Bed Savvy.

Thought I would do another quick post with a landscape maintenance tip. Mostly because I just made a shoddily Photoshopped logo for my "The Mower You Know" sections. :)

Chickweed

If you have flowerbeds or gardens, they will probably need to be weeded... a lot. Bigger weeds with single stems are easier to pull but chances are, you'll experience a lot of tiny weeds spread around, or icky ground cover weeds like chickweed. Pulling weeds like this is futile, unless you have all day and meticulous fingers. You will always leave behind little stems and roots which will just grow again with a new lease on life.

You could consider using a tool to till up the dirt (assuming your garden isn't mulched, barked or covered with rocks...). A standard garden hoe is likely the first and most traditional choice. However, perhaps you should consider using a cousin of the hoe that you probably haven't even heard of: the Hula Hoe! Hula hoes are my favorite tool for weeding the flowerbeds and prepping them for planting. (Believe me when I say that my younger sister, who is also my coworker, and I have all sorts of "hoe-er" and "working the beds" jokes)

A hula hoe has a stirrup-shaped head which you can push and pull through the dirt. It will dig up the roots of weeds and fluff up the dirt. Everyone likes fluffy dirt in their flowerbeds. A traditional hoe will pull the dirt with each stroke, leave large clumps of dirt and trenches. The hula hoe channels dirt through the hoop. Weeds can then be picked out of the fluffy dirt, easy peasy.

No garden shed is complete without a hula hoe: perfect for prepping your flower beds for annuals and cleaning up around perennials and vegetable gardens. Your soil will be light, fluffy and manageable. How enviable. :)

Dry Brushing: What the heck, Why the heck?

Summer time is that wonderful three months of the Montana year to get some sun (although this year, we've had to deal with less). The trouble with all that skin exposure is that you need to cover it up again...with no less than SPF 30 sunscreen!

I'm usually Miss Sun Safety Sally, especially since I work outside. In my opinion, a good day at work is one in which I can wear my coat all day... For the most part though, it is necessary for me to coat myself, rather, with sunscreen in the morning and halfway through the day. When you're mowing lawns all day, that sunscreen makes you an adhesive for blowing grass. Walking flypaper. Needless to say, I feel pretty grubby at the end of the day. My skin takes a beating in the summertime with all the heat, wind, sunscreen and itchy grass--an extra one-two to my skin lies in the fact that I dehydrate easily without realizing it. The good thing is that I rarely burn enough for my skin to peel. Skin peeling after a burn is just horrendous when you realize that it's essentially your skin committing suicide because the DNA is too damaged to replicate properly. Yeesh. So with all the sunscreen, bugspray and dehydration, I'm sure everyone's skin is feeling a little stressed.

Anyway, the point of this post was to share a little something I recently happened upon in a Women's Health magazine. It is called dry brushing and is full body exfoliation with a natural bristle brush before you shower. Naturally, before I try anything myself, I do a good amount of research. Dry brushing can offer a lot of health benefits including, obviously, aiding in cell turnover and therefore improving the resiliency and texture of skin. I did come across other claims that dry brushing can help detoxify your body, improve circulation, reduce cellulite and the like. These claims haven't been extensively studied and every person can experience a different result. However, I felt that the de-grubbifying offered by dry brushing was enough for me to want to give it a shot.

I ordered a natural bristle brush with a long handle from Amazon.com and just received it yesterday. I didn't spend too much on it: about $12 with shipping. I was super excited to try it out. It is recommended that you dry brush your skin in the morning before a shower to help you wake up and improve circulation. I shower at night in the summer and figured I'd just chance having an invigorated circulatory system before bed.

Here is a website that offers some really good tips for dry brushing; I recommend giving it a read: http://epicureantable.com/articles/adrybrush.htm

*You should stand in the shower (with the water off, of course) before dry brushing. You'd be surprised how much dry skin will come off. Plus you've heard of the statistic that like 80% (or more even--I'm just pulling that number from memory) of the dust in your house is made up of dead skin cells... Imagine the dust you'd make standing in one place, doing a full body exfoliation. (I hate to make a reference to clapping erasers....) By standing in the shower, you will contain that dust and be able to wash it down the drain.

*Dry brushing technique suggests that you make long strokes with the brush, always pulling it or pushing it toward your heart.

*You should brush hard enough for your skin to redden a bit--not hard enough to break your skin though!

