Hello

Hello garden beds! You've been buried under so many feet of snow for so long, we practically forgot you were there.



Hello rain barrels! We are so glad to have you back! We are so glad we can put you back out since it's probably not going to freeze (too much or too bad) again.



Hello mountain of dirt and rain garden! Okay, the mountain of dirt is kind of ugly. We've got to get some plants in that mountain soon. And it's so good to see the rain garden again; it even has a few green plants in it. Amazing!



And what's this!?!?



I can't believe things are actually coming up! Last fall one of us found a bulb (or two?) somewhere in the yard. I think it had been dormant because I don't remember ever seeing a plant in the place where we found the bulb - and I think it was down deep. So I plopped it in the rain garden and put the ? tag on it. Now something is coming up. I can't wait to see what it is! But given how early it is I should really go cover it over with more hay so it will be protected from any frosts.

Sigh, this reminds me so much of last year and all my secret garden posts (here, here, and here!). I'm so looking forward to seeing what comes up this year, especially after how much transplanting, moving, disrupting, and digging we did. I hope things survived!

Sprouts

These are about the only fresh greens we get throughout the winter. They are quick and easy to grow. I think next year we'll experiment with different sprouts and growing them in different ways.

I think it's a tablespoon or two of seeds (alfalfa I think). Put them in the jar with the mesh top (which we bought at the co-op) rinse them then soak them for about 6 hours. Dump out the water and lay the jar on it's side. I guess you could just leave it upright - I'm not sure why we lay it down.
Anyway, rinse it out every morning and night and in a few days you'll have a jar bursting with sprouts!

Freezer challenge: chicken surprise!

Okay, "chicken surprise" is not the name of some crazy recipe we came up with. But we were surprised the other day when we found two whole Buckeye chickens in the depths of the freezer! We bought them from the farmer's market a year and a half ago! I guess they got buried and we forgot they were in there. Jeremy just discovered them last week.

He put one on to roast in the morning last Friday:



We had some chicken for lunch, but the veggies weren't really done. Jeremy threw the veggies, some of the chicken, some of our homemade chicken stock and some noodles in the slow cooker right after lunch and we had chicken soup for dinner!

We're not really having a "root cellar" challenge since we don't have a root cellar (yet), but this did help us use up some carrots and potatoes from the basement that looked like they were more ready for planting than cooking!

Alteration

I'm still sewing for folks, though things have been a bit slow lately. It's amazing how many zippers I've replaced or repaired in the last couple months. I'm learning a lot about zippers!

Every now and then I come across the blog of some really creative person who does amazing crafts or amazing things with clothing. Indigorchid is one of these. I've read about some pretty cool projects in her blog. For one project, she took a regular pull-over sweater and turned it into a buttoned sweater. That has stuck in my mind for some time. I had never thought of altering clothing in that way!

Just my luck that I've had a couple folks ask recently if I could do that very thing. I've never done it, but I'll give it a try!

A friend brought me this coat she picked up at an antique store in Seattle. It's a pull over and has a laced-up v-neck top. (I forgot to take a picture with the lace in before I drew a line down the center of the coat!)



I spent quite a bit of time thinking about how I was going to turn this into a zippered coat. It's made out of wool which really doesn't fray much so at one point I considered just cutting it in half and running a zigzag stitch down both sides more for looks. But there was that decorative ribbon that would fray. I think I finally solved it during Meeting (I'm embarrassed to say I sometimes spend a fair amount of time thinking about and solving sewing problems during Meeting!)

Anyway, I bound the edge with a thin piece of dark black cotton. The fabric wraps around the zipper too which makes it more finished on the inside.



I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.





There is still the v-neck to deal with though. If my friend wants to close that up it may be a matter of using some buttons or something. We'll figure it out.


