HERB JAR WALL

It seems that no matter how big my herb orders are, I'm constantly running out of stock. I made a Headache Relief Tea, but had to first order 3 herbs. After I finished making a large jar of the loose herbs, I ran out of 2 more different herbs ands wouldn't you know, someone came into the shop and bought the whole 10 oz. jar of herbs. So now, I'm out of headache tea and am out of 2 of the herbs that go into the tea.

I can not get everything I need from one company, so when I put in my herb orders I must have paid out $50 in shipping charges. That is absolutely outrageous. Maybe I should start growing my own, but then I'd have to spend all my time in the fields and I'd rather be sewing!!

Here's a picture of one of the herb walls in my shop. I must have about 160 medicinal herbs, about 90 culinary herbs, probably 60 or so herbal teas, and 20 (?) green and black teas. It really has to be seen to be believed.

GARDEN OF WEEDS

I started this herb garden 2 years ago and have been adding to it and last year it looked really good. I don't know what happened but the weeds have really taken over.
Some of the weeds are 7 feet tall.

My feverfew (which should only grow 2-3 feet) grew to 5 feet. It is very leggy though. I cut all the feverfew and am going to put it in a patch by itself where it will self-sow and can grow wild. It took over a good 8 foot patch of the garden.

There are 2 other very large bushes in this garden that have expanded. One filled in a good chunk of space by runners and crowded out my hyssop and licorice plants, so those are gone to the big herb patch in the sky. The other bush grew so tall and wide, it also over shadowed some herbs and they are gone. We had hooked a tow strap to these bushes in order to pull them up and transplant them, but the bushes didn't budge and the 4" wide strap broke.

It took a couple of days to weed the garden. Most of the weeds pulled right out of the mulch, root and all. I think the mulch was full of weed seeds. I decided to move the rest of the herbs into another harb garden for safe keeping and will rorotill this garden under and start over. Don't know yet if I should move the garden away from the two bushes or set fire to them.

THE FAMOUS "NECKTIE QUILT"

I spent the whole winter making this quilt. Patti brought in a bagful of neckties and asked for a cutom-made queen-sized quilt using the neckties. I dumped the ties on my workbench and looked at them, moved them around, looked at them some more......no idea what to do with them.

Took them home, counted them, moved them around, looked some more.......finally after about 2 months, hand appliqued the ties to background squares.

Had to buy fabrics, but didn't quite know how to match fabric to the ties because all the ties were different colors and styles. So I bought the fabrics to match each other and didn't worry about matching the ties. It is certainly a one of a kind quilt.

There will never be another quilt like this one....past, present or future...........