It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.....

The only solution for all of my friends in other parts of the world is to move to Arizona. The sun is shining. Not a flake of snow. Not a drop of rain. The temperature at 10:00AM is 66° and rising. It is expected to be in the 70s today.

I went out earlier in short sleeves to pick some thyme out of the garden. Yes. I have thyme. My rosemary is in full bloom. OK, I won't rub it in any more. I had a reason for picking thyme. Tessie wanted some to hang in the kitchen to dry. She loves using it in her potions. It's the only herb that she can use without my help in chopping. For her, they are about the size that bay leaves would be for me. She will simply leave them hanging until they are needed.

I just picked the tips and tied them with red thread to hang from the shelf by the stove.

I am not sure what the concoction in the bottle on the shelf could be. I will have to ask her to label it.

She uses a lot of the recipes in this book. I have mentioned it before. It is invaluable for would be witches of any level. I don't imagine it is still in print. I bought it years ago. I just looked on Alibris.com. Their most inexpensive copy right now is 36 dollars and change!!! I am sure that you could find it somewhere a lot cheaper.

The reason that I put a scan of the cover here is so that you could "borrow" it and scale it down for any mini witches that you might know. I use Paintshop Pro. I imagine that you could even do it in Paint or Word if need be. Anyway, in case you can't tell by now, I am a big fan of this particular book.

Last but not least for today, I finished the toadstool tray garden for Tessie yesterday afternoon. As soon as I did, One of the neighbors had to join in the fun. No. That's not a one of those garden gnome statues. That's really one of the neighbors. He lives among the roots of a tree down the road. He has trained his very own transport snail.

I have had the terracotta tray for a few years and never could decide what to plant in it. When I went to look in my gardening supplies I found it and it was the perfect size. I planted it first with Fast Grab Aileen's glue smeared on the bottom. I sprinkled that with two colors of railroad greenery. Then I placed the toadstools in by putting more glue on the bottom of each one and pushing them down into the greenery so that it came up around the stems. It needed something else, so I planted 3 poison Ivy plants at the back for height. It still needed something. I went out in the back yard and picked out a few tiny pebbles and glued them in here and there. About that time Mortimer inched his way forward on his snail. That was what was missing! I bribed him to stay whilst I snapped a few photos for you. He is a real grouch. He had the nerve to complain that I didn't leave a snail trail for him to follow. He had to back out the way that he came in......The last that I saw of him, he was headed back to his tree mumbling something about how big people just didn't understand how to build practical gardens for gnomes. Oh well. It wasn't a garden for him anyway. Tessie is pleased and that's all that matters.

See you tomorrow.