New Items in 1000 Markets Shop

Today I put quite a few new earrings in my 1000 markets shop:
http://www.1000markets.com/users/twentypoundtabby
including the moon earrings above. 1000 Markets takes Amazon payments, so if you already buy from Amazon, you'll have no trouble making purchases from 1000 Markets.

How I Put Paypal Buttons on my Blog

I've had a few requests for how I learned to put Paypal buttons on my blog. It turns out that it's incredibly easy!
I just followed the instructions in this YouTube video:
Adding Paypal buttons

Selling on Blogger! Orange Red Poppy Flower Earrings

Paypal makes it so easy to sell right off a blog, that I'm going to try it out myself. Here's one of my more popular items - Orange Red Poppy Flower Earrings. This way, if you'd like to buy a pair, but don't want to join Etsy, you can just buy them from here. I've included the shipping in the price.


These dainty, garden inspired earrings remind me of the California Poppies that reseed in my garden, especially the vivid orange red Mikado variety. They are made using glass flower beads that are a mottled Picasso finished orange red with touches of green.


I offer three different ear hooks. One is a nickel free antiqued copper plated lever back and the other two are nickel free pure copper, one large and one small. I make the pure copper hooks myself using 20 gage jewelry grade copper wire and sand the ends down so they are smooth after hardening them.

Until Paypal gives me the option of specifying which country I can ship internationally to, I'll be shipping to USA addresses only.

Orange Red Poppy Flower Earrings
$10.00 Including shipping within the USA

Ear Hook Type

large hook small hook lever back

Snow in Denver

I woke up to see quite a bit of snow today, October 28, 2009. Right now it's 8:30 mountain time and there is about 5 or 6 inches on the ground of very heavy wet snow and it's still snowing. It's suppose to keep snowing until sometime Thursday. I'm so glad I topped off the bird feeders yesterday.



Here is an unusual sight - a junco on a bird feeder. They usually feed on the ground. This is the first time I have noticed them up on the feeder.

Pepper Jelly

This year I grew peppers solely for the purpose of making jelly. The peppers I grew were Gypsy (mild), Marconi (mild) and Volcano (hot, but not killer hot). My spouse had the idea of using the juicer on the peppers and then making jelly out of the juice. The only problem I had then was figuring out how much juice to use since the recipes called for chopped up peppers, not juice. The Gypsy peppers ripened yellow and made a nice golden jelly, while the Marconi peppers are green and made an olive green jelly.
Here is the recipe I used:

Pepper Jelly

2 cups juice from mild peppers
1/2 cup juice from hot peppers
2 cups cider vingegar
6 cups sugar
2 pouches of Certo liquid pectin

Juice peppers using a juicer.
Combine with vinegar and sugar in large pot.
Bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Boil for ten more minutes.
Add pectin. Bring back to a rolling boil and keep boiling for 1 minute.
Pout into hot sterilized jars.
Process (boil) in hot water bath for 10 minutes.

At first I used just 1 cup of juice from the mild peppers and 1/2 cup from the Volcanos, but that didn't seem quite peppery enough, so I eventually settled on 2 cups of either Gypsy or Marconi pepper juice and 1/2 cup of Volcano pepper juice. Next time, I'll grow more hot peppers and make the jelly even hotter.

Sempervivums, Sedums and Hypertufa

Recently, I bought some new hypertufa pots from a local pot maker. What is hypertufa, you may ask? It is a concoction of cement, peat, and other stuff such as vermiculite or perlite that is used to make planters, fake rocks other garden objects. Its main advantage over regular cement is that it's lighter. Plants, such as succulents do well in planters made of it.

Years ago I made my own hypertufa pot and it turned out well. But it was quite messy and time consuming for one pot. I planted some Sempervivum funckii, Monstrosum and Cobweb in it and pretty much ignored it for years. The pot sat there in all weather, staying in good shape and the semps grew.
Eventually the pot got partially covered up by rogue lavender plants, which didn't hurt the pot, but did cause some of the semps to disappear. I pulled the pot out from under the lavender, put it back in the sun and the semps resumed their growing. See the picture at the top of this post.


Since I really like the look of hypertufa as well as its ability to withstand our freezes and thaws, when I saw some for sale (at a VERY good price!) I bought some more. The picture above shows one of four I bought.

Then, I hit up some of the end of season clearance sales at Timberline and O'Tooles and bought some more sedums, alpines and sempervivum. I planted them in temporary pots and will keep them there until next spring, when I'll then plant those that overwinter well into the hypertufa pots that will be well seasoned by then and ready to plant.


The pot above contains Sedum dasyphyllum, Sedum globosum, Sedum tetractinum and an unknown sempervivum.


The pot above contains Sedum divergens, Draba aizoides, Sedum rupestre 'Angelina', Sedum Major, Sedum hispanicum Purple Form and Sempervivum arachnoideum.




I also acquired some sempervivum via mail order. The above two pots contain sempervivum Blue Boy, calcareum, Gay Jester, Magical, Maigret, Speciosum, Spherette, Casa, Sirius, Fuego, Solange, Dolle Dina and Jovibarba arenaria x hirta f/Belansky Tatra.

Demon Eyed Cat!

There was a glowing eyed beasty in the garage the other night!

Eric is hoping we don't notice him and he can stay there all night hunting mousies!