'm going?), with those needs comes my yearly hem'n haw session in the garden centers. Containers are spendy, I'm sure I could manage flower beds too.

Oh now just hold the phone there missy! Shall we revisit the not so distant past of last year??? Coming back to you is it?? I thought it might. Just for the record, last year.....everything died. Irrigation died, plants died, only the weeds survived . No, not right now, no time to manage flower beds unless they are artistically wild......they aren't, soon, but not just yet.

It came to me in an epiphany! I'm sure I saw something similar years ago, kind of a "duh" moment really. The equation is simple.

Coffee can + spray paint + plants + hanger = Cute, finished, retasking, clearing out some room and completely me.

Better yet, I can make more throughout the season and have my little planters barfed all over the place. No weeds. I wander around watering with the kids and I can have the pretty.

Yay! I are smart. ;)

End result? They're a little thin yet, there's nasturtiums planted in there so they'll fill out during the summer.

Nothing is safe from them. ;) The one above is by the chicken yard, the one below is on a fence post by the pasture. I have more of them up, more that are drying and more that will be made.

Anna and Malina helped plant, Lars helped pick out, Leif was busy chasing baby grasshoppers and Bruce, well.....he's 13 now, come on! He helped paint actually.

Lars and Anna helped get half the corn in yesturday. I'll put more in next week, got a little too much sun the last couple of days and I've been banned. It seems that I've developed something of a sun allergy, so I need to ease myself into the sun. Biig problem. By the time it shows up, I'm really ready for it. Too much all at once and I get a rash. Anyway, apparently I wasn't sneaky enough with the itchy, or it could have been that it was kind of hard to miss....but I've been banned. Argh! Ah well, I've been washing wool and planting on the back patio, hanging up the laundry, all things I can do with minimal exposure.

Justin has been busy working on the lawn irrigation today. It's going fairly well, the children are familiar with most of the words he's used so far. Upside (yeah me and that upside), when he's finished it will be automated, and the heads will sink down. No more snapped off irrigation, well atleast on the ones that have been replaced.