Outside 1407 Russell Rd., a terrifying pirate ship that captivated neighbors and passersby at Halloween has been transformed into Santa's sleigh. Captain Jack ceded his throne to Santa's workshop and a jail that once housed a buccaneer in chains now appears as a stage for a whimsical dancing bear. Tami Sarjeant—known to many in Del Ray as "the pirate lady"—has been hard at work the past month replacing her award-winning Halloween display with an equally extravagant outdoor celebration of Christmas. Perhaps we should call her Santa's helper, too. Young boys with mouths open in song stand …
Looking for a unique gift for the home and garden enthusiast in your life, something out of the ordinary that you won't find at the mall or assorted big box stores? Look no further than the shops on Mount Vernon Avenue on Small Business Saturday. I browsed through a number of the businesses on Del Ray's main drag this past week and I can tell you that your "I just couldn't find the right gift" excuse isn't going to work this year. There are trinkets and keepsakes for young and old; handcrafted and vintage pieces; luxury items with a touch of whimsy; gifts that might break the bank and ones …
I employed a new weapon in my perennial war with the weeds this year: winter rye. In years past, at the close of growing season, I cleared my garden of spent tomato plants and weeds, put my tomato cages in storage and left the plot at the Chinquapin Organic Gardens fallow for the winter. Every spring, I found it in exactly the same state, swallowed by a sea of thick weeds, some as tall as four feet. "Whoa!" my kids said every spring on our first trip back to the gardens. I'm told the winter rye will eliminate the weeds and, more importantly, the need to spend two to three full days of …
Ask my children how many pets we have and most times, they'll answer 'one.' Our dog. But sometimes, when they're feeling playful, they'll say 'hundreds.' "The worms!" they shout. Last September, we took a short trip to the southern Maryland farm of Heidi and Stefano Briguglio and, to my surprise, came home with a compact composter filled with half a pound of red wiggler worms. I didn't know a thing about worm composting before that trip, so I never imagined countertop composting for myself. But, the couple made the venture seem so easy and it looked like a fun project to take on with the …
The first year I grew tomatoes, I planted about six seedlings. Now, I tend to 16 tomato plants plus several more volunteers that surprised me when they popped from the ground. The reason for the big leap in plants? I learned to can tomatoes. It's time consuming and hot—think boiling pots, a hot oven and steamy tomatoes—but the reward is a shelf full of savory, summertime tomatoes for you to enjoy in the dead of winter when others are eating from cans. A quick online search of canning methods reveals that my method is unorthodox, but I learned from a graduate of the Culinary Institute of …
The single biggest pleasure I get from gardening is putting delicious food on the table. A jar of canned tomatoes, fresh salad greens, chocolate zucchini cake and basil pesto—especially the basil pesto—make the blistered hands, muddy knees, dirt-stained fingers and insufferable mosquito bites worth it. So, a few months ago, when a friend and local blogger invited me to the inaugural DIY Del Ray Food Swap I didn't have to think twice. Of course, I would be there: basil pesto and cake in hand. Leslie Duss, one of the writers of the local blog DIY Del Ray, found her inspiration for the party …
When Russ Adams retired from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office six years ago, he got a whale of a retirement gift: an impressive backyard pond stocked with assorted fish. Seven giant koi with distinct personalities and looks that inspired names like Coy Koi and Moo Moo share space in the oversized pond with about 20 comets, a fancy type of goldfish. Tall, tropical-looking plants like Thalia and Elephant Ear grow from the pond, and a small waterfall projects a tranquil sound of the backwoods in Adam's idyllic Warwick Village yard. "The fish pond was his retirement gift," said Adams' wife, …
Yard sales are as much a summertime staple as lemonade stands, Slip 'N Slides and vacations to sandy beaches. Drive through the neighborhood on any Saturday this time of year and chances are you'll see more than a handful of yards and driveways overflowing with unwanted furniture, used books, outgrown clothes and discarded knickknacks. We used to call them garage sales in the Maryland neighborhood where I grew up and everyone had a garage. Here in Del Ray, where a garage—detached or otherwise—is unusual, the preferred term seems to be yard sale. Regardless of the name, the same principle …
When strong storms blew through Del Ray June 29 and knocked the power out for more than a million people across the region, there was an addition to the normal city sounds of birds, kids, cars, sirens and planes: portable generators. The hum of the gas-powered machines signaled sweet relief to people anxious to protect the food in their refrigerators or run a fan to break the heat. But others found the "hum" an inescapable, maddening roar. "I'm about to shoot a hole in my neighbor's generator," a friend of mine wrote on Facebook the second day of the blackout. "The noise is literally …
