End of 2018

I’m saying this so often, but time really flies.

I graduated from a full-time student, but this fall was so busy with school, the Master Gardener program, volunteering, and gardening.

I take one class at a semester at the VWCC, Virginia Western Community College, for fun. It’s so nice to not worry about grade anymore and simply enjoy learning something I don’t know. I took Macroeconomic this semester since some people said: “it would be good for you”. I think it was good, but I did not like it, and I didn’t like the fact that I had to suffer from a paper during the Thanksgiving break. Though, I was happy about the final exam turned out a take-home due to inclement weather as the college was closed for 3 days during the final exam week. I really could not keep my motivation up for studying at the end of the semester and was thinking of skipping the exam. Lucky me.



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R and I finished the Master Gardener program and received a certificate and the nice name tags.



We had a total of 50 hours of lectures and a few field trips, but for many people, most of the contents usually don’t stay in our head as practical knowledge. So, 50 hours of volunteer work by the end of 2019 is required to keep the title of Master Gardener. The hour is reduced to 20 for next year. The concept is to keep learning from experience and update the gardening skill. I already finished the 50 hours. I will add more hours to be comfortable with a social setting.

The program covered a wide range of gardening including landscaping, fruit, vegetables, flower gardening, wildlife, water quality, soil, bugs, pruning, plant diseases, etc, etc. I have only three years of vegetable garden experience and not familiar with other plants. So, I now regularly volunteer at the Arboretum in VWCC to learn about indoor, outdoor plants and trees.



One of the main annual events — We had a poinsettia sale at the beginning of Dec. The sale went well. So many people and our time are involved in this sale. I love the idea that our volunteered time is calculated as $20+/h and it becomes a fund of scholarship for young people who are interested in a plant.

Also, I am a team member of teaching about vegetable and soil at a junior high school, once a month. The organizer is a retired elementary school teacher. My role is just to guide children for her class. 10 days ago, we had a workshop about soil.



I like the Master Gardener program which provides us the opportunities to engage in the community and help people as well as educational to us.

Other than those, I donated 30 quilts to two quilting organizations since April this year.
A few pics of the quilts are below.







My friend moved to another state this summer. Every time I visit her home for help, I came back home with a lot of fabrics and her incomplete blocks. She donated materials and I donated my time for the charity quilts.

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Gardening.
I don’t have winter vegetables growing in my yard, but fall is the season of compost. Since we don’t have trees in the yard, we collect leaves from neighbors. This year, one neighbor had leaf piles for us to take, one had leaf collection bags nicely packed with his leaves so we just took them, and we had to rake one’s yard.









We also cleaned the compost area in the Arboretum which was a junkyard for years. We haven’t finished cleaning yet, but people really appreciated us, so we are happy. We gained muscles in our arms.

Before and after the compost area.







Because of these activities, I didn’t have much time for sewing for myself (Etsy), but after these were done. I am enjoying staying home all day long for a week. I don’t have any quilting jobs right now as well, which is getting difficult to do physically. I don’t take a large size quilt anymore. Next year, I would stop to take hand binding jobs also. Getting old is sad, but cannot help it.

I will talk about my recent sewing projects in the next post.
Thank you for reading!