In scrolling my Reddit I came across jumping spiders and over time I’ve come to realize that many people have them as pets. I had no idea. And you can just find them in the wild anywhere. So recently as I was wiping our glass table on the deck I saw one! It watched me for awhile and hung out while we ate dinner but then I lost track. I don’t plan to have one as a pet, but it’s kind of got me interested in spotting them outside. I was thinking that it would be a fun game to see who could find a spider first in the backyard. You might think it would be hard, but if you try to find itty bitty ones, like smaller than your fingernail, they’re plentiful.

I’ve started to appreciate how they can be “cute”

While we’re in the backyard, we may as well do an egg hunt. The chickens have been laying them ALL OVER the place! Jimmy’s spot these days is under a corner of a tarp covering one of the raised gardenbeds. And Jokić still prefers next to the pool pump under the deck. Sometimes eggs are in the old wooden barrels in the middle of the yard, sometimes in the coop but not necessarily in the roosts, and often hidden amid the shiso in the flowerbed. Not as many eggs in general which we attribute to the changing seasons. Cici is broody and I just leave her alone. Zsa Zsa is still treated poorly so she hangs out all day in the roost. Twice a day I take her out and set her by the water if the coast is clear (no other chickens nearby).

The fruit trees are finally bearing fruit this year. We had quite a flew plums, which tasted great, but many had been ravaged by a beetle. Next year we plan to put nets around them to protect them. We have LOTS of peaches on the way, and we already had a couple, so we’re hoping we can eat a lot of them before they too are preyed upon. As this was our first year of stone fruit, we consider this a big win.

The raised beds have been interesting too because everything is a surprise! Some things start growing that I didn’t even plant this year, like the sour gherkin which apparently seeded itself from last year! And some things that I think are weeds are actually something I planted, like the Bachelor Buttons. The funniest example is when I finally realized that an odd-looking plant was something I planted (Jacob’s Tears) and so I started to weed around it and to my dismay realized I pulled up some carrots prematurely!

I’m continuing to plant a lot of edible flowers, because I love the idea of eating flowers for some reason. We have a great set of Petunias I’ve been using as garnish. And I’m looking foward to using the Bachelor’s Buttons as well. Oh and we had nice nasturtiums for a while this spring but they puckered out.

One last thing about raised beds- we bought a baby melon plant at Natural Gardener but so far the only gourd-like produce we’ve harvested is one pickling cucumber. Um, how? Because what I’m seeing on the vines now looks like maybe small melons. So weird!

It is now officially shiso season, so we make this amazing beverage from the leaves of this plant. Mostly we use it as a mixer for our gin and tonics.

A big decision we made recently is to replace the semi-above-ground pool with a “proper” pool. It’ll be a ways out as we still haven’t signed the agreement yet but the plan has been mostly finalized. It’ll be neat to look at and also good for lap swimming. I am also looking forward to having plants around it.

I’ve slowed down making handmade books, although I did make a couple of all-black books. I would make more because I think it’s a cool idea but the paper I ordered isn’t as heavyweight as I’d like.

But my big adventure was in something ridiculously simple, crumpling paper. I had been doing specific things using plain paper based on the design book I bought, but I decided to try crumpling my gelli prints and this proved to be super cool (in my opinion). Now the “lousy” prints became cool looking! I started to brush on some clear acrylic stuff on the final crumple in order to retain the crumples, and then I did a whole set of these embroidered onto nice paper which had varied embroidered backgrounds. I made about 30 I believe(?) and next I’m hoping Rob can help me get them all mounted in a grid like pattern for hanging on the wall.

Here’s a few of the items to be in the “installation” grid

Then after all that things got really meta because I was like wait how about if I use crumpled paper to make more gelli prints? And once again, I was like, “whooooah”. See pics below: on far left is the crumpled papers I used and the other pictures are the resulting gelli prints.

I prefer these results to many other gelli prints which is hilarious since crumpling paper is so much simpler than so many of the other random objects I’ve accumulated for printing!

I had an amazing Mother’s Day because I set out for a jog that morning and came across not one, but two tarantulas! I got some sweet pics and video and shared it in the master naturalist feed. For some reason I tied it to the Twas the Night Before Xmas poem. Haha I had a BALL that day! You can see the footage in the link (recommended).

I’ll put some other pics in gallery below.