Welcome to Mountaintop Quilting Studio

This is where you find me exploring a variety of creative adventures mostly about but not limited to quilting. I'm a firm believer that one increases their creativity by being open to and playing with a variety of cretative endeavors ... at least that my excuse for today. Enjoy your sourjourn through my studio playroom. May you find encouragement and inspiration, and on occassion, a little pin-prick that may be thought-provoking or spark your imagination. Thank you for stopping by.

One of the activities I've enjoyed the most (most of the time) in our new home is a flat space for gardening. My last gardening adventures happened when the kids were toddlers. We had a nice large space for a garden which then became the new two-car garage. That was almost 25 years ago. Whew, time does fly, doesn't it!

Another nice surprise in gardening in the Berkshires is the lack of clay in the soil. No shortage of rocks, but nice black soft soil. I do think I need to add "stuff" to the soil to help hold the moisture more. A friend made this suggestion a gave me a bag of peat moss to work into the garden plot.

I began my gardening season as a human tiller plowing and digging with shovel in hand. A little bucket was always close at hand for collecting rocks. Eventually seedlings were added and it was time for watching things grow ... including the weeds! I couldn't believe how they almost burried my poor little plants during the 10 days I was in Oregon, but with the help of Betty, my mother-in-law who is an avid gardener, we soon tamed the weeds to a managable irritation during one of her visits.

Advice from another friend: "Kay, you do realize that tomatoes are not a ground creeping plant." LOL ...  Yes, I knew that ... I just hadn't gotten my tomato cages up in time. GRRRR! However tomatoes are up off the ground now after my fashioning makeshift tomato cages that seem to be working pretty well. I used the fiberglass electric fence posts Mike added to the moving van at the last second and some stretchy ribbon tie fabric from the hardware store to create a tomato fence. My fence seems to be holding up pretty well during our fierce thunderstorms and tomatoes are rippening almost as fast as we can eat them.

The fruits of my labor:

• At the end of the afternoon walk to the post office Colin, Luci, and I visit the garden for a little snack ... the best ... warm sweet tomatoes right off the vine.
• The best part of dinner last night ... quick sauted yellow squash with fresh cherry tomatoes halved and scattered across the top.

YUM!!!