Sewing on the quilt had a bit of a delay. I pretty much finished the top, but then realized I was short one row for what we had planned. Sometimes my math skills are so bad it's a wonder I made it through school! Actually, I wasn't short the entire row - just 6 squares, and partial squares at that.
The delay really came when we talked about the quilt border again. I kind of wanted to do something really simple - like a solid border, one or two colors. Jeremy wanted to do something complicated with different sized triangles (I can't do that math!). Since I'd run out of colors and we couldn't mock this up easily, we took what we had back to the quilt shop, grabbed the bolts of fabric we needed and started brainstorming. One of the women there pulled out a book and showed us what she'd done to finish her kaleidoscope quilt. Problem solved! Except now I needed to make another 50 squares! And the shop had to order another bolt of white fabric because the first bolt was gone. So now I'm waiting on that white fabric...

Slow progress

I haven't said much about the upstairs because not much has been happening. Jeremy got all the pine up on the walls and I've got it almost all painted. Then he started working on the basswood.





It's really beautiful, especially in the morning sun as you can see. Jeremy did finish this wall so we were able to get rid of the piece of wood spanning over the stairs. It's nice not to bump our heads going up and nice not have to do the limbo, ducking as we go down.

But that is where we've been sitting since he picked up the logs. The plan was that after doing logs most of the day he'd take a brief break then head upstairs to do more work. But that hasn't worked so far. It's a bummer, but he'll be done with the logs in a few weeks and get back to working upstairs again. I hope!

Garden beginnings

Just a year ago, I wrote a blog with the same title. Knowing that we were going to have to move, I'm not sure why we started seeds at all! I'm pretty sure every last seedling died, mostly neglected in their little trays.

We'll do better this year. We've got two beds ready to go and one that still needs to be built (after the snow melts). Technically we should have started our first seeds last Wednesday. (Broccoli, cauliflower, kale, thyme, celery, spinach, parsley, and swiss chard were on the calendar.) But we're on a gardening listserv here and people started talking about their planting schedules. Some folks couldn't help themselves and started planting weeks ago! Then others said they had done experiments and found there was very little difference between yields, etc if they planted indoors now or if they sowed directly outside starting in May!

So we're slacking off a bit. We'll still start indoors, but we're not holding ourselves to a rigorous schedule.

We decided to set up our seed trays in the mudroom. Here's the mudroom at the beginning of last month:



A disaster!! After a day or two of work, it was mostly ready to go:



Of course it has been a month since this shot and the place has filled up again! It's just too easy to dump things back there to be dealt with "later." Anyway, we're planning to bring in an extra door we have and lay it across the railing there, then attach an enormous light from the ceiling. This should be happening... any day now...

In the meantime, Jeremy has been drawing numerous garden plans:





I think what we're growing in the garden is:
sweet peppers
tomatoes
beans
broccoli
peas
cauliflower
fennel
garlic
melons
endive
arugula
lettuce
kale (maybe)
lovage
skirret
tomatillos
blood sorrell
ground cherries

For herbs it's: rosemary, basil, peppermint, lemon basil, thyme, wormwood, chervil, mustard, cumin, cilantro, and comfrey.

For added flowers we're planning coneflowers, hyssop, black-eyed susans, nasturtiums, and sunflowers.

We've been reading about companion planting, permaculture, beneficial plants and that sort of thing. I'll probably do a post on that later. If you are unsure what some of the stuff in this list is - I probably am too! It's all Jeremy's idea. =)

To make things even crazier, he's put together a plan for planting a cornucopia of fruit and nut trees/bushes/etc: peach, pear, shagbark hickory, blueberry, strawberry, cranberry, lingonberry, hazelnut, currant, gooseberry, and elderberry!! At least, I think that's it...

Some trees require a second tree in order for pollination. But, the trees don't have to be right next to each other. They could be 100 or maybe 200 feet away. So a neighbor of ours a few houses up the street has agreed to get a matching pear and peach tree so our trees will all produce! I love that kind of cooperation.

Not sure when we're going to plant seedlings or when the snow will finally reveal the raised beds. But you know I'll post as soon as we make some progress!

Wild birds

We had this bird feeder back at the old house. It took us almost a year to pick up a new bag of seed to fill up the feeder.

It took the birds a whole week to discover the feeder was full of seed.

It took them one day to eat everything!

And the squirrel showed up the next day.



I wish we had gotten seed months ago. There is nothing like a flock of wild birds twittering happily and zooming around your yard to make winter a little more bearable.