with our hydrangeas in full bloom, we’ve been keeping fresh flowers throughout the house. the problem is our cut flowers kept wilting after only a few hours, which was very frustrating. we decided to look for a remedy and take action.

here’s what we found worked best for keeping hydrangeas fresh after cutting them from a garden. first, cut the flowers in the early morning when the weather is cool, not in the afternoon heat. be sure to bring a pitcher or bucket of water and place the flowers in the water right after cutting. when ready to arrange, cut the stems at an angle under cold tap water and dip the flower tips into a bottle of alum powder, found in the spice section of most grocery stores. after dipping, place the flowers in a vase filled with water. that’s it.

we’ve used this method numerous times now and it totally works! it’s impressive how much longer our cut hydrangeas last.

– ryan & gub

here is our garden at four weeks.

we planted our cute little garden on the 15th of april, here’s what we are growing:

here is our garden at six weeks.

we ended up losing our one artichoke plant early on and replaced it with another much younger tomato plant to try and stagger the tomato harvest a bit.

here is our garden at seven weeks.

everything is thriving pretty well, although something pesky keeps biting off our squash blossoms. they aren’t even eating them, just leaving them on the ground. which is even more annoying. we are working on fencing in the garden and bought some organic insecticide as well, so hopefully we’ll get that under control soon.

– ryan & gub

we had a really great time being part of the kirkwood tour of homes! we met a lot of nice neighbors and got to show off our cute little house. it turns out one of our neighbors becky writes for various blogs and wrote about our house here and here!

we’ve spent the last couple of months working on house projects and doing the most thorough spring cleaning we’ve done in ages. our friend and neighbor miguel martinez took photos of our house in all its de-cluttered glory. he is a really amazing photographer who works for the mundo hispánico. he took so many great photos we decided to spread them out over a few posts.

this first post covers our front porch, family room, media room, backyard and garden.

– ryan & gub

the second part of our tour of home series features our office, bedrooms, and bathroom, which includes our vintage snow globe collection.

again, all of the photos were taken by our friend miguel martinez!

– ryan & gub

the third and final part of our tour of homes series covers our kitchen and back deck. we’ve done a lot of work on our kitchen over the last year. we tiled our kitchen floor, added a backsplash, repainted, recovered our kitchen chairs, and added new roman shades to the windows. we plan on doing posts on our renovations, so we won’t get into too many details on the upgrades right now.

again, all of the photos were taken by our friend miguel martinez!

– ryan & gub

we recently tilled our garden! we rented a tiller from home depot for 4 hours, which was super easy, and got our backyard ready for spring planting. our garden plans are moving along and we hope to finish planting this week.

we realized our backyard was full of tons of random debris while tilling. we found rusty nails, roofing tiles, concrete, bricks, tools, and lots of other junk.

– ryan & gub

we noticed our horseshoe pits were looking rough recently, so we decided to give them a face-lift. we started by getting rid of the weeds and adding more sand. that alone made a huge difference. then we spray painted the poles bright colors, we went with blue and red, and topped it all off by adding our bottle cap collection.

we’ve been saving bottle caps for years, although we never really found the right use for them. gub has fond memories of her grandparents general store where they threw caps from soda bottles out front for gravel. the rusty gravel must have made an impression on her, we’ve been saving bottle caps since i’ve known her.

we’re excited to find a new use for our bottle caps! it’s gratifying to reuse something that could easily be thrown away. we plan on filling our pits a good bit more, our collection seemed a lot bigger inside the house. we are going to ask our local bartender to save bottle caps for us to help the cause.

– ryan

i filmed the snow melting on our back deck after the recent snow storm. the camera went for 3 days and i put together this time-lapse piece from the footage.

– ryan

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ryan and i are beginning to plan our very first vegetable and herb garden. we’ve been composting for over a year and have planted a few vegetables here and there, but this summer we’ve got big plans. we carved out a sunny 16′ by 10′ spot in the middle of our backyard, found some helpful info on the uga center for urban agriculture website, and we’re off!

we need to do a bit more research, come up with a planting schedule, and finalize our vegetable and herb list based on our garden space; but here’s our wish list:

we took some before photos and will post updates as the summer progresses. the garden will be under the blue tarp you see in the photos.

– gub & ryan

we had another snow day in atlanta! twice in a month is quite crazy for the south. gub and i tried to stay warm while enjoying the beautiful scenery. i ended up taking a ton of photos and filmed a time lapse of the snow storm.

– words & photos/video by ryan

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