I added this cool Twitter stream on January 1st

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P H o t o s

My small collection of blue bottles cheers up a window in the old house. Look at all the wonderful, whimsical things people make from them in this post at Flea Market Gardening.

Blue Bottles

Here are a few thumbnails from a Google Search that show how the popularity of these trees is "growing" around the world—and the bottom row is blue bottle art by my FMG friend, Nancy K. Meyers:

This winter, I've been working hard on sorting, organizing, locating seed stock. To steal Thomas Jefferson's words, "I am but a young gardener and not a blade of grass sprouts uninteresting to me …"

potager

I try to highlight miniature-sized produce because I only get about 4 hours of sun on my side of the mountain.

flowers

I've tried all of the above lovelies in my winter sowing boxes. A few successes are my reward, and always offset the failures.

Winter Sowing

These boxes are full of nursery pots and seeds! This is my variation on the art and craft of winter sowing—which is a way of creating a miniature greenhouse and increase the amount of flower and vegetable stock for your garden.

Read more about my Winter Sowing here!

o o o o o

It was kittens for Christmas this year!

Luna Lovegood McCarthy, adopted November 29th, 2012…

Max red hat

Max has been very patient with the newcomers around here. We got another "baby" too, at the same time … her name is Marty-Cat, but at the risk of seeming too much a crazy cat lady, I'll stop at 3 pictures of cats on this blog, and put one of the other people instead:

We adopted Luna AND Marty-cat the same day our Facebook website at Flea Market Gardening rolled over to 20,000 members!

Already, at the time of this writing, we are at 24,000!

Click the picture above if you'd like to join the conversation on Facebook; we'd love to see what you are up to with flea markets, gardening, or any fun craft thing. Even if you're not on Facebook, every Sunday night you can read my new blog post at FleaMarketGardening.org

I shared a new design for plant markers made from tart pans and it was a lot of fun seeing my design re-created by this artist above.

Here's what I've been working on at the old house studio, before the weather got really cold:

Gingerbread porch

I replaced two of these gingerbread pickets myself, and mixed the light blue chalk paint ont the spot. They say the house next door is haunted. I was goth, before goth was a word, so anything to do with ghosts gets my attention!

In and around our town in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia the hikers come down from the Appalachian Trail (at the top of the bluff in this photo), and make the most whimsical totems of rocks:

rock totems