Summer Plans:Books, Gardening,Crafts & Hard Labor

Summer Reading, Gardening, Outdoor Projects and relaxing activities.

#summertbr #summer

Find me on Instagram: Lunasmenagerie

uh nothing sounds like summer than the sound of a lawnmower while my husband’s out mowing the yard he’s going to put me to work later thought I would record a quick video this morning as I’m recording it’s June the 1st i just really got this inspiration to want to make the most of my summer it just feels I feel like life passes me by and before you know it one season’s gone and another one’s starting and I just want to make the most of summer so I thought I would make myself a list this is my Katie Daisy planner and they have little areas you can make notes and all of a sudden I just got this inspiration to make myself a list of things that I want to do over the summer months and I thought I would share those with you now this is a book channel and I will show you some books that I want to read over the summer as a matter of fact I’m going to do a special thing called scary summer reading challenge this kick off the first day of summer and in that video I’ll be showing some different books from these i love like dark atmospheric folklore type of things so it won’t be too scary but eerie more than anything else so I’ll show you some other books in just a little bit but I also want to share with you some other plans i know I’ve I’ve seen several of you mentioned uh and just videos I watch that everybody’s stressed out these days it just you always have some kind of stress in your life right sometimes it’s big stress sometimes it’s micro stresses and that’s what has attacked me here lately the micro stresses that drag you down so I think it’s good to take some time for yourself and as they say romanticize your life and just do little things to create memories either by yourself or with your family or friends or whatever you want to do and I will be doing a few things of these with my sister she likes to she lives in town so she comes over sometimes spend some time with me so I’m going to read this list off to you maybe you can get some ideas of your own first of all I got a bicycle this year i’ve been wanting one for several years and so my husband bought me one and uh he got a John Deere tractor though so I think I got the short end of the stick there anyway I really I hate to exercise i absolutely hate it i don’t mind walking and I thought this would be a good form of exercise riding up and down our lane uh getting a little bit and I realize how out of shape I am so I’m going to spend some time on my bicycle this year hopefully on the handlebar of my bicycle are a basket of herbs and I’m going to be planting these later today actually my main focus for this year’s garden I’m going to plant a lot of herbs because that is something you can’t easily buy in the grocery store that looks decent they always look half dead when you get them and they’re quite expensive so it’s always worthwhile I think to plant some herbs in your garden and plus they help repel pest so I have some Thai basil some dill some lemon thyme which I’m going to plant right by an area where I read i hope this will help deter some mosquitoes and of course basil i love the smell of basil and making basil pesto i bought the ingredients for that this morning actually so that’s one thing I’ll be doing a little bit later today and also I want to I’ve mentioned this in a previous video i want to learn how to watercol i just feel like that’s a peaceful activity so since I talked to you I have acquired some watercolor supplies these were fairly inexpensive if you just want to get started with a hobby I got all this stuff at Walmart got a paint pad i mentioned earlier I checked out a book from the library how to watercol and I found this palette of so many different colors and then a little paint set there so I I think this is something I’ll actually do yes I’m one of those sometimes I get excited about an activity and then I don’t do it right away but this is something that I’ve had interest in for a while and having that book to help me know where to get started is a big factor in me doing this another thing that I want to do is needle point and I purchased this kit actually back in the winter this is a spring kit i do not have the patience for crossstitch those of you that do oh gosh you do such a wonderful job i know uh Crystal from Barber Artsy she does a lot of that’s amazing and Linda she’s a viewer of the channel too she has amazing work on hers too but I just do not have a patient for that so uh a needle point kit though it’s pre-stamped you just stitch in and out it’s been many years since I’ve done one of these kind of cuts and uh I look forward to doing that and we do have a little small shop in our town that will frame things for you too so I’m looking forward to doing that i also just this morning purchased a pillow needle point kit it was a little pricey but oh it was so lovely and I will use it for a long time another thing that I want to do is to plant a pollinator garden now what that is this is a wild flower mix and you it helps attract bees to your garden i was inspired by a trip to the cemetery over the Memorial Day weekend i passed by this one house and they had one of these gardens in their front yard and someone told me that last year they had hired up their ground or as they say around my part of the country hard up the ground you know it’s basically we till up the ground to loosen the soil to plant some things it was so beautiful I was so inspired so I’m going