*Don't forget to brush the bottoms of your feet and your hands.

*Perhaps consider getting a separate, smaller brush for use on just your face.

*Rinse off well in the shower, avoiding really hot water, which dries you out.

All in all, the dry skin brushing felt really good! And it did improve the smoothness of my skin after just one use. Areas like my shins, which are pretty dinked up from debris thrown from my string trimmer were evened out. People with a propensity for ingrown hairs or those with mild cases of those little KP bumps on the backs of their arms could also benefit from this ritual. I imagine that dry brushing daily will ultimately keep my skin clearer--my back and shoulders tend to break out in the summer from the sunscreen, dirt and sweat. I will certainly recommend that people give dry brushing a shot!

Under Construction.

Work was canceled on account of rain... and hail. One of the nice things about landscaping is that you can get yourself a three-day weekend if the weather is potentially harmful. :) The hail is bouncing three feet off the deck! I suppose I'd take a tree to the face over being cold, wet and hailed-on while mucking around in slurpy flower beds pulling weeds.

I can use this time to figure out how to make my blog a little personal. I did a little doodle of a chimerical mascot to add to the header of the page, but haven't yet figured out how to get it where I want it. So for now, it'll have to be mascot-less.

Also, I plan to put up a gallery of my artwork as soon as possible.

The Awful Truth About Blue Spruce.

You can bet your boots that somewhere in the world, everyday, a landscape maintenance worker is getting hit in the head or face by a tree branch. I bring up this totally plausible, though not extensively-researched assertion because, today, I was that landscape maintenance worker. I have been working for Blooming Flowers and Grass for the past 4 summers, so you could pretty much say I'm a pro. But, despite my experience and walking-backward skills, I will get hit in the head or face with a tree branch at least once per day. OR get hit in the head or face enough in one day to fill up two weeks worth of daily tree-bashings (that also includes bashings from large shrubs...like dogwoods).

Although grass doesn't particularly enjoy growing underneath trees (especially pine for some reason), it grows just enough to be really long, patchy, and scraggly. This wimpy patch of lawn is usually found beneath trees and shrubs that have low branches and cannot be reached by a lawn mower (Walkers for life!). Therefore, it must be cleaned up with a string trimmer. It is necessary to push your way through the branches to reach the highly-visible, scraggly grass near the base of the tree.

The trouble with trees is that they are pokey, covered with sap, unyielding and did I mention pokey? The most prickley of trees that I have encountered (besides Russian olive, but more on those later) is the blue spruce. It is a lovely tree that is very Christmassy, nice smelling and is a neat color to boot. The needles however, are short, stiff and very, very sharp! Blue spruce are apparently very popular on the properties we tend... Needless to say, I've had some unpleasant, pokey-branch-to-the-face encounters in my day.

If you were to take any practical knowledge from a seasoned landscape maintenance worker it would be this:
Don't plant blue spruce in such a location that you will have grass underneath it!

This has been... "The 'Mower' You Know"

Etymology.

I suppose I have been thinking about starting up a blog for awhile. Perhaps to help me sort out the mish-mash of my life after college. After having only known school for the past 17 years of my life (Kindergarten does count!), I'm faced with a whole new set of routines. No more 3-month-long summer jobs, no more Christmas Break or Spring Break, nor homework even! I will have to learn to redefine myself, rediscover myself and understand the importance of the things I've learned throughout those years.

What I have always known about myself is that I have always been interested in several things at once. I had so many potential career dreams when I was little. Paleontologist, artist, cartoonist, author, actress, paleontologist again, orthodontist... respectively. I have so many interests to realize and address, all of which define me.

I had pondered the title of my blog for awhile before deciding on "Para Chimera".  The Chimera is a monster from Greek mythology with the body of a lion, a snake for a tail and a random goat coming out of her back (weird). But the term has come to mean any animal made up of the parts of others. One thing made of many other things.
The Latin word para means "near, beside, like" = "similar to" (my favorite dinosaur is the Parasaurolophus, by the way!).

Essentially, this blog is something made up of many parts; this isn't a blog just about the joys of raising orchids or just about home improvement. This is a blog about art, health, diet, recipes, family, relationships, practical advice regarding landscaping, wedding planning (I have my very own coming up!), science and basically anything that defines myself as a chimera.

Join me, chimeras!