Three months ago, Del Ray Realtor Jen Walker found an envelope in her mailbox with her address penned in an unfamiliar script. The sender didn't know Walker's name and instead directed it simply to "The Folks." Inside the envelope, Walker found two black and white photos of her house printed by Hicks Photo Finishers of Washington, D.C., and a letter from Fairfax resident Frances Campbell Haas. "I was born in this house 83 years ago and lived there until I married 63 years ago," Haas wrote. "As a child growing up, we had wonderful neighbors and a lot of kids to play with. There were woods …
There are few things I love more than wandering around garden shops, and I consider it one of my major mom achievements that my children seem to love them almost as much as me. They collect spent blooms from the ground to make bouquets, play hide and seek among the trees and stare transfixed into garden ponds. So, it astounds me that I've lived in Del Ray six years now and never once went to Nature By Design until this week. It's a magical spot at the end of a concrete stretch of warehouses off Route 1, an urban oasis chock-a-block with native plants, trees and shrubs, marked by muddy …
When students from Cora Kelly helped plant three black gum trees at the park across the street from their school recently, they became the latest in a devoted band of volunteers working to transform the once unused corner lot. The city bought the site at the corner of Reed and Commonwealth avenues in July 2009, but beyond making the $850,000 investment in the property, it didn't plan to do anything more than scatter grass seed and mow regularly. It couldn't afford to, said Laura Durham, open space coordinator for Alexandria. "It was clear that it was just going to be open space but not …
Do you ever find that when you walk past a house under renovation you start to brainstorm the ways you would change your place if you hit the lottery, wrote the next "Harry Potter" or created the social media site that vanquished Facebook? I do, occasionally, especially as dusk starts to settle and interior lights are flicked on to reveal floor-to-ceiling built-in bookcases or cozy foyers or a beautifully-detailed staircase. Truth is, I used to let my mind rework our space a lot more, but I made myself stop because it felt a little greedy looking at others' things and wanting more. I'm not…
There are few things more disappointing to gardeners than waiting all year for a beloved plant to bloom only to wake one morning and find it ravaged by pests. Especially vexing is when you have no idea what's attacking it and have to don a pest detective hat in order to kill the pest and save the plant. Early this spring, I walked through my garden and stopped beside a small rose I grew from a cutting of a bush my grandmother tended for decades. My grandmother passed away a year ago, so I put a lot of pressure on myself to make her memory live on in my garden. When I found the one lone rose …
The first time I met Del Ray resident Kevin Tullier, he was ferrying plants from an older woman's car to her garden plot at the Chinquapin Organic Gardens. Tullier, a first-time gardener who waited two years for a spot in the gardens, had just met his new garden plot neighbor and immediately embraced the spirit of "community" that makes the gardens such a special, sought-after place. He helped carry her plants, listened to her gardening tips and chatted happily as he ripped weeds from his overgrown plot (and broke a couple garden tools in the process). Tullier is one of a small crop of lucky…
You may have noticed the recent construction of numerous new homes all over Del Ray: built of mud and twigs, grass and leaves, they're inhabited by baby birds hungry for worms and insects. Breeding season is well underway for many birds in Northern Virginia, including American robins and gray catbirds, and our porches, trees, shrubs and houses make inviting spots for them to nest. Whether we want them there or not. For the past several weeks, Tricia Schulze and her husband Jamie Huff kept their eyes trained toward the robin's nest that sits atop a column on the front porch of their home on …
It takes a discerning, optimistic eye to stand outside a dilapidated boarding house and see grandeur. And it takes a fair amount of bravery and blind faith to buy the house without a do-it-yourself bone in your body. But that's just what Maria Wasowski and her husband, Mark Blackden, did 25 years ago when they bought the ramshackle American Foursquare at 306 E. Hume Ave. With six major renovations over two and a half decades, they transformed the house into an open, beautifully-decorated space surrounded by a large, lush garden. They saw promise in a place others deemed impossible. …
The first thing I do when I go camping, after I pitch the tent, is lay out the sleeping bags, unpack my rucksack and tidy up around camp. I go through a similar process of putting away clothes and bags when I stay at hotels except there I'm also likely to rearrange furniture and hide knick knacks in unused drawers or closets. I'm a quintessential Cancer, if you put any stock in the signs of the Zodiac. If astrology strikes you as hokum, then I'm someone who likes to create a feeling of "home" wherever I am: from a tent in Denali National Park to an oceanside hut in Zanzibar. Either I suffer…
