Mulch Madness

We finally broke down and bought a load of much needed mulch. This mulch mountain is what 8 cubic yards looks like, after having probably 20 wheelbarrow-loads already toted away.

Our mulching projects went in order of urgency - first, the apple and hazelnut trees we planted in the fall, then the much-neglected blueberry bushes we planted two falls ago, and then our perennial beds containing our hops vines, chicory, blackberries, mint, rhubarb, and our newly-planted strawberry crowns. Here you can see the hops bed, with some daffodil bulbs strewn in, and with plenty of room for the chives, lavender, sage, rosemary, and thyme I'll be planting soon.

With Sprout being born right at the time when this work should have been done last year, it just didn't get done, which meant that later in the season the weeds got pretty unmanageable. This year, all the heavy lifting should pay off with healthier plants (and happier neighbors too, I'm sure). Our next project is to put down a layer of cardboard and then mulch the walkways between our vegetable beds to cut down on mowing and trimming, and to get us a step closer to the colonial-kitchen-garden inspired and more suburban-friendly design we have in mind.

Out on the Line

It's now been about five months since our electric dryer quit working and we decided not to fix it. During the winter, our "Study", the room with the wood stove, was where you could find our temporary clothes line, tied to and strung between two extra dining room chairs which were weighed down with boxes of encyclopedias. Now that spring is here, I'm so glad to be able to take the laundry outside to hang in the breezes and sunshine!

We decided to relocate the line from halfway across the back lawn to just a few steps from the deck. Inspired by a post on one of our favorite blogs, we designed our upgraded new poles to resemble telephone poles, complete with blue glass insulators, and we have plans to add clothes-pin-holding "transformers" and bird silhouettes just for kitsch. I see no reason why chores have to be boring, or why utility can't also be artistic!

Happy Bunny Egg Day

We dyed a dozen of our hens' eggs this weekend.  I'm pretty sure it's the first time we've ever dyed brown eggs, but they came out brilliant.

They made for a tasty breakfast.

Cold Frame Progress

It's been about a month since I planted some kale under the glass and its looking pretty good.

I absolutely love this kale! We collected the seeds from our biennial kale in its second season.  It grows a thick almost shrub like trunk at the base and sprouts new leaves late into the fall. The flavor is less bitter than most store bought kale and it self seeds like crazy.

In the center you can see some baby cabbages.  It may look really crowded in there but the cabbage is an early maturing miniature cabbage.

Early Season Experiment

This past holiday season the Gardness' family gave me a copy of The Winter Harvest Handbook. It's quite an amazing book that details the steps employed by Eliot Coleman to not only extend the growing season in Maine but to actually grow greens all year round.  We didn't manage to test out the deep winter growing techniques but we were inspired to build our first cold frame.

Motivated to keep it as cheap as possible, I dug around the basement and found two matching picture frames. The sides are made from a 2x6 with a bit of 2x4 that I ran through the table saw to angle the glass. It's small but the hope is to make several others, possibly using plexiglass poster frames. On a sunny day when the air temperature was around 55° we saw it as high as 95° under the glass.

This past weekend I planted a few kale seeds in the frame so we'll be watching and waiting for any sprouts.

Flowers of Spring

The perennials planted by my late aunt have started their annual bloom around the homestead.  Spring is indeed upon us!

Tree Taping Time

I think we are all starting to come out of our hibernation a little lately.  Even though there is a bit of snow on the ground the trees are starting to wake up.  This week, depending on the weather, we will be tapping a few of our maple trees.  We're waiting for the temperature changes to be just right.  Maple sap flows when daily highs are above freezing and nightly lows are below freezing consistently.

Last year we were able to freeze a bit of sap that we recently boiled down into syrup.  It took nearly 3 gallons of sap and about 5 hours to make 3/4 of a bottle of syrup.  

It was really an easy process. We simply filled a large pot with sap, put it on the stove, set up a fan to blow the moisture away from the cabinetry and let it boil.

The syrup is a little cloudy because we didn't bother to filter it.  It has a very rich and creamy maple flavor a bit like maple fudge with a slight chocolaty flavor in there somewhere. The results are wonderful and far better than I had expected.