to start out with a one of my raised beds that I’m not using really that much anymore and I’m going to plant this sometime in the next week or so i’ve kind of waited a little long to do this but we’ll see how it does okay now I’m going to show you a couple of the books I’ll be reading over the summer months i love books set in the summer and I love southern fiction like The Help i love that book one of the books that I’ve been wanting to reread for several years is Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain this is a favorite book of mine it’s been many many years since I’ve read this i was wanting to read it for quite some time i just kept putting it off and then when the book by Pul Eric came out James I knew I needed to go ahead and reread this book to kind of get the perspective of Jim now versus the book James so this is going to be on my s summer reading list you know traveling down the Mississippi another book that is a southern fiction type of book is Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fanny Flag i don’t remember if it was last year or the year before I watched this movie loved it i knew immediately I wanted to read the book my library did not have the book so I did go ahead and order this and I’m going to be reading it over the summer months i’m looking forward to this as I mentioned in some of my other videos I’ve been really enjoying working puzzles and at the Gallison website it’s what kind of puzzles I’ve been working lately they had a sale over Memorial Day weekend and I I bought several puzzles oh I’m so excited to work these but one of these is a summer themed one and it’s a greenhouse greenhouse gardens i got a really good deal on this and uh it’s it was in my cart for a while and then when they had the sale I knew I wanted to add this one thing I’m going to do I invested in a swivel puzzle board several years ago and I have a picnic table that I keep on my front porch and I’m going to bring the puzzle board outside to work the puzzle outside that way I can bring it in and out if I want to so just have a little time outside and working a puzzle another kind of bookish thing that I’m going to do is reread and annotate a favorite book now I have three that I’m debating on right now i don’t want to tell you what they are right now so we’ll see later what that is but I encourage any of you if you have a favorite book that you enjoy and you’re wanting to maybe reread it if you have your own copy do some annotations some notes for yourself and just uh relax doing that i find annotating really relaxing a couple of other things on my list and Bob’s kind of in the kitchen area i want to bake at least two summer themed cakes on my mind right now I’m thinking strawberry cake and hummingbird cake that sounds summerlike right for the next couple things on my list I’m going to go out and about and show you some projects I’ll be working on over the summer months one of these I’ve been putting off for a while and the other one I actually started on last year and it just got too darn hot so I’ll take you out and about show you those things and we’ll come back and I’ll show you the rest of the books that I want to read over the summer months okay here is the entrance to a wooded area on my property it’s about a half a acre of woods i live on about 5 acres total but this is an area I’ve been wanting to clean up i did start on it last year you can see where I saw it off this has been a war zone we’ve had so many trees go down there’s my dump bucket there even more since I’ve been down here so I did clear it up to a certain point last year though because a lot of this was blocked off this is going to be a lot of hard work so you can see here yeah that’s the mess I have waiting for me uh thank goodness for battery operated chainsaws because that’s something I can handle myself and do so I’m blocked off here i do have a back entrance to this area too so I’m going to go around the other way and show you what delight is behind this area that I want to open up again okay I am now out of breath but here is the other side of this once upon a time I This is a plant hook that holds a lot of hanging baskets and I had some like shady flowers like impatience hanging from there as you can see we’ve had some trees lay down on it and then when you swing around here this is just an open area it’s grown up quite a bit since the last saw it but once this is mowed down it’s just a cozy area to hang out in and then I want to got some like some iron furniture to put down here and here are some pillow boards that I had planted that were blooming in February and March so I want to get all this opened up it is really a big mess but once I get this opened up I can create trails where I can ride my bicycle down to so that’s my motivation i am so out of shape another reason I want to open this back up is because when the kids were little I would have little picnics down here and I want to do that again i want to have my sister over and have some picnics and things like that it’s just something cozy about that I think and just spending some time outside away from your phone and just relaxing and uh Jay from Faceless Book Reviews I don’t know if you’re watching this video or not but uh you’re pretty good at cleaning up your property want to come and give me a hand here there’s the hubby’s new ride h I have a feeling we’re going to be doing a lot of work this summer though okay so this is the project I started on a few weeks ago before we started having a lot of rain again this is a garden pond i did have a fountain pump