Going to Durham - White Oak Pottery

We are packing up some of our pottery to take to Durham today. We will join Julie Olson of White Oak Pottery along with other artists, for her home Spring Sale in Durham tomorrow. Bulldog is packing a mixture of our crystalline vases and Moka glaze to display at her studio. There will be a raffle - 5 pieces:one from each studio - to benefit the Durham Independent Animal Rescue. To read more details about the event tomorrow visit Julie's website.

Bruce is polishing the bottom of these Yunomis and vases.

Some of the Moka Glaze we will be bringing

Our shop will be open! Gloria and Ed will be here to greet you. The garden they have been working diligently on for the past month, is shaping up nicely.

Aunt Ruby's Green

Aunt Ruby's Green, Brandywine, Enchantment, Sungold, Juliet, Black Brandywine, Beefmaster, Polish Linguista, Pineapple, Kellogs Breakfast ...... It's a rainbow of tomatoes. We also planted our favorite peppers which are Fooled You and Anaheim, and eggplants which are Ichiban and Pingtung. Soon we will plant melons..... watermelons..... Ahhhh. To pick a watermelon out of the garden is divine. Have you smelled the roots of a cantaloupe plant?

The satisfaction of planting seeds and watching them perk up from the soil is one of the best feelings. I am always amazed to think that such a little seed makes a seedling and then a plant. Then that reasonable sized plant becomes a gargantuan plant and takes more room than we want to admit or plan for when planting in the garden. We always have more plants than room, and always want to squeeze one more plant in. This can sometimes cause real problems come July and August. Do you think we will learn this year? We will see......

So delicate and hypnotizing

Gloria and Ed have been out in the garden raking up old weeds and crabby grass, actually it is the invasive Burmuda runners that are the real bear. Getting this plot of land ready for the seedlings is a satisfying chore. This empty area will be a sea of green soon with lots of yummies for our dinner table.

Color Landscape

We are busily glazing in the studio.
These are a few pictures from my recent trip out into the garden. I wanted to take some close ups of the cannas we have growing there. In one of the folds I found this spider with her egg case.

Vases and Insects

Samantha's vases in process

In between our excursions to Raleigh and Charlotte we have been making vases in the studio. The vases above are in the process of being trimmed and finished. We are busily getting ready for our Cousins in Clay kiln opening. We are excited about Michael Kline, of Bakersville, joining us with his lovely pottery on June 6th and 7th. Bruce and I will have a selection of our crystalline vases and wall hangings for this pottery sale.

What is in the garden? Lets take a look at the clump of blooming chives in the middle left of the garden. A close observation reveals some important work is taking place here too.

Ants as pollinators

I think this is a -Phidippus audax- but definitely a jumping spider. I think he came by to see if he could find lunch.

Thank you to all of the great information on Wikipedia.

Life in the Undergrowth

Here are our recent images of life in the undergrowth from our garden. The insect world is intriguing. There is a BBC series by David Attenborough called Life in the Undergrowth. They drop him off all over the world to look at different invertebrates. "Invertebrates. For every one of us, there are 200 million of them. " We rented it from Netflix.

Here is spider with her egg case.

Ed spotted a Spider

We were in the studio glazing when Ed came in and yelled "Spider".  I was in the back.  I thought that was what he said, but was not quite sure what he was getting at.  Bruce left and then came back and said "Spider!"  "Ed found a spider come look.  Bring your camera"  So I cleaned up and went out to find my dad standing in the middle of the garden.  I took a picture.  He was marking the spot where he found the largest garden spider I have ever seen.  This spider must of been ready to lay eggs, it was huge.  I went back to look for it a few hours later but she was gone.  I believe we messed with her enough that she figured this was not the spot to hang.  After I took many shots of her I turned around to go back to work when I spotted the grasshopper curiously watching.   

Harvesting from the Garden

We were busily harvesting from the garden the other day.  Bruce is cutting the basil and Gloria is getting some of the okra.  The okra can get away from us pretty fast.  I will walk by and say I will pick you next time and when I go back they are as big as my hand.  

Well maybe I did not go back right away.  But there is something anti climatic about picking okra.  One has to have a lot of plants to get a meal.  I feel like I pick one, two , three.... o.k. next day 1, 2, 3, 4 ......  Just never seems to add up to much.  We usually end up enjoying watching them grow.  

Hands down the peppers pictures below are our favorite peppers to grow (well besides anaheims).  They are called Fooled You , because they look like a jalapeno but they are not hot.  I purchased the seed from Pinetree Seeds.   This year Mom and I ordered 17 varieties of tomatoes from a variety of catalogs.  Yikes!  Fun, Fun, Fun....   Anyway getting back to the Fooled You.  This pepper is thick walled, sweet, and great for stir frys.  The plants produce an abundant amount of peppers all the way into fall.  We are constantly picking peppers from around 6 plants.

Loading the Kiln and Unexpected Surprises

Bruce had time to glaze one fossil fish platter. Bruce is putting some smaller pots around his platter. It is a good feeling to have all of the spaces filled. We are always saying, if only we had one shaped like this and.....we could fill that spot, we need to make that special piece some day.

Bruce is bricking up the door. It looks like he is always doing all of the work. Not true. I just stop long enough to take a few shots. My job in this task is to hand him the bricks.

We are growing these beautiful morning glories. I believe the name of this variety is Grandfather Ots. Or is it Grandmother Ots? I don't remember right now. It may be another variety all together. They are beautiful. The pink in the purple is really incredible. The picture below looks like Moka is staring back at me from the foliage. Not quite sure how his eye got in the picture.


I did not see the mantis beside the morning glory this morning when I took the picture. It popped out at me on the computer. What a serendipitous composition!

Melon of a time loading the kiln

We are loading the kiln. We could not of asked for a better day. It is weird that we can be experiencing life as usual while people down at the coast are having to pack up, evacuate, put off deadlines and daily life, to sit and wait.
The last kiln load we fired, Bruce made larger then usual pieces, around 15" - 20 " pieces for the top of the kiln. We had an eureka moment. We have decided when possible we will do this from now on. It saves Bruce's back when loading the top levels of the kiln. We may not get as many individual pieces in the kiln, but it is worth saving his back. Ed is helping Bruce take the pieces down to the kiln.

We loaded the back of the kiln yesterday. When we can, we load the kiln over a two day period. It is another way we have found to help save Bruce's back.


We have spent some time on top of Mount Melon during the past couple of weeks. Looking around for which melon is ripe. We are at the end of harvest. Which is good and bad. We will miss the daily fruits, but how many cantaloupes, honey dews, and watermelons can one eat? We had an incredible experience yesterday eating an orange watermelon. I will search through Gloria's seeds to find the name. We highly recommend it. We never know if we are opening up one that will be tossed into the compost or an out of body experience. Melons are so finicky.

The melon below is a volunteer of unknown variety. A couple of years back we stopped planting full size melons because they would not fit into the refrigerator, and they were way too much for us to eat. We have found that planting ice box variety melons is more manageable. This one is a party melon.


Samantha and Ratatouille on top of Mount Melon which is top soil from making a new driveway.

Bulldog Gardens

Here is one my recent photo shots from our garden. Ed and Gloria have been doing an incredible job in the garden this year. By this time of summer, Bruce and would be threading our way through a tangle of weeds in the garden to see if anything is ripe and ready to pick. It is amazing what one can grow admist thigh high weeds (we called it bio-intensive). I much rather have a garden that looks like this. Mom just loves working in it. She is in her element. Me too because I can now go out into it to observe the insect life there without worrying about what will drag me down below the undergrowth.

Here are some recent pictures Gloria's and Ed's Bulldog garden