Gypsy Skirt Update

Last year the blog New Dress a Day became really popular (I followed it myself) as a young woman challenged herself, a la Julie & Julia, to take a different thrift-store dress every day and transform it into something she'd actually want to wear. The challenge was one year, and her total budget was $365, or one dollar per dress. With humor and wit she blogged these quick and amazing changes and inspired many others to take to their sewing machines.

Today, I present my own dress re-make.

Here's the before, a waaaay too big dress that had some promise with the gypsy skirt:

I cut off the top, removed the side zipper, took in the sides a couple of inches, and cut off the red top-stitching from the tiers of the skirt. A simple drawstring later, and it's a cute white gypsy skirt, perfect for summer!

The Liberty Garden

A few of my readers will know about the vegetable garden I started last summer at our local Thompsonville Community Garden. Well, this year's growing season is well underway and the garden is really thriving!

This was taken a week or two ago... it's even bigger now!

I've even made a few fresh-picked salads using lettuce and radishes right from the garden. Now that's fresh!

Somehow even veggies you aren't crazy about seem to taste better when you grew them yourself!

I even decided to "accessorize" the garden this year with this flower outdoor lawn ornament made of recycled spoons and forks. Fun!

You know, with all of the negative information out there about today's agricorporate culture (did I just coin a word?) that makes us sicker and poorer, it makes so much sense to grow what you can. You can easily have a beautiful, bountiful organic garden that yields delicious, nutritious, inexpensive food! Even a few pots out on your patio will work. 

Have you ever heard of a Victory garden? During wartime, there were major efforts to encourage people to help out and grow food because food production had fallen so severely. We may be at war (boo!), but we don't face that problem today. Agribusiness is big business, and government subsides, tariffs, and quotas unnaturally distort prices and market signals. You can, in your own quiet way, resist this with what I'm calling the Liberty Garden. Grow what you can, support local family farms by buying from their farm stands, and at the grocery store vote with your dollars by buying things you believe in. 

Happy gardening!

P.S. I just want to add that this is my 100th post! Yay!