These are the days of wine and roses

I got all the bottles in the ground and got to spend the day in the warmth of the sun.  It was a pretty breezy day where it was warm in the sun and cool in the shade.  Our yard has plenty of both which is fortunate for us since Jason loves growing food and I have a deep love for shade plants and natives.

This is where I left off last year at the end of November.

Kalib had a  friend here and they were sweet enough to help me move all the bottles outside and get them laid out where I was going to get started.  Then Jason got involved and started fixing a path that I was hoping to get to before I ran out of bottles

I finished the right side of the path all the way to the grass.

My plan is to eventually take the bottles all the way past the gate in the photo to the edge of the wood and line the raspberry bed with them. That's AFTER I finish the front gardens.  (Many MANY bottles later)

 After finishing the section to the right of the path, I came back to the front porch area and started heading up the path towards where we park our cars.  I stopped where they ran into the liriope we have planted down that path.  I'm still trying to decide whether to go all the way up the path or not, so I'm stopping there for now

Once I hit the liriope, I moved over to the path that runs to the water spicket.  This little path becomes an issue every summer as it was getting overgrown with liriope and there was a large cherry tree in the corner. Jason pulled out the cherry tree and pulled up the liriope and we have replaced what was there with roses for India.  (She raises ALL the roses around here - they are her plant specialty)  

As I get more bottles I'm going to line the right side of this path next. We will mulch the path and getting to that water spigot in the summer will be a breeze. (This is the path Jason was working on in the other photos - doesn't it look nice?)  This spigot is where all the irrigation for the front yard connects to, so being able to get in and out of there easily has become important.

This is a view looking back towards the porch and shadier side of the yard.  (We are thinking about how to light the bottles at night.  Any suggestions?)

 

 

If you are willing to save your bottles for me.  I would really appreciate it.  (Well, that is if you live close by and drink wine.)

I am also trying to think of somewhere local I could pick up bottles from that would be convenient for me.  What I think would be perfect is somewhere that serves a small variety of wines and doesn't go through tons of bottles a night, but enough I would need to pick them up every few days.  I think I could handle that.

Now, I'm off to sit out in the sunshine a read a bit, then back to those flowers!

She's Back on the Bottle

Oh Yes!  The weather is warming, the rain has moved out for a few days and the sun has FINALLY come out.  I'm excited to be able to get back to my garden bottle project. I have been a busy girl in the kitchen scraping labels off of wine bottles. 

I had to leave this project alone at the end of November because the soil was getting too hard and the weather too cold and WAY too wet.  Can someone remind me just how many snow days did we get this year again?  Oh. That's right. Too many for Georgia.  

Here is where I last left the bottle project - my stopping point for winter.

After a while, I even quit taking in wine bottles through the winter. I had so many waiting to have labels removed and get into the ground that I eventually started feeling like I was going to run out of space to store them before it was warm enough to get to them.

Our annual Maypole party is coming up and we are eager to get the yard whipped into shape for the myriad of people with whom we will be celebrating the return of the warmth, the blooming spring, and ALL the new life swirling and spiraling around us. 

With the Maypole party and the sunny weather in mind on Friday morning, I put a new blade into my razor knife and started bringing bottles in.  Looking at the huge pile of them awaiting me, I was a bit unsure of how long it would take me to get the labels off them all.  I was wondering whether I would actually get them into the ground this weekend on not.  As it turns out, it only took me about 5 hours all total to get them all done (there were A LOT of them)  

First, I bring them in and soak them in warm soapy water.  I try to let them soak at least 5 minutes before I start trying to get the labels off.  This seems to soften the glue and helps the label come off much easier.  (There are plenty of products out there one can use for this, but I'm into keeping it simple and cheap - even if it takes a little longer.)

Then, I bring them over to the other side of the sink and scrape the labels off - some labels come off really easily and some do not.  I don't worry about getting everything off - eventually the glue will wear down in the sunshine and weather.

Once the labels are off, I rinse the bottle one more time and make sure everything sticky is off and then move them to the drying rack.

When the drying rack is full, I usually move them outside and then bring in more, but I was determined to get them all done at once this time, so I set out towels and dried them on my counter.

It turned out to be 78 bottles we cleaned.

That's a lot of bottles and I only drank a few of them!

Now, I'm off to get them into the ground!