how does your garlic grow?

ours is doing very well :)

also planted potatoes and lettuce and peas this weekend  (and Big T planted sunflowers along the front fence - I really hope they work for him!)  We are way behind last year but what can you do?

Ordered the chicks for June 29... woooo booy

Need to decide if I'll just add 3 layers to that mix or trust fate to land some chickens in my lap again ...

Too wet to plant .. but never too wet for a quick trip to Paradise (aka Point Petre). Had the big dogs with us .. and we were about the only life forms there! Lovely!

planting and gardening in the rain ...

Yup .. .that was me today .. and Big T too.

Planted beets, radishes, carrots and got 4 beds ready for planting.
Peas tomorrow I hope.

It was very very wet. The lack of a lawn mower is making it even wetter as long grass hold water like nothing else! At least the leak hasn't started up. I'll take whatever blessings where ever I can find them. Tulips are lovely at the moment.

and now we build an ark ...

9 times out of 10 ... heck 99 times out of 100 I love living in a 134 year old house but when it pours cold miserable rain and the front porch leak starts up I HATE it. We have tried to find the leak; gotten experts to track down the leak yet nothing we do works. The rain starts and  we cross our fingers and hope it ends soon. Not today. One leak starts; then another; then another. Very frustrating.

Seeds sit waiting for the weather to catch up to ambition.

The new garden for melons looks neat - we scavenged some neat rocks to mark the boundary - now I need to decide what's going in there ... pumpkins? zucchini? cucumber? melons?  some combination? I just don't know what to try first.

Sally dog is miserable today. She is curled up in a ball by the fire. She wouldn't even get up to come to town. Most unlike her so I hope she is just disgusted by the rain not fighting something.

and another season starts ...

you can hardly see the schoolhouse!

yup 60 onions in (240 to go)
two short rows of carrots and radishes ..
garlic all poked back to bed (some of it always comes to the surface through the freeze up and melting)

new bed (was a flower bed that got entirely overgrown) turned over ready for tilling to be the melon/cuke or zucchini bed

more wood split

a good day's work

and that doesn't include the long pleasure walk we took either!

Another Day in Paradise

Yes, I should have been planting or at the very least cleaning up the garden but who can resist a trip to paradise? We had the entire beach to ourselves (over a kilometre) and it was gorgeous.

melting snow ...



Dog reversal .. Kizmet wants in; Sally wants out!



and growing garden ... it's still not nice enough out for little old man Kizmet to want to be out though! We are off for a week and looking forward to it. Sally has already fallen through the pond once.

I was busy poking garlic back into the ground and watching carrots come to life .. We

collecting fermented apples on the ground and tossed them into the compost.

I'm hoping it's a drying week that stays above freezing so I can get the onions in ... (300 of them - spanish, yellow and red). Yum!

Spring just might be in the air ...

This is the view of town from the top of our "mountaian". Town is 7 minutes drive but far enough away that we are totally rural. Big enough to have choices in gas stations, grocery stores, have a liquior store AND a beer store but small enough to be a little town at the same time. Postcard pretty at this time of year too!

dreaming on a winter's day ...

The view from what, one day, might be our kitchen. A whole lot of nothing. Soul replenishing. Beautiful. Even if it never happens fun to contemplate. We realized we will likely have a pond view from the house too - at least in all but the thickest of summer.

The inside of a renovation for a kitchen. Amazing to see the space gutted and ready to be rebuilt. Exciting.

All this promise and we aren't even officially in spring yet!!

i am done with apologies

"I am done with apologies. If contrariness is my inheritance and destiny, so be it. If it is my mission to go in at exits and come out at entrances, so be it. I have planted by the stars in defiance of the experts, and tilled somewhat by incantation and by singing, and reaped, as I knew, by luck and Heaven's favor,in spite of the best advice. If I have been caught so often laughing at funerals, that was because I knew the dead were already slipping away, preparing a comeback, and can I help it? And if at weddings I have gritted and gnashed my teeth, it was because I knew where the bridegroom had sunk his manhood, and knew it would not be resurrected by a piece of cake. ‘Dance,’ they told me, and I stood still, and while they stood quiet in line at the gate of the Kingdom, I danced. ‘Pray,’ they said, and I laughed, covering myself in the earth's brightnesses, and then stole off gray into the midst of a revel, and prayed like an orphan. When they said, ‘I know my Redeemer liveth,’I told them, ‘He's dead.’ And when they told me‘God is dead,’ I answered, ‘He goes fishing ever day in the Kentucky River. I see Him often.’ When they asked me would I like to contribute I said no, and when they had collected more than they needed, I gave them as much as I had. When they asked me to join them I wouldn't, and then went off by myself and did more than they would have asked. ‘Well, then,’ they said ‘go and organize the International Brotherhood of Contraries,’ and I said, ‘Did you finish killing everybody who was against peace?’ So be it. Going against men, I have heard at times a deep harmony thrumming in the mixture, and when they ask me what I say I don't know. It is not the only or the easiest way to come to the truth. It is one way."

from Wendell Berry

fabulous eh?