More Garden Dreams

JP and I have been trying to price lumber for building raised beds in our garden. We are hoping that in the future, we can practice no-till gardening, and also have an easier time planting, keeping things weed free, and harvesting. The first order of business was to sketch out plans in order to estimate how much lumber we will be needing.

I finished up the sketch yesterday evening. Look at all the boxes in neat little rows!



Hopefully it will be somewhat close to being that neat and tidy...at least for the first year! The bigger ones are 16 ft x 4 ft, and the smaller ones are 8 ft x 4 ft. We are planning to craft a tiered bed for the strawberries near the center. The size of that is actually unknown. We want to recycle the "dually" wheel rims from the old tractor for the center tier.

Last night, the girls and I constructed these other little garden beds in the kitchen. You can find directions for them here.



Gotta plant, gotta plant, gotta plant!

Peas Are In!

Not even a week after St. Patrick's Day, we have the peas planted...way ahead of last year.

Dad spent several hours this afternoon rototilling the bottom 10 feet of the garden in preparation. I love the velvety look of the soil after it's been tilled. Mom, the girls and I haphazardly dropped seeds into the rows until dinner time, nearly giddy with the scent of Sassafras.

We have some radishes and lettuce seeded in as well. The winter squash and cucumbers are curiously peeking out of the downstairs windows. They need to sit tight for another month or so before they can play outside.

The girls have been spending hours out in the fresh air and sunshine lately. They are both cultivating "families" of sticks, stuck into the ground around the base of the big Hickory tree.

I am thrilled with the success of my plantings from last year. Almost everything in the flower bed is coming back, along with 4 of the 8 ornamental pears. Even the daffodils that I roughly dug out of the ground down by the mailboxes are fringing the trees in the yard.

Three cheers for Spring Planting!

Ole Hickory

We have a big Hickory tree in the back yard. It is wonderfully shady during the summer, and supports one side of our hammock. Last Fall, however, it went a little nuts. It became hazardous to walk out there unless you wanted to risk a 3 Stooges style slip and fall.

They remained out there over the winter. That was in part because I wanted to leave them for animals to eat, but mostly because I didn't get around to cleaning them up before the first snow fell.



This weekend, I tackled the clean up. I raked and collected 4 wheelbarrows full of husks and nuts from the back, and 3 from the smaller Hickory tree out front by the girl's sandbox.



It was obvious that the squirrels enjoyed the buffet!



My crocuses finally started to bloom on the first day of Spring. There is finally Spring color up on Poplar Ridge!

St. Patty's Day Walk in the Woods

Neverland

Yesterday, the laundry on my clothes line was struggling to free itself from the pins and fly away to Neverland. It is a lovely place to be! The laundry there, once washed, remains clean forever. In Neverland, toys never break, and siblings always get along.



I spent Thursday night in Neverland. It was wonderfully peaceful. 8 inches of heavy, wet snow that threatened power lines were not forecast to fall overnight. I was promised a complete night of slumber, without being woken pre-dawn by eldest child.

Unfortunately, the laundry never made it to Neverland. It couldn't fly farther than the muddy front yard, where I slogged out to rescue it. And although I fell asleep in Neverland, I was woken on Poplar Ridge at dawn by eldest child who had a stomach bug on Thursday and awoke early Friday morning extremely hungry.

"Why the alternate reality?" you may ask. It works for me. Oh, and I may have been watching too many X-Files episodes lately. The friendly alien in my ice cream carton can attest to that.

Pancakes

My Dad has been teaching the girls about making Maple Syrup this year. J especially, is thrilled with the whole process. I am thrilled that they are able to learn to do this!

We started by marking several Maple trees in the Fall before all of the leaves were gone. All of the trees are bare this time of year, and it would have been difficult to distinguish the Maples from everything else otherwise.

Early in February, the girls went out with my Dad and helped to pound the taps in...



...and hang buckets on them. On most of the days since then, they have helped with collecting the sap daily. We collect the most on days where it was freezing or below overnight and warmer during the day.



Dad dumps all of the sap (after picking various insects out) into the canner and starts cooking it down on the camp stove out under his deck. The ratio of sap to syrup is about 40 to 1, so there is a lot of cooking to do!



So far, he has made this much syrup (minus some for various meals)!



We brought a couple of bottles home this weekend, and ate home made pancakes with home made Maple Syrup on them for breakfast yesterday! Deee-licious!

Legit

After approximately 6 weeks of "observing" at my new job, I finally got word today that my paperwork was all in order to really WORK for the first time! I actually got to scrub in and assist on a case in the Operating Room...the first time in about 13 years or so! Can you believe I actually remembered my sterile glove size? (Probably just a lucky guess!)

Luckily, my job pays the same for observing as for actually working, so the only negative to the 6 weeks of limbo was boredom.

J received new materials last week for cyber school. It has been taking us almost twice as long to get the work done since then. I spent about an hour last night, prepping materials for today. My Mom worked with J in the morning while I was at work, and we finished up this afternoon in much better time than before...even with an extra hour of on-line classes, and ample time to play outside in the sunshine! Perhaps I should do this on a regular basis??



I'm feeling Spring in my blood these days. The unexpected snow yesterday afternoon did not diminish it for a moment. I cleaned out my flower beds last weekend...trimmed the old, dead stuff, pulled out leaves and scooped out cat poo (nice). This afternoon, I dug my planting trays out of the garage to start winter squash, pumpkin and cucumber seeds indoors. The sunshine makes me anxious to DIG in the dirt!

The sap is running in our Maple trees. My Dad and the girls have tapped 9 or 10 trees, and have collected gallons and gallons of sap. Dad has boiled down the sap to get several pints of Maple Syrup...the ratio is roughly 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup. I have only had the chance to taste a spoonful here and there, but I'm hoping to try our own Maple Syrup on pancakes this weekend.

Time and seasons continue to flow by. Now the time has arrived to fix dinner. Happy Almost-Spring!