Fig Trees!

Long before we ever bought the house, I began dreaming about our garden-to-be.  A luscious landscape, teeming with a wide array of succulent jewels, straight from Mother Earth's fertile womb. An abundance of nutritious organic fruits and vegetables for us to consume merrily while being simultaneously eco + health friendly...

Well, we haven't quite gotten there yet.  Okay, so we're not even close.  Maybe we haven't even tried...  To our dismay we have quickly discovered that the "fertile earth" here kind of sucks... It's filled with rock hard clay (not to mention rock hard rocks), there's very little drainage and we're going to have to tear up our grass/lawn to put a garden area in.  

We haven't figured out how we're going to work this yet.  There is a good solution.  We are still pondering it. Perhaps this is a project for spring 2013. 

We lost little time, however, buying a small collection of fruit plants to tide us over until the spring! To start - we bought 3 beautiful fig trees!  Figs are DELISH, and so expensive to buy fresh.  When I found out they grow well here in Maryland, there wasn't a question!

We went back and forth with the decision to keep the fig trees potted or plant them in the ground.  So far we've decided to go with potted, for a number of reasons:  

• As previously mentioned - the dirt sucks. It doesn't drain well (which apparently is very important for fig happiness), but it is also REALLY hard to dig a hole in! 
• We don't know where to put them.  It's tough to make such long term decisions and we just weren't ready to pull the trigger yet.
• Figs are tropical trees and don't like the cold winter. Keeping fig trees alive through winter in Maryland can entail wrapping them in plastic/straw/mulch/leaves/other shenanigans.  Alternatively, you can move potted fig trees to a dark basement/shed/CELLAR (woot we have one!), to encourage the tree to go dormant for the winter, but not die in the cold/frost/nasty winter weather.
• Keeping fig trees potted is a great way to constrain their growth and maintain a reasonable sized fig tree.

Woo!  Behold our lovely collection of fig trees!

This is our 'celeste' fig tree.  I love the huge willowy leaves.  As you can see, it does have a number of small baby figs.. but they don't appear to be growing... I hear celeste trees can be quite 'difficult'.  Right now with the pot, the tree is about my height, approximately 5'10"... (okay, more like 5'4")

This is our 'brown turkey'.  It has recently exploded with new leaf growth, I think its enjoying the new larger pot.  It has a ton of decent sized figs - I hope they ripen.  The figs on this tree are shaped sort of like a drop of water - rounded on the end, but oblong rather than circular.  This tree is MUCH shorter, and was clearly pruned to grow out rather than up.

Lastly, this is our 'texas everbearing' fig tree.  There seems to be some conflicting information - it may (or may not) be the same thing as a 'brown turkey'.  Why a nursery would sell the same thing under different names beats me.  But, from what I can tell - the figs are shaped QUITE differently.  I have noticed one large fig growing into a shape that is nearly a perfect circle.  They are quite rounded!

After much research, we planted them in a mixture of planting mix, compost manure, and perlite, to encourage soil drainage.  We topped the mix with mulch, to hold in some moisture.  

So far, the trees appear to be healthy. The celeste did suffer a spat of yellowing leaves not long after we brought her home, but I think it might have been a massive heat wave that sprung up at the time.  The other two have shown a ton of leaf growth recently, which is good I suppose, but annoying because I would prefer more figs!  Ah well. Hopefully the current figs all ripen up and we can feast upon them.  :)

We are still fig newbies - so please feel free to share your tips and expertise!

Our Backyard

As promised, I ventured out to get pictures of the backyard and the back of the house.  The sun was beautiful this evening.

The back of the house:

The patio is really lovely.  It also has a nice view of the nearly the whole yard, and it's covered.  
It'll be an amazing brunch spot.

We also have an exciting storm cellar which will come in handy if I get into canning...

The yard was a little big to capture in one picture, so I took the first picture from outside our side door, and the rest from every corner of the backyard looking back toward the house.

You can see where the butternut tree was. 

The garden is likely to go here, it gets sun all day. 

 Because I love the big tree, I took a couple more pics of it.  Unfortunately it lost a number of branches in the big storm (that stole my butternut tree) but it's still beautiful.

Kitchen - Painted!

I wasn't a big fan of the yellow/creme color in the kitchen.  Not because I don't like yellow (I do), but it looked... 

dirty? ugly? dingy?  Something.

So painting was the obvious choice.  But we don't let Clint paint anymore, hehe. That was unfortunate though, because painting the kitchen was nothing short of a huge pain in the ass.  :)

But in the end, I think it was worth it.  

We used Behr Premium Plus Ultra (a Paint and Primer in One) in "Misty Morn UL220-9" = a light blue color:

Not only does it help the island 'match' the kitchen, but it really brings out the color pattern in the marble.

It also kind of matches the distressed blue paint on the shelf.

Puff was so tired after a long day of painting.

It seems like blue is probably not a common color for a kitchen, but I find it pretty soothing. I also really like the way the 

stainless steel and cabinets look with it.

On top of the pleasant change of color, the kitchen just FEELS so much cleaner.  The walls were dirty, and filled with cobwebs.

Now the kitchen just begs to be cooked in.  :)

Kitchen - post move in, pre-painting

The kitchen is big, and there was basically a whole wall empty of cabinetry. So we decided to fill it. With cute stuffs.

We found this wine rack/wine glass holder for cheap at HomeGoods. We don't drink a lot of wine, but the rustic metal and weathered wood embodied the 'industrial farmhouse' style we are going for

and we couldn't pass it up.

Throw in a few shower curtain hooks from BB&B, and voila!

A perfect 'industrial farmhouse' pot rack.

We also got this wooden shelf at HomeGoods. Ideally, this is the kind of thing we would make ourselves, but we're not there yet.

I'm obsessed with the idea of using wooden pallets to make things.

But for now, this will do.

I absolutely fell in love with this vintage lunch box at an estate sale (we went for an old trunk). Clint let me buy it. Actually, he bought it for me. <3

We also had to buy a microwave:

And awesomely, Clint got this cast iron skillet for free, as an anniversary gift with his company. Woot!

Nothing says country kitchen like a cast iron skillet!

Kitchen - pre move in

When we were looking at the pictures of the farmhouse online (before we bought it), it looked like the kitchen *might* be decent. The previous owner's pictures didn't do the kitchen justice - it's AMAZING.

(On the whole, the pictures didn't do the farmhouse justice. We were REALLY skeptical about even coming to look at the place.)

There is a 22,000 BTU 6-burner BlueStar range, in-wall Electrolux convection oven, and a cabinet-matching Bosch dishwasher.

Not to mention the awesome vent hood (perfect for when you're cooking Korean BBQ at home).

Unfortunately... there was a wildly UNMATCHING KITCHEN ISLAND. Apparently its the vogue thing to do these days?

On the whole though, can't complain.

The cabinetry is custom and from New Hampshire:

The stove is big and lovely:

This is where we've put the table:

Slightly awkwardly in front of the HVAC, a little storage closet and a really old phone, but what can you do?

The kitchen (well the whole house really) boasts the original (pine?) floors.

For the most part they really have a lot of charm.

For the most part...

At some point we will have to do something about the painted plywood mend job where the kitchen and the mudroom meet.