Good Things List No.94 - Spring Seed Starting, Small Seedling Lights, Affordable Faux Flowers, Books, and More

Good things to do, buy, read, and watch: start a few seeds, realistic affordable faux flowers for the transition season, plus six short book reviews and a fun movie to watch.

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Well, hello March – Spring is right around the corner!! I picked my first small handful of daffodils the other day and they are bringing such joy every time I walk by them.

If you get my newsletter then you know I broke my wrist a couple weeks ago, so things have looked a bit different around here to say the least (it’s my dominant wrist of course). I’m surrounded by loving family and friends who have brought food, flowers, and comfort, though, which is a silver lining.

It’s meant no writing in my journal, no knitting or crocheting, very little cooking, and no cutting back of perennials and shrubs. But I can read, type some (back to pecking style, lol), and people have helped with my seeds, so I do have that to share as well as the “flowers” that are getting me through the fresh-flower-drought months of mid-January through mid-March.

Let’s get to it!

Good Things List

Spring Seed Starting

I had started onion seeds the week before my injury and they now need to be potted up in more nutrient-dense soil. The soil pictured ended up having too much wood pieces, but I had to use it. These are sweet varieties, I will also plant sets of storage onions.

My daughter helped prep the soil for another tray last week for peppers and tomatoes, which I’m still waiting to come up.

Smaller seed trays and lights

I’m changing my seed set-up now that we are building a greenhouse. I need a place to start the seeds inside before moving them to the greenhouse, usually a week or two. I only have a small area in our mudroom/laundry that I can use (sometimes I really miss our larger mudroom with its bigger growing area).

I was thrilled to find these 2-tier lights on stands at Epic Gardening that fit perfectly to use with trays I already had. I will pot up to the Epic 6-cell or 4-cell trays before moving to the greenhouse (that will hopefully be ready to go soon). TIP: Use my code, ANOREGONCOTTAGE5 to get 5% off anything you order, many times in combo with any sale they may be having!

Want to know more about starting seeds?

pink and white faux flowers in white vase

Affordable Realistic Faux Flowers

At the end of January I ordered three stems of pink ranunculus and two of white sedum which I mixed with some baby’s breath I had (that will dry nicely) and a few rosemary stems. If you look closely, they’re obviously fake, but from a distance you can’t really tell, especially the sedum.

I’m ALL about real flowers here – I use them all the time when I have them growing which is about 9-10 months. But late January, February, and March before the daffodils start blooming there’s not much to harvest outside. We don’t live near a store and the last time I bought a couple bouquets at Trader Joes it was $11 for a week of blooms. These Hearth & Hand fake flowers were $30 (way cheaper than other real-touch type flowers) and will last pretty much forever. I view these as a stopgap between the seasons, and they have brought a lot of joy being continually in bloom.

TIPS: I also looked at some greenery stems from the same brand, but they looked WAY more fake and plasticky, so steer clear of those. I’ve found that adding real greenery or flowers that dry well like the baby’s breath with faux flowers is a great way to make them look even more real.

February Books Read

The Unselected Journals of Emma M Lion, Vol.7 & Vol.8, Beth Brower. How sad was I to get to the last books in this series (see my review of the previous volumes here which explains more)! No one knows when volume 9 will be released but I know that everybody who’s read these wonderfully spirited, heartfelt books are waiting impatiently just like me.

This American Woman, Zarna Garg. I read about this book on a number of book lists. I had never heard of this Indian-American comedian but the number of people recommending it as a funny, amazing story was enough for me to put it on my library list. I listened to the author read it which was good, though I think I missed some things because of her accent. I did enjoy her story and it is amazing as her Indian culture growing up is so different than ours, but it wasn’t as funny as I had thought it would be and the chapters of her mom-wife years tended to drag. I found I fast-forwarded a lot.

The Eights, Joanna Miller. This is a historical fiction book based on some of the first women who were able to actually graduate from Oxford back in the 1920s (women had been going to the college before that but they hadn’t been allowed to graduate with a diploma). This is a fictionalized account of four women who are housed in the 8th floor (I can’t remember exactly why they’re called the eights, but it was either the floor or the section). I enjoyed the time period and each of the women’s story was interesting. I think the best thing about it, though, was the women’s friendship and how they were so different from each other but how they connected and became so important to each other.

Theo of Golden, Levi Allen. What to say about this book? This is on so many people’s list as a book that they just absolutely loved, it’s got a huge number of great reviews, and the story of how it was self-published and gained momentum word-of-mouth is really inspiring. For me it was a nice book and of course I liked how it shows humanity being nice, but I found it a little bit treacly. All the connections just working out, everyone just being misunderstood, and the paper-thin characterizations. I don’t know why the me of the “just give me a happy ending” temperament didn’t enjoy this like others do. It just shows there are different books for different people!

The Will of the Many, James Islington. Brian and I listened to this audiobook together and we both really liked it. It has elements from a lot of other science fiction/fantasy books that we’ve listened to, like Red Rising as well as some elements from Hunger Games. I don’t see this as a negative since we enjoyed those! We found this a well-written story that grabbed us right away and was different enough that we could just enjoy the story. It tells the story of an orphaned boy (who we learn later is a actually a prince from province that was taken over) and it’s set in a Roman type of setting with carriages, lots of stone, and tunics and togas. The “tech” in the story comes from people offering their “will” to those above them in a strict caste system and this is how things get built and done. There’s a mystery around not only the main character (who is the first-person narrator) but a higher up man who adopts him to try to find out information from a school where teens are trained to become part of the Hierarchy. It’s not a perfect story, but it is a good one with enough twists and turns to keep it interesting. We will definitely be listening to the next book in the series.

The Road To Tender Hearts, Annie Hartnett. Okay, this is another book that has been on many other book lists in the past few months and most reviews talk about the fun road trip aspect of the story, the quirky characters, the found family aspect, and forgiveness and grief. While it is all that, it’s also kind of weird – there’s a lot of death and I wasn’t really expecting that. And it’s those kind of deaths where they’re supposed to be funny? I’m just not really sure how to take it. There was also a ghost element I found jarring, and then things kind of wrapped up a little too neatly in the end, and yet at the same time didn’t give you enough information to really feel like it was satisfying.

Watching

Thursday Murder Club, Netflix. I had read this book and enjoyed the cozy mystery and setting. The movie did a fine job with it, even if we had to suspend our belief that a retirement home would ever be found in a castle/mansion or that the huge apartments were actually in that mansion!

That’s it for another addition of the Good Things List!

If you’d like to see more of what I’m enjoying, you can check out all the Good Things Lists here. I’d love to know what you think – if you’ve tried any of these or what you’d recommend. Leave a comment below with your thoughts!

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