Vintage Home and Farm

  Our brussels sprouts have bolted and the flowers look a lot like broccoli, which made us wonder if brussels sprout flowers are edible.  There are quite a few articles out there about eating the leaves of the brussels sprout plant, but very little is written about the flowers.  So we decided to experiment with eating some to see how they tasted, since we did read that every part of the brussels sprout plant is edible. We noticed that the flowers not only look like broccoli but also taste similar to broccoli, too. However, we do know for sure that these are brussels sprout plants and not broccoli because we have been watching them form the sprouts and have picked a few off the plant to eat.  And of course, I also kept a record of these when I planted them.  Below you can see the sprouts forming on the plant earlier in the year.   Unfortunately, our sprouts never did very well in the garden. I think it's because we waited until early fall to get them pl...

We removed the rest of the junk that former owners had left behind in the old milk shed.  The shed is now pretty much empty. Outside the milk shed, we stacked everything into piles: Found treasures to keep. Flower pots and planters, a striped patio umbrella that was in amazingly good shape, drip irrigation hose, decorative outdoor wire baskets, a piece of rail from a railroad, nice-sized pieces of treated lumber, enormously giant nails (a foot long and an inch or more thick!), and more. There is also an old cast iron bathtub that we are thinking about parking next to the entrance of our property or by the garden and planting flowers in it.  We had to use the tractor to move the tub out of there. Pile #2 had items to discard. Broken terracotta pots, bent and rusted metal poles, a metal pamphlet display rack, brittle garden hose, hand-operated cement mixer, a small piece of metal roofing, and more. The last pile contained wood that needed to be moved to the burn pile. Mostly it ...

I didn't think we had too many slugs in the garden this late in the winter until I went looking for them this morning.  Since we are using cardboard in the walkways as a weed barrier, with rocks and pots of plants holding the cardboard down so it doesn't blow away, I realized what we've actually done here is given the slugs tons of hiding places all through the garden. That's not to say the cardboard is a bad thing, because it does an excellent job of preventing weeds and it also keeps the soil from eroding.  However, since slugs can really decimate a garden, finding good methods of slug control are important if cardboard is going to be used.  So this morning I brought a little metal pail with me to the garden to see how many of the little buggers I could gather.  At first when I began looking for the slugs, I turned over a piece of cardboard and looked beneath at the ground.  There were no slugs there crawling on the ground.  Well! What am I worried about?...

The buds on the plum branches that I put in the kitchen window have opened. This is the first year I have tried forcing branches to bloom in the house. So pretty! We are enjoying seeing them every day. What an easy and affordable way to brighten a room with flowers.

During the chilly winter months when there were fewer outdoor projects, we spent more time indoors doing creative activities like sewing.  One of the sewing projects we enjoyed was making envelope-style pillow covers for our living room using flannel fabric that I bought on sale from Jo-Ann Fabric.  The material was only $2.99 a yard!  We bought enough fabric to make curtains for two bedroom windows as well.  It was fun choosing from among the hundreds of different prints in their flannel fabric department. Envelope-style pillow covers for toss pillows have an opening in the back that you use to slide your pillow form through.  The cover easily removes so that it can be washed.  You can see from the image above why it's necessary for us to wash the toss pillow covers on our couch fairly regularly. Mojo is such a spoiled doggy. Many websites offer instructions for how to make envelope-style pillow covers.  Here are the instructions I followed from the ...

Here at Vintage Home and Farm, it's time to clean up the flower beds and plant more flowers!  Daffodils are already starting to come up by the barn.  Our flower beds still need additional plants to fill in the empty spaces left behind when we removed a towering laurel hedge from the space about a year and a half ago. We also have to be careful not to plant anything that the deer love, since we have many deer that come through our yard and munch on things.  I planted three heather bushes along the walkway.  A bumblebee appeared on one of the plants while I was putting it in the ground!  Bumblebees are one of the first bees to emerge in the spring.  Incidentally, I recently learned that if you want to control wasps, hornets and yellow jackets, you need to put traps out for them as soon as there is any hint of spring (like right now).  The mated queen is the only one to survive the winter and she's out looking for a new place to build the nest. They neve...