very pretty greenhouse gal!
Who has a potager?
If you could cover with a sheet and rig a low wattage light bulb inside the enclosure it might keep the blossoms safe. Had a friend who used to do that with a lemon tree ......
Rah, is tonight the only night that such low temps are forecast? If you can rig up the sheet and light that might do it. Lots of luck!
Here's my garden seen from the driveway, with the pond in front. You can get a better idea of the fencing from here:
I love all of these gardens. Please post pics throughout the season!
Donna, I too am impressed with your ability to garden at 83. Something to aspire to!
Greenhouse gal your garden is beautiful! How lucky to have so much space. I'd like to see a picture of your sign when it is hung.
I too would like to see pictures of the potagers throughout the spring and summer.
rah,
We're getting down to 30 tomorrow night. I will do the same thing I did last year--throw a plastic painter's drop sheet over all my fruit trees. It worked fine last year. It's light enough that it doesn't put too much weight on the young trees but it keeps the frost off the blooms. Hubby helped me--we centered the sheet on top of the tree, let it drape, and loosely tied it around the bottoms with binder twine. Worked like a charm. When we no longer needed them, we folded up to save for another year--obviously this year :-{ They are pretty cheap at Wal Mart or HD.
Hey Rah, thinking of your apples. TG I didn't plant much yet!!
gloria 125, I have dried fruits in the past but not lately. My Mom and Dad did a lot of fruit drying and were actually invited to the Spokane Worlds Fair in the 70s, they demonstrated drying and the results and home made teas, for a week. Mother had made up a nice little folder that she passed out.
Here at this location, ( I lived with my husband in the middle of our 80 acre orchard, at our house there for fifty years. )
After he passed away I sold out as I didn't want to live in the middle of an orchard any longer. And moved to this location 14 years ago. Had to start new with everything, so don't have as many fruit trees as I used to have. But have enough for myself, and some for neighbors and my fairly close family, close is 6 hours away over two mountain passes!!!!!
greenhouse gal, lovely garden you have. I have a 10 X 20 foot gh. attached to garage, that now is filled with seedlings.
It was almost like spring here yesterday and today, in very low 60s, yesterday no wind , today rather windy.
Donna
I might be able to use a comforter or quilt because the fence is behind them and can support the weight--luckily it is just one night
Donna
The fruit trees must have been lovely blooming in the spring in that part of the world.
I lived in the middle of an avacado orchard in Santa Barbara. They don't get spring blossoms though. Here I live in the middle of what's left of a 100 year old pecan orchard. No blossoms on those trees either!
Rah, how did your trees make out? I hope they're okay! Or won't you know for a bit?
I am having issues with my potager sign. I painted it on a piece of rough board that we took from the old cottage on our property, when we remodeled it as a studio for me. It was probably milled on this lane long ago. But it's rather dark, and the two-toned green I used for the lettering doesn't show up very well. I'm trying to think of a way to resolve it! So until then it won't be put up.
Rutholive, my gh is an 8x8 Rion. I haven't repotted my tomato plants and put them out there yet because it's still a mite chilly at night, even with a small auxilliary heater.
My trees are just starting to blossom now!
Leslie
will know after Wednesday morning--supposed to be 30 tonight and 28 tomorrow night--I covered them and then it rained so I am not sure if it will help
We've got the same temperatures predicted for Tuesday and Wednesday night. My trees haven't completely opened yet, so I'm not sure if this will affect them.
Leslie
We are right on the edge of a hard freeze, it will depend on the cloud cover, praying for clouds.
By the way, here's my sign. But it needs more contrast and I'm not sure how to increase it. It's going to be hung above the entrance to the garden that faces the driveway, so it really should stand out better than this! Maybe if I add a drop-shadow to it...
Very nice. Are you totally against doing it in a glossy black? How about hunter green?
BTW, how did you do the lettering? We want to do a sign for our house.
KaperC, some friends suggested doing drop-shadows using a mixture of black with a little yellow to make a very dark green. I didn't want straight black letters, though. In fact, I was toying with painting the letters different garden-y colors - greens, purples, blues, pinks - but I realized that then I'd never see the words well enough. I like the colors in the sign I have now, and I think I'll see whether the shadow effect makes them stand out enough to do the trick.
I don't know whether you can do this in Word; I haven't figured that out yet. To make a sign I use Appleworks, pick a font, enlarge the words to the size I need for my letters, then change the style to "outline" so I have an outline I can fill. I print it on however many sheets of paper are necessary and then tape them together. I either use tracing paper or I print it backwards and pencil over the lines with soft lead, and then transfer the design to my surface, taping it to the board so it doesn't shift while I'm working on it. This one was hard because the surface was rough and also dark, so I ended up having to sand the board and try again.
