The long, hot days of an Oklahoma Summer.

This Summer has been abnormally hot, even for our scorching Oklahoma Summers. When June came around, our temperatures reached the 100's and have stayed that way. There seems to be no end in sight, and every week we watch the weather, disappointed by another 7 days of triple digit temperatures and no rain in sight. We are in the middle of a severe drought, and the days seem to drag on with no relief.
At any given time, the weather here seems to be an indicator that the world is ending, when in reality, it is just a typical Oklahoma weather pattern.



Even our watering holes prove no relief, only feeling like a disappointing tepid bath. One that makes your skin almost feel worse than it did before.



We are all suffering from severe cabin fever, and feeling the need to spread our wings and be part of the outside world again. Days are spent trapped inside our house with the air conditioner on constantly, barely clothed, and sweating. Sweet Elodie seems to be taking it the worst. She loves nothing more than being outside - I adore that first moment when I take her out and she sighs, blinks her eyes, and takes in all the smells, sounds, and happy bits of nature. But these days she is stuck inside with the rest of us, and also teething. She cries, cries, cries...chews on frozen pacifiers and her little fingers. I want desperately to let her feel the wind on her skin and through her hair....I miss it, too.



We keep her busy the best we can, but there is only so much you can do with a (almost) 4 month old that just wants to sit in the hammock and swing, listening to the birds.



I try to rattle toys at her, but everything seems to make her cry. I make her promises of Fall, and how we will hike, go for walks, and lay in the hammock until she falls asleep and drifts off to another place.



The time inside has been a nice break to spend with family, and rest. But as the days go by and I see more and more of her personality come through, I realize how much of the two of us is inside her tiny body.



She is a whole mess of bored & sensitive, and a combination of her screams and this heat have been making my head very heavy.

We still have 2 more full months of hot weather, and for now I have to focus on the day to day. Looking ahead, it seems like a lifetime away before I can open the windows and let the stale out of this home that feels like a prison.





When she is in bed and my world is quiet again, I grab the monitor and sneak outside to unwind. The evening is the only time of day that is somewhat bearable, although the upper 90's are not much of a relief from this overbearing weight of Summer.
I take photos, pull weeds, and sadly look over a garden that stood no chance against the kind of Summer we had this year.



In late July, a Summer Breeze in Oklahoma is nothing like the ones that cool us to our bones in Spring. Now they feel heavy, thick, like a brick across your face. It feels like opening an oven, and being met with a wall of heat.

My herbs have long ago dried up, and what I didn't save to dry myself for the cooler months, I let go to seed. I have been outside in these hot evenings, picking them to prepare for gardening season, next Spring.






The way you feel after spending a couple hours outside in this weather can only be truly understood if you have spent a Summer here, in the middle of arid Oklahoma.
After a period of time, it almost feels like death. Your body is only brought back to reality by the beads of sweat that slowly trickle down your back, reminding you that you are still alive. Everything slows down, and even your senses are completely numb. Things seem to move slower, the world is drowsier, your heart beats quieter.



Across the state, people are losing their lives, and our wildlife is completely threatened by this drought.



In a literal sense, everything is just cooking.



Every couple weeks, clouds will fill the sky and everyone is praying to their God that it will finally rain. But we are met with no response from anyone or thing upstairs, and the tiny drops that barely cover the tallest leaves quickly evaporate.



The only things thriving are the sunflowers. My wildflower garden has dried up, but the sunflowers seem to be loving this heat.



Their faces are an absolute joy, a mirror image of the hot sun that is causing all of this trouble. But still they make me happy, to know that something is still able to live through this.





I've been clipping them and bringing them inside, my tiny bits of the outdoors inside of this air-conditioned-prison.
I've also been bringing inside handfuls of tomatoes from the garden...they are the only other remaining things that have survived.



But as of last week, this spider has made it's home in the middle of my three tomato plants, and I doubt that I will be in the middle of her web, picking my fruit any longer.




How challenging it really is... to stay optimistic and alive when everything around you is dying.
In these moments - the end of our icy Winters and the long, hot days of an Oklahoma Summer - it is a daily struggle and fight to put on a smile and face a world that is doing everything it can to break you down.



In these weak moments I think of sweet Elodie. Tiny, teething, sensitive, and innocent. Her first Summer has been a challenging one....and I wish that I could make it all better for her. For myself. But in real life, things don't work that way.

