drAnn's Art

A Lizard

I finally got close enough to this guy to take a picture.  Now I want to try to paint him:

      
Now that I know which flower pot he lives under I can take some better pictures.  The last time I checked under this pot there were two of them.  My plant lives in another pot that usually nests inside this one.  That way I can take the plant out of the ground to tend it without having to bend over or dig it up.  Here is the plant:

 

Here is a Pretty Picture from our Indoor Garden

My petunia growlog is here:  Pretty Petunias

More Edible Art

Every day is a photo op when there are AeroGardens in one's home.   Actually, the purple hot peppers (and they ARE hot, too!) are growing out on the porch in a laundry soap container, but we started them in the AG. 

They tend to blossom at the very top of each branch which makes it difficult for me to prune them back, as I hate to cut back and kill the pretty flowers. 

Here are more future tomatoes from out on the porch:

We didn't know if we could do this in December or not, but so far they look OK. 

A New Sketchbook

I love the Bienfang Sketch Notebooks with pages that are half lined and half blank for drawing.  Here is a page from one of mine:

I am writing up an experiment to see if I can save the ends of scallions and regrow them.  It will be a while before these are ready to eat.  It seemed like they got bigger just while I was trying to make a sketch, though. 

I used a 2:2:2 solution of the General Hydroponics Flora Series nutrients to feed them.

 To the right is a detail of how the new growth looked after a few days.  The inner container has holes drilled in the bottom.  It is filled with expanded clay pellets and the pipe cleaner handle allows me to easily lift the little onions out of the liquid nutrient solution and then let it drain back into the outer container every day or so. 

When the inner container is lifted completedly out, then if the liquid does not come up to the drain line marked on the outer container,  I top it off.  The inner container is opaque, which helps keep light from shining directly on the roots, and this discourages the formation of algae. 

Art Worth a Row of Beans

I've been learning about plants, as I wish to draw them from life.   Until this very week I didn't even know that haricots (which I did understand to be the French name for beans), a variety of string bean we also know as French Beans were actually just the young pods of the kidney bean. 

I found out this way.  We decided to make a big pot of kidney bean soup (artists have to eat!) and I decided to take out a handful of the beans and sprout them just to see what they would look like.  Now I cannot kill anything that I start as long as it is healthy and wants to live, so after they sprouted I put them in a container of grow rocks and poured water over them with a small amount of liquid nutrients and a month later there were buds all over the little puppies.  Then this:

 A work of art if I ever saw one!

Moreover, just two days later there was an inch long bean where this flower had been.  Soon there will be hundreds of them, I hope.  All from a handful of dried beans from the supermarket, stolen from the soup pot.  Life is good.

More on my beans is HERE. 

The same week we got the first flowers on our anasazi beans.

  

Those are the purple and white ones that look as though paint had been spilled over them.  They taste very much like pinto beans, but cook up faster and softer and they have a slightly sweeter, slightly less nutty flavor.   They are good!  Presumably, the snap beans are good to eat fresh as well, but we'll have to wait a few more weeks to know for sure.