I hate signs, but end up doing a certain amount of it for our place. Actually I'm a painter and do mostly commissioned portraits and some landscapes, so I'm way out of my league with the lettering!
greenhouse gal,
The drop shadow won't do much good if you do it in a dark color, and a light color doesn't really look like a shadow. Try doing a thin outline in a very light shade of the same color. You can do it in Appleworks and see the effect. Make your background dark brown, like the board, then assign the letters a color close to the one you're painting, then when you create outlines assign a lighter color to the stroke and the letter color to the fill. You can play with the weight of the outline and the color mix on the outline. Anytime you have a dark background you need a strong transition to make the lettering visible.
Learned this on a company logo that I designed and took to a sign maker. She taught me quite a bit about signage and lettering design on that one simple project.
That's what I had in mind, GG! Glad to know I was on the right track.
Good tips, jeffinsgf!
Thanks for the ideas, Jeffinsgf! I'm not quite sure I follow you on this. Do you mean rather than having a drop shadow, doing a thin outline in a very light shade of, say, green? Would you try it in the Appleworks paint program or the draw program?
The problem is that the background isn't really a dark brown; it's such an in-between color that the value of my paint doesn't contrast with it no matter which color I use.
I had started in a darker green but then added the yellow accents, which did seem to help bring it out but not enough.
Yesterday as I was driving somewhere I noticed a sign with similar colors, in which they used a thin border of white around the letters and then a thinner border of black around that. But I have neither room nor patience for such a treatment!
From what I learned about sign making in that one project, the light colored outline is the key.
I cheated and used InDesign, but you get the idea. I also was lazy and just used white. A shade of light green might be better.
Oops. Dave doesn't like PDF. Here's JPG
One more thing that I just thought of.
Unless you feel compelled by creative desire to paint the sign, you might take the computer file to a sign shop and see if they can print the file to vinyl, which you would then peel and stick on the wood.
Then I'd still have to wrestle with spacing! I don't know how long vinyl letters would stick, either, do you?
That looks nice, but I'm going to try the drop shadows and see how they look, since that's easier than outlining the whole thing. If worse comes to worse I can always use it for firewood!
I don't have InDesign - just Appleworks, Photoshop Elements and Word....
You should be able to assign a different color to the outline in just about any of those programs.
They don't give a separate outline to the letters; they just make the letters themselves an outline so they're easy to paint.
Try it with a dark green drop shadow and see how that looks, if you can do that.
Sorry, I didn't save the file.
Not to worry, I already painted it with a drop-shadow. Here it is; I think it works:
Looks great! :-)
Love it with the drop-shadow!
What a difference, looks great!
KaperC, are you inspired? What kinds of signs were you contemplating? Thanks, Cathy and Lizzie! I am really pleased with it. I was toying with the idea of putting some leaves in the corners, or flowers and veggies, but I think I'll leave well enough alone!
Leslie
Now I need a sign for my little greenhouse, I guess "keep out" wouldn't be very nice? :-D
What about "Trespassers Will Be Put to Work!" or "Abandon All Leisure, Ye Who Enter Here..."
I'll bet we could come up with some real winners if we all put our heads to it!
Leslie
When I'm in there, I keep hearing the song from cinderella, "in my own little greenhouse (corner), in my own little chair, I can be whatever I want to be"
All you garden set ups look simply wonderful.
Rah, did you do all the building of the wood fencing? Is it intended to be more decorative and space defining? I know, here, with openings that large in fence, all the critters I would be trying to keep out (rabbits, dogs, ground squirrels) could walk right through - except gophers who would have tunneled in regardless!
Sujo, The bricks and stone for the raised beds look great. Were they new or salvaged?
Chrystel, very cool potting shed. Do you actually pot in there or on the porch? So cute, I would hate to get it dirty! LOL
Thanks quiltygirl!! The stone is a chunky field stone from a mountain in TN (given to me by my neighbor in the spirit of a co-op garden.) The bricks are a combo of old and new, some 70 years old, some printed with the word "calvert" and some new but recovered from a burned down house site. I have way vintage bricks on all my other borders and borders. I got most of them from a salvage yard downtown.
Greenhouse gal, I love your sign. I can see it hung with a rusty chain and some old railroad nails!!
Sujo, how neat that you're using such an interesting mixture of stone and brick! I'm looking forward to seeing it when your potager has green things in it, too.
We ended up hanging the sign using cuphooks, because we didn't want it to dangle too much and hit people on the head! That clearance isn't that high. Unfortunately it's very hard to read unless the sun is on it. I used a Minwax protective coating and it darkened the wood a bit. But it's one more detail to discover in checking out the garden, so that's nice.