right in the middle of it and we had a tree go down in it and oh it created a mess it really did so I’ve got to scoop all that out this is what I’ve gotten out of there already and clean up all this area around here uh there are binka vines that are beautiful i’m keeping those but all the like poison oak and everything that’s growing up around there I want to clean that up a little frog house there another motivation to get this pond cleaned up my sister when she comes over she enjoys coming over here because she loves watching the frogs they’ll rest along the rocks there when you approach they’ll make a little squeaking noise and jump into the pond and she just likes watching all of that so again a lot of work but I’ll be glad to get that done and running again happy about that now for the rest of the books that I hope to read over the summer months i am a huge mood reader so this could always change though this is one that I recently purchased the dust never settles karina licorice Quinn i love that middle name licorice it’s so different kind of name i love this cover it captured my attention when I saw it on Blackwells and some of the blurbs on the back said “A messmerizing beat of imagination of a masterful debut uh enchants from the first page to the last a breathtaking writer of singular voice and this is a magical realism book which is a genre I really love i really do this next one reminds me of Summer at Nighttime and this is a new release i think it come out in April and I had it pre-ordered on Blackwells it’s a gorgeous boat too the Midnight Carousel step aboard if you dare that’s Vasa Sed Mcllin and this is described as beautiful evocative writing with twists and turns that kept me gassing a truly magical book bound me in a spell a moving story of survival and love i completely surrendered to its magic that just sounds like such a pleasant read being a person that has a ton of fantasy books on her shelves I do have a couple going right now but one of them that I want to try to make sure I read this year and this book reminds me of the beauty of summer so I want to try to get this started during the summer months and that’s Dreamers Pull by Juliet Merier and this is part of a trilogy it’s called the Blackthorn and Grim Trilogy isn’t that gorgeous and I’ve just always heard her writing being described as beautiful the next one is The Dance Tree by Kieran Milwood Hargrave i have read from this author before and the texture of this book I love it i love how a book feels in my hands and here is the blurb on the back of the book she is crying but she is not ashamed the tendrils of light swarm about her like flies heavenly and revealing beneath the blue and burning sky she lifts up her hands and begins to dance this sounds like it just has beautiful beautiful writing now I do have a couple of books I’m currently reading that are like summery filling type of books and one of them I’ve already shown this one actually is The Woodby Queen by Edward Cox i am not real real far in this but I have started because I read like four or five books at a time because I’m crazy but anyway that’s one of them and another one that Oh this reminds me of A Deadly Summer Belladonna by Edlin Grace um I take this to work to read i’m not very far into it and everybody’s like “What’s that mean?” And I was like “That’s a deadly plant.” They none of them had any clue what it was i I don’t know i guess I thought people knew what that was but anyway uh this is I believe a YA novel but these covers the US and the UK covers always attracted me and I’ve just been really compelled to read it so I finally made the splurge and bought the first book if I like this I want to read the other two and now look at these beautiful sprayed edges now this is before you seen you see it all the time now but at at the time I got this you didn’t see it quite as much this one sky a day by Leon Ross this is because I’ve been wanting to read this for a while i saw it on my shelves and I was like I need to try to read that this summer it just has those summer colors and again the texture of the book itself it’s such a beautiful novel and on the back it says “She kicked out as seaweed entangled her ankle a salty wave smacked her in the face and she gulped sputtered laughed spat sniffed and began to swim again.” Summer right and lastly I don’t know if I’ll get this one red or not but if it runs into fall that’s fine too i was inspired because I had made that list of putting needle work on my uh summer list and I saw this book on my shelf and that that reminded me of that Thread Needle by Carrie Thomas i’ve had this book for a while too and just it’s such a lovely book and I’ve heard it is pretty good magic and love love and magic they destroy everything in the end and this is blurred by Robin Hob actually the magic both gleams and threatens you want to give this a try maybe I will i hope so anyway I do uh I am reading a little bit off and on of um The Wizard’s First Rule by Terry Goodkind and uh I am enjoying that i have it on my nightstands i just read a few pages a night and going off on their adventures with them and another one that was in my viewer’s choice TBR jar that I haven’t gotten started with yet is the sword of Shannon i was actually going to go ahead and start that and I misplaced my book if you ever do this thing you’re having company coming over and you’ve got these stacks of things you just shove it wherever you can i don’t know where I put it i hope you have a good summer let me know if you have any special plans or what do you do to relax goodbye