Of Summer’s Magic in the Garden, Plus Miniatures

Hello hello lovely friends, from the land of sunshine heat, monsoon rain, growing things, sleepy dogs, sunburned shoulders and endless homemade popsicles.

I have some lovely little summer snippets for you. As well as a little video that I made of a miniature general store that I’ve been working on as a fun little summertime project.

I am testing a different way to post, which makes it much simpler and means I can be here more often.

I will also insert a little gallery of photos below to see how that works out.

Let me know if you like it?

These strawberry photos in my old clay pot are my absolute favorite photos of the season for some reason.

Incidentally, those strawberries have not stopped all summer.

And now a mama quail is in the pot with her eggs.

I am willing to let the strawberries go for her and her babies. I can always plant new strawberries next year, even though these have been around for a decade.

It’s no bother♡

As for what has been going on around here…

I have spent the better part of my summer at the country house.

My houses are 8 minutes apart, and I travel between them regularly. But as you know, I have lived at the country house for about 26 years (and at house 2 almost 10), and my old beloved gardens of my heart are here in the country. Although I do love the gardens I have built at house 2 deeply. I have a different connection to my country gardens because I’ve been here since I was in my early twenties.

So, I decided that this would be an old school immersion summer of vegetables, herbs, flowers and all the things that I’ve been doing for a couple decades or more at the country house.

The gardens are always going at the country house, but growing summer vegetables and such is a whole extra level of daily tending commitment, which I do quite love.

It’s the kind of summer where you work extra hard, wake up at 5 a.m. daily. Toil in the heat, dance in the hose, relax in the outdoor cast iron tub, and garden by moonlight.

When you do the full-blown big vegetable gardens, you are busy every single day and the rewards are vast♡♡♡

Every single morning I wake up super early and the first thing I do is put Poppy in her harness and skip outside to see how much taller the pumpkin vines that are growing up the trees and wisteria have grown. Then I check on all the other vegetables and the pumpkin patch, and I do my watering and tending for a few hours.

As you may know, Poppy hurt her knee tendons a couple times in a row, so I decided to get very serious about her healing and follow the guidelines that people have shared with their own pup journeys and those that the vet suggested as well. Which means Poppy can only walk for a little while on a harness (controlled walks), and then she’s back in the house. This is so that she does not run and blow out her tendons again, plus heals the current damage. Trust me, she tries to take off, so this is crucial. Sometimes I’m down in the dirt with her as she tries to escape. It’s a whole production I tell ya.

This can happen in many dogs. The vet says it’s a combination of genetics and her quads being so strong and her knees being so feeble and tiny. She has a very strong and large chest and then tiny little legs. Please send her some good vibes. Hopefully she will heal well and not have to have surgery. It breaks my heart that she was having such a great time, and she loves to run and wrestle with Teddy. I hope we can get back to that someday.

She’s only two years old, poor little thing♡

I give her daily knee massages, which seem to help a lot as well.

She is sooooo sassy & stubborn as can be. But she’s equally as cuddly & funny when she wants to be🤍

Teddy & Poppy.

And now back to some summertime goodness.

Below I will load a little gallery of photos and see what you think about seeing all the photos in that sort of grid. After all the photos, I will continue typing to you…

The monsoon storms have been epic. We also had a full week of rain, and now we’re having a little bit of a heat wave again, with rain hopefully returning soon. Although it did rain late at night on Saturday, which was incredible. We sat on the porch, listening to old music, chatting, eating popsicles and watching it rain with so much lightning and thunder. Magic✨️

It’s just been a wonderfully old school summer. There were so many midsummer apples that I must have made twenty Tarte Tatins for us, friends & family. I perfected my homemade buttercrunch toffee & we’ve made all sorts of salads, especially fruit salad. My favorite is eating ice cold melon and sitting in front of the air conditioning and fan doing projects.

Which leads me to my little summertime project below.

I made a video of a little general store I’ve been working on, which I had been wanting to do for a really long time. I think I purchased this dollhouse in 2018, and it was brown with black shutters. So, I immediately painted it white and painted the shutters green, but then I just put it in my kitchen nook and enjoyed looking at it knowing full well that eventually I wanted to turn it into a general store. For some reason, I’ve always had a real love for general stores and that whole sort of country living. I remember my dad taking me in his big light blue Ford truck to the general store in our town when I was little to buy chips, soda and pickles out of the big huge jar on the counter. Such great memories.

A couple weeks ago I decided to turn a paint stirrer into little signs for the dollhouse general store, and then it just evolved from there. I used all sorts of little things that I already had.

I have many dollhouses, so I have quite a large collection of dollhouse miniature accessories, so I just used things I had on hand. I managed to burn the Dickens out of my finger on a hot glue gun. When I told my mom she said, Martha Stewart says to always keep a little glass of ice water near you when you’re working with a hot glue gun. I wish I had known that before, haha. ( I’ve used hot glue guns for a lifetime and had never burned myself so badly, alas)

I was able to cut the paint stirrer with my gardening shears very easily. It was the perfect height wood for my little signs.

I just freehanded the font, so it’s a bit quirky, but that’s ok.

Here’s my little general store followed by the video…

A fun little project for those very hot summer days…

So, I guess those are the things that I’ve been up to thus far for the summer.

How are you doing out there? Is it especially hot where you are?

This is my Mombie’s birthday week, so I’m working on making her all sorts of goodies and special things. I can’t wait to see her and celebrate.

Well, I suppose I should be on my way. I hope you enjoyed this post and I can’t wait to hear what you think about me posting photos in a gallery grid.

We are about to enter August, which is always exciting.

Hope to be back with many more tales very soon♡

And I especially hope you are doing wonderfully well in your neck of the woods.

Love, Vanessa

PS UPDATE: Hello friends, per your requests, I am testing the option to enlarge an image by clicking on it once to enlarge it and then clicking on it again to make it small and take you back into the post. Can you test it and let me know what you think?

All of my posts that were created on my old blog have the option to click an image to view it larger, but not all my posts on this new platform have that option. However, I know that if you right click on an image (on computer) or if using a phone hold your finger down on the image, a window opens with an option to “View Image” which opens the image to view it larger.

I will work on editing all my newer posts so that the images have a simple click function like this post.

Thank you so much, I love any tips for making your visit more pleasurable.