I wanted to create a small herb garden off my kitchen door for my cooking. I found this zinc (galvanized steel) tub in my old barn and bought all the basic herbs at my local garden center and planted them in the tub. I prefer keeping the herbs outside as I never have to water them, nature will take care of that.

I used the basics:

Chive
Thyme
Parsley
Celery
Basil
Rosemary

I added lavender for some height, color and luck.

You can also start a herb garden in a plastic tub to hang over your balcony, or Tubtrugs are excellent planters. Never forget to drill some holes in the bottom for drainage, you don't want to drown your herbs.

Hello and welcome to my new blog layout. I've been planning this for quite some time, I find with a new house comes a new layout and some new stuff here and there. For example I'll start sharing gardening, cooking and making tips with you and file them outside the blog instead. You can find them under the tags at the top of all the pages. I'll announce on the blog when I add something to a category and will direct link you to it. I also have a bigger picture size.

As you can see (and for those who visited) I've intergraded The Yvestown Lifestyle blog with The Yvestown blog but I'll be no longer blogging about third party subjects as I only gave good contents away. You can now enjoy the things I love via my tumblr page 'Today I Love' instead. This blog will all about me LOL!

I'm not so happy with the technical bits of the blog itself so I'll be working on that. It needs a lot of weeding, hence the blog title. I might archive all the older posts and start from scratch.

I hope you like the contents so far. I'm planning to add items daily starting as from September as I have to move offices first and ... oh all about that later.

Now the weather is so nice we've moved from working indoors to outdoors. We are planting a garden from scratch. Only the trees were here and probably have been for the past 113 years.

I've started a tumblr blog for inspiration.

I've done something today that I never do ... I sat in the sun!! Yes people, I sat in the sun for an hour flipping magazines. I sat in the sun for an hour flipping magazines with my feet in a bucket of water, I sat in the sun for an hour flipping magazines with my feet in a bucket of water in my UNDERWEAR!!!

Mind me but it wasn't really a lovely little sun with a nice summer's breeze, it was a sweltering heat wave kind of "I'm going to get toasted" sun. And I sat in it ... I still can't believe it.

Boo tried to copy me but couldn't stand the heat with so much fur and fat. The temperature read 37 °C (98 F) in the shade - IN THE SHADE!! It's just crazy and I sat in the sun!!

This is an achievement and I think I need to be awarded. I who hates sun, who hates sitting down doing nothing for an hour, who hates sitting in underwear, who hates ... well I actually loved the feet in the bucket of water and the flipping magazines.

Something else I like to share (because I got tagged twice and have been trying to ignore it - hehe) 8 random bits about me:

1. I'm super emotional and well up at very odd moments. Like when a marching band starts to play music or when people applaud for a save landing or when one of the teachers from my old Au Pair child celebrated her last day at the nursery. It's super embarrassing sometimes and utterly inconvenient.
2. I'm attracted to imperfect people.
3. I've been a big Oprah fan for a long time until she said "eat whole grain" as if it was a revelation. That made me not believe her anymore.
4. I still have movie star crushes.
5. I do not believe in heaven or hell but I do want to go to a place full of kittens, free shopping and fat free yummy food when I'm dead.
6. I like celebrity gossip and know everything there's to know about Brad and Angelina.
7. I shower every day and clean my bedding every other day.
8. I do not like summers and I actually think I suffer from summer depressions. When the leaves start to fall from the trees I get happy and energetic. I do believe in a struggle and I feel you have to struggle harder in autumn and winter.

Just a couple of weeks ago I discovered Charlotte - Hello Charlotte!! Discovering new blogs and new people is always such an excitement. To quote Proust (ah, doesn't that sound intellectual)

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

Charlotte's "Once in a lifetime" post put me up a great idea. I'm always suffering from terrible hay fever this time a year and I throw so many paper towel and tissues away that I sometimes feel guilty for doing so. After a little searching I found a great lot of hankies on eBay. Late today I received them in the mail and spent washing and drying them.

I just felt like Charlotte for a moment.

And all of a sudden it started to snow. Just one day before the day I've been looking forward to for so long.

Tomorrow my home will be photographed for a magazine, and just now the photographer called me that we might have to cancel it because of the weather.

I love snow. Like Lorelai Gilmore I have a love affair with snow but now ... I hate snow, I want to kick it!!

Wish me luck ... and some sunshine.

After a very long and fun conversation with Kathleen last night we came to talk about my garden and the boot room and how the boot room is joined to the house. It's a bit complicated because pre WWII houses here in The Netherlands are always a bit of a mystery. For example we didn't have a full working bathroom when we moved in because the house wasn't designed for it. Apparently the previous previous previous previous owners used to bathe in the little house (we call boot room now) in a bucket. The previous previous owners made that little extension that joins the main house with the little house. That little house is a true gem because it's multifunctional. Behind that cute door, with the heart cut out, is a little attic where we store "things we do not want to look at and be seen with" aka Bo's stuff. Behind the large window is the laundry and behind the small window is a WC. The little annex is for washing hands and for being pretty.

The patio is still really boring but everything needs to grow and I still need to paint. But we've come a long way as this is what it looked like when we bought it two years ago.



It's home and it's different to most houses here and that's why we like.

See the whole set here