So today, and tomorrow, and for as long as that 7 day forecast spells 106 + no precipitation, I will smile and teach Elodie that sometimes we cannot control what goes on around us. The hand we are dealt may not be the best, but it's the only one we have.
In our home we are dreaming of the brisk days of Fall, open windows, and new life. Long walks, bike rides, and patio nights. Throwing more wood on the chiminea fire, swinging in the hammock, and a barren weight of Summer '11 to be lifted from our weary shoulders.

We will take it one day at a time, and one day we will wake up and these dreams will be today. Until then, all we can do is wait.

A photo a day (starting a 365 project)

I think starting a project like this is a lot like a forgotten New Years Resolution. Everyone starts out with good intentions, and then just as quickly as things began, those good intentions fade into forgotten promises.

I take photos every single day. What I post here is not even half of the things I keep for myself. Personal albums full of family photos, small adventures, and details around our house. For me, starting a project like this is simple in the sense that I am already looking through the lens every day - but almost overwhelming when it comes to choosing just one photo to sum up what that 24 hours meant to me.



There is a quote that says:

"And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it." -Roald Dahl


And so true it is. Here is an article on how to find beauty in life. A good guideline to inspire you to see things a bit clearer.
But I promise you that looking too far into something like that will not help you find that beauty at all. In fact there is a small irony in trying to teach someone to see the world through different eyes. How can you really teach something that can only be felt in your heart? It's like teaching someone to find happiness, when the only true path there is to stop looking for it.

"If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi desert. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar button that has rolled under the radiator. He will not be striving for it as a goal in itself. He will have become aware that he is happy in the course of living life twenty-four crowded hours of the day." -W. Beran Wolfe



Today was a busy day...an end to a busy weekend that left me feeling more tired than rested. I spent the day yesterday pulling weeds and planting new lavender bushes around the patio, and today I felt every bit of 9 months pregnant.





Tonight when evening started to roll around, I realized I hadn't taken one photograph. In that moment the only thing to do was to quiet my mind and look around at what I was thankful for, today. In the end to this busy day, there was such a calm moment in where I was. The breeze outside is so sweet that it almost feels like it is coming straight off the ocean. With all the windows open in the house, sheer drapes gently swaying, everything seems right.



Today, on my brand new day, I am finding beauty in those swaying drapes. The shades of green in every room of our house, finished packages for friends who live miles away, and new garden boots waiting to be worn in and used this season. Soft, evening light through all the open windows, that biting breeze, and the beautiful, quiet moments that come with realizations at the end of a busy weekend.








If you are planning on starting your own 365 project, remember that you don't need to go looking for something beautiful to photograph. There is already so much around you, waiting to be seen and appreciated. These small, quiet details of your day are the ones that we too often forget about by the end of our year. But they are the ones that make our days truly count. We should not remember only the big moments that take place, or else our memories by the end of our years will only fit on our fingers and toes. There are many other moments that slip through our hands and are often long forgotten, like our New Years Resolutions.



Today, on your brand new day, slow down and see the world around you for what it really is. Mundane, ordinary, and absolutely perfect in these still moments.

Backyard Farming W e e k - The Flowers.

Hello Nature lovers!
Are you ready for a week of my backyard in it's entirety?

Here goes.

Once upon a time Michael and I were Newlyweds. Four years ago we packed a wedding's worth of toasters, sheets, glasses, and Target giftcards into our friend Scott's truck and moved into our 600 sq. foot apartment.
Just the two of us, and baby Olive.

We named it our nest, and honestly, it wasn't much different than our nest, now.




And even though the backyard-farming itch had been tickling away at me since I was a little girl, I first felt it strongly, here.
We had created this little home, and I wanted it to be everything I grew up loving. So right away business was in order, and on one 6 X 5 concrete patio, facing North, with a huge building blocking the view, I planted my garden.


Since then we've bought our home and I've spent the last 3 Summers with my hands in the soil.
The first two years I focused on light landscaping, we put in a couple trees, and I tended to my vegetable and herb garden.

This year I started my first flower garden, in hopes of bringing more color, birds, butterflies, and opportunities to practice my photography around the yard.

If you'd like to look back into the gardening archive, you can see what types of flowers all of these are.

So here are my little lovely flowers, my first year of flower gardening.








They make spending time outside every single day a little bit sweeter.

I am always in complete awe of the sunflowers.
I got two kinds that didn't require staking, and planted away.



They were my fastest growers. By the first 2 weeks they'd already started to sprout, and by the first day of Summer I was already filling vases full of clipped flowers to bring inside.




