Biscuits, Boraxo, and buckets o' posies...

 Are you a biscuit eater?  I am!  I've been thinking about biscuits with cream and apricot jam for a long time and yesterday was the day they happened!  It was drizzly and cool and I thought HP and I would have biscuits and coffee for afternoon tea.  They were even better than I imagined.  Just when others like GG at Firefily Cottage are blogging about chugging down green smoothies and keeping it healthy, I'm making biscuits.  Ah well.  I really do intend to make one of those green smoothies....at least I'm gonna try.

 Today we went to town to get some supplies for branding coming up next week.  We also made a grocery run and a quick stop at the local Pamida for some garden herbs.  While I was moseying down the soap aisle at my rancher-friendly grocery store, I came upon this powdered hand soap -- Boraxo.  I had never seen it before, but I definitely knew the name Borax so I read the label and decided it might make an extra-good soap to try at the mudroom sink where the dirtiest of the dirty wash up.  I took a turn at using it after planting the herbs and flowers and I liked it!  Now I'm wondering how I can make this stuff at home.  Can't be that hard, can it?  Borax and grated soap flakes, I'm thinking.  Kind of like the homemade laundry powder.  Check this out:  25 household uses for Borax.

 I've got my buckets o' posies all planted and I'm happy, happy just looking at them.  There's just something about bright red geraniums on the front porch, don't you think?

Hanging just above the geraniums is my only hanging pot of the summer.  I used to hang lots of pots and baskets around, but they dry out so quickly in our summer heat and wind that I decided against it this year.  I do like to hang this old tea kettle though, so I planted some blue lobelia in it.

I've been working at my garden beds lately and although it's been very cool and wet here, the peas, beans and zucchini are coming up and so are the radishes and lettuce.  I might even have a couple heads of Buttercrunch to pull up for a salad this weekend.  Oh, how I love me some green stuff from the garden.  No green smoothies from my lettuce.  Just salad -- at least for now.  Hubby is going to build me a garden gate to put up on my new deer-proof fence.  It's not going to be anything fancy.  Just a rustic look for a ranchwife's garden.  Simple yet cute.  I'll snap some pictures of that soon.

  Vincent van Gogh, Irissen, 1889

My flower beds have changed from the reds and yellows of tulips and daffodils to the blues and purples of iris, blue flax, alium, and purple columbine.  How did it changed over night?  Flower fairies?

More than anything, I must have flowers, always, always. 

~Claude Monet