Please make sure you are soaking these in water as soon as you bring them inside. Sunflowers are known for bringing in the ants.
But don't worry, they also bring in lots of beautiful birds, who in turn eat your mosquitoes, and little pests along the way.

I've had a couple questions about how to keep pests at bay. Honestly, I believe in the most natural approach possible. I don't discount chemicals completely, but will always turn to the natural alternatives, first.

Try attracting predators, or spraying with soapy or red pepper + water sprays.

Honestly, at this point though, you might have to wave your white flag in defeat. It's late in the season, and the ants are in full force. If you treat problems very early on, they won't escalate to the point where natural remedies don't work.

I check my garden, head to toe, every single day. If I catch problems early on, I can quickly and efficiently deal with them as they come along. I can't stress spending time in your garden, enough. There is always work to be done, if you want to earn that green thumb.

I'll talk more about taking care of pests, later in the week.



PS. The ants in the bowl? I never have the heart to drown them. I just shake them loose into the water, then pour the bowl out in the yard. Thanks to my Dad, I inherited his inability to harm any living creature. It annoys my Mom, in the same way that I annoy my husband with it.



I guess it's hard for me to see the difference between the ant, the butterfly, and myself in this picture. The three of us are just hanging out, enjoying these flowers.


A lot of you have been asking what became of my garden, after our treacherous rains that we have been having.
Because of the hurricanes in the South, Oklahoma is getting hit hard with the storm traveling towards us. We have had a lot of beautiful lightning shows, cool evenings, and lazy days, but our gardens have also suffered. My veggie garden will wait for another day, because today I am going to show you what a weeks worth of Summer thunderstorms can do to a flower garden.


The pictures above were all from my garden, before last week.
These are from this week:




My dahlias have all turned brown and are officially grounded. They no longer stand on their own, and won't any time soon. You know why? Because this is right where they used to be:



You're probably asking yourself who Charlotte is. Let me give you a visual.



Yikes, right? Guys....I haven't seen spiders like that since Michael and I were hiking in the Sierra Madre Mountain range. Do you know where we were? In a tropical JUNGLE.
Do you know what this means? It means that thanks to a few mistakes I made, and a few bad weeks of weather that Mother Nature gave us, I ended up re-producing a jungle-like environment in my backyard.
I sat on the phone one night with my Mom for 30 minutes going on and on about how I couldn't believe that I didn't think to raise my flower bed when I knew that corner flooded, until finally she said:

Aura. Calm down. It's just a garden.

Okay. She's right. In Spring '11 I will lay out my new plan for the flower garden, post new tips for avoiding a jungle, and show you my new draw-ups of the yard.

For now I'll give you guys a couple tips on how to start a flower garden of your own.



Flower Gardening Made Easy is a type of website you need to be looking for, if you're wanting information online. There are tons of them out there, if you just search for flower gardening online.

The wildflowers that did best out of my seeds were the ones that grow locally, in Oklahoma. Make sure you're taking regional weather into account when you're planting. Figure out which gardening zone you're in, and go from there. Don't try to grow flowers that need cool temperatures, shade, and moist soil in a sunny spot in warmer climates.

Take into account what each flower attracts. One big heartbreak for me is not being able to grow any wisteria, clematis, jasmine, or other flowering vines around the house. Michael is allergic to bees, so we need to keep the patio bee-free.
But on a positive note, certain flowers will attract birds that eat your pests right up for dinner.

&. Don't make the same mistakes I did. My mistakes for 2010:

-Planting herbs underneath the sunflowers. The flowers are so tall that the herbs no longer get sun.
-Planting my sunflowers in a spot that floods. Their roots are shallow, and if the ground is wet, they TIP. I have tied every single sunflower I have to the fence with twine. Ankle deep in mud, with Charlotte 6 inches from my leg. The dahlias I'm willing to let go, since she built her web where they used to be.
-Planting too many things in a small area. My flower garden is crowded, and adds to that "jungle" feel I created. Hence Charlotte, a ton of mosquitoes, and dead herbs.


Besides those few little blunders, I didn't do too bad my first year.
But next year I've got some big plans. And already, I'm itching for Spring '11, and starting fresh again. I hope some of you backyard-farmers who have only worked with the edible crops will venture into the world of flower gardening.


Next up will be a post about my Veggies.
Happy gardening, friends.



PS. I'm terribly behind on replying to comments. I've had right under 16,000 visitors to the blog the last two days, and the comments have been flooding in. If you were waiting for an answer to anything in my St. Augustine post, I replied to you guys earlier in the night.